pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Estimating Mass Distribution of Articulated Objects using Non-prehensile Manipulation
Authors: K. Niranjan Kumar, Irfan Essa, Sehoon Ha, C. Karen Liu
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, Object, Reinforcement Learning

We explore the problem of estimating the mass distribution of an articulated object by an interactive robotic agent. Our method predicts the mass distribution of an object by using the limited sensing and actuating capabilities of a robotic agent that is interacting with the object. We are inspired by the role of exploratory play in human infants. We take the combined approach of supervised and reinforcement learning to train an agent that learns to strategically interact with the object to estimate the object's mass distribution. Our method consists of two neural networks: (i) the policy network which decides how to interact with the object, and (ii) the predictor network that estimates the mass distribution given a history of observations and interactions. Using our method, we train a robotic arm to estimate the mass distribution of an object with moving parts (e.g. an articulated rigid body system) by pushing it on a surface with unknown friction properties. We also demonstrate how our training from simulations can be transferred to real hardware using a small amount of real-world data for fine-tuning. We use a UR10 robot to interact with 3D printed articulated chains with varying mass distributions and show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline system that uses random pushes to interact with the object.
NTT's Machine Translation Systems for WMT19 Robustness Task
Authors: Soichiro Murakami, Makoto Morishita, Tsutomu Hirao, Masaaki Nagata
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, Translation

This paper describes NTT's submission to the WMT19 robustness task. This task mainly focuses on translating noisy text (e.g., posts on Twitter), which presents different difficulties from typical translation tasks such as news. Our submission combined techniques including utilization of a synthetic corpus, domain adaptation, and a placeholder mechanism, which significantly improved over the previous baseline. Experimental results revealed the placeholder mechanism, which temporarily replaces the non-standard tokens including emojis and emoticons with special placeholder tokens during translation, improves translation accuracy even with noisy texts.
Hahahahaha, Duuuuude, Yeeessss!: A two-parameter characterization of stretchable words and the dynamics of mistypings and misspellings
Authors: Tyler J. Gray, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00

Stretched words like `heellllp' or `heyyyyy' are a regular feature of spoken language, often used to emphasize or exaggerate the underlying meaning of the root word. While stretched words are rarely found in formal written language and dictionaries, they are prevalent within social media. In this paper, we examine the frequency distributions of `stretchable words' found in roughly 100 billion tweets authored over an 8 year period. We introduce two central parameters, `balance' and `stretch', that capture their main characteristics, and explore their dynamics by creating visual tools we call `balance plots' and `spelling trees'. We discuss how the tools and methods we develop here could be used to study the statistical patterns of mistypings and misspellings, along with the potential applications in augmenting dictionaries, improving language processing, and in any area where sequence construction matters, such as genetics.
Pitako -- Recommending Game Design Elements in Cicero
Authors: Tiago Machado, Dan Gopstein, Andy Nealen, Julian Togelius
Date: 2019-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design, Recommendation Systems

Recommender Systems are widely and successfully applied in e-commerce. Could they be used for design? In this paper, we introduce Pitako1, a tool that applies the Recommender System concept to assist humans in creative tasks. More specifically, Pitako provides suggestions by taking games designed by humans as inputs, and recommends mechanics and dynamics as outputs. Pitako is implemented as a new system within the mixed-initiative AI-based Game Design Assistant, Cicero. This paper discusses the motivation behind the implementation of Pitako as well as its technical details and presents usage examples. We believe that Pitako can influence the use of recommender systems to help humans in their daily tasks.
Diverse Agents for Ad-Hoc Cooperation in Hanabi
Authors: Rodrigo Canaan, Julian Togelius, Andy Nealen, Stefan Menzel
Date: 2019-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

In complex scenarios where a model of other actors is necessary to predict and interpret their actions, it is often desirable that the model works well with a wide variety of previously unknown actors. Hanabi is a card game that brings the problem of modeling other players to the forefront, but there is no agreement on how to best generate a pool of agents to use as partners in ad-hoc cooperation evaluation. This paper proposes Quality Diversity algorithms as a promising class of algorithms to generate populations for this purpose and shows an initial implementation of an agent generator based on this idea. We also discuss what metrics can be used to compare such generators, and how the proposed generator could be leveraged to help build adaptive agents for the game.
A new hybrid genetic algorithm for protein structure prediction on the 2D triangular lattice
Authors: Nabil Boumedine, Sadek Bouroubi
Date: 2019-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Protein Structure Prediction

The flawless functioning of a protein is essentially linked to its own three-dimensional structure. Therefore, the prediction of a protein structure from its amino acid sequence is a fundamental problem in many fields that draws researchers attention. This problem can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem based on simplified lattice models such as the hydrophobic-polar model. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid algorithm combining three different well-known heuristic algorithms: genetic algorithm, tabu search strategy and local search algorithm in order to solve the PSP problem. Regarding the assessment of suggested algorithm, an experimental study is included, where we considered the quality of the produced solution as the main quality criterion. Furthermore, we compared the suggested algorithm with state-of-the-art algorithms using a selection of well-studied benchmark instances.
Melody Generation using an Interactive Evolutionary Algorithm
Authors: Majid Farzaneh, Rahil Mahdian Toroghi
Date: 2019-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

Music generation with the aid of computers has been recently grabbed the attention of many scientists in the area of artificial intelligence. Deep learning techniques have evolved sequence production methods for this purpose. Yet, a challenging problem is how to evaluate generated music by a machine. In this paper, a methodology has been developed based upon an interactive evolutionary optimization method, with which the scoring of the generated melodies is primarily performed by human expertise, during the training. This music quality scoring is modeled using a Bi-LSTM recurrent neural network. Moreover, the innovative generated melody through a Genetic algorithm will then be evaluated using this Bi-LSTM network. The results of this mechanism clearly show that the proposed method is able to create pleasurable melodies with desired styles and pieces. This method is also quite fast, compared to the state-of-the-art data-oriented evolutionary systems.
Streaming 1.9 Billion Hypersparse Network Updates per Second with D4M
Authors: Jeremy Kepner, Vijay Gadepally, Lauren Milechin, Siddharth Samsi, William Arcand, David Bestor, William Bergeron, Chansup Byun, Matthew Hubbell, Michael Houle, Michael Jones, Anne Klein, Peter Michaleas, Julie Mullen, Andrew Prout, Antonio Rosa, Charles Yee, Albert Reuther
Date: 2019-07-06 00:00:00

The Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model (D4M) library implements associative arrays in a variety of languages (Python, Julia, and Matlab/Octave) and provides a lightweight in-memory database implementation of hypersparse arrays that are ideal for analyzing many types of network data. D4M relies on associative arrays which combine properties of spreadsheets, databases, matrices, graphs, and networks, while providing rigorous mathematical guarantees, such as linearity. Streaming updates of D4M associative arrays put enormous pressure on the memory hierarchy. This work describes the design and performance optimization of an implementation of hierarchical associative arrays that reduces memory pressure and dramatically increases the update rate into an associative array. The parameters of hierarchical associative arrays rely on controlling the number of entries in each level in the hierarchy before an update is cascaded. The parameters are easily tunable to achieve optimal performance for a variety of applications. Hierarchical arrays achieve over 40,000 updates per second in a single instance. Scaling to 34,000 instances of hierarchical D4M associative arrays on 1,100 server nodes on the MIT SuperCloud achieved a sustained update rate of 1,900,000,000 updates per second. This capability allows the MIT SuperCloud to analyze extremely large streaming network data sets.
Universal One-Dimensional Cellular Automata Derived for Turing Machines and its Dynamical Behaviour
Authors: Sergio J. Martinez, Ivan M. Mendoza, Genaro J. Martinez, Shigeru Ninagawa
Date: 2019-07-06 00:00:00

Universality in cellular automata theory is a central problem studied and developed from their origins by John von Neumann. In this paper, we present an algorithm where any Turing machine can be converted to one-dimensional cellular automaton with a 2-linear time and display its spatial dynamics. Three particular Turing machines are converted in three universal one-dimensional cellular automata, they are: binary sum, rule 110 and a universal reversible Turing machine.
A Study of the Effect of Resolving Negation and Sentiment Analysis in Recognizing Text Entailment for Arabic
Authors: Fatima T. AL-Khawaldeh
Date: 2019-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Negation, Negation Detection, Question Answering, Relation, Sentiment Analysis, Text Summarization

Recognizing the entailment relation showed that its influence to extract the semantic inferences in wide-ranging natural language processing domains (text summarization, question answering, etc.) and enhanced the results of their output. For Arabic language, few attempts concerns with Arabic entailment problem. This paper aims to increase the entailment accuracy for Arabic texts by resolving negation of the text-hypothesis pair and determining the polarity of the text-hypothesis pair whether it is Positive, Negative or Neutral. It is noticed that the absence of negation detection feature gives inaccurate results when detecting the entailment relation since the negation revers the truth. The negation words are considered stop words and removed from the text-hypothesis pair which may lead wrong entailment decision. Another case not solved previously, it is impossible that the positive text entails negative text and vice versa. In this paper, in order to classify the text-hypothesis pair polarity, a sentiment analysis tool is used. We show that analyzing the polarity of the text-hypothesis pair increases the entailment accuracy. to evaluate our approach we used a dataset for Arabic textual entailment (ArbTEDS) consisted of 618 text-hypothesis pairs and showed that the Arabic entailment accuracy is increased by resolving negation for entailment relation and analyzing the polarity of the text-hypothesis pair.
Answer Extraction for Why Arabic Questions Answering Systems: EWAQ
Authors: Fatima T. AL-Khawaldeh
Date: 2019-07-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

With the increasing amount of web information, questions answering systems becomes very important to allow users to access to direct answers for their requests. This paper presents an Arabic Questions Answering Systems based on entailment metrics. The type of questions which this paper focuses on is why questions. There are many reasons lead us to develop this system: generally, the lack of Arabic Questions Answering Systems and scarcity Arabic Questions Answering Systems which focus on why questions. The goal of the proposed system in this research is to extract answers from re-ranked retrieved passages which are retrieved by search engines. This system extracts the answer only to why questions. This system is called by EWAQ: Entailment based Why Arabic Questions Answering. Each answer is scored with entailment metrics and ranked according to their scores in order to determine the most possible correct answer. EWAQ is compared with search engines: yahoo, google and ask.com, the well-established web-based Questions Answering systems, using manual test set. In EWAQ experiments, it is showed that the accuracy is increased by implementing the textual entailment in re-raking the retrieved relevant passages by search engines and deciding the correct answer. The obtained results show that using entailment based similarity can help significantly to tackle the why Answer Extraction module in Arabic language.
Interpretable Segmentation of Medical Free-Text Records Based on Word Embeddings
Authors: Adam Gabriel Dobrakowski, Agnieszka Mykowiecka, Małgorzata Marciniak, Wojciech Jaworski, Przemysław Biecek
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Word Embeddings

Is it true that patients with similar conditions get similar diagnoses? In this paper we show NLP methods and a unique corpus of documents to validate this claim. We (1) introduce a method for representation of medical visits based on free-text descriptions recorded by doctors, (2) introduce a new method for clustering of patients' visits and (3) present an~application of the proposed method on a corpus of 100,000 visits. With the proposed method we obtained stable and separated segments of visits which were positively validated against final medical diagnoses. We show how the presented algorithm may be used to aid doctors during their practice.
FairST: Equitable Spatial and Temporal Demand Prediction for New Mobility Systems
Authors: An Yan, Bill Howe
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Emerging transportation modes, including car-sharing, bike-sharing, and ride-hailing, are transforming urban mobility but have been shown to reinforce socioeconomic inequities. Spatiotemporal demand prediction models for these new mobility regimes must therefore consider fairness as a first-class design requirement. We present FairST, a fairness-aware model for predicting demand for new mobility systems. Our approach utilizes 1D, 2D and 3D convolutions to integrate various urban features and learn the spatial-temporal dynamics of a mobility system, but we include fairness metrics as a form of regularization to make the predictions more equitable across demographic groups. We propose two novel spatiotemporal fairness metrics, a region-based fairness gap (RFG) and an individual-based fairness gap (IFG). Both quantify equity in a spatiotemporal context, but vary by whether demographics are labeled at the region level (RFG) or whether population distribution information is available (IFG). Experimental results on real bike share and ride share datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model: FairST not only reduces the fairness gap by more than 80%, but can surprisingly achieve better accuracy than state-of-the-art yet fairness-oblivious methods including LSTMs, ConvLSTMs, and 3D CNN.
Norms for Beneficial A.I.: A Computational Analysis of the Societal Value Alignment Problem
Authors: Pedro Fernandes, Francisco C. Santos, Manuel Lopes
Date: 2019-06-26 00:00:00

The rise of artificial intelligence (A.I.) based systems is already offering substantial benefits to the society as a whole. However, these systems may also enclose potential conflicts and unintended consequences. Notably, people will tend to adopt an A.I. system if it confers them an advantage, at which point non-adopters might push for a strong regulation if that advantage for adopters is at a cost for them. Here we propose an agent-based game-theoretical model for these conflicts, where agents may decide to resort to A.I. to use and acquire additional information on the payoffs of a stochastic game, striving to bring insights from simulation to what has been, hitherto, a mostly philosophical discussion. We frame our results under the current discussion on ethical A.I. and the conflict between individual and societal gains: the societal value alignment problem. We test the arising equilibria in the adoption of A.I. technology under different norms followed by artificial agents, their ensuing benefits, and the emergent levels of wealth inequality. We show that without any regulation, purely selfish A.I. systems will have the strongest advantage, even when a utilitarian A.I. provides significant benefits for the individual and the society. Nevertheless, we show that it is possible to develop A.I. systems following human conscious policies that, when introduced in society, lead to an equilibrium where the gains for the adopters are not at a cost for non-adopters, thus increasing the overall wealth of the population and lowering inequality. However, as shown, a self-organised adoption of such policies would require external regulation.
Artificial Intelligence Governance and Ethics: Global Perspectives
Authors: Angela Daly, Thilo Hagendorff, Li Hui, Monique Mann, Vidushi Marda, Ben Wagner, Wei Wang, Saskia Witteborn
Date: 2019-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology which is increasingly being utilised in society and the economy worldwide, and its implementation is planned to become more prevalent in coming years. AI is increasingly being embedded in our lives, supplementing our pervasive use of digital technologies. But this is being accompanied by disquiet over problematic and dangerous implementations of AI, or indeed, even AI itself deciding to do dangerous and problematic actions, especially in fields such as the military, medicine and criminal justice. These developments have led to concerns about whether and how AI systems adhere, and will adhere to ethical standards. These concerns have stimulated a global conversation on AI ethics, and have resulted in various actors from different countries and sectors issuing ethics and governance initiatives and guidelines for AI. Such developments form the basis for our research in this report, combining our international and interdisciplinary expertise to give an insight into what is happening in Australia, China, Europe, India and the US.
The State and Future of Genetic Improvement
Authors: William B. Langdon, Westley Weimer, Christopher Timperley, Oliver Krauss, Zhen Yu Ding, Yiwei Lyu, Nicolas Chausseau, Eric Schulte, Shin Hwei Tan, Kevin Leach, Yu Huang, Gabin An
Date: 2019-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: software testing

We report the discussion session at the sixth international Genetic Improvement workshop, GI-2019 @ ICSE, which was held as part of the 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering on Tuesday 28th May 2019. Topics included GI representations, the maintainability of evolved code, automated software testing, future areas of GI research, such as co-evolution, and existing GI tools and benchmarks.
Ordered SGD: A New Stochastic Optimization Framework for Empirical Risk Minimization
Authors: Kenji Kawaguchi, Haihao Lu
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an unbiased gradient estimator of the empirical average loss. In contrast, we develop a computationally efficient method to construct a gradient estimator that is purposely biased toward those observations with higher current losses. On the theory side, we show that the proposed method minimizes a new ordered modification of the empirical average loss, and is guaranteed to converge at a sublinear rate to a global optimum for convex loss and to a critical point for weakly convex (non-convex) loss. Furthermore, we prove a new generalization bound for the proposed algorithm. On the empirical side, the numerical experiments show that our proposed method consistently improves the test errors compared with the standard mini-batch SGD in various models including SVM, logistic regression, and deep learning problems.
On Designing Machine Learning Models for Malicious Network Traffic Classification
Authors: Talha Ongun, Timothy Sakharaov, Simona Boboila, Alina Oprea, Tina Eliassi-Rad
Date: 2019-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification, General Classification, Traffic Classification

Machine learning (ML) started to become widely deployed in cyber security settings for shortening the detection cycle of cyber attacks. To date, most ML-based systems are either proprietary or make specific choices of feature representations and machine learning models. The success of these techniques is difficult to assess as public benchmark datasets are currently unavailable. In this paper, we provide concrete guidelines and recommendations for using supervised ML in cyber security. As a case study, we consider the problem of botnet detection from network traffic data. Among our findings we highlight that: (1) feature representations should take into consideration attack characteristics; (2) ensemble models are well-suited to handle class imbalance; (3) the granularity of ground truth plays an important role in the success of these methods.
Sparse Networks from Scratch: Faster Training without Losing Performance
Authors: Tim Dettmers, Luke Zettlemoyer
Date: 2019-07-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Image Classification, Sparse Learning

We demonstrate the possibility of what we call sparse learning: accelerated training of deep neural networks that maintain sparse weights throughout training while achieving dense performance levels. We accomplish this by developing sparse momentum, an algorithm which uses exponentially smoothed gradients (momentum) to identify layers and weights which reduce the error efficiently. Sparse momentum redistributes pruned weights across layers according to the mean momentum magnitude of each layer. Within a layer, sparse momentum grows weights according to the momentum magnitude of zero-valued weights. We demonstrate state-of-the-art sparse performance on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet, decreasing the mean error by a relative 8%, 15%, and 6% compared to other sparse algorithms. Furthermore, we show that sparse momentum reliably reproduces dense performance levels while providing up to 5.61x faster training. In our analysis, ablations show that the benefits of momentum redistribution and growth increase with the depth and size of the network. Additionally, we find that sparse momentum is insensitive to the choice of its hyperparameters suggesting that sparse momentum is robust and easy to use.