pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Partner Approximating Learners (PAL): Simulation-Accelerated Learning with Explicit Partner Modeling in Multi-Agent Domains
Authors: Florian Köpf, Alexander Nitsch, Michael Flad, Sören Hohmann
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Mixed cooperative-competitive control scenarios such as human-machine interaction with individual goals of the interacting partners are very challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In order to contribute towards intuitive human-machine collaboration, we focus on problems in the continuous state and control domain where no explicit communication is considered and the agents do not know the others' goals or control laws but only sense their control inputs retrospectively. Our proposed framework combines a learned partner model based on online data with a reinforcement learning agent that is trained in a simulated environment including the partner model. Thus, we overcome drawbacks of independent learners and, in addition, benefit from a reduced amount of real world data required for reinforcement learning which is vital in the human-machine context. We finally analyze an example that demonstrates the merits of our proposed framework which learns fast due to the simulated environment and adapts to the continuously changing partner due to the partner approximation.
Out-of-domain Detection for Natural Language Understanding in Dialog Systems
Authors: Yinhe Zheng, Guanyi Chen, Minlie Huang
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Natural Language Understanding, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Text Generation

Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is a vital component of dialogue systems, and its ability to detect Out-of-Domain (OOD) inputs is critical in practical applications, since the acceptance of the OOD input that is unsupported by the current system may lead to catastrophic failure. However, most existing OOD detection methods rely heavily on manually labeled OOD samples and cannot take full advantage of unlabeled data. This limits the feasibility of these models in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel model to generate high-quality pseudo OOD samples that are akin to IN-Domain (IND) input utterances, and thereby improves the performance of OOD detection. To this end, an autoencoder is trained to map an input utterance into a latent code. and the codes of IND and OOD samples are trained to be indistinguishable by utilizing a generative adversarial network. To provide more supervision signals, an auxiliary classifier is introduced to regularize the generated OOD samples to have indistinguishable intent labels. Experiments show that these pseudo OOD samples generated by our model can be used to effectively improve OOD detection in NLU. Besides, we also demonstrate that the effectiveness of these pseudo OOD data can be further improved by efficiently utilizing unlabeled data.
Crowd Counting on Images with Scale Variation and Isolated Clusters
Authors: Haoyue Bai, Song Wen, S. -H. Gary Chan
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Crowd Counting

Crowd counting is to estimate the number of objects (e.g., people or vehicles) in an image of unconstrained congested scenes. Designing a general crowd counting algorithm applicable to a wide range of crowd images is challenging, mainly due to the possibly large variation in object scales and the presence of many isolated small clusters. Previous approaches based on convolution operations with multi-branch architecture are effective for only some narrow bands of scales and have not captured the long-range contextual relationship due to isolated clustering. To address that, we propose SACANet, a novel scale-adaptive long-range context-aware network for crowd counting. SACANet consists of three major modules: the pyramid contextual module which extracts long-range contextual information and enlarges the receptive field, a scale-adaptive self-attention multi-branch module to attain high scale sensitivity and detection accuracy of isolated clusters, and a hierarchical fusion module to fuse multi-level self-attention features. With group normalization, SACANet achieves better optimality in the training process. We have conducted extensive experiments using the VisDrone2019 People dataset, the VisDrone2019 Vehicle dataset, and some other challenging benchmarks. As compared with the state-of-the-art methods, SACANet is shown to be effective, especially for extremely crowded conditions with diverse scales and scattered clusters, and achieves much lower MAE as compared with baselines.
Combination of Unified Embedding Model and Observed Features for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Takuma Ebisu, Ryutaro Ichise
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Prediction, Translation

Knowledge graphs are useful for many artificial intelligence tasks but often have missing data. Hence, a method for completing knowledge graphs is required. Existing approaches include embedding models, the Path Ranking Algorithm, and rule evaluation models. However, these approaches have limitations. For example, all the information is mixed and difficult to interpret in embedding models, and traditional rule evaluation models are basically slow. In this paper, we provide an integrated view of various approaches and combine them to compensate for their limitations. We first unify state-of-the-art embedding models, such as ComplEx and TorusE, reinterpreting them as a variant of translation-based models. Then, we show that these models utilize paths for link prediction and propose a method for evaluating rules based on this idea. Finally, we combine an embedding model and observed feature models to predict missing triples. This is possible because all of these models utilize paths. We also conduct experiments, including link prediction tasks, with standard datasets to evaluate our method and framework. The experiments show that our method can evaluate rules faster than traditional methods and that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of link prediction.
Learning Concepts Definable in First-Order Logic with Counting
Authors: Steffen van Bergerem
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, PAC learning

We study Boolean classification problems over relational background structures in the logical framework introduced by Grohe and Tur\'an (TOCS 2004). It is known (Grohe and Ritzert, LICS 2017) that classifiers definable in first-order logic over structures of polylogarithmic degree can be learned in sublinear time, where the degree of the structure and the running time are measured in terms of the size of the structure. We generalise the results to the first-order logic with counting FOCN, which was introduced by Kuske and Schweikardt (LICS 2017) as an expressive logic generalising various other counting logics. Specifically, we prove that classifiers definable in FOCN over classes of structures of polylogarithmic degree can be consistently learned in sublinear time. This can be seen as a first step towards extending the learning framework to include numerical aspects of machine learning. We extend the result to agnostic probably approximately correct (PAC) learning for classes of structures of degree at most $(\log \log n)^c$ for some constant $c$. Moreover, we show that bounding the degree is crucial to obtain sublinear-time learning algorithms. That is, we prove that, for structures of unbounded degree, learning is not possible in sublinear time, even for classifiers definable in plain first-order logic.
Parameter Tuning for Self-optimizing Software at Scale
Authors: Dmytro Pukhkaiev, Uwe Aßmann
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00

Efficiency of self-optimizing systems is heavily dependent on their optimization strategies, e.g., choosing exact or approximate solver. A choice of such a strategy, in turn, is influenced by numerous factors, such as re-optimization time, size of the problem, optimality constraints, etc. Exact solvers are domain-independent and can guarantee optimality but suffer from scaling, while approximate solvers offer a "good-enough" solution in exchange for a lack of generality and parameter-dependence. In this paper we discuss the trade-offs between exact and approximate optimizers for solving a quality-based software selection and hardware mapping problem from the scalability perspective. We show that even a simple heuristic can compete with thoroughly developed exact solvers under condition of an effective parameter tuning. Moreover, we discuss robustness of the obtained algorithm's configuration. Last but not least, we present a software product line for parameter tuning, which comprise the main features of this process and can serve as a platform for further research in the area of parameter tuning.
HoughNet: neural network architecture for vanishing points detection
Authors: Alexander Sheshkus, Anastasia Ingacheva, Vladimir Arlazarov, Dmitry Nikolaev
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

In this paper we introduce a novel neural network architecture based on Fast Hough Transform layer. The layer of this type allows our neural network to accumulate features from linear areas across the entire image instead of local areas. We demonstrate its potential by solving the problem of vanishing points detection in the images of documents. Such problem occurs when dealing with camera shots of the documents in uncontrolled conditions. In this case, the document image can suffer several specific distortions including projective transform. To train our model, we use MIDV-500 dataset and provide testing results. The strong generalization ability of the suggested method is proven with its applying to a completely different ICDAR 2011 dewarping contest. In previously published papers considering these dataset authors measured the quality of vanishing point detection by counting correctly recognized words with open OCR engine Tesseract. To compare with them, we reproduce this experiment and show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art result.
Subjectivity Learning Theory towards Artificial General Intelligence
Authors: Xin Su, Shangqi Guo, Feng Chen
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

The construction of artificial general intelligence (AGI) was a long-term goal of AI research aiming to deal with the complex data in the real world and make reasonable judgments in various cases like a human. However, the current AI creations, referred to as "Narrow AI", are limited to a specific problem. The constraints come from two basic assumptions of data, which are independent and identical distributed samples and single-valued mapping between inputs and outputs. We completely break these constraints and develop the subjectivity learning theory for general intelligence. We assign the mathematical meaning for the philosophical concept of subjectivity and build the data representation of general intelligence. Under the subjectivity representation, then the global risk is constructed as the new learning goal. We prove that subjectivity learning holds a lower risk bound than traditional machine learning. Moreover, we propose the principle of empirical global risk minimization (EGRM) as the subjectivity learning process in practice, establish the condition of consistency, and present triple variables for controlling the total risk bound. The subjectivity learning is a novel learning theory for unconstrained real data and provides a path to develop AGI.
Language learning using Speech to Image retrieval
Authors: Danny Merkx, Stefan L. Frank, Mirjam Ernestus
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Grounded language learning, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Speech Recognition, Visual Grounding

Humans learn language by interaction with their environment and listening to other humans. It should also be possible for computational models to learn language directly from speech but so far most approaches require text. We improve on existing neural network approaches to create visually grounded embeddings for spoken utterances. Using a combination of a multi-layer GRU, importance sampling, cyclic learning rates, ensembling and vectorial self-attention our results show a remarkable increase in image-caption retrieval performance over previous work. Furthermore, we investigate which layers in the model learn to recognise words in the input. We find that deeper network layers are better at encoding word presence, although the final layer has slightly lower performance. This shows that our visually grounded sentence encoder learns to recognise words from the input even though it is not explicitly trained for word recognition.
Composing Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Word Embeddings
Authors: Lianbo Ma, Peng Sun, Zhiwei Lin, Hui Wang
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Relation, Word Embeddings

Learning knowledge graph embedding from an existing knowledge graph is very important to knowledge graph completion. For a fact $(h,r,t)$ with the head entity $h$ having a relation $r$ with the tail entity $t$, the current approaches aim to learn low dimensional representations $(\mathbf{h},\mathbf{r},\mathbf{t})$, each of which corresponds to the elements in $(h, r, t)$, respectively. As $(\mathbf{h},\mathbf{r},\mathbf{t})$ is learned from the existing facts within a knowledge graph, these representations can not be used to detect unknown facts (if the entities or relations never occur in the knowledge graph). This paper proposes a new approach called TransW, aiming to go beyond the current work by composing knowledge graph embeddings using word embeddings. Given the fact that an entity or a relation contains one or more words (quite often), it is sensible to learn a mapping function from word embedding spaces to knowledge embedding spaces, which shows how entities are constructed using human words. More importantly, composing knowledge embeddings using word embeddings makes it possible to deal with the emerging new facts (either new entities or relations). Experimental results using three public datasets show the consistency and outperformance of the proposed TransW.
Graph Random Neural Features for Distance-Preserving Graph Representations
Authors: Daniele Zambon, Cesare Alippi, Lorenzo Livi
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

We present Graph Random Neural Features (GRNF), a novel embedding method from graph-structured data to real vectors based on a family of graph neural networks. The embedding naturally deals with graph isomorphism and preserves the metric structure of the graph domain, in probability. In addition to being an explicit embedding method, it also allows us to efficiently and effectively approximate graph metric distances (as well as complete kernel functions); a criterion to select the embedding dimension trading off the approximation accuracy with the computational cost is also provided. GRNF can be used within traditional processing methods or as a training-free input layer of a graph neural network. The theoretical guarantees that accompany GRNF ensure that the considered graph distance is metric, hence allowing to distinguish any pair of non-isomorphic graphs.
Imitation Learning from Pixel-Level Demonstrations by HashReward
Authors: Xin-Qiang Cai, Yao-Xiang Ding, Yuan Jiang, Zhi-Hua Zhou
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Imitation Learning

One of the key issues for imitation learning lies in making policy learned from limited samples to generalize well in the whole state-action space. This problem is much more severe in high-dimensional state environments, such as game playing with raw pixel inputs. Under this situation, even state-of-the-art adversary-based imitation learning algorithms fail. Through empirical studies, we find that the main cause lies in the failure of training a powerful discriminator to generate meaningful rewards in high-dimensional environments. Although it seems that dimensionality reduction can help, a straightforward application of off-the-shelf methods cannot achieve good performance. In this work, we show in theory that the balance between dimensionality reduction and discriminative training is essential for effective learning. To achieve this target, we propose HashReward, which utilizes the idea of supervised hashing to realize such an ideal balance. Experimental results show that HashReward could outperform state-of-the-art methods for a large gap under the challenging high-dimensional environments.
A Survey on Reproducibility by Evaluating Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms on Real-World Robots
Authors: Nicolai A. Lynnerup, Laura Nolling, Rasmus Hasle, John Hallam
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

As reinforcement learning (RL) achieves more success in solving complex tasks, more care is needed to ensure that RL research is reproducible and that algorithms herein can be compared easily and fairly with minimal bias. RL results are, however, notoriously hard to reproduce due to the algorithms' intrinsic variance, the environments' stochasticity, and numerous (potentially unreported) hyper-parameters. In this work we investigate the many issues leading to irreproducible research and how to manage those. We further show how to utilise a rigorous and standardised evaluation approach for easing the process of documentation, evaluation and fair comparison of different algorithms, where we emphasise the importance of choosing the right measurement metrics and conducting proper statistics on the results, for unbiased reporting of the results.
Differential equations as models of deep neural networks
Authors: Julius Ruseckas
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this work we systematically analyze general properties of differential equations used as machine learning models. We demonstrate that the gradient of the loss function with respect to to the hidden state can be considered as a generalized momentum conjugate to the hidden state, allowing application of the tools of classical mechanics. In addition, we show that not only residual networks, but also feedforward neural networks with small nonlinearities and the weights matrices deviating only slightly from identity matrices can be related to the differential equations. We propose a differential equation describing such networks and investigate its properties.
Balancing Reconstruction Quality and Regularisation in ELBO for VAEs
Authors: Shuyu Lin, Stephen Roberts, Niki Trigoni, Ronald Clark
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00

A trade-off exists between reconstruction quality and the prior regularisation in the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) loss that Variational Autoencoder (VAE) models use for learning. There are few satisfactory approaches to deal with a balance between the prior and reconstruction objective, with most methods dealing with this problem through heuristics. In this paper, we show that the noise variance (often set as a fixed value) in the Gaussian likelihood p(x|z) for real-valued data can naturally act to provide such a balance. By learning this noise variance so as to maximise the ELBO loss, we automatically obtain an optimal trade-off between the reconstruction error and the prior constraint on the posteriors. This variance can be interpreted intuitively as the necessary noise level for the current model to be the best explanation of the observed dataset. Further, by allowing the variance inference to be more flexible it can conveniently be used as an uncertainty estimator for reconstructed or generated samples. We demonstrate that optimising the noise variance is a crucial component of VAE learning, and showcase the performance on MNIST, Fashion MNIST and CelebA datasets. We find our approach can significantly improve the quality of generated samples whilst maintaining a smooth latent-space manifold to represent the data. The method also offers an indication of uncertainty in the final generative model.
Neural Conversational QA: Learning to Reason v.s. Exploiting Patterns
Authors: Nikhil Verma, Abhishek Sharma, Dhiraj Madan, Danish Contractor, Harshit Kumar, Sachindra Joshi
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00

Neural Conversational QA tasks like ShARC require systems to answer questions based on the contents of a given passage. On studying recent state-of-the-art models on the ShARCQA task, we found indications that the models learn spurious clues/patterns in the dataset. Furthermore, we show that a heuristic-based program designed to exploit these patterns can have performance comparable to that of the neural models. In this paper we share our findings about four types of patterns found in the ShARC corpus and describe how neural models exploit them. Motivated by the aforementioned findings, we create and share a modified dataset that has fewer spurious patterns, consequently allowing models to learn better.
Masking by Moving: Learning Distraction-Free Radar Odometry from Pose Information
Authors: Dan Barnes, Rob Weston, Ingmar Posner
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Radar odometry

This paper presents an end-to-end radar odometry system which delivers robust, real-time pose estimates based on a learned embedding space free of sensing artefacts and distractor objects. The system deploys a fully differentiable, correlation-based radar matching approach. This provides the same level of interpretability as established scan-matching methods and allows for a principled derivation of uncertainty estimates. The system is trained in a (self-)supervised way using only previously obtained pose information as a training signal. Using 280km of urban driving data, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in radar odometry by reducing errors by up 68% whilst running an order of magnitude faster.
Adaptive Unimodal Cost Volume Filtering for Deep Stereo Matching
Authors: Youmin Zhang, Yimin Chen, Xiao Bai, Suihanjin Yu, Kun Yu, Zhiwei Li, Kuiyuan Yang
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Disparity Estimation, regression, Stereo Matching, Stereo Matching Hand

State-of-the-art deep learning based stereo matching approaches treat disparity estimation as a regression problem, where loss function is directly defined on true disparities and their estimated ones. However, disparity is just a byproduct of a matching process modeled by cost volume, while indirectly learning cost volume driven by disparity regression is prone to overfitting since the cost volume is under constrained. In this paper, we propose to directly add constraints to the cost volume by filtering cost volume with unimodal distribution peaked at true disparities. In addition, variances of the unimodal distributions for each pixel are estimated to explicitly model matching uncertainty under different contexts. The proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on Scene Flow and two KITTI stereo benchmarks. In particular, our method ranked the $1^{st}$ place of KITTI 2012 evaluation and the $4^{th}$ place of KITTI 2015 evaluation (recorded on 2019.8.20). The codes of AcfNet are available at: https://github.com/DeepMotionAIResearch/DenseMatchingBenchmark.