pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning the Stein Discrepancy for Training and Evaluating Energy-Based Models without Sampling
Authors: Will Grathwohl, Kuan-Chieh Wang, Jorn-Henrik Jacobsen, David Duvenaud, Richard Zemel
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

We present a new method for evaluating and training unnormalized density models. Our approach only requires access to the gradient of the unnormalized model's log-density. We estimate the Stein discrepancy between the data density $p(x)$ and the model density $q(x)$ defined by a vector function of the data. We parameterize this function with a neural network and fit its parameters to maximize the discrepancy. This yields a novel goodness-of-fit test which outperforms existing methods on high dimensional data. Furthermore, optimizing $q(x)$ to minimize this discrepancy produces a novel method for training unnormalized models which scales more gracefully than existing methods. The ability to both learn and compare models is a unique feature of the proposed method.
Verifiable RNN-Based Policies for POMDPs Under Temporal Logic Constraints
Authors: Steven Carr, Nils Jansen, Ufuk Topcu
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Sequential Decision Making

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have emerged as an effective representation of control policies in sequential decision-making problems. However, a major drawback in the application of RNN-based policies is the difficulty in providing formal guarantees on the satisfaction of behavioral specifications, e.g. safety and/or reachability. By integrating techniques from formal methods and machine learning, we propose an approach to automatically extract a finite-state controller (FSC) from an RNN, which, when composed with a finite-state system model, is amenable to existing formal verification tools. Specifically, we introduce an iterative modification to the so-called quantized bottleneck insertion technique to create an FSC as a randomized policy with memory. For the cases in which the resulting FSC fails to satisfy the specification, verification generates diagnostic information. We utilize this information to either adjust the amount of memory in the extracted FSC or perform focused retraining of the RNN. While generally applicable, we detail the resulting iterative procedure in the context of policy synthesis for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), which is known to be notoriously hard. The numerical experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms traditional POMDP synthesis methods by 3 orders of magnitude within 2% of optimal benchmark values.
Pre-Training for Query Rewriting in A Spoken Language Understanding System
Authors: Zheng Chen, Xing Fan, Yuan Ling, Lambert Mathias, Chenlei Guo
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Resolution, Friction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding

Query rewriting (QR) is an increasingly important technique to reduce customer friction caused by errors in a spoken language understanding pipeline, where the errors originate from various sources such as speech recognition errors, language understanding errors or entity resolution errors. In this work, we first propose a neural-retrieval based approach for query rewriting. Then, inspired by the wide success of pre-trained contextual language embeddings, and also as a way to compensate for insufficient QR training data, we propose a language-modeling (LM) based approach to pre-train query embeddings on historical user conversation data with a voice assistant. In addition, we propose to use the NLU hypotheses generated by the language understanding system to augment the pre-training. Our experiments show pre-training provides rich prior information and help the QR task achieve strong performance. We also show joint pre-training with NLU hypotheses has further benefit. Finally, after pre-training, we find a small set of rewrite pairs is enough to fine-tune the QR model to outperform a strong baseline by full training on all QR training data.
Sentiment Analysis Using Averaged Weighted Word Vector Features
Authors: Ali Erkan, Tunga Gungor
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

People use the world wide web heavily to share their experience with entities such as products, services, or travel destinations. Texts that provide online feedback in the form of reviews and comments are essential to make consumer decisions. These comments create a valuable source that may be used to measure satisfaction related to products or services. Sentiment analysis is the task of identifying opinions expressed in such text fragments. In this work, we develop two methods that combine different types of word vectors to learn and estimate polarity of reviews. We develop average review vectors from word vectors and add weights to this review vectors using word frequencies in positive and negative sensitivity-tagged reviews. We applied the methods to several datasets from different domains that are used as standard benchmarks for sentiment analysis. We ensemble the techniques with each other and existing methods, and we make a comparison with the approaches in the literature. The results show that the performances of our approaches outperform the state-of-the-art success rates.
Asynchronous Tracking-by-Detection on Adaptive Time Surfaces for Event-based Object Tracking
Authors: Haosheng Chen, Qiangqiang Wu, Yanjie Liang, Xinbo Gao, Hanzi Wang
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking

Event cameras, which are asynchronous bio-inspired vision sensors, have shown great potential in a variety of situations, such as fast motion and low illumination scenes. However, most of the event-based object tracking methods are designed for scenarios with untextured objects and uncluttered backgrounds. There are few event-based object tracking methods that support bounding box-based object tracking. The main idea behind this work is to propose an asynchronous Event-based Tracking-by-Detection (ETD) method for generic bounding box-based object tracking. To achieve this goal, we present an Adaptive Time-Surface with Linear Time Decay (ATSLTD) event-to-frame conversion algorithm, which asynchronously and effectively warps the spatio-temporal information of asynchronous retinal events to a sequence of ATSLTD frames with clear object contours. We feed the sequence of ATSLTD frames to the proposed ETD method to perform accurate and efficient object tracking, which leverages the high temporal resolution property of event cameras. We compare the proposed ETD method with seven popular object tracking methods, that are based on conventional cameras or event cameras, and two variants of ETD. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed ETD method in handling various challenging environments.
Learning to Predict Error for MRI Reconstruction
Authors: Shi Hu, Nicola Pezzotti, Max Welling
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis, MRI Reconstruction

In healthcare applications, predictive uncertainty has been used to assess predictive accuracy. In this paper, we demonstrate that predictive uncertainty estimated by the current methods does not highly correlate with prediction error by decomposing the latter into random and systematic errors, and showing that the former is equivalent to the variance of the random error. In addition, we observe that current methods unnecessarily compromise performance by modifying the model and training loss to estimate the target and uncertainty jointly. We show that estimating them separately without modifications improves performance. Following this, we propose a novel method that estimates the target labels and magnitude of the prediction error in two steps. We demonstrate this method on a large-scale MRI reconstruction task, and achieve significantly better results than the state-of-the-art uncertainty estimation methods.
Multiresolution Tensor Learning for Efficient and Interpretable Spatial Analysis
Authors: Jung Yeon Park, Kenneth Theo Carr, Stephan Zheng, Yisong Yue, Rose Yu
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

Efficient and interpretable spatial analysis is crucial in many fields such as geology, sports, and climate science. Tensor latent factor models can describe higher-order correlations for spatial data. However, they are computationally expensive to train and are sensitive to initialization, leading to spatially incoherent, uninterpretable results. We develop a novel Multiresolution Tensor Learning (MRTL) algorithm for efficiently learning interpretable spatial patterns. MRTL initializes the latent factors from an approximate full-rank tensor model for improved interpretability and progressively learns from a coarse resolution to the fine resolution to reduce computation. We also prove the theoretical convergence and computational complexity of MRTL. When applied to two real-world datasets, MRTL demonstrates 4~5x speedup compared to a fixed resolution approach while yielding accurate and interpretable latent factors.
Fast Convergence for Langevin Diffusion with Manifold Structure
Authors: Ankur Moitra, Andrej Risteski
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from distributions of the form p(x) \propto e^{-\beta f(x)} for some function f whose values and gradients we can query. This mode of access to f is natural in the scenarios in which such problems arise, for instance sampling from posteriors in parametric Bayesian models. Classical results show that a natural random walk, Langevin diffusion, mixes rapidly when f is convex. Unfortunately, even in simple examples, the applications listed above will entail working with functions f that are nonconvex -- for which sampling from p may in general require an exponential number of queries. In this paper, we focus on an aspect of nonconvexity relevant for modern machine learning applications: existence of invariances (symmetries) in the function f, as a result of which the distribution p will have manifolds of points with equal probability. First, we give a recipe for proving mixing time bounds for Langevin diffusion as a function of the geometry of these manifolds. Second, we specialize our arguments to classic matrix factorization-like Bayesian inference problems where we get noisy measurements A(XX^T), X \in R^{d \times k} of a low-rank matrix, i.e. f(X) = \|A(XX^T) - b\|^2_2, X \in R^{d \times k}, and \beta the inverse of the variance of the noise. Such functions f are invariant under orthogonal transformations, and include problems like matrix factorization, sensing, completion. Beyond sampling, Langevin dynamics is a popular toy model for studying stochastic gradient descent. Along these lines, we believe that our work is an important first step towards understanding how SGD behaves when there is a high degree of symmetry in the space of parameters the produce the same output.
Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Beam Tracking for Low-Latency Services in Vehicular Networks
Authors: Yan Liu, Zhiyuan Jiang, Shunqing Zhang, Shugong Xu
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) services in vehicular networks on millimeter-wave bands present a significant challenge, considering the necessity of constantly adjusting the beam directions. Conventional methods are mostly based on classical control theory, e.g., Kalman filter and its variations, which mainly deal with stationary scenarios. Therefore, severe application limitations exist, especially with complicated, dynamic Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) channels. This paper gives a thorough study of this subject, by first modifying the classical approaches, e.g., Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and Particle Filter (PF), for non-stationary scenarios, and then proposing a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based approach that can achieve the URLLC requirements in a typical intersection scenario. Simulation results based on a commercial ray-tracing simulator show that enhanced EKF and PF methods achieve packet delay more than $10$ ms, whereas the proposed deep RL-based method can reduce the latency to about $6$ ms, by extracting context information from the training data.
Sparse and Structured Visual Attention
Authors: Pedro Henrique Martins, Vlad Niculae, Zita Marinho, André Martins
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual attention mechanisms are widely used in multimodal tasks, as visual question answering (VQA). One drawback of softmax-based attention mechanisms is that they assign some probability mass to all image regions, regardless of their adjacency structure and of their relevance to the text. In this paper, to better link the image structure with the text, we replace the traditional softmax attention mechanism with two alternative sparsity-promoting transformations: sparsemax, which is able to select only the relevant regions (assigning zero weight to the rest), and a newly proposed Total-Variation Sparse Attention (TVmax), which further encourages the joint selection of adjacent spatial locations. Experiments in VQA show gains in accuracy as well as higher similarity to human attention, which suggests better interpretability.
PACOH: Bayes-Optimal Meta-Learning with PAC-Guarantees
Authors: Jonas Rothfuss, Vincent Fortuin, Martin Josifoski, Andreas Krause
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML Workshop LifelongML 2020 7
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Generalization Bounds, Meta-Learning, Stochastic Optimization

Meta-learning can successfully acquire useful inductive biases from data. Yet, its generalization properties to unseen learning tasks are poorly understood. Particularly if the number of meta-training tasks is small, this raises concerns about overfitting. We provide a theoretical analysis using the PAC-Bayesian framework and derive novel generalization bounds for meta-learning. Using these bounds, we develop a class of PAC-optimal meta-learning algorithms with performance guarantees and a principled meta-level regularization. Unlike previous PAC-Bayesian meta-learners, our method results in a standard stochastic optimization problem which can be solved efficiently and scales well. When instantiating our PAC-optimal hyper-posterior (PACOH) with Gaussian processes and Bayesian Neural Networks as base learners, the resulting methods yield state-of-the-art performance, both in terms of predictive accuracy and the quality of uncertainty estimates. Thanks to their principled treatment of uncertainty, our meta-learners can also be successfully employed for sequential decision problems.
Sampling and Update Frequencies in Proximal Variance-Reduced Stochastic Gradient Methods
Authors: Martin Morin, Pontus Giselsson
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00

Variance-reduced stochastic gradient methods have gained popularity in recent times. Several variants exist with different strategies for the storing and sampling of gradients and this work concerns the interactions between these two aspects. We present a general proximal variance-reduced gradient method and analyze it under strong convexity assumptions. Special cases of the algorithm include SAGA, L-SVRG and their proximal variants. Our analysis sheds light on epoch-length selection and the need to balance the convergence of the iterates with how often gradients are stored. The analysis improves on other convergence rates found in the literature and produces a new and faster converging sampling strategy for SAGA. Problem instances for which the predicted rates are the same as the practical rates are presented together with problems based on real world data.
Superpixel Image Classification with Graph Attention Networks
Authors: Pedro H. C. Avelar, Anderson R. Tavares, Thiago L. T. da Silveira, Cláudio R. Jung, Luís C. Lamb
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Graph Attention, Graph Neural Network, image-classification, Image Classification, RAG, Superpixel Image Classification, Superpixels

This paper presents a methodology for image classification using Graph Neural Network (GNN) models. We transform the input images into region adjacency graphs (RAGs), in which regions are superpixels and edges connect neighboring superpixels. Our experiments suggest that Graph Attention Networks (GATs), which combine graph convolutions with self-attention mechanisms, outperforms other GNN models. Although raw image classifiers perform better than GATs due to information loss during the RAG generation, our methodology opens an interesting avenue of research on deep learning beyond rectangular-gridded images, such as 360-degree field of view panoramas. Traditional convolutional kernels of current state-of-the-art methods cannot handle panoramas, whereas the adapted superpixel algorithms and the resulting region adjacency graphs can naturally feed a GNN, without topology issues.
SpotNet: Self-Attention Multi-Task Network for Object Detection
Authors: Hughes Perreault, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau, Nicolas Saunier, Maguelonne Héritier
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation

Humans are very good at directing their visual attention toward relevant areas when they search for different types of objects. For instance, when we search for cars, we will look at the streets, not at the top of buildings. The motivation of this paper is to train a network to do the same via a multi-task learning approach. To train visual attention, we produce foreground/background segmentation labels in a semi-supervised way, using background subtraction or optical flow. Using these labels, we train an object detection model to produce foreground/background segmentation maps as well as bounding boxes while sharing most model parameters. We use those segmentation maps inside the network as a self-attention mechanism to weight the feature map used to produce the bounding boxes, decreasing the signal of non-relevant areas. We show that by using this method, we obtain a significant mAP improvement on two traffic surveillance datasets, with state-of-the-art results on both UA-DETRAC and UAVDT.
Stochastic Approximate Gradient Descent via the Langevin Algorithm
Authors: Yixuan Qiu, Xiao Wang
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00

We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained. Traditional methods for such problems rely on general-purpose sampling techniques such as Markov chain Monte Carlo, which typically requires manual intervention for tuning parameters and does not work efficiently in practice. Instead, SAGD makes use of the Langevin algorithm to construct stochastic gradients that are biased in finite steps but accurate asymptotically, enabling us to theoretically establish the convergence guarantee for SAGD. Inspired by our theoretical analysis, we also provide useful guidelines for its practical implementation. Finally, we show that SAGD performs well experimentally in popular statistical and machine learning problems such as the expectation-maximization algorithm and the variational autoencoders.
Multi-Vehicle Routing Problems with Soft Time Windows: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Ke Zhang, Meng Li, Zhengchao Zhang, Xi Lin, Fang He
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Decoder, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Multi-vehicle routing problem with soft time windows (MVRPSTW) is an indispensable constituent in urban logistics distribution systems. Over the past decade, numerous methods for MVRPSTW have been proposed, but most are based on heuristic rules that require a large amount of computation time. With the current rapid increase of logistics demands, traditional methods incur the dilemma between computational efficiency and solution quality. To efficiently solve the problem, we propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm called the Multi-Agent Attention Model that can solve routing problem instantly benefit from lengthy offline training. Specifically, the vehicle routing problem is regarded as a vehicle tour generation process, and an encoder-decoder framework with attention layers is proposed to generate tours of multiple vehicles iteratively. Furthermore, a multi-agent reinforcement learning method with an unsupervised auxiliary network is developed for the model training. By evaluated on four synthetic networks with different scales, the results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms Google OR-Tools and traditional methods with little computation time. In addition, we validate the robustness of the well-trained model by varying the number of customers and the capacities of vehicles.
Replacing Mobile Camera ISP with a Single Deep Learning Model
Authors: Andrey Ignatov, Luc van Gool, Radu Timofte
Date: 2020-02-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Demosaicking, Denoising, Image Restoration

As the popularity of mobile photography is growing constantly, lots of efforts are being invested now into building complex hand-crafted camera ISP solutions. In this work, we demonstrate that even the most sophisticated ISP pipelines can be replaced with a single end-to-end deep learning model trained without any prior knowledge about the sensor and optics used in a particular device. For this, we present PyNET, a novel pyramidal CNN architecture designed for fine-grained image restoration that implicitly learns to perform all ISP steps such as image demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, color and contrast correction, demoireing, etc. The model is trained to convert RAW Bayer data obtained directly from mobile camera sensor into photos captured with a professional high-end DSLR camera, making the solution independent of any particular mobile ISP implementation. To validate the proposed approach on the real data, we collected a large-scale dataset consisting of 10 thousand full-resolution RAW-RGB image pairs captured in the wild with the Huawei P20 cameraphone (12.3 MP Sony Exmor IMX380 sensor) and Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution can easily get to the level of the embedded P20's ISP pipeline that, unlike our approach, is combining the data from two (RGB + B/W) camera sensors. The dataset, pre-trained models and codes used in this paper are available on the project website.