pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Deep Image Compression Framework for Face Recognition
Authors: Nai Bian, Feng Liang, Haisheng Fu, Bo Lei
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Face Verification, Image Compression

Face recognition technology has advanced rapidly and has been widely used in various applications. Due to the extremely huge amount of data of face images and the large computing resources required correspondingly in large-scale face recognition tasks, there is a requirement for a face image compression approach that is highly suitable for face recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional autoencoder compression network for face recognition tasks. In the compression process, deep features are extracted from the original image by the convolutional neural networks to produce a compact representation of the original image, which is then encoded and saved by existing codec such as PNG. This compact representation is utilized by the reconstruction network to generate a reconstructed image of the original one. In order to improve the face recognition accuracy when the compression framework is used in a face recognition system, we combine this compression framework with a existing face recognition network for joint optimization. We test the proposed scheme and find that after joint training, the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset compressed by our compression framework has higher face verification accuracy than that compressed by JPEG2000, and is much higher than that compressed by JPEG.
Mask Embedding in conditional GAN for Guided Synthesis of High Resolution Images
Authors: Yinhao Ren, Zhe Zhu, Yingzhou Li, Joseph Lo
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Recent advancements in conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) have shown promises in label guided image synthesis. Semantic masks, such as sketches and label maps, are another intuitive and effective form of guidance in image synthesis. Directly incorporating the semantic masks as constraints dramatically reduces the variability and quality of the synthesized results. We observe this is caused by the incompatibility of features from different inputs (such as mask image and latent vector) of the generator. To use semantic masks as guidance whilst providing realistic synthesized results with fine details, we propose to use mask embedding mechanism to allow for a more efficient initial feature projection in the generator. We validate the effectiveness of our approach by training a mask guided face generator using CELEBA-HQ dataset. We can generate realistic and high resolution facial images up to the resolution of 512*512 with a mask guidance. Our code is publicly available.
Compositional Structure Learning for Sequential Video Data
Authors: Kyoung-Woon On, Eun-Sol Kim, Yu-Jung Heo, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00

Conventional sequential learning methods such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) focus on interactions between consecutive inputs, i.e. first-order Markovian dependency. However, most of sequential data, as seen with videos, have complex temporal dependencies that imply variable-length semantic flows and their compositions, and those are hard to be captured by conventional methods. Here, we propose Temporal Dependency Networks (TDNs) for learning video data by discovering these complex structures of the videos. The TDNs represent video as a graph whose nodes and edges correspond to frames of the video and their dependencies respectively. Via a parameterized kernel with graph-cut and graph convolutions, the TDNs find compositional temporal dependencies of the data in multilevel graph forms. We evaluate the proposed method on the large-scale video dataset Youtube-8M. The experimental results show that our model efficiently learns the complex semantic structure of video data.
Graph Embeddings at Scale
Authors: C. Bayan Bruss, Anish Khazane, Jonathan Rider, Richard Serpe, Saurabh Nagrecha, Keegan E. Hines
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, graph partitioning, Link Prediction

Graph embedding is a popular algorithmic approach for creating vector representations for individual vertices in networks. Training these algorithms at scale is important for creating embeddings that can be used for classification, ranking, recommendation and other common applications in industry. While industrial systems exist for training graph embeddings on large datasets, many of these distributed architectures are forced to partition copious amounts of data and model logic across many worker nodes. In this paper, we propose a distributed infrastructure that completely avoids graph partitioning, dynamically creates size constrained computational graphs across worker nodes, and uses highly efficient indexing operations for updating embeddings that allow the system to function at scale. We show that our system can scale an existing embeddings algorithm - skip-gram - to train on the open-source Friendster network (68 million vertices) and on an internal heterogeneous graph (50 million vertices). We measure the performance of our system on two key quantitative metrics: link-prediction accuracy and rate of convergence. We conclude this work by analyzing how a greater number of worker nodes actually improves our system's performance on the aforementioned metrics and discuss our next steps for rigorously evaluating the embedding vectors produced by our system.
Don't take it lightly: Phasing optical random projections with unknown operators
Authors: Sidharth Gupta, Rémi Gribonval, Laurent Daudet, Ivan Dokmanić
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Quantization, Retrieval

In this paper we tackle the problem of recovering the phase of complex linear measurements when only magnitude information is available and we control the input. We are motivated by the recent development of dedicated optics-based hardware for rapid random projections which leverages the propagation of light in random media. A signal of interest $\mathbf{\xi} \in \mathbb{R}^N$ is mixed by a random scattering medium to compute the projection $\mathbf{y} = \mathbf{A} \mathbf{\xi}$, with $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{C}^{M \times N}$ being a realization of a standard complex Gaussian iid random matrix. Such optics-based matrix multiplications can be much faster and energy-efficient than their CPU or GPU counterparts, yet two difficulties must be resolved: only the intensity ${|\mathbf{y}|}^2$ can be recorded by the camera, and the transmission matrix $\mathbf{A}$ is unknown. We show that even without knowing $\mathbf{A}$, we can recover the unknown phase of $\mathbf{y}$ for some equivalent transmission matrix with the same distribution as $\mathbf{A}$. Our method is based on two observations: first, conjugating or changing the phase of any row of $\mathbf{A}$ does not change its distribution; and second, since we control the input we can interfere $\mathbf{\xi}$ with arbitrary reference signals. We show how to leverage these observations to cast the measurement phase retrieval problem as a Euclidean distance geometry problem. We demonstrate appealing properties of the proposed algorithm in both numerical simulations and real hardware experiments. Not only does our algorithm accurately recover the missing phase, but it mitigates the effects of quantization and the sensitivity threshold, thus improving the measured magnitudes.
VELC: A New Variational AutoEncoder Based Model for Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Chunkai Zhang, Shaocong Li, Hongye Zhang, Yingyang Chen
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decoder, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a classical but worthwhile problem, and many deep learning-based anomaly detection algorithms have been proposed, which can usually achieve better detection results than traditional methods. In view of reconstruct ability of the model and the calculation of anomaly score, this paper proposes a time series anomaly detection method based on Variational AutoEncoder model(VAE) with re-Encoder and Latent Constraint network(VELC). In order to modify reconstruct ability of the model to prevent it from reconstructing abnormal samples well, we add a constraint network in the latent space of the VAE to force it generate new latent variables that are similar with that of training samples. To be able to calculate anomaly score in two feature spaces, we train a re-encoder to transform the generated data to a new latent space. For better handling the time series, we use the LSTM as the encoder and decoder part of the VAE framework. Experimental results of several benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods.
HyperNOMAD: Hyperparameter optimization of deep neural networks using mesh adaptive direct search
Authors: Dounia Lakhmiri, Sébastien Le Digabel, Christophe Tribes
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization

The performance of deep neural networks is highly sensitive to the choice of the hyperparameters that define the structure of the network and the learning process. When facing a new application, tuning a deep neural network is a tedious and time consuming process that is often described as a "dark art". This explains the necessity of automating the calibration of these hyperparameters. Derivative-free optimization is a field that develops methods designed to optimize time consuming functions without relying on derivatives. This work introduces the HyperNOMAD package, an extension of the NOMAD software that applies the MADS algorithm [7] to simultaneously tune the hyperparameters responsible for both the architecture and the learning process of a deep neural network (DNN), and that allows for an important flexibility in the exploration of the search space by taking advantage of categorical variables. This new approach is tested on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 data sets and achieves results comparable to the current state of the art.
Recommendations on Designing Practical Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Systems
Authors: Dongrui Wu, Jerry Mendel
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy systems have become increasingly popular in the last 20 years. They have demonstrated superior performance in many applications. However, the operation of an IT2 fuzzy system is more complex than that of its type-1 counterpart. There are many questions to be answered in designing an IT2 fuzzy system: Should singleton or non-singleton fuzzifier be used? How many membership functions (MFs) should be used for each input? Should Gaussian or piecewise linear MFs be used? Should Mamdani or Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) inference be used? Should minimum or product $t$-norm be used? Should type-reduction be used or not? How to optimize the IT2 fuzzy system? These questions may look overwhelming and confusing to IT2 beginners. In this paper we recommend some representative starting choices for an IT2 fuzzy system design, which hopefully will make IT2 fuzzy systems more accessible to IT2 fuzzy system designers.
A Semi-Supervised Framework for Automatic Pixel-Wise Breast Cancer Grading of Histological Images
Authors: Yanyuet Man, Xiangyun Ding, Xingcheng Yao, Han Bao
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Collaborative Filtering, whole slide images

Throughout the world, breast cancer is one of the leading causes of female death. Recently, deep learning methods are developed to automatically grade breast cancer of histological slides. However, the performance of existing deep learning models is limited due to the lack of large annotated biomedical datasets. One promising way to relieve the annotating burden is to leverage the unannotated datasets to enhance the trained model. In this paper, we first apply active learning method in breast cancer grading, and propose a semi-supervised framework based on expectation maximization (EM) model. The proposed EM approach is based on the collaborative filtering among the annotated and unannotated datasets. The collaborative filtering method effectively extracts useful and credible datasets from the unannotated images. Results of pixel-wise prediction of whole-slide images (WSI) demonstrate that the proposed method not only outperforms state-of-art methods, but also significantly reduces the annotation cost by over 70%.
On the Privacy of dK-Random Graphs
Authors: Sameera Horawalavithana, Adriana Iamnitchi
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00

Real social network datasets provide significant benefits for understanding phenomena such as information diffusion or network evolution. Yet the privacy risks raised from sharing real graph datasets, even when stripped of user identity information, are significant. Previous research shows that many graph anonymization techniques fail against existing graph de-anonymization attacks. However, the specific reason for the success of such de-anonymization attacks is yet to be understood. This paper systematically studies the structural properties of real graphs that make them more vulnerable to machine learning-based techniques for de-anonymization. More precisely, we study the boundaries of anonymity based on the structural properties of real graph datasets in terms of how their dK-based anonymized versions resist (or fail) to various types of attacks. Our experimental results lead to three contributions. First, we identify the strength of an attacker based on the graph characteristics of the subset of nodes from which it starts the de-anonymization attack. Second, we quantify the relative effectiveness of dK-series for graph anonymization. And third, we identify the properties of the original graph that make it more vulnerable to de-anonymization.
Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) Based Multi-View Learning: An Overview
Authors: Chenfeng Guo, Dongrui Wu
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: MULTI-VIEW LEARNING

Multi-view learning (MVL) is a strategy for fusing data from different sources or subsets. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is very important in MVL, whose main idea is to map data from different views onto a common space with maximum correlation. Traditional CCA can only be used to calculate the linear correlation of two views. Besides, it is unsupervised and the label information is wasted. Many nonlinear, supervised, or generalized extensions have been proposed to overcome these limitations. However, to our knowledge, there is no overview for these approaches. This paper provides an overview of many representative CCA-based MVL approaches.
SkeletonNet: Shape Pixel to Skeleton Pixel
Authors: Sabari Nathan, Priya Kansal
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Deep Learning for Geometric Shape Understating has organized a challenge for extracting different kinds of skeletons from the images of different objects. This competition is organized in association with CVPR 2019. There are three different tracks of this competition. The present manuscript describes the method used to train the model for the dataset provided in the first track. The first track aims to extract skeleton pixels from the shape pixels of 89 different objects. For the purpose of extracting the skeleton, a U-net model which is comprised of an encoder-decoder structure has been used. In our proposed architecture, unlike the plain decoder in the traditional Unet, we have designed the decoder in the format of HED architecture, wherein we have introduced 4 side layers and fused them to one dilation convolutional layer to connect the broken links of the skeleton. Our proposed architecture achieved the F1 score of 0.77 on test data.
On Conforming and Conflicting Values
Authors: Kinzang Chhogyal, Abhaya Nayak, Aditya Ghose, Mehmet Orgun, Hoa Dam
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00

Values are things that are important to us. Actions activate values - they either go against our values or they promote our values. Values themselves can either be conforming or conflicting depending on the action that is taken. In this short paper, we argue that values may be classified as one of two types - conflicting and inherently conflicting values. They are distinguished by the fact that the latter in some sense can be thought of as being independent of actions. This allows us to do two things: i) check whether a set of values is consistent and ii) check whether it is in conflict with other sets of values.
The Role of Memory in Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Antonio Orvieto, Jonas Kohler, Aurelien Lucchi
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

The choice of how to retain information about past gradients dramatically affects the convergence properties of state-of-the-art stochastic optimization methods, such as Heavy-ball, Nesterov's momentum, RMSprop and Adam. Building on this observation, we use stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to explicitly study the role of memory in gradient-based algorithms. We first derive a general continuous-time model that can incorporate arbitrary types of memory, for both deterministic and stochastic settings. We provide convergence guarantees for this SDE for weakly-quasi-convex and quadratically growing functions. We then demonstrate how to discretize this SDE to get a flexible discrete-time algorithm that can implement a board spectrum of memories ranging from short- to long-term. Not only does this algorithm increase the degrees of freedom in algorithmic choice for practitioners but it also comes with better stability properties than classical momentum in the convex stochastic setting. In particular, no iterate averaging is needed for convergence. Interestingly, our analysis also provides a novel interpretation of Nesterov's momentum as stable gradient amplification and highlights a possible reason for its unstable behavior in the (convex) stochastic setting. Furthermore, we discuss the use of long term memory for second-moment estimation in adaptive methods, such as Adam and RMSprop. Finally, we provide an extensive experimental study of the effect of different types of memory in both convex and nonconvex settings.
Scalable Multi Corpora Neural Language Models for ASR
Authors: Anirudh Raju, Denis Filimonov, Gautam Tiwari, Guitang Lan, Ariya Rastrow
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Neural language models (NLM) have been shown to outperform conventional n-gram language models by a substantial margin in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and other tasks. There are, however, a number of challenges that need to be addressed for an NLM to be used in a practical large-scale ASR system. In this paper, we present solutions to some of the challenges, including training NLM from heterogenous corpora, limiting latency impact and handling personalized bias in the second-pass rescorer. Overall, we show that we can achieve a 6.2% relative WER reduction using neural LM in a second-pass n-best rescoring framework with a minimal increase in latency.
Machine Learning based Prediction of Hierarchical Classification of Transposable Elements
Authors: Manisha Panta, Avdesh Mishra, Md. Tamjidul Hoque, Joel Atallah
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Transposable Elements (TEs) or jumping genes are the DNA sequences that have an intrinsic capability to move within a host genome from one genomic location to another. Studies show that the presence of a TE within or adjacent to a functional gene may alter its expression. TEs can also cause an increase in the rate of mutation and can even mediate duplications and large insertions and deletions in the genome, promoting gross genetic rearrangements. Thus, the proper classification of the identified jumping genes is essential to understand their genetic and evolutionary effects in the genome. While computational methods have been developed that perform either binary classification or multi-label classification of TEs, few studies have focused on their hierarchical classification. The state-of-the-art machine learning classification method utilizes a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), a class of neural network, for hierarchical classification of TEs. However, the existing methods have limited accuracy in classifying TEs. A more effective classifier, which can explain the role of TEs in germline and somatic evolution, is needed. In this study, we examine the performance of a variety of machine learning (ML) methods. And eventually, propose a robust approach for the hierarchical classification of TEs, with higher accuracy, using Support Vector Machines (SVM).
Quantifying Algorithmic Biases over Time
Authors: Vivek K. Singh, Ishaan Singh
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval

Algorithms now permeate multiple aspects of human lives and multiple recent results have reported that these algorithms may have biases pertaining to gender, race, and other demographic characteristics. The metrics used to quantify such biases have still focused on a static notion of algorithms. However, algorithms evolve over time. For instance, Tay (a conversational bot launched by Microsoft) was arguably not biased at its launch but quickly became biased, sexist, and racist over time. We suggest a set of intuitive metrics to study the variations in biases over time and present the results for a case study for genders represented in images resulting from a Twitter image search for #Nurse and #Doctor over a period of 21 days. Results indicate that biases vary significantly over time and the direction of bias could appear to be different on different days. Hence, one-shot measurements may not suffice for understanding algorithmic bias, thus motivating further work on studying biases in algorithms over time.
MultiWOZ 2.1: A Consolidated Multi-Domain Dialogue Dataset with State Corrections and State Tracking Baselines
Authors: Mihail Eric, Rahul Goel, Shachi Paul, Adarsh Kumar, Abhishek Sethi, Peter Ku, Anuj Kumar Goyal, Sanchit Agarwal, Shuyang Gao, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
Date: 2019-07-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking, Multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking

MultiWOZ 2.0 (Budzianowski et al., 2018) is a recently released multi-domain dialogue dataset spanning 7 distinct domains and containing over 10,000 dialogues. Though immensely useful and one of the largest resources of its kind to-date, MultiWOZ 2.0 has a few shortcomings. Firstly, there is substantial noise in the dialogue state annotations and dialogue utterances which negatively impact the performance of state-tracking models. Secondly, follow-up work (Lee et al., 2019) has augmented the original dataset with user dialogue acts. This leads to multiple co-existent versions of the same dataset with minor modifications. In this work we tackle the aforementioned issues by introducing MultiWOZ 2.1. To fix the noisy state annotations, we use crowdsourced workers to re-annotate state and utterances based on the original utterances in the dataset. This correction process results in changes to over 32% of state annotations across 40% of the dialogue turns. In addition, we fix 146 dialogue utterances by canonicalizing slot values in the utterances to the values in the dataset ontology. To address the second problem, we combined the contributions of the follow-up works into MultiWOZ 2.1. Hence, our dataset also includes user dialogue acts as well as multiple slot descriptions per dialogue state slot. We then benchmark a number of state-of-the-art dialogue state tracking models on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset and show the joint state tracking performance on the corrected state annotations. We are publicly releasing MultiWOZ 2.1 to the community, hoping that this dataset resource will allow for more effective models across various dialogue subproblems to be built in the future.