pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
EDD: Efficient Differentiable DNN Architecture and Implementation Co-search for Embedded AI Solutions
Authors: Yuhong Li, Cong Hao, Xiaofan Zhang, Xinheng Liu, Yao Chen, JinJun Xiong, Wen-mei Hwu, Deming Chen
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search

High quality AI solutions require joint optimization of AI algorithms and their hardware implementations. In this work, we are the first to propose a fully simultaneous, efficient differentiable DNN architecture and implementation co-search (EDD) methodology. We formulate the co-search problem by fusing DNN search variables and hardware implementation variables into one solution space, and maximize both algorithm accuracy and hardware implementation quality. The formulation is differentiable with respect to the fused variables, so that gradient descent algorithm can be applied to greatly reduce the search time. The formulation is also applicable for various devices with different objectives. In the experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our EDD methodology by searching for three representative DNNs, targeting low-latency GPU implementation and FPGA implementations with both recursive and pipelined architectures. Each model produced by EDD achieves similar accuracy as the best existing DNN models searched by neural architecture search (NAS) methods on ImageNet, but with superior performance obtained within 12 GPU-hour searches. Our DNN targeting GPU is 1.40x faster than the state-of-the-art solution reported in Proxyless, and our DNN targeting FPGA delivers 1.45x higher throughput than the state-of-the-art solution reported in DNNBuilder.
Revisiting Regex Generation for Modeling Industrial Applications by Incorporating Byte Pair Encoder
Authors: De-Sheng Wang, Jiawei Liu, Xiang Qi, Baolin Sun, Peng Zhang
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00

Regular expression is important for many natural language processing tasks especially when used to deal with unstructured and semi-structured data. This work focuses on automatically generating regular expressions and proposes a novel genetic algorithm to deal with this problem. Different from the methods which generate regular expressions from character level, we first utilize byte pair encoder (BPE) to extract some frequent items, which are then used to construct regular expressions. The fitness function of our genetic algorithm contains multi objectives and is solved based on evolutionary procedure including crossover and mutation operation. In the fitness function, we take the length of generated regular expression, the maximum matching characters and samples for positive training samples, and the minimum matching characters and samples for negative training samples into consideration. In addition, to accelerate the training process, we do exponential decay on the population size of the genetic algorithm. Our method together with a strong baseline is tested on 13 kinds of challenging datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms the baseline on 10 kinds of data and achieves nearly 50 percent improvement on average. By doing exponential decay, the training speed is approximately 100 times faster than the methods without using exponential decay. In summary, our method possesses both effectiveness and efficiency, and can be implemented for the industry application.
Crossing Variational Autoencoders for Answer Retrieval
Authors: Wenhao Yu, Lingfei Wu, Qingkai Zeng, Shu Tao, Yu Deng, Meng Jiang
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Retrieval

Answer retrieval is to find the most aligned answer from a large set of candidates given a question. Learning vector representations of questions/answers is the key factor. Question-answer alignment and question/answer semantics are two important signals for learning the representations. Existing methods learned semantic representations with dual encoders or dual variational auto-encoders. The semantic information was learned from language models or question-to-question (answer-to-answer) generative processes. However, the alignment and semantics were too separate to capture the aligned semantics between question and answer. In this work, we propose to cross variational auto-encoders by generating questions with aligned answers and generating answers with aligned questions. Experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art answer retrieval method on SQuAD.
Interpretable Learning-to-Rank with Generalized Additive Models
Authors: Honglei Zhuang, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky, Alexander Grushetsky, Yonghui Wu, Petr Mitrichev, Ethan Sterling, Nathan Bell, Walker Ravina, Hai Qian
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Additive models, Interpretable Machine Learning, Learning-To-Rank, regression

Interpretability of learning-to-rank models is a crucial yet relatively under-examined research area. Recent progress on interpretable ranking models largely focuses on generating post-hoc explanations for existing black-box ranking models, whereas the alternative option of building an intrinsically interpretable ranking model with transparent and self-explainable structure remains unexplored. Developing fully-understandable ranking models is necessary in some scenarios (e.g., due to legal or policy constraints) where post-hoc methods cannot provide sufficiently accurate explanations. In this paper, we lay the groundwork for intrinsically interpretable learning-to-rank by introducing generalized additive models (GAMs) into ranking tasks. Generalized additive models (GAMs) are intrinsically interpretable machine learning models and have been extensively studied on regression and classification tasks. We study how to extend GAMs into ranking models which can handle both item-level and list-level features and propose a novel formulation of ranking GAMs. To instantiate ranking GAMs, we employ neural networks instead of traditional splines or regression trees. We also show that our neural ranking GAMs can be distilled into a set of simple and compact piece-wise linear functions that are much more efficient to evaluate with little accuracy loss. We conduct experiments on three data sets and show that our proposed neural ranking GAMs can achieve significantly better performance than other traditional GAM baselines while maintaining similar interpretability.
Enhancing Intrinsic Adversarial Robustness via Feature Pyramid Decoder
Authors: Guanlin Li, Shuya Ding, Jun Luo, Chang Liu
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Decoder, Denoising, Image Restoration, Self-Supervised Learning

Whereas adversarial training is employed as the main defence strategy against specific adversarial samples, it has limited generalization capability and incurs excessive time complexity. In this paper, we propose an attack-agnostic defence framework to enhance the intrinsic robustness of neural networks, without jeopardizing the ability of generalizing clean samples. Our Feature Pyramid Decoder (FPD) framework applies to all block-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs). It implants denoising and image restoration modules into a targeted CNN, and it also constraints the Lipschitz constant of the classification layer. Moreover, we propose a two-phase strategy to train the FPD-enhanced CNN, utilizing $\epsilon$-neighbourhood noisy images with multi-task and self-supervised learning. Evaluated against a variety of white-box and black-box attacks, we demonstrate that FPD-enhanced CNNs gain sufficient robustness against general adversarial samples on MNIST, SVHN and CALTECH. In addition, if we further conduct adversarial training, the FPD-enhanced CNNs perform better than their non-enhanced versions.
CascadePSP: Toward Class-Agnostic and Very High-Resolution Segmentation via Global and Local Refinement
Authors: Ho Kei Cheng, Jihoon Chung, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 4k, Land Cover Classification, Scene Parsing, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

State-of-the-art semantic segmentation methods were almost exclusively trained on images within a fixed resolution range. These segmentations are inaccurate for very high-resolution images since using bicubic upsampling of low-resolution segmentation does not adequately capture high-resolution details along object boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address the high-resolution segmentation problem without using any high-resolution training data. The key insight is our CascadePSP network which refines and corrects local boundaries whenever possible. Although our network is trained with low-resolution segmentation data, our method is applicable to any resolution even for very high-resolution images larger than 4K. We present quantitative and qualitative studies on different datasets to show that CascadePSP can reveal pixel-accurate segmentation boundaries using our novel refinement module without any finetuning. Thus, our method can be regarded as class-agnostic. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our model to scene parsing in multi-class segmentation.
Fine-grained Financial Opinion Mining: A Survey and Research Agenda
Authors: Chung-Chi Chen, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Opinion Mining, Position, Sentiment Analysis, Survey

Opinion mining is a prevalent research issue in many domains. In the financial domain, however, it is still in the early stages. Most of the researches on this topic only focus on the coarse-grained market sentiment analysis, i.e., 2-way classification for bullish/bearish. Thanks to the recent financial technology (FinTech) development, some interdisciplinary researchers start to involve in the in-depth analysis of investors' opinions. In this position paper, we first define the financial opinions from both coarse-grained and fine-grained points of views, and then provide an overview on the issues already tackled. In addition to listing research issues of the existing topics, we further propose a road map of fine-grained financial opinion mining for future researches, and point out several challenges yet to explore. Moreover, we provide possible directions to deal with the proposed research issues.
Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving based on Multi-Head Attention with Joint Agent-Map Representation
Authors: Kaouther Messaoud, Nachiket Deo, Mohan M. Trivedi, Fawzi Nashashibi
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Trajectory Prediction

Predicting the trajectories of surrounding agents is an essential ability for autonomous vehicles navigating through complex traffic scenes. The future trajectories of agents can be inferred using two important cues: the locations and past motion of agents, and the static scene structure. Due to the high variability in scene structure and agent configurations, prior work has employed the attention mechanism, applied separately to the scene and agent configuration to learn the most salient parts of both cues. However, the two cues are tightly linked. The agent configuration can inform what part of the scene is most relevant to prediction. The static scene in turn can help determine the relative influence of agents on each other's motion. Moreover, the distribution of future trajectories is multimodal, with modes corresponding to the agent's intent. The agent's intent also informs what part of the scene and agent configuration is relevant to prediction. We thus propose a novel approach applying multi-head attention by considering a joint representation of the static scene and surrounding agents. We use each attention head to generate a distinct future trajectory to address multimodality of future trajectories. Our model achieves state of the art results on the nuScenes prediction benchmark and generates diverse future trajectories compliant with scene structure and agent configuration.
AutoScale: Optimizing Energy Efficiency of End-to-End Edge Inference under Stochastic Variance
Authors: Young Geun Kim, Carole-Jean Wu
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

Deep learning inference is increasingly run at the edge. As the programming and system stack support becomes mature, it enables acceleration opportunities within a mobile system, where the system performance envelope is scaled up with a plethora of programmable co-processors. Thus, intelligent services designed for mobile users can choose between running inference on the CPU or any of the co-processors on the mobile system, or exploiting connected systems, such as the cloud or a nearby, locally connected system. By doing so, the services can scale out the performance and increase the energy efficiency of edge mobile systems. This gives rise to a new challenge - deciding when inference should run where. Such execution scaling decision becomes more complicated with the stochastic nature of mobile-cloud execution, where signal strength variations of the wireless networks and resource interference can significantly affect real-time inference performance and system energy efficiency. To enable accurate, energy-efficient deep learning inference at the edge, this paper proposes AutoScale. AutoScale is an adaptive and light-weight execution scaling engine built upon the custom-designed reinforcement learning algorithm. It continuously learns and selects the most energy-efficient inference execution target by taking into account characteristics of neural networks and available systems in the collaborative cloud-edge execution environment while adapting to the stochastic runtime variance. Real system implementation and evaluation, considering realistic execution scenarios, demonstrate an average of 9.8 and 1.6 times energy efficiency improvement for DNN edge inference over the baseline mobile CPU and cloud offloading, while meeting the real-time performance and accuracy requirement.
Measuring Adversarial Robustness using a Voronoi-Epsilon Adversary
Authors: Hyeongji Kim, Pekka Parviainen, Ketil Malde
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Previous studies on robustness have argued that there is a tradeoff between accuracy and adversarial accuracy. The tradeoff can be inevitable even when we neglect generalization. We argue that the tradeoff is inherent to the commonly used definition of adversarial accuracy, which uses an adversary that can construct adversarial points constrained by $\epsilon$-balls around data points. As $\epsilon$ gets large, the adversary may use real data points from other classes as adversarial examples. We propose a Voronoi-epsilon adversary which is constrained both by Voronoi cells and by $\epsilon$-balls. This adversary balances between two notions of perturbation. As a result, adversarial accuracy based on this adversary avoids a tradeoff between accuracy and adversarial accuracy on training data even when $\epsilon$ is large. Finally, we show that a nearest neighbor classifier is the maximally robust classifier against the proposed adversary on the training data.
Speak to your Parser: Interactive Text-to-SQL with Natural Language Feedback
Authors: Ahmed Elgohary, Saghar Hosseini, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Form, Semantic Parsing, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL, Translation

We study the task of semantic parse correction with natural language feedback. Given a natural language utterance, most semantic parsing systems pose the problem as one-shot translation where the utterance is mapped to a corresponding logical form. In this paper, we investigate a more interactive scenario where humans can further interact with the system by providing free-form natural language feedback to correct the system when it generates an inaccurate interpretation of an initial utterance. We focus on natural language to SQL systems and construct, SPLASH, a dataset of utterances, incorrect SQL interpretations and the corresponding natural language feedback. We compare various reference models for the correction task and show that incorporating such a rich form of feedback can significantly improve the overall semantic parsing accuracy while retaining the flexibility of natural language interaction. While we estimated human correction accuracy is 81.5%, our best model achieves only 25.1%, which leaves a large gap for improvement in future research. SPLASH is publicly available at https://aka.ms/Splash_dataset.
The Cascade Transformer: an Application for Efficient Answer Sentence Selection
Authors: Luca Soldaini, Alessandro Moschitti
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: General Classification, Question Answering, Sentence

Large transformer-based language models have been shown to be very effective in many classification tasks. However, their computational complexity prevents their use in applications requiring the classification of a large set of candidates. While previous works have investigated approaches to reduce model size, relatively little attention has been paid to techniques to improve batch throughput during inference. In this paper, we introduce the Cascade Transformer, a simple yet effective technique to adapt transformer-based models into a cascade of rankers. Each ranker is used to prune a subset of candidates in a batch, thus dramatically increasing throughput at inference time. Partial encodings from the transformer model are shared among rerankers, providing further speed-up. When compared to a state-of-the-art transformer model, our approach reduces computation by 37% with almost no impact on accuracy, as measured on two English Question Answering datasets.
Approximation Algorithms for Multi-Robot Patrol-Scheduling with Min-Max Latency
Authors: Peyman Afshani, Mark De Berg, Kevin Buchin, Jie Gao, Maarten Loffler, Amir Nayyeri, Benjamin Raichel, Rik Sarkar, Haotian Wang, Hao-Tsung Yang
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling, Traveling Salesman Problem

We consider the problem of finding patrol schedules for $k$ robots to visit a given set of $n$ sites in a metric space. Each robot has the same maximum speed and the goal is to minimize the weighted maximum latency of any site, where the latency of a site is defined as the maximum time duration between consecutive visits of that site. The problem is NP-hard, as it has the traveling salesman problem as a special case (when $k=1$ and all sites have the same weight). We present a polynomial-time algorithm with an approximation factor of $O(k^2 \log \frac{w_{\max}}{w_{\min}})$ to the optimal solution, where $w_{\max}$ and $w_{\min}$ are the maximum and minimum weight of the sites respectively. Further, we consider the special case where the sites are in 1D. When all sites have the same weight, we present a polynomial-time algorithm to solve the problem exactly. If the sites may have different weights, we present a $12$-approximate solution, which runs in polynomial time when the number of robots, $k$, is a constant.
ESG2Risk: A Deep Learning Framework from ESG News to Stock Volatility Prediction
Authors: Tian Guo, Nicolas Jamet, Valentin Betrix, Louis-Alexandre Piquet, Emmanuel Hauptmann
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into systematic investments has drawn numerous attention recently. In this paper, we focus on the ESG events in financial news flow and exploring the predictive power of ESG related financial news on stock volatility. In particular, we develop a pipeline of ESG news extraction, news representations, and Bayesian inference of deep learning models. Experimental evaluation on real data and different markets demonstrates the superior predicting performance as well as the relation of high volatility prediction to stocks with potential high risk and low return. It also shows the prospect of the proposed pipeline as a flexible predicting framework for various textual data and target variables.
Neural-Symbolic Relational Reasoning on Graph Models: Effective Link Inference and Computation from Knowledge Bases
Authors: Henrique Lemos, Pedro Avelar, Marcelo Prates, Luís Lamb, Artur Garcez
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Relational Reasoning, Word Embeddings

The recent developments and growing interest in neural-symbolic models has shown that hybrid approaches can offer richer models for Artificial Intelligence. The integration of effective relational learning and reasoning methods is one of the key challenges in this direction, as neural learning and symbolic reasoning offer complementary characteristics that can benefit the development of AI systems. Relational labelling or link prediction on knowledge graphs has become one of the main problems in deep learning-based natural language processing research. Moreover, other fields which make use of neural-symbolic techniques may also benefit from such research endeavours. There have been several efforts towards the identification of missing facts from existing ones in knowledge graphs. Two lines of research try and predict knowledge relations between two entities by considering all known facts connecting them or several paths of facts connecting them. We propose a neural-symbolic graph neural network which applies learning over all the paths by feeding the model with the embedding of the minimal subset of the knowledge graph containing such paths. By learning to produce representations for entities and facts corresponding to word embeddings, we show how the model can be trained end-to-end to decode these representations and infer relations between entities in a multitask approach. Our contribution is two-fold: a neural-symbolic methodology leverages the resolution of relational inference in large graphs, and we also demonstrate that such neural-symbolic model is shown more effective than path-based approaches
Partly Supervised Multitask Learning
Authors: Abdullah-Al-Zubaer Imran, Chao Huang, Hui Tang, Wei Fan, Yuan Xiao, Dingjun Hao, Zhen Qian, Demetri Terzopoulos
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning has recently been attracting attention as an alternative to fully supervised models that require large pools of labeled data. Moreover, optimizing a model for multiple tasks can provide better generalizability than single-task learning. Leveraging self-supervision and adversarial training, we propose a novel general purpose semi-supervised, multiple-task model---namely, self-supervised, semi-supervised, multitask learning (S$^4$MTL)---for accomplishing two important tasks in medical imaging, segmentation and diagnostic classification. Experimental results on chest and spine X-ray datasets suggest that our S$^4$MTL model significantly outperforms semi-supervised single task, semi/fully-supervised multitask, and fully-supervised single task models, even with a 50\% reduction of class and segmentation labels. We hypothesize that our proposed model can be effective in tackling limited annotation problems for joint training, not only in medical imaging domains, but also for general-purpose vision tasks.