pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MAVEN: Multi-Agent Variational Exploration
Authors: Anuj Mahajan, Tabish Rashid, Mikayel Samvelyan, Shimon Whiteson
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, SMAC, SMAC+

Centralised training with decentralised execution is an important setting for cooperative deep multi-agent reinforcement learning due to communication constraints during execution and computational tractability in training. In this paper, we analyse value-based methods that are known to have superior performance in complex environments [43]. We specifically focus on QMIX [40], the current state-of-the-art in this domain. We show that the representational constraints on the joint action-values introduced by QMIX and similar methods lead to provably poor exploration and suboptimality. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach called MAVEN that hybridises value and policy-based methods by introducing a latent space for hierarchical control. The value-based agents condition their behaviour on the shared latent variable controlled by a hierarchical policy. This allows MAVEN to achieve committed, temporally extended exploration, which is key to solving complex multi-agent tasks. Our experimental results show that MAVEN achieves significant performance improvements on the challenging SMAC domain [43].
Imperial College London Submission to VATEX Video Captioning Task
Authors: Ozan Caglayan, Zixiu Wu, Pranava Madhyastha, Josiah Wang, Lucia Specia
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Video Captioning

This paper describes the Imperial College London team's submission to the 2019' VATEX video captioning challenge, where we first explore two sequence-to-sequence models, namely a recurrent (GRU) model and a transformer model, which generate captions from the I3D action features. We then investigate the effect of dropping the encoder and the attention mechanism and instead conditioning the GRU decoder over two different vectorial representations: (i) a max-pooled action feature vector and (ii) the output of a multi-label classifier trained to predict visual entities from the action features. Our baselines achieved scores comparable to the official baseline. Conditioning over entity predictions performed substantially better than conditioning on the max-pooled feature vector, and only marginally worse than the GRU-based sequence-to-sequence baseline.
Using Whole Document Context in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Valentin Macé, Christophe Servan
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (IWSLT) 2019 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

In Machine Translation, considering the document as a whole can help to resolve ambiguities and inconsistencies. In this paper, we propose a simple yet promising approach to add contextual information in Neural Machine Translation. We present a method to add source context that capture the whole document with accurate boundaries, taking every word into account. We provide this additional information to a Transformer model and study the impact of our method on three language pairs. The proposed approach obtains promising results in the English-German, English-French and French-English document-level translation tasks. We observe interesting cross-sentential behaviors where the model learns to use document-level information to improve translation coherence.
Conditional Importance Sampling for Off-Policy Learning
Authors: Mark Rowland, Anna Harutyunyan, Hado van Hasselt, Diana Borsa, Tom Schaul, Rémi Munos, Will Dabney
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The principal contribution of this paper is a conceptual framework for off-policy reinforcement learning, based on conditional expectations of importance sampling ratios. This framework yields new perspectives and understanding of existing off-policy algorithms, and reveals a broad space of unexplored algorithms. We theoretically analyse this space, and concretely investigate several algorithms that arise from this framework.
Adaptive Trade-Offs in Off-Policy Learning
Authors: Mark Rowland, Will Dabney, Rémi Munos
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Off-policy evaluation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A great variety of off-policy learning algorithms exist in the literature, and new breakthroughs in this area continue to be made, improving theoretical understanding and yielding state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, we take a unifying view of this space of algorithms, and consider their trade-offs of three fundamental quantities: update variance, fixed-point bias, and contraction rate. This leads to new perspectives of existing methods, and also naturally yields novel algorithms for off-policy evaluation and control. We develop one such algorithm, C-trace, demonstrating that it is able to more efficiently make these trade-offs than existing methods in use, and that it can be scaled to yield state-of-the-art performance in large-scale environments.
Hidden Unit Specialization in Layered Neural Networks: ReLU vs. Sigmoidal Activation
Authors: Elisa Oostwal, Michiel Straat, Michael Biehl
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00

We study layered neural networks of rectified linear units (ReLU) in a modelling framework for stochastic training processes. The comparison with sigmoidal activation functions is in the center of interest. We compute typical learning curves for shallow networks with K hidden units in matching student teacher scenarios. The systems exhibit sudden changes of the generalization performance via the process of hidden unit specialization at critical sizes of the training set. Surprisingly, our results show that the training behavior of ReLU networks is qualitatively different from that of networks with sigmoidal activations. In networks with K >= 3 sigmoidal hidden units, the transition is discontinuous: Specialized network configurations co-exist and compete with states of poor performance even for very large training sets. On the contrary, the use of ReLU activations results in continuous transitions for all K: For large enough training sets, two competing, differently specialized states display similar generalization abilities, which coincide exactly for large networks in the limit K to infinity.
MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answering
Authors: Patrick Lewis, Barlas Oğuz, Ruty Rinott, Sebastian Riedel, Holger Schwenk
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Articles, Extractive Question-Answering, Machine Translation, Question Answering

Question answering (QA) models have shown rapid progress enabled by the availability of large, high-quality benchmark datasets. Such annotated datasets are difficult and costly to collect, and rarely exist in languages other than English, making training QA systems in other languages challenging. An alternative to building large monolingual training datasets is to develop cross-lingual systems which can transfer to a target language without requiring training data in that language. In order to develop such systems, it is crucial to invest in high quality multilingual evaluation benchmarks to measure progress. We present MLQA, a multi-way aligned extractive QA evaluation benchmark intended to spur research in this area. MLQA contains QA instances in 7 languages, namely English, Arabic, German, Spanish, Hindi, Vietnamese and Simplified Chinese. It consists of over 12K QA instances in English and 5K in each other language, with each QA instance being parallel between 4 languages on average. MLQA is built using a novel alignment context strategy on Wikipedia articles, and serves as a cross-lingual extension to existing extractive QA datasets. We evaluate current state-of-the-art cross-lingual representations on MLQA, and also provide machine-translation-based baselines. In all cases, transfer results are shown to be significantly behind training-language performance.
Universal Marginaliser for Deep Amortised Inference for Probabilistic Programs
Authors: Robert Walecki, Kostis Gourgoulias, Adam Baker, Chris Hart, Chris Lucas, Max Zwiessele, Albert Buchard, Maria Lomeli, Yura Perov, Saurabh Johri
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Probabilistic Programming

Probabilistic programming languages (PPLs) are powerful modelling tools which allow to formalise our knowledge about the world and reason about its inherent uncertainty. Inference methods used in PPL can be computationally costly due to significant time burden and/or storage requirements; or they can lack theoretical guarantees of convergence and accuracy when applied to large scale graphical models. To this end, we present the Universal Marginaliser (UM), a novel method for amortised inference, in PPL. We show how combining samples drawn from the original probabilistic program prior with an appropriate augmentation method allows us to train one neural network to approximate any of the corresponding conditional marginal distributions, with any separation into latent and observed variables, and thus amortise the cost of inference. Finally, we benchmark the method on multiple probabilistic programs, in Pyro, with different model structure.
A Survey on Recent Advancements for AI Enabled Radiomics in Neuro-Oncology
Authors: Syed Muhammad Anwar, Tooba Altaf, Khola Rafique, Harish RaviPrakash, Hassan Mohy-ud-Din, Ulas Bagci
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00

Artificial intelligence (AI) enabled radiomics has evolved immensely especially in the field of oncology. Radiomics provide assistancein diagnosis of cancer, planning of treatment strategy, and predictionof survival. Radiomics in neuro-oncology has progressed significantly inthe recent past. Deep learning has outperformed conventional machinelearning methods in most image-based applications. Convolutional neu-ral networks (CNNs) have seen some popularity in radiomics, since theydo not require hand-crafted features and can automatically extract fea-tures during the learning process. In this regard, it is observed that CNNbased radiomics could provide state-of-the-art results in neuro-oncology,similar to the recent success of such methods in a wide spectrum ofmedical image analysis applications. Herein we present a review of the most recent best practices and establish the future trends for AI enabled radiomics in neuro-oncology.
Fine-grained evaluation of Quality Estimation for Machine translation based on a linguistically-motivated Test Suite
Authors: Avramidis Eleftherios, Vivien Macketanz, Arle Lommel, Hans Uszkoreit
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We present an alternative method of evaluating Quality Estimation systems, which is based on a linguistically-motivated Test Suite. We create a test-set consisting of 14 linguistic error categories and we gather for each of them a set of samples with both correct and erroneous translations. Then, we measure the performance of 5 Quality Estimation systems by checking their ability to distinguish between the correct and the erroneous translations. The detailed results are much more informative about the ability of each system. The fact that different Quality Estimation systems perform differently at various phenomena confirms the usefulness of the Test Suite.
Root Mean Square Layer Normalization
Authors: Biao Zhang, Rico Sennrich
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Layer normalization (LayerNorm) has been successfully applied to various deep neural networks to help stabilize training and boost model convergence because of its capability in handling re-centering and re-scaling of both inputs and weight matrix. However, the computational overhead introduced by LayerNorm makes these improvements expensive and significantly slows the underlying network, e.g. RNN in particular. In this paper, we hypothesize that re-centering invariance in LayerNorm is dispensable and propose root mean square layer normalization, or RMSNorm. RMSNorm regularizes the summed inputs to a neuron in one layer according to root mean square (RMS), giving the model re-scaling invariance property and implicit learning rate adaptation ability. RMSNorm is computationally simpler and thus more efficient than LayerNorm. We also present partial RMSNorm, or pRMSNorm where the RMS is estimated from p% of the summed inputs without breaking the above properties. Extensive experiments on several tasks using diverse network architectures show that RMSNorm achieves comparable performance against LayerNorm but reduces the running time by 7%~64% on different models. Source code is available at https://github.com/bzhangGo/rmsnorm.
Fine-grained evaluation of German-English Machine Translation based on a Test Suite
Authors: Vivien Macketanz, Eleftherios Avramidis, Aljoscha Burchardt, Hans Uszkoreit
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2018 10
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

We present an analysis of 16 state-of-the-art MT systems on German-English based on a linguistically-motivated test suite. The test suite has been devised manually by a team of language professionals in order to cover a broad variety of linguistic phenomena that MT often fails to translate properly. It contains 5,000 test sentences covering 106 linguistic phenomena in 14 categories, with an increased focus on verb tenses, aspects and moods. The MT outputs are evaluated in a semi-automatic way through regular expressions that focus only on the part of the sentence that is relevant to each phenomenon. Through our analysis, we are able to compare systems based on their performance on these categories. Additionally, we reveal strengths and weaknesses of particular systems and we identify grammatical phenomena where the overall performance of MT is relatively low.
Creativity in Robot Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Juan Carlos Vargas, Malhar Bhoite, Amir Barati Farimani
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Manipulation

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful control technique in robotic science. In contrast to control theory, DRL is more robust in the thorough exploration of the environment. This capability of DRL generates more human-like behaviour and intelligence when applied to the robots. To explore this capability, we designed challenging manipulation tasks to observe robots strategy to handle complex scenarios. We observed that robots not only perform tasks successfully, but also transpire a creative and non intuitive solution. We also observed robot's persistence in tasks that are close to success and its striking ability in discerning to continue or give up.
Linguistic evaluation of German-English Machine Translation using a Test Suite
Authors: Eleftherios Avramidis, Vivien Macketanz, Ursula Strohriegel, Hans Uszkoreit
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We present the results of the application of a grammatical test suite for German$\rightarrow$English MT on the systems submitted at WMT19, with a detailed analysis for 107 phenomena organized in 14 categories. The systems still translate wrong one out of four test items in average. Low performance is indicated for idioms, modals, pseudo-clefts, multi-word expressions and verb valency. When compared to last year, there has been a improvement of function words, non-verbal agreement and punctuation. More detailed conclusions about particular systems and phenomena are also presented.
An Exponential Learning Rate Schedule for Deep Learning
Authors: Zhiyuan Li, Sanjeev Arora
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Deep Learning

Intriguing empirical evidence exists that deep learning can work well with exoticschedules for varying the learning rate. This paper suggests that the phenomenon may be due to Batch Normalization or BN, which is ubiquitous and provides benefits in optimization and generalization across all standard architectures. The following new results are shown about BN with weight decay and momentum (in other words, the typical use case which was not considered in earlier theoretical analyses of stand-alone BN. 1. Training can be done using SGD with momentum and an exponentially increasing learning rate schedule, i.e., learning rate increases by some $(1 +\alpha)$ factor in every epoch for some $\alpha >0$. (Precise statement in the paper.) To the best of our knowledge this is the first time such a rate schedule has been successfully used, let alone for highly successful architectures. As expected, such training rapidly blows up network weights, but the net stays well-behaved due to normalization. 2. Mathematical explanation of the success of the above rate schedule: a rigorous proof that it is equivalent to the standard setting of BN + SGD + StandardRate Tuning + Weight Decay + Momentum. This equivalence holds for other normalization layers as well, Group Normalization, LayerNormalization, Instance Norm, etc. 3. A worked-out toy example illustrating the above linkage of hyper-parameters. Using either weight decay or BN alone reaches global minimum, but convergence fails when both are used.
Bridging the Knowledge Gap: Enhancing Question Answering with World and Domain Knowledge
Authors: Travis R. Goodwin, Dina Demner-Fushman
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Question Answering, Semantic Composition, World Knowledge

In this paper we present OSCAR (Ontology-based Semantic Composition Augmented Regularization), a method for injecting task-agnostic knowledge from an Ontology or knowledge graph into a neural network during pretraining. We evaluated the impact of including OSCAR when pretraining BERT with Wikipedia articles by measuring the performance when fine-tuning on two question answering tasks involving world knowledge and causal reasoning and one requiring domain (healthcare) knowledge and obtained 33:3%, 18:6%, and 4% improved accuracy compared to pretraining BERT without OSCAR and obtaining new state-of-the-art results on two of the tasks.
Gaze Gestures and Their Applications in human-computer interaction with a head-mounted display
Authors: W. X. Chen, X. Y. Cui, J. Zheng, J. M. Zhang, S. Chen, Y. D. Yao
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00

A head-mounted display (HMD) is a portable and interactive display device. With the development of 5G technology, it may become a general-purpose computing platform in the future. Human-computer interaction (HCI) technology for HMDs has also been of significant interest in recent years. In addition to tracking gestures and speech, tracking human eyes as a means of interaction is highly effective. In this paper, we propose two UnityEyes-based convolutional neural network models, UEGazeNet and UEGazeNet*, which can be used for input images with low resolution and high resolution, respectively. These models can perform rapid interactions by classifying gaze trajectories (GTs), and a GTgestures dataset containing data for 10,200 "eye-painting gestures" collected from 15 individuals is established with our gaze-tracking method. We evaluated the performance both indoors and outdoors and the UEGazeNet can obtaine results 52\% and 67\% better than those of state-of-the-art networks. The generalizability of our GTgestures dataset using a variety of gaze-tracking models is evaluated, and an average recognition rate of 96.71\% is obtained by our method.
Modeling Sequences with Quantum States: A Look Under the Hood
Authors: Tai-Danae Bradley, E. Miles Stoudenmire, John Terilla
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00

Classical probability distributions on sets of sequences can be modeled using quantum states. Here, we do so with a quantum state that is pure and entangled. Because it is entangled, the reduced densities that describe subsystems also carry information about the complementary subsystem. This is in contrast to the classical marginal distributions on a subsystem in which information about the complementary system has been integrated out and lost. A training algorithm based on the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) procedure uses the extra information contained in the reduced densities and organizes it into a tensor network model. An understanding of the extra information contained in the reduced densities allow us to examine the mechanics of this DMRG algorithm and study the generalization error of the resulting model. As an illustration, we work with the even-parity dataset and produce an estimate for the generalization error as a function of the fraction of the dataset used in training.
On the Global Optima of Kernelized Adversarial Representation Learning
Authors: Bashir Sadeghi, Runyi Yu, Vishnu Naresh Boddeti
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Representation Learning

Adversarial representation learning is a promising paradigm for obtaining data representations that are invariant to certain sensitive attributes while retaining the information necessary for predicting target attributes. Existing approaches solve this problem through iterative adversarial minimax optimization and lack theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we first study the "linear" form of this problem i.e., the setting where all the players are linear functions. We show that the resulting optimization problem is both non-convex and non-differentiable. We obtain an exact closed-form expression for its global optima through spectral learning and provide performance guarantees in terms of analytical bounds on the achievable utility and invariance. We then extend this solution and analysis to non-linear functions through kernel representation. Numerical experiments on UCI, Extended Yale B and CIFAR-100 datasets indicate that, (a) practically, our solution is ideal for "imparting" provable invariance to any biased pre-trained data representation, and (b) empirically, the trade-off between utility and invariance provided by our solution is comparable to iterative minimax optimization of existing deep neural network based approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/human-analysis/Kernel-ARL
Deep Reinforcement Learning meets Graph Neural Networks: exploring a routing optimization use case
Authors: Paul Almasan, José Suárez-Varela, Krzysztof Rusek, Pere Barlet-Ros, Albert Cabellos-Aparicio
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown a dramatic improvement in decision-making and automated control problems. Consequently, DRL represents a promising technique to efficiently solve many relevant optimization problems (e.g., routing) in self-driving networks. However, existing DRL-based solutions applied to networking fail to generalize, which means that they are not able to operate properly when applied to network topologies not observed during training. This lack of generalization capability significantly hinders the deployment of DRL technologies in production networks. This is because state-of-the-art DRL-based networking solutions use standard neural networks (e.g., fully connected, convolutional), which are not suited to learn from information structured as graphs. In this paper, we integrate Graph Neural Networks (GNN) into DRL agents and we design a problem specific action space to enable generalization. GNNs are Deep Learning models inherently designed to generalize over graphs of different sizes and structures. This allows the proposed GNN-based DRL agent to learn and generalize over arbitrary network topologies. We test our DRL+GNN agent in a routing optimization use case in optical networks and evaluate it on 180 and 232 unseen synthetic and real-world network topologies respectively. The results show that the DRL+GNN agent is able to outperform state-of-the-art solutions in topologies never seen during training.