pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages
Authors: Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Yuhui Zhang, Jason Bolton, Christopher D. Manning
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Coreference Resolution, Dependency Parsing, Lemmatization, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction

We introduce Stanza, an open-source Python natural language processing toolkit supporting 66 human languages. Compared to existing widely used toolkits, Stanza features a language-agnostic fully neural pipeline for text analysis, including tokenization, multi-word token expansion, lemmatization, part-of-speech and morphological feature tagging, dependency parsing, and named entity recognition. We have trained Stanza on a total of 112 datasets, including the Universal Dependencies treebanks and other multilingual corpora, and show that the same neural architecture generalizes well and achieves competitive performance on all languages tested. Additionally, Stanza includes a native Python interface to the widely used Java Stanford CoreNLP software, which further extends its functionality to cover other tasks such as coreference resolution and relation extraction. Source code, documentation, and pretrained models for 66 languages are available at https://stanfordnlp.github.io/stanza.
PS-RCNN: Detecting Secondary Human Instances in a Crowd via Primary Object Suppression
Authors: Zheng Ge, Zequn Jie, Xin Huang, Rong Xu, Osamu Yoshie
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, Object Detection

Detecting human bodies in highly crowded scenes is a challenging problem. Two main reasons result in such a problem: 1). weak visual cues of heavily occluded instances can hardly provide sufficient information for accurate detection; 2). heavily occluded instances are easier to be suppressed by Non-Maximum-Suppression (NMS). To address these two issues, we introduce a variant of two-stage detectors called PS-RCNN. PS-RCNN first detects slightly/none occluded objects by an R-CNN module (referred as P-RCNN), and then suppress the detected instances by human-shaped masks so that the features of heavily occluded instances can stand out. After that, PS-RCNN utilizes another R-CNN module specialized in heavily occluded human detection (referred as S-RCNN) to detect the rest missed objects by P-RCNN. Final results are the ensemble of the outputs from these two R-CNNs. Moreover, we introduce a High Resolution RoI Align (HRRA) module to retain as much of fine-grained features of visible parts of the heavily occluded humans as possible. Our PS-RCNN significantly improves recall and AP by 4.49% and 2.92% respectively on CrowdHuman, compared to the baseline. Similar improvements on Widerperson are also achieved by the PS-RCNN.
Interpretable MTL from Heterogeneous Domains using Boosted Tree
Authors: Ya-Lin Zhang, Longfei Li
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Philosophy

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims at improving the generalization performance of several related tasks by leveraging useful information contained in them. However, in industrial scenarios, interpretability is always demanded, and the data of different tasks may be in heterogeneous domains, making the existing methods unsuitable or unsatisfactory. In this paper, following the philosophy of boosted tree, we proposed a two-stage method. In stage one, a common model is built to learn the commonalities using the common features of all instances. Different from the training of conventional boosted tree model, we proposed a regularization strategy and an early-stopping mechanism to optimize the multi-task learning process. In stage two, started by fitting the residual error of the common model, a specific model is constructed with the task-specific instances to further boost the performance. Experiments on both benchmark and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. What's more, interpretability can be naturally obtained from the tree based method, satisfying the industrial needs.
A Machine Learning Application for Raising WASH Awareness in the Times of COVID-19 Pandemic
Authors: Rohan Pandey, Vaibhav Gautam, Ridam Pal, Harsh Bandhey, Lovedeep Singh Dhingra, Himanshu Sharma, Chirag Jain, Kanav Bhagat, Arushi, Lajjaben Patel, Mudit Agarwal, Samprati Agrawal, Rishabh Jalan, Akshat Wadhwa, Ayush Garg, Vihaan Misra, Yashwin Agrawal, Bhavika Rana, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Tavpritesh Sethi
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Chatbot, Machine Translation, Misinformation, Word Embeddings

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered the potential of digital misinformation in shaping the health of nations. The deluge of unverified information that spreads faster than the epidemic itself is an unprecedented phenomenon that has put millions of lives in danger. Mitigating this Infodemic requires strong health messaging systems that are engaging, vernacular, scalable, effective and continuously learn the new patterns of misinformation. Objective: We created WashKaro, a multi-pronged intervention for mitigating misinformation through conversational AI, machine translation and natural language processing. WashKaro provides the right information matched against WHO guidelines through AI, and delivers it in the right format in local languages. Methods: We theorize (i) an NLP based AI engine that could continuously incorporate user feedback to improve relevance of information, (ii) bite sized audio in the local language to improve penetrance in a country with skewed gender literacy ratios, and (iii) conversational but interactive AI engagement with users towards an increased health awareness in the community. Results: A total of 5026 people who downloaded the app during the study window, among those 1545 were active users. Our study shows that 3.4 times more females engaged with the App in Hindi as compared to males, the relevance of AI-filtered news content doubled within 45 days of continuous machine learning, and the prudence of integrated AI chatbot Satya increased thus proving the usefulness of an mHealth platform to mitigate health misinformation. Conclusion: We conclude that a multi-pronged machine learning application delivering vernacular bite-sized audios and conversational AI is an effective approach to mitigate health misinformation.
LT-Net: Label Transfer by Learning Reversible Voxel-wise Correspondence for One-shot Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Shuxin Wang, Shilei Cao, Dong Wei, Renzhen Wang, Kai Ma, Liansheng Wang, Deyu Meng, Yefeng Zheng
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, One-Shot Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce a one-shot segmentation method to alleviate the burden of manual annotation for medical images. The main idea is to treat one-shot segmentation as a classical atlas-based segmentation problem, where voxel-wise correspondence from the atlas to the unlabelled data is learned. Subsequently, segmentation label of the atlas can be transferred to the unlabelled data with the learned correspondence. However, since ground truth correspondence between images is usually unavailable, the learning system must be well-supervised to avoid mode collapse and convergence failure. To overcome this difficulty, we resort to the forward-backward consistency, which is widely used in correspondence problems, and additionally learn the backward correspondences from the warped atlases back to the original atlas. This cycle-correspondence learning design enables a variety of extra, cycle-consistency-based supervision signals to make the training process stable, while also boost the performance. We demonstrate the superiority of our method over both deep learning-based one-shot segmentation methods and a classical multi-atlas segmentation method via thorough experiments.
Adapting Object Detectors with Conditional Domain Normalization
Authors: Peng Su, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Shixiang Tang, Dapeng Chen, Di Qiu, Xiaogang Wang
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Attribute, Object, Object Detection, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Real-world object detectors are often challenged by the domain gaps between different datasets. In this work, we present the Conditional Domain Normalization (CDN) to bridge the domain gap. CDN is designed to encode different domain inputs into a shared latent space, where the features from different domains carry the same domain attribute. To achieve this, we first disentangle the domain-specific attribute out of the semantic features from one domain via a domain embedding module, which learns a domain-vector to characterize the corresponding domain attribute information. Then this domain-vector is used to encode the features from another domain through a conditional normalization, resulting in different domains' features carrying the same domain attribute. We incorporate CDN into various convolution stages of an object detector to adaptively address the domain shifts of different level's representation. In contrast to existing adaptation works that conduct domain confusion learning on semantic features to remove domain-specific factors, CDN aligns different domain distributions by modulating the semantic features of one domain conditioned on the learned domain-vector of another domain. Extensive experiments show that CDN outperforms existing methods remarkably on both real-to-real and synthetic-to-real adaptation benchmarks, including 2D image detection and 3D point cloud detection.
Merge-split Markov chain Monte Carlo for community detection
Authors: Tiago P. Peixoto
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Stochastic Block Model

We present a Markov chain Monte Carlo scheme based on merges and splits of groups that is capable of efficiently sampling from the posterior distribution of network partitions, defined according to the stochastic block model (SBM). We demonstrate how schemes based on the move of single nodes between groups systematically fail at correctly sampling from the posterior distribution even on small networks, and how our merge-split approach behaves significantly better, and improves the mixing time of the Markov chain by several orders of magnitude in typical cases. We also show how the scheme can be straightforwardly extended to nested versions of the SBM, yielding asymptotically exact samples of hierarchical network partitions.
Self-Supervised Discovering of Interpretable Features for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wenjie Shi, Gao Huang, Shiji Song, Zhuoyuan Wang, Tingyu Lin, Cheng Wu
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has recently led to many breakthroughs on a range of complex control tasks. However, the agent's decision-making process is generally not transparent. The lack of interpretability hinders the applicability of RL in safety-critical scenarios. While several methods have attempted to interpret vision-based RL, most come without detailed explanation for the agent's behavior. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised interpretable framework, which can discover interpretable features to enable easy understanding of RL agents even for non-experts. Specifically, a self-supervised interpretable network (SSINet) is employed to produce fine-grained attention masks for highlighting task-relevant information, which constitutes most evidence for the agent's decisions. We verify and evaluate our method on several Atari 2600 games as well as Duckietown, which is a challenging self-driving car simulator environment. The results show that our method renders empirical evidences about how the agent makes decisions and why the agent performs well or badly, especially when transferred to novel scenes. Overall, our method provides valuable insight into the internal decision-making process of vision-based RL. In addition, our method does not use any external labelled data, and thus demonstrates the possibility to learn high-quality mask through a self-supervised manner, which may shed light on new paradigms for label-free vision learning such as self-supervised segmentation and detection.
On Translation Invariance in CNNs: Convolutional Layers can Exploit Absolute Spatial Location
Authors: Osman Semih Kayhan, Jan C. van Gemert
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Inductive Bias, Patch Matching, Small Data Image Classification, Translation, Video Classification

In this paper we challenge the common assumption that convolutional layers in modern CNNs are translation invariant. We show that CNNs can and will exploit the absolute spatial location by learning filters that respond exclusively to particular absolute locations by exploiting image boundary effects. Because modern CNNs filters have a huge receptive field, these boundary effects operate even far from the image boundary, allowing the network to exploit absolute spatial location all over the image. We give a simple solution to remove spatial location encoding which improves translation invariance and thus gives a stronger visual inductive bias which particularly benefits small data sets. We broadly demonstrate these benefits on several architectures and various applications such as image classification, patch matching, and two video classification datasets.
Finding Fair and Efficient Allocations When Valuations Don't Add Up
Authors: Nawal Benabbou, Mithun Chakraborty, Ayumi Igarashi, Yair Zick
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

In this paper, we present new results on the fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods to agents whose preferences correspond to {\em matroid rank functions}. This is a versatile valuation class with several desirable properties (such as monotonicity and submodularity), which naturally lends itself to a number of real-world domains. We use these properties to our advantage; first, we show that when agent valuations are matroid rank functions, a socially optimal (i.e. utilitarian social welfare-maximizing) allocation that achieves envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) exists and is computationally tractable. We also prove that the Nash welfare-maximizing and the leximin allocations both exhibit this fairness/efficiency combination, by showing that they can be achieved by minimizing any symmetric strictly convex function over utilitarian optimal outcomes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first valuation function class not subsumed by additive valuations for which it has been established that an allocation maximizing Nash welfare is EF1. Moreover, for a subclass of these valuation functions based on maximum (unweighted) bipartite matching, we show that a leximin allocation can be computed in polynomial time. Additionally, we explore possible extensions of our results to fairness criteria other than EF1 as well as to generalizations of the above valuation classes.
Deep Neural Review Text Interaction for Recommendation Systems
Authors: Parisa Abolfath Beygi Dezfouli, Saeedeh Momtazi, Mehdi Dehghan
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Small Data Image Classification, Text Matching

Users' reviews contain valuable information which are not taken into account in most recommender systems. According to the latest studies in this field, using review texts could not only improve the performance of recommendation, but it can also alleviate the impact of data sparsity and help to tackle the cold start problem. In this paper, we present a neural recommender model which recommends items by leveraging user reviews. In order to predict user rating for each item, our proposed model, named MatchPyramid Recommender System (MPRS), represents each user and item with their corresponding review texts. Thus, the problem of recommendation is viewed as a text matching problem such that the matching score obtained from matching user and item texts could be considered as a good representative of their joint extent of similarity. To solve the text matching problem, inspired by MatchPyramid (Pang, 2016), we employed an interaction-based approach according to which a matching matrix is constructed given a pair of input texts. The matching matrix, which has the property of hierarchical matching patterns, is then fed into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to compute the matching score for the given user-item pair. Our experiments on the small data categories of Amazon review dataset show that our proposed model gains from 1.76% to 21.72% relative improvement compared to DeepCoNN model, and from 0.83% to 3.15% relative improvement compared to TransNets model. Also, on two large categories, namely AZ-CSJ and AZ-Mov, our model achieves relative improvements of 8.08% and 7.56% compared to the DeepCoNN model, and relative improvements of 1.74% and 0.86% compared to the TransNets model, respectively.
Weakly-Supervised Multi-Level Attentional Reconstruction Network for Grounding Textual Queries in Videos
Authors: Yijun Song, Jingwen Wang, Lin Ma, Zhou Yu, Jun Yu
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The task of temporally grounding textual queries in videos is to localize one video segment that semantically corresponds to the given query. Most of the existing approaches rely on segment-sentence pairs (temporal annotations) for training, which are usually unavailable in real-world scenarios. In this work we present an effective weakly-supervised model, named as Multi-Level Attentional Reconstruction Network (MARN), which only relies on video-sentence pairs during the training stage. The proposed method leverages the idea of attentional reconstruction and directly scores the candidate segments with the learnt proposal-level attentions. Moreover, another branch learning clip-level attention is exploited to refine the proposals at both the training and testing stage. We develop a novel proposal sampling mechanism to leverage intra-proposal information for learning better proposal representation and adopt 2D convolution to exploit inter-proposal clues for learning reliable attention map. Experiments on Charades-STA and ActivityNet-Captions datasets demonstrate the superiority of our MARN over the existing weakly-supervised methods.
Gated Texture CNN for Efficient and Configurable Image Denoising
Authors: Kaito Imai, Takamichi Miyata
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Denoising, Image Denoising

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based image denoising methods typically estimate the noise component contained in a noisy input image and restore a clean image by subtracting the estimated noise from the input. However, previous denoising methods tend to remove high-frequency information (e.g., textures) from the input. It caused by intermediate feature maps of CNN contains texture information. A straightforward approach to this problem is stacking numerous layers, which leads to a high computational cost. To achieve high performance and computational efficiency, we propose a gated texture CNN (GTCNN), which is designed to carefully exclude the texture information from each intermediate feature map of the CNN by incorporating gating mechanisms. Our GTCNN achieves state-of-the-art performance with 4.8 times fewer parameters than previous state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the GTCNN allows us to interactively control the texture strength in the output image without any additional modules, training, or computational costs.
Discrete-Valued Latent Preference Matrix Estimation with Graph Side Information
Authors: Changhun Jo, Kangwook Lee
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Incorporating graph side information into recommender systems has been widely used to better predict ratings, but relatively few works have focused on theoretical guarantees. Ahn et al. (2018) firstly characterized the optimal sample complexity in the presence of graph side information, but the results are limited due to strict, unrealistic assumptions made on the unknown latent preference matrix and the structure of user clusters. In this work, we propose a new model in which 1) the unknown latent preference matrix can have any discrete values, and 2) users can be clustered into multiple clusters, thereby relaxing the assumptions made in prior work. Under this new model, we fully characterize the optimal sample complexity and develop a computationally-efficient algorithm that matches the optimal sample complexity. Our algorithm is robust to model errors and outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of prediction performance on both synthetic and real data.
NLPMM: a Next Location Predictor with Markov Modeling
Authors: Meng Chen, Yang Liu, Xiaohui Yu
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00

In this paper, we solve the problem of predicting the next locations of the moving objects with a historical dataset of trajectories. We present a Next Location Predictor with Markov Modeling (NLPMM) which has the following advantages: (1) it considers both individual and collective movement patterns in making prediction, (2) it is effective even when the trajectory data is sparse, (3) it considers the time factor and builds models that are suited to different time periods. We have conducted extensive experiments in a real dataset, and the results demonstrate the superiority of NLPMM over existing methods.
PCNN: Deep Convolutional Networks for Short-term Traffic Congestion Prediction
Authors: Meng Chen, Xiaohui Yu, Yang Liu
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Traffic problems have seriously affected people's life quality and urban development, and forecasting the short-term traffic congestion is of great importance to both individuals and governments. However, understanding and modeling the traffic conditions can be extremely difficult, and our observations from real traffic data reveal that (1) similar traffic congestion patterns exist in the neighboring time slots and on consecutive workdays; (2) the levels of traffic congestion have clear multiscale properties. To capture these characteristics, we propose a novel method named PCNN based on deep Convolutional Neural Network, modeling Periodic traffic data for short-term traffic congestion prediction. PCNN has two pivotal procedures: time series folding and multi-grained learning. It first temporally folds the time series and constructs a two-dimensional matrix as the network input, such that both the real-time traffic conditions and past traffic patterns are well considered; then with a series of convolutions over the input matrix, it is able to model the local temporal dependency and multiscale traffic patterns. In particular, the global trend of congestion can be addressed at the macroscale; whereas more details and variations of the congestion can be captured at the microscale. Experimental results on a real-world urban traffic dataset confirm that folding time series data into a two-dimensional matrix is effective and PCNN outperforms the baselines significantly for the task of short-term congestion prediction.