pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multimodal deep networks for text and image-based document classification
Authors: Nicolas Audebert, Catherine Herold, Kuider Slimani, Cédric Vidal
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification, General Classification, Multimodal Deep Learning, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Word Embeddings

Classification of document images is a critical step for archival of old manuscripts, online subscription and administrative procedures. Computer vision and deep learning have been suggested as a first solution to classify documents based on their visual appearance. However, achieving the fine-grained classification that is required in real-world setting cannot be achieved by visual analysis alone. Often, the relevant information is in the actual text content of the document. We design a multimodal neural network that is able to learn from word embeddings, computed on text extracted by OCR, and from the image. We show that this approach boosts pure image accuracy by 3% on Tobacco3482 and RVL-CDIP augmented by our new QS-OCR text dataset (https://github.com/Quicksign/ocrized-text-dataset), even without clean text information.
DA-RefineNet:A Dual Input Whole Slide Image Segmentation Algorithm Based on Attention
Authors: Ziqiang Li, Rentuo Tao, Qianrun Wu, Bin Li
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, whole slide images

Automatic medical image segmentation has wide applications for disease diagnosing. However, it is much more challenging than natural optical image segmentation due to the high-resolution of medical images and the corresponding huge computation cost. The sliding window is a commonly used technique for whole slide image (WSI) segmentation, however, for these methods based on the sliding window, the main drawback is lacking global contextual information for supervision. In this paper, we propose a dual-inputs attention network (denoted as DA-RefineNet) for WSI segmentation, where both local fine-grained information and global coarse information can be efficiently utilized. Sufficient comparative experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the results prove that the proposed method can achieve better performance on WSI segmentation compared to methods relying on single-input.
Motorway Traffic Flow Prediction using Advanced Deep Learning
Authors: Adriana-Simona Mihaita, Haowen Li, Zongyang He, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Management, Prediction

Congestion prediction represents a major priority for traffic management centres around the world to ensure timely incident response handling. The increasing amounts of generated traffic data have been used to train machine learning predictors for traffic, however this is a challenging task due to inter-dependencies of traffic flow both in time and space. Recently, deep learning techniques have shown significant prediction improvements over traditional models, however open questions remain around their applicability, accuracy and parameter tuning. This paper proposes an advanced deep learning framework for simultaneously predicting the traffic flow on a large number of monitoring stations along a highly circulated motorway in Sydney, Australia, including exit and entry loop count stations, and over varying training and prediction time horizons. The spatial and temporal features extracted from the 36.34 million data points are used in various deep learning architectures that exploit their spatial structure (convolutional neuronal networks), their temporal dynamics (recurrent neuronal networks), or both through a hybrid spatio-temporal modelling (CNN-LSTM). We show that our deep learning models consistently outperform traditional methods, and we conduct a comparative analysis of the optimal time horizon of historical data required to predict traffic flow at different time points in the future.
Discriminative Active Learning
Authors: Daniel Gissin, Shai Shalev-Shwartz
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2019 5
Tasks: Active Learning, Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

We propose a new batch mode active learning algorithm designed for neural networks and large query batch sizes. The method, Discriminative Active Learning (DAL), poses active learning as a binary classification task, attempting to choose examples to label in such a way as to make the labeled set and the unlabeled pool indistinguishable. Experimenting on image classification tasks, we empirically show our method to be on par with state of the art methods in medium and large query batch sizes, while being simple to implement and also extend to other domains besides classification tasks. Our experiments also show that none of the state of the art methods of today are clearly better than uncertainty sampling when the batch size is relatively large, negating some of the reported results in the recent literature.
Joint Language Identification of Code-Switching Speech using Attention based E2E Network
Authors: Sreeram Ganji, Kunal Dhawan, Kumar Priyadarshi, Rohit Sinha
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification

Language identification (LID) has relevance in many speech processing applications. For the automatic recognition of code-switching speech, the conventional approaches often employ an LID system for detecting the languages present within an utterance. In the existing works, the LID on code-switching speech involves modelling of the underlying languages separately. In this work, we propose a joint modelling based LID system for code-switching speech. To achieve the same, an attention-based end-to-end (E2E) network has been explored. For the development and evaluation of the proposed approach, a recently created Hindi-English code-switching corpus has been used. For the contrast purpose, an LID system employing the connectionist temporal classification-based E2E network is also developed. On comparing both the LID systems, the attention based approach is noted to result in better LID accuracy. The effective location of code-switching boundaries within the utterance by the proposed approach has been demonstrated by plotting the attention weights of E2E network.
Controlling Model Complexity in Probabilistic Model-Based Dynamic Optimization of Neural Network Structures
Authors: Shota Saito, Shinichi Shirakawa
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Neural Architecture Search

A method of simultaneously optimizing both the structure of neural networks and the connection weights in a single training loop can reduce the enormous computational cost of neural architecture search. We focus on the probabilistic model-based dynamic neural network structure optimization that considers the probability distribution of structure parameters and simultaneously optimizes both the distribution parameters and connection weights based on gradient methods. Since the existing algorithm searches for the structures that only minimize the training loss, this method might find overly complicated structures. In this paper, we propose the introduction of a penalty term to control the model complexity of obtained structures. We formulate a penalty term using the number of weights or units and derive its analytical natural gradient. The proposed method minimizes the objective function injected the penalty term based on the stochastic gradient descent. We apply the proposed method in the unit selection of a fully-connected neural network and the connection selection of a convolutional neural network. The experimental results show that the proposed method can control model complexity while maintaining performance.
Myers-Briggs Personality Classification and Personality-Specific Language Generation Using Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Sedrick Scott Keh, I-Tsun Cheng
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Text Generation

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is a popular personality metric that uses four dichotomies as indicators of personality traits. This paper examines the use of pre-trained language models to predict MBTI personality types based on scraped labeled texts. The proposed model reaches an accuracy of $0.47$ for correctly predicting all 4 types and $0.86$ for correctly predicting at least 2 types. Furthermore, we investigate the possible uses of a fine-tuned BERT model for personality-specific language generation. This is a task essential for both modern psychology and for intelligent empathetic systems.
Ranking sentences from product description & bullets for better search
Authors: Prateek Verma, Aliasgar Kutiyanawala, Ke Shen
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Extractive Summarization, NER, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sentence

Products in an ecommerce catalog contain information-rich fields like description and bullets that can be useful to extract entities (attributes) using NER based systems. However, these fields are often verbose and contain lot of information that is not relevant from a search perspective. Treating each sentence within these fields equally can lead to poor full text match and introduce problems in extracting attributes to develop ontologies, semantic search etc. To address this issue, we describe two methods based on extractive summarization with reinforcement learning by leveraging information in product titles and search click through logs to rank sentences from bullets, description, etc. Finally, we compare the accuracy of these two models.
FastV2C-HandNet: Fast Voxel to Coordinate Hand Pose Estimation with 3D Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Rohan Lekhwani, Bhupendra Singh
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Hand Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Hand pose estimation from monocular depth images has been an important and challenging problem in the Computer Vision community. In this paper, we present a novel approach to estimate 3D hand joint locations from 2D depth images. Unlike most of the previous methods, our model captures the 3D spatial information from a depth image thereby giving it a greater understanding of the input. We voxelize the input depth map to capture the 3D features of the input and perform 3D data augmentations to make our network robust to real-world images. Our network is trained in an end-to-end manner which reduces time and space complexity significantly when compared to other methods. Through extensive experiments, we show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods with respect to the time it takes to train and predict 3D hand joint locations. This makes our method more suitable for real-world hand pose estimation scenarios.
A Novel User Representation Paradigm for Making Personalized Candidate Retrieval
Authors: Zheng Liu, Yu Xing, Jianxun Lian, Defu Lian, Ziyao Li, Xing Xie
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Retrieval

Candidate retrieval is a fundamental issue in recommendation system. Given user's recommendation request, relevant candidates need to be retrieved in realtime for subsequent ranking operations. Considering that the retrieval operation is conducted over considerable items, it has to be both precise and scalable so that high-quality candidates can be acquired within tolerable latency. Unfortunately, conventional methods would trade off precision for high running efficiency, which leads to inferior retrieval quality. In contrast, those deep learning-based approaches can be highly accurate in identifying relevant items; yet, they are unsuitable for candidate retrieval due to their inherent limitation on scalability. In this work, a novel framework is proposed to address the above challenges. The underlying intuition is to rely on a well-trained ranking model for the supervision of an efficient retrieval model, such that it will unify the scalability and precision as a whole. We have implemented our conceptual framework and made comprehensive evaluation for it, where promising results are achieved against representative baselines. Our work is undergoing a anonymous review, and it will soon be released after the notification. If you're also interested in this problem, please feel free to contact us.
Enabling Multi-Shell b-Value Generalizability of Data-Driven Diffusion Models with Deep SHORE
Authors: Vishwesh Nath, Ilwoo Lyu, Kurt G. Schilling, Prasanna Parvathaneni, Colin B. Hansen, Yucheng Tang, Yuankai Huo, Vaibhav A. Janve, Yurui Gao, Iwona Stepniewska, Adam W. Anderson, Bennett A. Landman
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Intra-voxel models of the diffusion signal are essential for interpreting organization of the tissue environment at micrometer level with data at millimeter resolution. Recent advances in data driven methods have enabled direct compari-son and optimization of methods for in-vivo data with externally validated histological sections with both 2-D and 3-D histology. Yet, all existing methods make limiting assumptions of either (1) model-based linkages between b-values or (2) limited associations with single shell data. We generalize prior deep learning models that used single shell spherical harmonic transforms to integrate the re-cently developed simple harmonic oscillator reconstruction (SHORE) basis. To enable learning on the SHORE manifold, we present an alternative formulation of the fiber orientation distribution (FOD) object using the SHORE basis while rep-resenting the observed diffusion weighted data in the SHORE basis. To ensure consistency of hyper-parameter optimization for SHORE, we present our Deep SHORE approach to learn on a data-optimized manifold. Deep SHORE is evalu-ated with eight-fold cross-validation of a preclinical MRI-histology data with four b-values. Generalizability of in-vivo human data is evaluated on two separate 3T MRI scanners. Specificity in terms of angular correlation (ACC) with the preclinical data improved on single shell: 0.78 relative to 0.73 and 0.73, multi-shell: 0.80 relative to 0.74 (p < 0.001). In the in-vivo human data, Deep SHORE was more consistent across scanners with 0.63 relative to other multi-shell methods 0.39, 0.52 and 0.57 in terms of ACC. In conclusion, Deep SHORE is a promising method to enable data driven learning with DW-MRI under conditions with varying b-values, number of diffusion shells, and gradient directions per shell.
Exploring Deep Anomaly Detection Methods Based on Capsule Net
Authors: Xiaoyan Li, Iluju Kiringa, Tet Yeap, Xiaodan Zhu, Yifeng Li
Date: 2019-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Prediction

In this paper, we develop and explore deep anomaly detection techniques based on the capsule network (CapsNet) for image data. Being able to encoding intrinsic spatial relationship between parts and a whole, CapsNet has been applied as both a classifier and deep autoencoder. This inspires us to design a prediction-probability-based and a reconstruction-error-based normality score functions for evaluating the "outlierness" of unseen images. Our results on three datasets demonstrate that the prediction-probability-based method performs consistently well, while the reconstruction-error-based approach is relatively sensitive to the similarity between labeled and unlabeled images. Furthermore, both of the CapsNet-based methods outperform the principled benchmark methods in many cases.
Perceptually Motivated Method for Image Inpainting Comparison
Authors: Ivan Molodetskikh, Mikhail Erofeev, Dmitry Vatolin
Date: 2019-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting

The field of automatic image inpainting has progressed rapidly in recent years, but no one has yet proposed a standard method of evaluating algorithms. This absence is due to the problem's challenging nature: image-inpainting algorithms strive for realism in the resulting images, but realism is a subjective concept intrinsic to human perception. Existing objective image-quality metrics provide a poor approximation of what humans consider more or less realistic. To improve the situation and to better organize both prior and future research in this field, we conducted a subjective comparison of nine state-of-the-art inpainting algorithms and propose objective quality metrics that exhibit high correlation with the results of our comparison.
TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset
Authors: Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang
Date: 2019-07-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Articles, Question Answering

With social media becoming increasingly pop-ular on which lots of news and real-time eventsare reported, developing automated questionanswering systems is critical to the effective-ness of many applications that rely on real-time knowledge. While previous datasets haveconcentrated on question answering (QA) forformal text like news and Wikipedia, wepresent the first large-scale dataset for QA oversocial media data. To ensure that the tweetswe collected are useful, we only gather tweetsused by journalists to write news articles. Wethen ask human annotators to write questionsand answers upon these tweets. Unlike otherQA datasets like SQuAD in which the answersare extractive, we allow the answers to be ab-stractive. We show that two recently proposedneural models that perform well on formaltexts are limited in their performance when ap-plied to our dataset. In addition, even the fine-tuned BERT model is still lagging behind hu-man performance with a large margin. Our re-sults thus point to the need of improved QAsystems targeting social media text.
Measuring the Transferability of Adversarial Examples
Authors: Deyan Petrov, Timothy M. Hospedales
Date: 2019-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: SSIM

Adversarial examples are of wide concern due to their impact on the reliability of contemporary machine learning systems. Effective adversarial examples are mostly found via white-box attacks. However, in some cases they can be transferred across models, thus enabling them to attack black-box models. In this work we evaluate the transferability of three adversarial attacks - the Fast Gradient Sign Method, the Basic Iterative Method, and the Carlini & Wagner method, across two classes of models - the VGG class(using VGG16, VGG19 and an ensemble of VGG16 and VGG19), and the Inception class(Inception V3, Xception, Inception Resnet V2, and an ensemble of the three). We also outline the problems with the assessment of transferability in the current body of research and attempt to amend them by picking specific "strong" parameters for the attacks, and by using a L-Infinity clipping technique and the SSIM metric for the final evaluation of the attack transferability.
Finite-Time Performance Bounds and Adaptive Learning Rate Selection for Two Time-Scale Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Harsh Gupta, R. Srikant, Lei Ying
Date: 2019-07-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We study two time-scale linear stochastic approximation algorithms, which can be used to model well-known reinforcement learning algorithms such as GTD, GTD2, and TDC. We present finite-time performance bounds for the case where the learning rate is fixed. The key idea in obtaining these bounds is to use a Lyapunov function motivated by singular perturbation theory for linear differential equations. We use the bound to design an adaptive learning rate scheme which significantly improves the convergence rate over the known optimal polynomial decay rule in our experiments, and can be used to potentially improve the performance of any other schedule where the learning rate is changed at pre-determined time instants.
Learning Neural Networks with Adaptive Regularization
Authors: Han Zhao, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Geoffrey J. Gordon
Date: 2019-07-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Feed-forward neural networks can be understood as a combination of an intermediate representation and a linear hypothesis. While most previous works aim to diversify the representations, we explore the complementary direction by performing an adaptive and data-dependent regularization motivated by the empirical Bayes method. Specifically, we propose to construct a matrix-variate normal prior (on weights) whose covariance matrix has a Kronecker product structure. This structure is designed to capture the correlations in neurons through backpropagation. Under the assumption of this Kronecker factorization, the prior encourages neurons to borrow statistical strength from one another. Hence, it leads to an adaptive and data-dependent regularization when training networks on small datasets. To optimize the model, we present an efficient block coordinate descent algorithm with analytical solutions. Empirically, we demonstrate that the proposed method helps networks converge to local optima with smaller stable ranks and spectral norms. These properties suggest better generalizations and we present empirical results to support this expectation. We also verify the effectiveness of the approach on multiclass classification and multitask regression problems with various network structures.
Autoencoding sensory substitution
Authors: Viktor Tóth, Lauri Parkkonen
Date: 2019-07-14 00:00:00

Tens of millions of people live blind, and their number is ever increasing. Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution (SS) encompasses a family of cheap, generic solutions to assist the visually impaired by conveying visual information through sound. The required SS training is lengthy: months of effort is necessary to reach a practical level of adaptation. There are two reasons for the tedious training process: the elongated substituting audio signal, and the disregard for the compressive characteristics of the human hearing system. To overcome these obstacles, we developed a novel class of SS methods, by training deep recurrent autoencoders for image-to-sound conversion. We successfully trained deep learning models on different datasets to execute visual-to-auditory stimulus conversion. By constraining the visual space, we demonstrated the viability of shortened substituting audio signals, while proposing mechanisms, such as the integration of computational hearing models, to optimally convey visual features in the substituting stimulus as perceptually discernible auditory components. We tested our approach in two separate cases. In the first experiment, the author went blindfolded for 5 days, while performing SS training on hand posture discrimination. The second experiment assessed the accuracy of reaching movements towards objects on a table. In both test cases, above-chance-level accuracy was attained after a few hours of training. Our novel SS architecture broadens the horizon of rehabilitation methods engineered for the visually impaired. Further improvements on the proposed model shall yield hastened rehabilitation of the blind and a wider adaptation of SS devices as a consequence.
Discourse Behavior of Older Adults Interacting With a Dialogue Agent Competent in Multiple Topics
Authors: S. Zahra Razavi, Lenhart K. Schubert, Kimberly A. Van Orden, Mohammad Rafayet Ali
Date: 2019-07-14 00:00:00

We present some results concerning the dialogue behavior and inferred sentiment of a group of older adults interacting with a computer-based avatar. Our avatar is unique in its ability to hold natural dialogues on a wide range of everyday topics---27 topics in three groups, developed with the help of gerontologists. The three groups vary in ``degrees of intimacy", and as such in degrees of difficulty for the user. Each participant interacted with the avatar for 7-9 sessions over a period of 3-4 weeks; analysis of the dialogues reveals correlations such as greater verbosity for more difficult topics, increasing verbosity with successive sessions, especially for more difficult topics, stronger sentiment on topics concerned with life goals rather than routine activities, and stronger self-disclosure for more intimate topics. In addition to their intrinsic interest, these results also reflect positively on the sophistication of our dialogue system.