pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
User-Device Authentication in Mobile Banking using APHEN for Paratuck2 Tensor Decomposition
Authors: Jeremy Charlier, Eric Falk, Radu State, Jean Hilger
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Tensor Decomposition

The new financial European regulations such as PSD2 are changing the retail banking services. Noticeably, the monitoring of the personal expenses is now opened to other institutions than retail banks. Nonetheless, the retail banks are looking to leverage the user-device authentication on the mobile banking applications to enhance the personal financial advertisement. To address the profiling of the authentication, we rely on tensor decomposition, a higher dimensional analogue of matrix decomposition. We use Paratuck2, which expresses a tensor as a multiplication of matrices and diagonal tensors, because of the imbalance between the number of users and devices. We highlight why Paratuck2 is more appropriate in this case than the popular CP tensor decomposition, which decomposes a tensor as a sum of rank-one tensors. However, the computation of Paratuck2 is computational intensive. We propose a new APproximate HEssian-based Newton resolution algorithm, APHEN, capable of solving Paratuck2 more accurately and faster than the other popular approaches based on alternating least square or gradient descent. The results of Paratuck2 are used for the predictions of users' authentication with neural networks. We apply our method for the concrete case of targeting clients for financial advertising campaigns based on the authentication events generated by mobile banking applications.
Applying Abstract Argumentation Theory to Cooperative Game Theory
Authors: Anthony P. Young, David Kohan Marzagao, Josh Murphy
Date: 2019-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Argumentation

We apply ideas from abstract argumentation theory to study cooperative game theory. Building on Dung's results in his seminal paper, we further the correspondence between Dung's four argumentation semantics and solution concepts in cooperative game theory by showing that complete extensions (the grounded extension) correspond to Roth's subsolutions (respectively, the supercore). We then investigate the relationship between well-founded argumentation frameworks and convex games, where in each case the semantics (respectively, solution concepts) coincide; we prove that three-player convex games do not in general have well-founded argumentation frameworks.
Naive probability
Authors: Zalan Gyenis, Andras Kornai
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00

We describe a rational, but low resolution model of probability.
Emotion Classification in Response to Tactile Enhanced Multimedia using Frequency Domain Features of Brain Signals
Authors: Aasim Raheel, Muhammad Majid, Syed Muhammad Anwar, Ulas Bagci
Date: 2019-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Emotion Classification, General Classification

Tactile enhanced multimedia is generated by synchronizing traditional multimedia clips, to generate hot and cold air effect, with an electric heater and a fan. This objective is to give viewers a more realistic and immersing feel of the multimedia content. The response to this enhanced multimedia content (mulsemedia) is evaluated in terms of the appreciation/emotion by using human brain signals. We observe and record electroencephalography (EEG) data using a commercially available four channel MUSE headband. A total of 21 participants voluntarily participated in this study for EEG recordings. We extract frequency domain features from five different bands of each EEG channel. Four emotions namely: happy, relaxed, sad, and angry are classified using a support vector machine in response to the tactile enhanced multimedia. An increased accuracy of 76:19% is achieved when compared to 63:41% by using the time domain features. Our results show that the selected frequency domain features could be better suited for emotion classification in mulsemedia studies.
Enhancing Salient Object Segmentation Through Attention
Authors: Anuj Pahuja, Avishek Majumder, Anirban Chakraborty, R. Venkatesh Babu
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segmenting salient objects in an image is an important vision task with ubiquitous applications. The problem becomes more challenging in the presence of a cluttered and textured background, low resolution and/or low contrast images. Even though existing algorithms perform well in segmenting most of the object(s) of interest, they often end up segmenting false positives due to resembling salient objects in the background. In this work, we tackle this problem by iteratively attending to image patches in a recurrent fashion and subsequently enhancing the predicted segmentation mask. Saliency features are estimated independently for every image patch, which are further combined using an aggregation strategy based on a Convolutional Gated Recurrent Unit (ConvGRU) network. The proposed approach works in an end-to-end manner, removing background noise and false positives incrementally. Through extensive evaluation on various benchmark datasets, we show superior performance to the existing approaches without any post-processing.
FAN: Focused Attention Networks
Authors: Chu Wang, Babak Samari, Vladimir Kim, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Kaleem Siddiqi
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Classification, Object Detection, Region Proposal, Sentence

Attention networks show promise for both vision and language tasks, by emphasizing relationships between constituent elements through weighting functions. Such elements could be regions in an image output by a region proposal network, or words in a sentence, represented by word embedding. Thus far the learning of attention weights has been driven solely by the minimization of task specific loss functions. We introduce a method for learning attention weights to better emphasize informative pair-wise relations between entities. The key component is a novel center-mass cross entropy loss, which can be applied in conjunction with the task specific ones. We further introduce a focused attention backbone to learn these attention weights for general tasks. We demonstrate that the focused supervision leads to improved attention distribution across meaningful entities, and that it enhances the representation by aggregating features from them. Our focused attention module leads to state-of-the-art recovery of relations in a relationship proposal task and boosts performance for various vision and language tasks.
Network Deconvolution
Authors: Chengxi Ye, Matthew Evanusa, Hua He, Anton Mitrokhin, Tom Goldstein, James A. Yorke, Cornelia Fermüller, Yiannis Aloimonos
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Image Classification

Convolution is a central operation in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which applies a kernel to overlapping regions shifted across the image. However, because of the strong correlations in real-world image data, convolutional kernels are in effect re-learning redundant data. In this work, we show that this redundancy has made neural network training challenging, and propose network deconvolution, a procedure which optimally removes pixel-wise and channel-wise correlations before the data is fed into each layer. Network deconvolution can be efficiently calculated at a fraction of the computational cost of a convolution layer. We also show that the deconvolution filters in the first layer of the network resemble the center-surround structure found in biological neurons in the visual regions of the brain. Filtering with such kernels results in a sparse representation, a desired property that has been missing in the training of neural networks. Learning from the sparse representation promotes faster convergence and superior results without the use of batch normalization. We apply our network deconvolution operation to 10 modern neural network models by replacing batch normalization within each. Extensive experiments show that the network deconvolution operation is able to deliver performance improvement in all cases on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, Cityscapes, and ImageNet datasets.
DHSGAN: An End to End Dehazing Network for Fog and Smoke
Authors: Ramavtar Malav, Ayoung Kim, Soumya Ranjan Sahoo, Gaurav Pandey
Date: 2019-05-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACCV2018 - Springer 2019 5
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Dehazing, Image Enhancement, Single Image Dehazing

In this paper we propose a novel end-to-end convolution dehazing architecture, called De-Haze and Smoke GAN (DHSGAN). The model is trained under a generative adversarial network framework to effectively learn the underlying distribution of clean images for the generation of realistic haze-free images. We train the model on a dataset that is synthesized to include image degradation scenarios from varied conditions of fog, haze, and smoke in both indoor and outdoor settings. Experimental results on both synthetic and natural degraded images demonstrate that our method shows significant robustness over different haze conditions in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods. A group of studies are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of each module of the proposed method.
Image Deformation Meta-Networks for One-Shot Learning
Authors: Zitian Chen, Yanwei Fu, Yu-Xiong Wang, Lin Ma, Wei Liu, Martial Hebert
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2019 6
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Meta-Learning, One-Shot Learning

Humans can robustly learn novel visual concepts even when images undergo various deformations and lose certain information. Mimicking the same behavior and synthesizing deformed instances of new concepts may help visual recognition systems perform better one-shot learning, i.e., learning concepts from one or few examples. Our key insight is that, while the deformed images may not be visually realistic, they still maintain critical semantic information and contribute significantly to formulating classifier decision boundaries. Inspired by the recent progress of meta-learning, we combine a meta-learner with an image deformation sub-network that produces additional training examples, and optimize both models in an end-to-end manner. The deformation sub-network learns to deform images by fusing a pair of images --- a probe image that keeps the visual content and a gallery image that diversifies the deformations. We demonstrate results on the widely used one-shot learning benchmarks (miniImageNet and ImageNet 1K Challenge datasets), which significantly outperform state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/tankche1/IDeMe-Net.
Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning
Authors: Pim de Haan, Dinesh Jayaraman, Sergey Levine
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Behavioral cloning reduces policy learning to supervised learning by training a discriminative model to predict expert actions given observations. Such discriminative models are non-causal: the training procedure is unaware of the causal structure of the interaction between the expert and the environment. We point out that ignoring causality is particularly damaging because of the distributional shift in imitation learning. In particular, it leads to a counter-intuitive "causal misidentification" phenomenon: access to more information can yield worse performance. We investigate how this problem arises, and propose a solution to combat it through targeted interventions---either environment interaction or expert queries---to determine the correct causal model. We show that causal misidentification occurs in several benchmark control domains as well as realistic driving settings, and validate our solution against DAgger and other baselines and ablations.
Better Long-Range Dependency By Bootstrapping A Mutual Information Regularizer
Authors: Yanshuai Cao, Peng Xu
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Inductive Bias, Language Modelling, Mutual Information Estimation, Sentence

In this work, we develop a novel regularizer to improve the learning of long-range dependency of sequence data. Applied on language modelling, our regularizer expresses the inductive bias that sequence variables should have high mutual information even though the model might not see abundant observations for complex long-range dependency. We show how the `next sentence prediction (classification)' heuristic can be derived in a principled way from our mutual information estimation framework, and be further extended to maximize the mutual information of sequence variables. The proposed approach not only is effective at increasing the mutual information of segments under the learned model but more importantly, leads to a higher likelihood on holdout data, and improved generation quality. Code is released at https://github.com/BorealisAI/BMI.
On Variational Learning of Controllable Representations for Text without Supervision
Authors: Peng Xu, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Yanshuai Cao
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Style Transfer, Text Generation, Text Style Transfer

The variational autoencoder (VAE) can learn the manifold of natural images on certain datasets, as evidenced by meaningful interpolating or extrapolating in the continuous latent space. However, on discrete data such as text, it is unclear if unsupervised learning can discover similar latent space that allows controllable manipulation. In this work, we find that sequence VAEs trained on text fail to properly decode when the latent codes are manipulated, because the modified codes often land in holes or vacant regions in the aggregated posterior latent space, where the decoding network fails to generalize. Both as a validation of the explanation and as a fix to the problem, we propose to constrain the posterior mean to a learned probability simplex, and performs manipulation within this simplex. Our proposed method mitigates the latent vacancy problem and achieves the first success in unsupervised learning of controllable representations for text. Empirically, our method outperforms unsupervised baselines and strong supervised approaches on text style transfer, and is capable of performing more flexible fine-grained control over text generation than existing methods.
Understanding the Behaviour of the Empirical Cross-Entropy Beyond the Training Distribution
Authors: Matias Vera, Pablo Piantanida, Leonardo Rey Vega
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

Machine learning theory has mostly focused on generalization to samples from the same distribution as the training data. Whereas a better understanding of generalization beyond the training distribution where the observed distribution changes is also fundamentally important to achieve a more powerful form of generalization. In this paper, we attempt to study through the lens of information measures how a particular architecture behaves when the true probability law of the samples is potentially different at training and testing times. Our main result is that the testing gap between the empirical cross-entropy and its statistical expectation (measured with respect to the testing probability law) can be bounded with high probability by the mutual information between the input testing samples and the corresponding representations, generated by the encoder obtained at training time. These results of theoretical nature are supported by numerical simulations showing that the mentioned mutual information is representative of the testing gap, capturing qualitatively the dynamic in terms of the hyperparameters of the network.
ME-Net: Towards Effective Adversarial Robustness with Matrix Estimation
Authors: Yuzhe Yang, Guo Zhang, Dina Katabi, Zhi Xu
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The literature is rich with algorithms that can easily craft successful adversarial examples. In contrast, the performance of defense techniques still lags behind. This paper proposes ME-Net, a defense method that leverages matrix estimation (ME). In ME-Net, images are preprocessed using two steps: first pixels are randomly dropped from the image; then, the image is reconstructed using ME. We show that this process destroys the adversarial structure of the noise, while re-enforcing the global structure in the original image. Since humans typically rely on such global structures in classifying images, the process makes the network mode compatible with human perception. We conduct comprehensive experiments on prevailing benchmarks such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, SVHN, and Tiny-ImageNet. Comparing ME-Net with state-of-the-art defense mechanisms shows that ME-Net consistently outperforms prior techniques, improving robustness against both black-box and white-box attacks.
Sublinear Update Time Randomized Algorithms for Dynamic Graph Regression
Authors: Mostafa Haghir Chehreghani
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Regression, regression

A well-known problem in data science and machine learning is {\em linear regression}, which is recently extended to dynamic graphs. Existing exact algorithms for updating the solution of dynamic graph regression require at least a linear time (in terms of $n$: the size of the graph). However, this time complexity might be intractable in practice. In the current paper, we utilize {\em subsampled randomized Hadamard transform} and \textsf{CountSketch} to propose the first sublinear update time randomized algorithms for regression of general dynamic graphs. Suppose that we are given a $n\times d$ matrix embedding $\mathbf M$ of the graph, where $d \ll n$ and $\mathbf M$ has certain properties. Let $r$ be the number of samples required by subsampled randomized Hadamard transform for a $1\pm \epsilon$ approximation, which is a sublinear of $n$. Our first algorithm supports edge insertion and edge deletion and updates the approximate solution in $O(rd)$ time. Our second algorithm is based on \textsf{CountSketch} and supports edge insertion, edge deletion, node insertion and node deletion. It updates the approximate solution in $O(qd)$ time, where $q=O\left(\frac{d^2}{\epsilon^2} \log^6(d/\epsilon) \right)$.
Texture Selection for Automatic Music Genre Classification
Authors: Juliano H. Foleiss, Tiago F. Tavares
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, feature selection, General Classification, Genre classification, Music Genre Classification

Music Genre Classification is the problem of associating genre-related labels to digitized music tracks. It has applications in the organization of commercial and personal music collections. Often, music tracks are described as a set of timbre-inspired sound textures. In shallow-learning systems, the total number of sound textures per track is usually too high, and texture downsampling is necessary to make training tractable. Although previous work has solved this by linear downsampling, no extensive work has been done to evaluate how texture selection benefits genre classification in the context of the bag of frames track descriptions. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of frame selection on automatic music genre classification in a bag of frames scenario. We also present a novel texture selector based on K-Means aimed to identify diverse sound textures within each track. We evaluated texture selection in diverse datasets, four different feature sets, as well as its relationship to a univariate feature selection strategy. The results show that frame selection leads to significant improvement over the single vector baseline on datasets consisting of full-length tracks, regardless of the feature set. Results also indicate that the K-Means texture selector achieves significant improvements over the baseline, using fewer textures per track than the commonly used linear downsampling. The results also suggest that texture selection is complementary to the feature selection strategy evaluated. Our qualitative analysis indicates that texture variety within classes benefits model generalization. Our analysis shows that selecting specific audio excerpts can improve classification performance, and it can be done automatically.
Sample Complexity of Sample Average Approximation for Conditional Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Yifan Hu, Xin Chen, Niao He
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Reinforcement Learning, Stochastic Optimization

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic optimization problems, referred to as the \emph{Conditional Stochastic Optimization} (CSO), in the form of $\min_{x \in \mathcal{X}} \EE_{\xi}f_\xi\Big({\EE_{\eta|\xi}[g_\eta(x,\xi)]}\Big)$, which finds a wide spectrum of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference and so on. Assuming availability of samples from the distribution $\PP(\xi)$ and samples from the conditional distribution $\PP(\eta|\xi)$, we establish the sample complexity of the sample average approximation (SAA) for CSO, under a variety of structural assumptions, such as Lipschitz continuity, smoothness, and error bound conditions. We show that the total sample complexity improves from $\cO(d/\eps^4)$ to $\cO(d/\eps^3)$ when assuming smoothness of the outer function, and further to $\cO(1/\eps^2)$ when the empirical function satisfies the quadratic growth condition. We also establish the sample complexity of a modified SAA, when $\xi$ and $\eta$ are independent. Several numerical experiments further support our theoretical findings. Keywords: stochastic optimization, sample average approximation, large deviations theory
Unsupervised Learning from Video with Deep Neural Embeddings
Authors: Chengxu Zhuang, Tianwei She, Alex Andonian, Max Sobol Mark, Daniel Yamins
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Action Recognition, Object Recognition

Because of the rich dynamical structure of videos and their ubiquity in everyday life, it is a natural idea that video data could serve as a powerful unsupervised learning signal for training visual representations in deep neural networks. However, instantiating this idea, especially at large scale, has remained a significant artificial intelligence challenge. Here we present the Video Instance Embedding (VIE) framework, which extends powerful recent unsupervised loss functions for learning deep nonlinear embeddings to multi-stream temporal processing architectures on large-scale video datasets. We show that VIE-trained networks substantially advance the state of the art in unsupervised learning from video datastreams, both for action recognition in the Kinetics dataset, and object recognition in the ImageNet dataset. We show that a hybrid model with both static and dynamic processing pathways is optimal for both transfer tasks, and provide analyses indicating how the pathways differ. Taken in context, our results suggest that deep neural embeddings are a promising approach to unsupervised visual learning across a wide variety of domains.
Private Identity Testing for High-Dimensional Distributions
Authors: Clément L. Canonne, Gautam Kamath, Audra McMillan, Jonathan Ullman, Lydia Zakynthinou
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In this work we present novel differentially private identity (goodness-of-fit) testers for natural and widely studied classes of multivariate product distributions: Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with known covariance and product distributions over $\{\pm 1\}^{d}$. Our testers have improved sample complexity compared to those derived from previous techniques, and are the first testers whose sample complexity matches the order-optimal minimax sample complexity of $O(d^{1/2}/\alpha^2)$ in many parameter regimes. We construct two types of testers, exhibiting tradeoffs between sample complexity and computational complexity. Finally, we provide a two-way reduction between testing a subclass of multivariate product distributions and testing univariate distributions, and thereby obtain upper and lower bounds for testing this subclass of product distributions.