pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Speeding Up Distributed Pseudo-tree Optimization Procedure with Cross Edge Consistency to Solve DCOPs
Authors: Mashrur Rashik, Md. Musfiqur Rahman, Md. Mamun-or-Rashid, Md. Mosaddek Khan
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Distributed Pseudo-tree Optimization Procedure (DPOP) is a well-known message passing algorithm that has been used to provide optimal solutions of Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) -- a framework that is designed to optimize constraints in cooperative multi-agent systems. The traditional DCOP formulation does not consider those constraints that must be satisfied (also known as hard constraints), rather it concentrates only on soft constraints. However, the presence of both types of constraints are observed in a number of applications, such as Distributed Radio Link Frequency Assignment and Distributed Event Scheduling, etc. Although the combination of these types of constraints is recently incorporated in DPOP to solve DCOPs, scalability remains an issue for them as finding an optimal solution is NP-hard. Additionally, in DPOP, the agents are arranged as a DFS pseudo-tree. Recently it has been observed that the constructed pseudo-trees in this way often come to be chain-like and greatly impair the algorithm's performance. To address these issues, we develop an algorithm that speeds up the DPOP algorithm by reducing the size of the messages exchanged and increasing parallelism in the pseudo tree. Our empirical evidence suggests that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by a significant margin.
Neuromodulated Patience for Robot and Self-Driving Vehicle Navigation
Authors: Jinwei Xing, Xinyun Zou, Jeffrey L. Krichmar
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Navigate, Reinforcement Learning, Robot Navigation

Robots and self-driving vehicles face a number of challenges when navigating through real environments. Successful navigation in dynamic environments requires prioritizing subtasks and monitoring resources. Animals are under similar constraints. It has been shown that the neuromodulator serotonin regulates impulsiveness and patience in animals. In the present paper, we take inspiration from the serotonergic system and apply it to the task of robot navigation. In a set of outdoor experiments, we show how changing the level of patience can affect the amount of time the robot will spend searching for a desired location. To navigate GPS compromised environments, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning paradigm in which the robot learns to follow sidewalks. This may further regulate a tradeoff between a smooth long route and a rough shorter route. Using patience as a parameter may be beneficial for autonomous systems under time pressure.
Bootstrapping non-parallel voice conversion from speaker-adaptive text-to-speech
Authors: Hieu-Thi Luong, Junichi Yamagishi
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) and text-to-speech (TTS) are two tasks that share a similar objective, generating speech with a target voice. However, they are usually developed independently under vastly different frameworks. In this paper, we propose a methodology to bootstrap a VC system from a pretrained speaker-adaptive TTS model and unify the techniques as well as the interpretations of these two tasks. Moreover by offloading the heavy data demand to the training stage of the TTS model, our VC system can be built using a small amount of target speaker speech data. It also opens up the possibility of using speech in a foreign unseen language to build the system. Our subjective evaluations show that the proposed framework is able to not only achieve competitive performance in the standard intra-language scenario but also adapt and convert using speech utterances in an unseen language.
Solving Service Robot Tasks: UT Austin Villa@Home 2019 Team Report
Authors: Rishi Shah, Yuqian Jiang, Haresh Karnan, Gilberto Briscoe-Martinez, Dominick Mulder, Ryan Gupta, Rachel Schlossman, Marika Murphy, Justin W. Hart, Luis Sentis, Peter Stone
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00

RoboCup@Home is an international robotics competition based on domestic tasks requiring autonomous capabilities pertaining to a large variety of AI technologies. Research challenges are motivated by these tasks both at the level of individual technologies and the integration of subsystems into a fully functional, robustly autonomous system. We describe the progress made by the UT Austin Villa 2019 RoboCup@Home team which represents a significant step forward in AI-based HRI due to the breadth of tasks accomplished within a unified system. Presented are the competition tasks, component technologies they rely on, our initial approaches both to the components and their integration, and directions for future research.
Towards Effective Human-AI Teams: The Case of Collaborative Packing
Authors: Gilwoo Lee, Christoforos Mavrogiannis, Siddhartha S. Srinivasa
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Decision Making

We focus on the problem of designing an artificial agent (AI), capable of assisting a human user to complete a task. Our goal is to guide human users towards optimal task performance while keeping their cognitive load as low as possible. Our insight is that doing so requires an understanding of human decision making for the task domain at hand. In this work, we consider the domain of collaborative packing, in which an AI agent provides placement recommendations to a human user. As a first step, we explore the mechanisms underlying human packing strategies. We conducted a user study in which 100 human participants completed a series of packing tasks in a virtual environment. We analyzed their packing strategies and discovered spatial and temporal patterns, such as that humans tend to place larger items at corners first. We expect that imbuing an artificial agent with an understanding of this spatiotemporal structure will enable improved assistance, which will be reflected in the task performance and the human perception of the AI. Ongoing work involves the development of a framework that incorporates the extracted insights to predict and manipulate human decision making towards an efficient trajectory of low cognitive load and high efficiency. A follow-up study will evaluate our framework against a set of baselines featuring alternative strategies of assistance. Our eventual goal is the deployment and evaluation of our framework on an autonomous robotic manipulator, actively assisting users on a packing task.
FfDL : A Flexible Multi-tenant Deep Learning Platform
Authors: K. R. Jayaram, Vinod Muthusamy, Parijat Dube, Vatche Ishakian, Chen Wang, Benjamin Herta, Scott Boag, Diana Arroyo, Asser Tantawi, Archit Verma, Falk Pollok, Rania Khalaf
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Drug Design, Scheduling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Deep learning (DL) is becoming increasingly popular in several application domains and has made several new application features involving computer vision, speech recognition and synthesis, self-driving automobiles, drug design, etc. feasible and accurate. As a result, large scale on-premise and cloud-hosted deep learning platforms have become essential infrastructure in many organizations. These systems accept, schedule, manage and execute DL training jobs at scale. This paper describes the design, implementation and our experiences with FfDL, a DL platform used at IBM. We describe how our design balances dependability with scalability, elasticity, flexibility and efficiency. We examine FfDL qualitatively through a retrospective look at the lessons learned from building, operating, and supporting FfDL; and quantitatively through a detailed empirical evaluation of FfDL, including the overheads introduced by the platform for various deep learning models, the load and performance observed in a real case study using FfDL within our organization, the frequency of various faults observed including unanticipated faults, and experiments demonstrating the benefits of various scheduling policies. FfDL has been open-sourced.
Multilingual Graphemic Hybrid ASR with Massive Data Augmentation
Authors: Chunxi Liu, Qiaochu Zhang, Xiaohui Zhang, Kritika Singh, Yatharth Saraf, Geoffrey Zweig
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Towards developing high-performing ASR for low-resource languages, approaches to address the lack of resources are to make use of data from multiple languages, and to augment the training data by creating acoustic variations. In this work we present a single grapheme-based ASR model learned on 7 geographically proximal languages, using standard hybrid BLSTM-HMM acoustic models with lattice-free MMI objective. We build the single ASR grapheme set via taking the union over each language-specific grapheme set, and we find such multilingual graphemic hybrid ASR model can perform language-independent recognition on all 7 languages, and substantially outperform each monolingual ASR model. Secondly, we evaluate the efficacy of multiple data augmentation alternatives within language, as well as their complementarity with multilingual modeling. Overall, we show that the proposed multilingual graphemic hybrid ASR with various data augmentation can not only recognize any within training set languages, but also provide large ASR performance improvements.
A Universal Parent Model for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation Transfer
Authors: Mozhdeh Gheini, Jonathan May
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Humanitarian, Low Resource Neural Machine Translation, Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation, Machine Translation, Transfer Learning, Translation

Transfer learning from a high-resource language pair `parent' has been proven to be an effective way to improve neural machine translation quality for low-resource language pairs `children.' However, previous approaches build a custom parent model or at least update an existing parent model's vocabulary for each child language pair they wish to train, in an effort to align parent and child vocabularies. This is not a practical solution. It is wasteful to devote the majority of training time for new language pairs to optimizing parameters on an unrelated data set. Further, this overhead reduces the utility of neural machine translation for deployment in humanitarian assistance scenarios, where extra time to deploy a new language pair can mean the difference between life and death. In this work, we present a `universal' pre-trained neural parent model with constant vocabulary that can be used as a starting point for training practically any new low-resource language to a fixed target language. We demonstrate that our approach, which leverages orthography unification and a broad-coverage approach to subword identification, generalizes well to several languages from a variety of families, and that translation systems built with our approach can be built more quickly than competing methods and with better quality as well.
Harnessing Indirect Training Data for End-to-End Automatic Speech Translation: Tricks of the Trade
Authors: Juan Pino, Liezl Puzon, Jiatao Gu, Xutai Ma, Arya D. McCarthy, Deepak Gopinath
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (IWSLT) 2019 11
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), automatic-speech-translation, Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Translation

For automatic speech translation (AST), end-to-end approaches are outperformed by cascaded models that transcribe with automatic speech recognition (ASR), then translate with machine translation (MT). A major cause of the performance gap is that, while existing AST corpora are small, massive datasets exist for both the ASR and MT subsystems. In this work, we evaluate several data augmentation and pretraining approaches for AST, by comparing all on the same datasets. Simple data augmentation by translating ASR transcripts proves most effective on the English--French augmented LibriSpeech dataset, closing the performance gap from 8.2 to 1.4 BLEU, compared to a very strong cascade that could directly utilize copious ASR and MT data. The same end-to-end approach plus fine-tuning closes the gap on the English--Romanian MuST-C dataset from 6.7 to 3.7 BLEU. In addition to these results, we present practical recommendations for augmentation and pretraining approaches. Finally, we decrease the performance gap to 0.01 BLEU using a Transformer-based architecture.
A new model for natural groupings in high-dimensional data
Authors: Mireille Boutin, Evzenie Coupkova
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Clustering aims to divide a set of points into groups. The current paradigm assumes that the grouping is well-defined (unique) given the probability model from which the data is drawn. Yet, recent experiments have uncovered several high-dimensional datasets that form different binary groupings after projecting the data to randomly chosen one-dimensional subspaces. This paper describes a probability model for the data that could explain this phenomenon. It is a simple model to serve as a proof of concept for understanding the geometry of high-dimensional data. We start by building a rescaled multivariate Bernouilli model (stretched hypercube) so to create several overlapping grouping structures in the data. The size of each scaling parameter is related to the likelihood of uncovering the corresponding grouping by random 1D projection. Clusters in the original space are then created by adding noise to this cluster-free model. In high dimension, these clusters would hardly be observable given a sample set from the distribution because of the curse of dimensionality, but the binary groupings are clear. Our construction makes it clear that one needs to make a distinction between "groupings" and "clusters" in the original space. It also highlights the need to interpret any clustering found in projected data as merely one among potentially many other groupings in a dataset.
Developing Computational Models of Social Assistance to Guide Socially Assistive Robots
Authors: Jason R. Wilson, Seongsik Kim, Ulyana Kurylo, Joseph Cummings, Eshan Tarneja
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00

While there are many examples in which robots provide social assistance, a lack of theory on how the robots should decide how to assist impedes progress in realizing these technologies. To address this deficiency, we propose a pair of computational models to guide a robot as it provides social assistance. The model of social autonomy helps a robot select an appropriate assistance that will help with the task at hand while also maintaining the autonomy of the person being assisted. The model of social alliance describes how a to determine whether the robot and the person being assisted are cooperatively working towards the same goal. Each of these models are rooted in social reasoning between people, and we describe here our ongoing work to adapt this social reasoning to human-robot interactions.
Performance Analysis of Spatial and Transform Filters for Efficient Image Noise Reduction
Authors: Santosh Paudel, Ajay Kumar Shrestha, Pradip Singh Maharjan, Rameshwar Rijal
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

During the acquisition of an image from its source, noise always becomes an integral part of it. Various algorithms have been used in past to denoise the images. Image denoising still has scope for improvement. Visual information transmitted in the form of digital images has become a considerable method of communication in the modern age, but the image obtained after the transmission is often corrupted due to noise. In this paper, we review the existing denoising algorithms such as filtering approach and wavelets based approach and then perform their comparative study with bilateral filters. We use different noise models to describe additive and multiplicative noise in an image. Based on the samples of degraded pixel neighbourhoods as inputs, the output of an efficient filtering approach has shown a better image denoising performance. This yields promising qualitative and quantitative results of the degraded noisy images in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, Mean Square Error and Universal Quality Identifier.
Multi-class Multilingual Classification of Wikipedia Articles Using Extended Named Entity Tag Set
Authors: Hassan S. Shavarani, Satoshi Sekine
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Articles, Classification, General Classification, TAG, World Knowledge

Wikipedia is a great source of general world knowledge which can guide NLP models better understand their motivation to make predictions. Structuring Wikipedia is the initial step towards this goal which can facilitate fine-grain classification of articles. In this work, we introduce the Shinra 5-Language Categorization Dataset (SHINRA-5LDS), a large multi-lingual and multi-labeled set of annotated Wikipedia articles in Japanese, English, French, German, and Farsi using Extended Named Entity (ENE) tag set. We evaluate the dataset using the best models provided for ENE label set classification and show that the currently available classification models struggle with large datasets using fine-grained tag sets.
Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition
Authors: Jian Liu, Naveed Akhtar, Ajmal Mian
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Adversarial Attack, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Deep learning models achieve impressive performance for skeleton-based human action recognition. However, the robustness of these models to adversarial attacks remains largely unexplored due to their complex spatio-temporal nature that must represent sparse and discrete skeleton joints. This work presents the first adversarial attack on skeleton-based action recognition with graph convolutional networks. The proposed targeted attack, termed Constrained Iterative Attack for Skeleton Actions (CIASA), perturbs joint locations in an action sequence such that the resulting adversarial sequence preserves the temporal coherence, spatial integrity, and the anthropomorphic plausibility of the skeletons. CIASA achieves this feat by satisfying multiple physical constraints, and employing spatial skeleton realignments for the perturbed skeletons along with regularization of the adversarial skeletons with Generative networks. We also explore the possibility of semantically imperceptible localized attacks with CIASA, and succeed in fooling the state-of-the-art skeleton action recognition models with high confidence. CIASA perturbations show high transferability for black-box attacks. We also show that the perturbed skeleton sequences are able to induce adversarial behavior in the RGB videos created with computer graphics. A comprehensive evaluation with NTU and Kinetics datasets ascertains the effectiveness of CIASA for graph-based skeleton action recognition and reveals the imminent threat to the spatio-temporal deep learning tasks in general.
Flight Controller Synthesis Via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: William Koch
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Traditional control methods are inadequate in many deployment settings involving control of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In such settings, CPS controllers must operate and respond to unpredictable interactions, conditions, or failure modes. Dealing with such unpredictability requires the use of executive and cognitive control functions that allow for planning and reasoning. Motivated by the sport of drone racing, this dissertation addresses these concerns for state-of-the-art flight control by investigating the use of deep neural networks to bring essential elements of higher-level cognition for constructing low level flight controllers. This thesis reports on the development and release of an open source, full solution stack for building neuro-flight controllers. This stack consists of the methodology for constructing a multicopter digital twin for synthesize the flight controller unique to a specific aircraft, a tuning framework for implementing training environments (GymFC), and a firmware for the world's first neural network supported flight controller (Neuroflight). GymFC's novel approach fuses together the digital twinning paradigm for flight control training to provide seamless transfer to hardware. Additionally, this thesis examines alternative reward system functions as well as changes to the software environment to bridge the gap between the simulation and real world deployment environments. Work summarized in this thesis demonstrates that reinforcement learning is able to be leveraged for training neural network controllers capable, not only of maintaining stable flight, but also precision aerobatic maneuvers in real world settings. As such, this work provides a foundation for developing the next generation of flight control systems.
Selfie Drone Stick: A Natural Interface for Quadcopter Photography
Authors: Saif Alabachi, Gita Sukthankar, Rahul Sukthankar
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

A physical selfie stick extends the user's reach, enabling the acquisition of personal photos that include more of the background scene. Similarly, a quadcopter can capture photos from vantage points unattainable by the user; but teleoperating a quadcopter to good viewpoints is a difficult task. This paper presents a natural interface for quadcopter photography, the SelfieDroneStick that allows the user to guide the quadcopter to the optimal vantage point based on the phone's sensors. Users specify the composition of their desired long-range selfies using their smartphone, and the quadcopter autonomously flies to a sequence of vantage points from where the desired shots can be taken. The robot controller is trained from a combination of real-world images and simulated flight data. This paper describes two key innovations required to deploy deep reinforcement learning models on a real robot: 1) an abstract state representation for transferring learning from simulation to the hardware platform, and 2) reward shaping and staging paradigms for training the controller. Both of these improvements were found to be essential in learning a robot controller from simulation that transfers successfully to the real robot.
Multi-Perspective, Simultaneous Embedding
Authors: Md Iqbal Hossain, Vahan Huroyan, Stephen Kobourov, Raymundo Navarrete
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

We describe MPSE: a Multi-Perspective Simultaneous Embedding method for visualizing high-dimensional data, based on multiple pairwise distances between the data points. Specifically, MPSE computes positions for the points in 3D and provides different views into the data by means of 2D projections (planes) that preserve each of the given distance matrices. We consider two versions of the problem: fixed projections and variable projections. MPSE with fixed projections takes as input a set of pairwise distance matrices defined on the data points, along with the same number of projections and embeds the points in 3D so that the pairwise distances are preserved in the given projections. MPSE with variable projections takes as input a set of pairwise distance matrices and embeds the points in 3D while also computing the appropriate projections that preserve the pairwise distances. The proposed approach can be useful in multiple scenarios: from creating simultaneous embedding of multiple graphs on the same set of vertices, to reconstructing a 3D object from multiple 2D snapshots, to analyzing data from multiple points of view. We provide a functional prototype of MPSE that is based on an adaptive and stochastic generalization of multi-dimensional scaling to multiple distances and multiple variable projections. We provide an extensive quantitative evaluation with datasets of different sizes and using different number of projections, as well as several examples that illustrate the quality of the resulting solutions.