pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Economy Statistical Recurrent Units For Inferring Nonlinear Granger Causality
Authors: Saurabh Khanna, Vincent Y. F. Tan
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Granger causality is a widely-used criterion for analyzing interactions in large-scale networks. As most physical interactions are inherently nonlinear, we consider the problem of inferring the existence of pairwise Granger causality between nonlinearly interacting stochastic processes from their time series measurements. Our proposed approach relies on modeling the embedded nonlinearities in the measurements using a component-wise time series prediction model based on Statistical Recurrent Units (SRUs). We make a case that the network topology of Granger causal relations is directly inferrable from a structured sparse estimate of the internal parameters of the SRU networks trained to predict the processes$'$ time series measurements. We propose a variant of SRU, called economy-SRU, which, by design has considerably fewer trainable parameters, and therefore less prone to overfitting. The economy-SRU computes a low-dimensional sketch of its high-dimensional hidden state in the form of random projections to generate the feedback for its recurrent processing. Additionally, the internal weight parameters of the economy-SRU are strategically regularized in a group-wise manner to facilitate the proposed network in extracting meaningful predictive features that are highly time-localized to mimic real-world causal events. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed economy-SRU based time series prediction model outperforms the MLP, LSTM and attention-gated CNN-based time series models considered previously for inferring Granger causality.
PAG-Net: Progressive Attention Guided Depth Super-resolution Network
Authors: Arpit Bansal, Sankaraganesh Jonna, Rajiv R. Sahay
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Map Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

In this paper, we propose a novel method for the challenging problem of guided depth map super-resolution, called PAGNet. It is based on residual dense networks and involves the attention mechanism to suppress the texture copying problem arises due to improper guidance by RGB images. The attention module mainly involves providing the spatial attention to guidance image based on the depth features. We evaluate the proposed trained models on test dataset and provide comparisons with the state-of-the-art depth super-resolution methods.
Neuron Interaction Based Representation Composition for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Jian Li, Xing Wang, Baosong Yang, Shuming Shi, Michael R. Lyu, Zhaopeng Tu
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Recent NLP studies reveal that substantial linguistic information can be attributed to single neurons, i.e., individual dimensions of the representation vectors. We hypothesize that modeling strong interactions among neurons helps to better capture complex information by composing the linguistic properties embedded in individual neurons. Starting from this intuition, we propose a novel approach to compose representations learned by different components in neural machine translation (e.g., multi-layer networks or multi-head attention), based on modeling strong interactions among neurons in the representation vectors. Specifically, we leverage bilinear pooling to model pairwise multiplicative interactions among individual neurons, and a low-rank approximation to make the model computationally feasible. We further propose extended bilinear pooling to incorporate first-order representations. Experiments on WMT14 English-German and English-French translation tasks show that our model consistently improves performances over the SOTA Transformer baseline. Further analyses demonstrate that our approach indeed captures more syntactic and semantic information as expected.
Feature Noise Induces Loss Discrepancy Across Groups
Authors: Fereshte Khani, Percy Liang
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Attribute

The performance of standard learning procedures has been observed to differ widely across groups. Recent studies usually attribute this loss discrepancy to an information deficiency for one group (e.g., one group has less data). In this work, we point to a more subtle source of loss discrepancy---feature noise. Our main result is that even when there is no information deficiency specific to one group (e.g., both groups have infinite data), adding the same amount of feature noise to all individuals leads to loss discrepancy. For linear regression, we thoroughly characterize the effect of feature noise on loss discrepancy in terms of the amount of noise, the difference between moments of the two groups, and whether group information is used or not. We then show this loss discrepancy does not vanish immediately if a shift in distribution causes the groups to have similar moments. On three real-world datasets, we show feature noise increases the loss discrepancy if groups have different distributions, while it does not affect the loss discrepancy on datasets where groups have similar distributions.
Neural Networks Learning and Memorization with (almost) no Over-Parameterization
Authors: Amit Daniely
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Memorization

Many results in recent years established polynomial time learnability of various models via neural networks algorithms. However, unless the model is linear separable, or the activation is a polynomial, these results require very large networks -- much more than what is needed for the mere existence of a good predictor. In this paper we prove that SGD on depth two neural networks can memorize samples, learn polynomials with bounded weights, and learn certain kernel spaces, with near optimal network size, sample complexity, and runtime. In particular, we show that SGD on depth two network with $\tilde{O}\left(\frac{m}{d}\right)$ hidden neurons (and hence $\tilde{O}(m)$ parameters) can memorize $m$ random labeled points in $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$.
Privacy-Aware Recommendation with Private-Attribute Protection using Adversarial Learning
Authors: Ghazaleh Beigi, Ahmadreza Mosallanezhad, Ruocheng Guo, Hamidreza Alvari, Alexander Nou, Huan Liu
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Recommendation is one of the critical applications that helps users find information relevant to their interests. However, a malicious attacker can infer users' private information via recommendations. Prior work obfuscates user-item data before sharing it with recommendation system. This approach does not explicitly address the quality of recommendation while performing data obfuscation. Moreover, it cannot protect users against private-attribute inference attacks based on recommendations. This work is the first attempt to build a Recommendation with Attribute Protection (RAP) model which simultaneously recommends relevant items and counters private-attribute inference attacks. The key idea of our approach is to formulate this problem as an adversarial learning problem with two main components: the private attribute inference attacker, and the Bayesian personalized recommender. The attacker seeks to infer users' private-attribute information according to their items list and recommendations. The recommender aims to extract users' interests while employing the attacker to regularize the recommendation process. Experiments show that the proposed model both preserves the quality of recommendation service and protects users against private-attribute inference attacks.
This Car is Mine!: Automobile Theft Countermeasure Leveraging Driver Identification with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Kyung Ho Park, Huy Kang Kim
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Driver Authentication, Driver Identification

As a car becomes more connected, a countermeasure against automobile theft has become a significant task in the real world. To respond to automobile theft, data mining, biometrics, and additional authentication methods are proposed. Among current countermeasures, data mining method is one of the efficient ways to capture the owner driver's unique characteristics. To identify the owner driver from thieves, previous works applied various algorithms toward driving data. Such data mining methods utilized supervised learning, thus required labeled data set. However, it is unrealistic to gather and apply the thief's driving pattern. To overcome this problem, we propose driver identification method with GAN. GAN has merit to build identification model by learning the owner driver's data only. We trained GAN only with owner driver's data and used trained discriminator to identify the owner driver. From actual driving data, we evaluated our identification model recognizes the owner driver well. By ensembling various driver authentication methods with the proposed model, we expect industry can develop automobile theft countermeasures available in the real world.
Shape Detection In 2D Ultrasound Images
Authors: Ruturaj Gole, Haixia Wu, Subho Ghose
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00

Ultrasound images are one of the most widely used techniques in clinical settings to analyze and detect different organs for study or diagnoses of diseases. The dependence on subjective opinions of experts such as radiologists calls for an automatic recognition and detection system that can provide an objective analysis. Previous work done on this topic is limited and can be classified by the organ of interest. Hybrid neural networks, linear and logistic regression models, 3D reconstructed models, and various machine learning techniques have been used to solve complex problems such as detection of lesions and cancer. Our project aims to use Dual Path Networks (DPN) to segment and detect shapes in ultrasound images taken from 3D printed models of the liver. Further the DPN deep architectures could be coupled with Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) to refine the results. Data denoised with various filters would be used to gauge how they fare against each other and provide the best results. Small amount of dataset works with DPNs, and hence, that should be appropriate for us as our dataset shall be limited in size. Moreover, the ultrasound scans shall need to be taken from different orientations of the scanner with respect to the organ, such that the training dataset can accurately perform segmentation and shape detection.
Data Programming using Continuous and Quality-Guided Labeling Functions
Authors: Oishik Chatterjee, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Sunita Sarawagi
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00

Scarcity of labeled data is a bottleneck for supervised learning models. A paradigm that has evolved for dealing with this problem is data programming. An existing data programming paradigm allows human supervision to be provided as a set of discrete labeling functions (LF) that output possibly noisy labels to input instances and a generative modelfor consolidating the weak labels. We enhance and generalize this paradigm by supporting functions that output a continuous score (instead of a hard label) that noisily correlates with labels. We show across five applications that continuous LFs are more natural to program and lead to improved recall. We also show that accuracy of existing generative models is unstable with respect to initialization, training epochs, and learning rates. We give control to the data programmer to guide the training process by providing intuitive quality guides with each LF. We propose an elegant method of incorporating these guides into the generative model. Our overall method, called CAGE, makes the data programming paradigm more reliable than other tricks based on initialization, sign-penalties, or soft-accuracy constraints.
Investigating bankruptcy prediction models in the presence of extreme class imbalance and multiple stages of economy
Authors: Sheikh Rabiul Islam, William Eberle, Sheikh K. Ghafoor, Sid C. Bundy, Douglas A. Talbert, Ambareen Siraj
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00

In the area of credit risk analytics, current Bankruptcy Prediction Models (BPMs) struggle with (a) the availability of comprehensive and real-world data sets and (b) the presence of extreme class imbalance in the data (i.e., very few samples for the minority class) that degrades the performance of the prediction model. Moreover, little research has compared the relative performance of well-known BPM's on public datasets addressing the class imbalance problem. In this work, we apply eight classes of well-known BPMs, as suggested by a review of decades of literature, on a new public dataset named Freddie Mac Single-Family Loan-Level Dataset with resampling (i.e., adding synthetic minority samples) of the minority class to tackle class imbalance. Additionally, we apply some recent AI techniques (e.g., tree-based ensemble techniques) that demonstrate potentially better results on models trained with resampled data. In addition, from the analysis of 19 years (1999-2017) of data, we discover that models behave differently when presented with sudden changes in the economy (e.g., a global financial crisis) resulting in abrupt fluctuations in the national default rate. In summary, this study should aid practitioners/researchers in determining the appropriate model with respect to data that contains a class imbalance and various economic stages.
Dual Learning-based Video Coding with Inception Dense Blocks
Authors: Chao Liu, Heming Sun, Junan Chen, Zhengxue Cheng, Masaru Takeuchi, Jiro Katto, Xiaoyang Zeng, Yibo Fan
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00

In this paper, a dual learning-based method in intra coding is introduced for PCS Grand Challenge. This method is mainly composed of two parts: intra prediction and reconstruction filtering. They use different network structures, the neural network-based intra prediction uses the full-connected network to predict the block while the neural network-based reconstruction filtering utilizes the convolutional networks. Different with the previous filtering works, we use a network with more powerful feature extraction capabilities in our reconstruction filtering network. And the filtering unit is the block-level so as to achieve a more accurate filtering compensation. To our best knowledge, among all the learning-based methods, this is the first attempt to combine two different networks in one application, and we achieve the state-of-the-art performance for AI configuration on the HEVC Test sequences. The experimental result shows that our method leads to significant BD-rate saving for provided 8 sequences compared to HM-16.20 baseline (average 10.24% and 3.57% bitrate reductions for all-intra and random-access coding, respectively). For HEVC test sequences, our model also achieved a 9.70% BD-rate saving compared to HM-16.20 baseline for all-intra configuration.
Domain Knowledge Aided Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Intrusion Detection and Response
Authors: Sheikh Rabiul Islam, William Eberle, Sheikh K. Ghafoor, Ambareen Siraj, Mike Rogers
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of modern-day security solutions for its ability to learn very complex functions and handling "Big Data". However, the lack of explainability and interpretability of successful AI models is a key stumbling block when trust in a model's prediction is critical. This leads to human intervention, which in turn results in a delayed response or decision. While there have been major advancements in the speed and performance of AI-based intrusion detection systems, the response is still at human speed when it comes to explaining and interpreting a specific prediction or decision. In this work, we infuse popular domain knowledge (i.e., CIA principles) in our model for better explainability and validate the approach on a network intrusion detection test case. Our experimental results suggest that the infusion of domain knowledge provides better explainability as well as a faster decision or response. In addition, the infused domain knowledge generalizes the model to work well with unknown attacks, as well as opens the path to adapt to a large stream of network traffic from numerous IoT devices.
A Discrete CVAE for Response Generation on Short-Text Conversation
Authors: Jun Gao, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Junhui Li, Guodong Zhou, Shuming Shi
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Response Generation, Short-Text Conversation, Variable Selection

Neural conversation models such as encoder-decoder models are easy to generate bland and generic responses. Some researchers propose to use the conditional variational autoencoder(CVAE) which maximizes the lower bound on the conditional log-likelihood on a continuous latent variable. With different sampled la-tent variables, the model is expected to generate diverse responses. Although the CVAE-based models have shown tremendous potential, their improvement of generating high-quality responses is still unsatisfactory. In this paper, we introduce a discrete latent variable with an explicit semantic meaning to improve the CVAE on short-text conversation. A major advantage of our model is that we can exploit the semantic distance between the latent variables to maintain good diversity between the sampled latent variables. Accordingly, we pro-pose a two-stage sampling approach to enable efficient diverse variable selection from a large latent space assumed in the short-text conversation task. Experimental results indicate that our model outperforms various kinds of generation models under both automatic and human evaluations and generates more diverse and in-formative responses.
Weakly-Supervised Opinion Summarization by Leveraging External Information
Authors: Chao Zhao, Snigdha Chaturvedi
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Opinion Summarization

Opinion summarization from online product reviews is a challenging task, which involves identifying opinions related to various aspects of the product being reviewed. While previous works require additional human effort to identify relevant aspects, we instead apply domain knowledge from external sources to automatically achieve the same goal. This work proposes AspMem, a generative method that contains an array of memory cells to store aspect-related knowledge. This explicit memory can help obtain a better opinion representation and infer the aspect information more precisely. We evaluate this method on both aspect identification and opinion summarization tasks. Our experiments show that AspMem outperforms the state-of-the-art methods even though, unlike the baselines, it does not rely on human supervision which is carefully handcrafted for the given tasks.
Trend to Equilibrium for the Kinetic Fokker-Planck Equation via the Neural Network Approach
Authors: Hyung Ju Hwang, Jin Woo Jang, Hyeontae Jo, Jae Yong Lee
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction

The issue of the relaxation to equilibrium has been at the core of the kinetic theory of rarefied gas dynamics. In the paper, we introduce the Deep Neural Network (DNN) approximated solutions to the kinetic Fokker-Planck equation in a bounded interval and study the large-time asymptotic behavior of the solutions and other physically relevant macroscopic quantities. We impose the varied types of boundary conditions including the inflow-type and the reflection-type boundaries as well as the varied diffusion and friction coefficients and study the boundary effects on the asymptotic behaviors. These include the predictions on the large-time behaviors of the pointwise values of the particle distribution and the macroscopic physical quantities including the total kinetic energy, the entropy, and the free energy. We also provide the theoretical supports for the pointwise convergence of the neural network solutions to the \textit{a priori} analytic solutions. We use the library \textit{PyTorch}, the activation function \textit{tanh} between layers, and the \textit{Adam} optimizer for the Deep Learning algorithm.
Real-time Ultrasound-enhanced Multimodal Imaging of Tongue using 3D Printable Stabilizer System: A Deep Learning Approach
Authors: M. Hamed Mozaffari, Won-Sook Lee
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00

Despite renewed awareness of the importance of articulation, it remains a challenge for instructors to handle the pronunciation needs of language learners. There are relatively scarce pedagogical tools for pronunciation teaching and learning. Unlike inefficient, traditional pronunciation instructions like listening and repeating, electronic visual feedback (EVF) systems such as ultrasound technology have been employed in new approaches. Recently, an ultrasound-enhanced multimodal method has been developed for visualizing tongue movements of a language learner overlaid on the face-side of the speaker's head. That system was evaluated for several language courses via a blended learning paradigm at the university level. The result was asserted that visualizing the articulator's system as biofeedback to language learners will significantly improve articulation learning efficiency. In spite of the successful usage of multimodal techniques for pronunciation training, it still requires manual works and human manipulation. In this article, we aim to contribute to this growing body of research by addressing difficulties of the previous approaches by proposing a new comprehensive, automatic, real-time multimodal pronunciation training system, benefits from powerful artificial intelligence techniques. The main objective of this research was to combine the advantages of ultrasound technology, three-dimensional printing, and deep learning algorithms to enhance the performance of previous systems. Our preliminary pedagogical evaluation of the proposed system revealed a significant improvement in flexibility, control, robustness, and autonomy.
Differentiable Algorithm for Marginalising Changepoints
Authors: Hyoungjin Lim, Gwonsoo Che, Wonyeol Lee, Hongseok Yang
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We present an algorithm for marginalising changepoints in time-series models that assume a fixed number of unknown changepoints. Our algorithm is differentiable with respect to its inputs, which are the values of latent random variables other than changepoints. Also, it runs in time O(mn) where n is the number of time steps and m the number of changepoints, an improvement over a naive marginalisation method with O(n^m) time complexity. We derive the algorithm by identifying quantities related to this marginalisation problem, showing that these quantities satisfy recursive relationships, and transforming the relationships to an algorithm via dynamic programming. Since our algorithm is differentiable, it can be applied to convert a model non-differentiable due to changepoints to a differentiable one, so that the resulting models can be analysed using gradient-based inference or learning techniques. We empirically show the effectiveness of our algorithm in this application by tackling the posterior inference problem on synthetic and real-world data.