pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning to Optimally Segment Point Clouds
Authors: Peiyun Hu, David Held, Deva Ramanan
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We focus on the problem of class-agnostic instance segmentation of LiDAR point clouds. We propose an approach that combines graph-theoretic search with data-driven learning: it searches over a set of candidate segmentations and returns one where individual segments score well according to a data-driven point-based model of "objectness". We prove that if we score a segmentation by the worst objectness among its individual segments, there is an efficient algorithm that finds the optimal worst-case segmentation among an exponentially large number of candidate segmentations. We also present an efficient algorithm for the average-case. For evaluation, we repurpose KITTI 3D detection as a segmentation benchmark and empirically demonstrate that our algorithms significantly outperform past bottom-up segmentation approaches and top-down object-based algorithms on segmenting point clouds.
A Two-Stage Approach to Few-Shot Learning for Image Recognition
Authors: Debasmit Das, C. S. George Lee
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

This paper proposes a multi-layer neural network structure for few-shot image recognition of novel categories. The proposed multi-layer neural network architecture encodes transferable knowledge extracted from a large annotated dataset of base categories. This architecture is then applied to novel categories containing only a few samples. The transfer of knowledge is carried out at the feature-extraction and the classification levels distributed across the two training stages. In the first-training stage, we introduce the relative feature to capture the structure of the data as well as obtain a low-dimensional discriminative space. Secondly, we account for the variable variance of different categories by using a network to predict the variance of each class. Classification is then performed by computing the Mahalanobis distance to the mean-class representation in contrast to previous approaches that used the Euclidean distance. In the second-training stage, a category-agnostic mapping is learned from the mean-sample representation to its corresponding class-prototype representation. This is because the mean-sample representation may not accurately represent the novel category prototype. Finally, we evaluate the proposed network structure on four standard few-shot image recognition datasets, where our proposed few-shot learning system produces competitive performance compared to previous work. We also extensively studied and analyzed the contribution of each component of our proposed framework.
Neural Module Networks for Reasoning over Text
Authors: Nitish Gupta, Kevin Lin, Dan Roth, Sameer Singh, Matt Gardner
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Diversity, Inductive Bias

Answering compositional questions that require multiple steps of reasoning against text is challenging, especially when they involve discrete, symbolic operations. Neural module networks (NMNs) learn to parse such questions as executable programs composed of learnable modules, performing well on synthetic visual QA domains. However, we find that it is challenging to learn these models for non-synthetic questions on open-domain text, where a model needs to deal with the diversity of natural language and perform a broader range of reasoning. We extend NMNs by: (a) introducing modules that reason over a paragraph of text, performing symbolic reasoning (such as arithmetic, sorting, counting) over numbers and dates in a probabilistic and differentiable manner; and (b) proposing an unsupervised auxiliary loss to help extract arguments associated with the events in text. Additionally, we show that a limited amount of heuristically-obtained question program and intermediate module output supervision provides sufficient inductive bias for accurate learning. Our proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on a subset of the DROP dataset that poses a variety of reasoning challenges that are covered by our modules.
Neural Memory Networks for Seizure Type Classification
Authors: David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Tharindu Fernando, Simon Denman, Lars Petersson, Matthew J. Aburn, Clinton Fookes
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), General Classification, Seizure Detection, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Classification of seizure type is a key step in the clinical process for evaluating an individual who presents with seizures. It determines the course of clinical diagnosis and treatment, and its impact stretches beyond the clinical domain to epilepsy research and the development of novel therapies. Automated identification of seizure type may facilitate understanding of the disease, and seizure detection and prediction has been the focus of recent research that has sought to exploit the benefits of machine learning and deep learning architectures. Nevertheless, there is not yet a definitive solution for automating the classification of seizure type, a task that must currently be performed by an expert epileptologist. Inspired by recent advances in neural memory networks (NMNs), we introduce a novel approach for the classification of seizure type using electrophysiological data. We first explore the performance of traditional deep learning techniques which use convolutional and recurrent neural networks, and enhance these architectures by using external memory modules with trainable neural plasticity. We show that our model achieves a state-of-the-art weighted F1 score of 0.945 for seizure type classification on the TUH EEG Seizure Corpus with the IBM TUSZ preprocessed data. This work highlights the potential of neural memory networks to support the field of epilepsy research, along with biomedical research and signal analysis more broadly.
An Ensemble Method for Producing Word Representations focusing on the Greek Language
Authors: Michalis Lioudakis, Stamatis Outsios, Michalis Vazirgiannis
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: loresmt (AACL) 2020 12

In this paper we present a new ensemble method, Continuous Bag-of-Skip-grams (CBOS), that produces high-quality word representations putting emphasis on the modern Greek language. The CBOS method combines the pioneering approaches for learning word representations: Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) and Continuous Skip-gram. These methods are compared through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation tasks on three different sources of data: the English Wikipedia corpus, the modern Greek Wikipedia corpus, and the modern Greek Web Content corpus. By comparing these methods across different tasks and datasets, it is evident that the CBOS method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Before we can find a model, we must forget about perfection
Authors: Dimiter Dobrev
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning

With Reinforcement Learning we assume that a model of the world does exist. We assume furthermore that the model in question is perfect (i.e. it describes the world completely and unambiguously). This article will demonstrate that it does not make sense to search for the perfect model because this model is too complicated and practically impossible to find. We will show that we should abandon the pursuit of perfection and pursue Event-Driven (ED) models instead. These models are generalization of Markov Decision Process (MDP) models. This generalization is essential because nothing can be found without it. Rather than a single MDP, we will aim to find a raft of neat simple ED models each one describing a simple dependency or property. In other words, we will replace the search for a singular and complex perfect model with a search for a large number of simple models.
Medication Regimen Extraction From Medical Conversations
Authors: Sai P. Selvaraj, Sandeep Konam
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Question Answering

Extracting relevant information from medical conversations and providing it to doctors and patients might help in addressing doctor burnout and patient forgetfulness. In this paper, we focus on extracting the Medication Regimen (dosage and frequency for medications) discussed in a medical conversation. We frame the problem as a Question Answering (QA) task and perform comparative analysis over: a QA approach, a new combined QA and Information Extraction approach, and other baselines. We use a small corpus of 6,692 annotated doctor-patient conversations for the task. Clinical conversation corpora are costly to create, difficult to handle (because of data privacy concerns), and thus scarce. We address this data scarcity challenge through data augmentation methods, using publicly available embeddings and pretrain part of the network on a related task (summarization) to improve the model's performance. Compared to the baseline, our best-performing models improve the dosage and frequency extractions' ROUGE-1 F1 scores from 54.28 and 37.13 to 89.57 and 45.94, respectively. Using our best-performing model, we present the first fully automated system that can extract Medication Regimen tags from spontaneous doctor-patient conversations with about $\approx$71% accuracy.
HyperCon: Image-To-Video Model Transfer for Video-To-Video Translation Tasks
Authors: Ryan Szeto, Mostafa El-Khamy, Jungwon Lee, Jason J. Corso
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Style Transfer, Super-Resolution, Translation, Video Inpainting, Video Style Transfer

Video-to-video translation is more difficult than image-to-image translation due to the temporal consistency problem that, if unaddressed, leads to distracting flickering effects. Although video models designed from scratch produce temporally consistent results, training them to match the vast visual knowledge captured by image models requires an intractable number of videos. To combine the benefits of image and video models, we propose an image-to-video model transfer method called Hyperconsistency (HyperCon) that transforms any well-trained image model into a temporally consistent video model without fine-tuning. HyperCon works by translating a temporally interpolated video frame-wise and then aggregating over temporally localized windows on the interpolated video. It handles both masked and unmasked inputs, enabling support for even more video-to-video translation tasks than prior image-to-video model transfer techniques. We demonstrate HyperCon on video style transfer and inpainting, where it performs favorably compared to prior state-of-the-art methods without training on a single stylized or incomplete video. Our project website is available at https://ryanszeto.com/projects/hypercon .
Frequentist Consistency of Generalized Variational Inference
Authors: Jeremias Knoblauch
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

This paper investigates Frequentist consistency properties of the posterior distributions constructed via Generalized Variational Inference (GVI). A number of generic and novel strategies are given for proving consistency, relying on the theory of $\Gamma$-convergence. Specifically, this paper shows that under minimal regularity conditions, the sequence of GVI posteriors is consistent and collapses to a point mass at the population-optimal parameter value as the number of observations goes to infinity. The results extend to the latent variable case without additional assumptions and hold under misspecification. Lastly, the paper explains how to apply the results to a selection of GVI posteriors with especially popular variational families. For example, consistency is established for GVI methods using the mean field normal variational family, normal mixtures, Gaussian process variational families as well as neural networks indexing a normal (mixture) distribution.
SKD: Keypoint Detection for Point Clouds using Saliency Estimation
Authors: Georgi Tinchev, Adrian Penate-Sanchez, Maurice Fallon
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection, Saliency Prediction

We present SKD, a novel keypoint detector that uses saliency to determine the best candidates from a point cloud for tasks such as registration and reconstruction. The approach can be applied to any differentiable deep learning descriptor by using the gradients of that descriptor with respect to the 3D position of the input points as a measure of their saliency. The saliency is combined with the original descriptor and context information in a neural network, which is trained to learn robust keypoint candidates. The key intuition behind this approach is that keypoints are not extracted solely as a result of the geometry surrounding a point, but also take into account the descriptor's response. The approach was evaluated on two large LIDAR datasets - the Oxford RobotCar dataset and the KITTI dataset, where we obtain up to 50% improvement over the state-of-the-art in both matchability and repeatability. When performing sparse matching with the keypoints computed by our method we achieve a higher inlier ratio and faster convergence.
Deep symbolic regression: Recovering mathematical expressions from data via risk-seeking policy gradients
Authors: Brenden K. Petersen, Mikel Landajuela Larma, T. Nathan Mundhenk, Claudio P. Santiago, Soo K. Kim, Joanne T. Kim
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: regression, Reinforcement Learning, Symbolic Regression

Discovering the underlying mathematical expressions describing a dataset is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. This is the problem of $\textit{symbolic regression}$. Despite recent advances in training neural networks to solve complex tasks, deep learning approaches to symbolic regression are underexplored. We propose a framework that leverages deep learning for symbolic regression via a simple idea: use a large model to search the space of small models. Specifically, we use a recurrent neural network to emit a distribution over tractable mathematical expressions and employ a novel risk-seeking policy gradient to train the network to generate better-fitting expressions. Our algorithm outperforms several baseline methods (including Eureqa, the gold standard for symbolic regression) in its ability to exactly recover symbolic expressions on a series of benchmark problems, both with and without added noise. More broadly, our contributions include a framework that can be applied to optimize hierarchical, variable-length objects under a black-box performance metric, with the ability to incorporate constraints in situ, and a risk-seeking policy gradient formulation that optimizes for best-case performance instead of expected performance.
Robust Training and Initialization of Deep Neural Networks: An Adaptive Basis Viewpoint
Authors: Eric C. Cyr, Mamikon A. Gulian, Ravi G. Patel, Mauro Perego, Nathaniel A. Trask
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Motivated by the gap between theoretical optimal approximation rates of deep neural networks (DNNs) and the accuracy realized in practice, we seek to improve the training of DNNs. The adoption of an adaptive basis viewpoint of DNNs leads to novel initializations and a hybrid least squares/gradient descent optimizer. We provide analysis of these techniques and illustrate via numerical examples dramatic increases in accuracy and convergence rate for benchmarks characterizing scientific applications where DNNs are currently used, including regression problems and physics-informed neural networks for the solution of partial differential equations.
Privacy-Preserving Blockchain Based Federated Learning with Differential Data Sharing
Authors: Anudit Nagar
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

For the modern world where data is becoming one of the most valuable assets, robust data privacy policies rooted in the fundamental infrastructure of networks and applications are becoming an even bigger necessity to secure sensitive user data. In due course with the ever-evolving nature of newer statistical techniques infringing user privacy, machine learning models with algorithms built with respect for user privacy can offer a dynamically adaptive solution to preserve user privacy against the exponentially increasing multidimensional relationships that datasets create. Using these privacy aware ML Models at the core of a Federated Learning Ecosystem can enable the entire network to learn from data in a decentralized manner. By harnessing the ever-increasing computational power of mobile devices, increasing network reliability and IoT devices revolutionizing the smart devices industry, and combining it with a secure and scalable, global learning session backed by a blockchain network with the ability to ensure on-device privacy, we allow any Internet enabled device to participate and contribute data to a global privacy preserving, data sharing network with blockchain technology even allowing the network to reward quality work. This network architecture can also be built on top of existing blockchain networks like Ethereum and Hyperledger, this lets even small startups build enterprise ready decentralized solutions allowing anyone to learn from data across different departments of a company, all the way to thousands of devices participating in a global synchronized learning network.
Embedding Comparator: Visualizing Differences in Global Structure and Local Neighborhoods via Small Multiples
Authors: Angie Boggust, Brandon Carter, Arvind Satyanarayan
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00

Embeddings mapping high-dimensional discrete input to lower-dimensional continuous vector spaces have been widely adopted in machine learning applications as a way to capture domain semantics. Interviewing 13 embedding users across disciplines, we find comparing embeddings is a key task for deployment or downstream analysis but unfolds in a tedious fashion that poorly supports systematic exploration. In response, we present the Embedding Comparator, an interactive system that presents a global comparison of embedding spaces alongside fine-grained inspection of local neighborhoods. It systematically surfaces points of comparison by computing the similarity of the $k$-nearest neighbors of every embedded object between a pair of spaces. Through case studies across multiple modalities, we demonstrate our system rapidly reveals insights, such as semantic changes following fine-tuning, language changes over time, and differences between seemingly similar models. In evaluations with 15 participants, we find our system accelerates comparisons by shifting from laborious manual specification to browsing and manipulating visualizations.
Deep Relevance Regularization: Interpretable and Robust Tumor Typing of Imaging Mass Spectrometry Data
Authors: Christian Etmann, Maximilian Schmidt, Jens Behrmann, Tobias Boskamp, Lena Hauberg-Lotte, Annette Peter, Rita Casadonte, Jörg Kriegsmann, Peter Maass
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Neural networks have recently been established as a viable classification method for imaging mass spectrometry data for tumor typing. For multi-laboratory scenarios however, certain confounding factors may strongly impede their performance. In this work, we introduce Deep Relevance Regularization, a method of restricting what the neural network can focus on during classification, in order to improve the classification performance. We demonstrate how Deep Relevance Regularization robustifies neural networks against confounding factors on a challenging inter-lab dataset consisting of breast and ovarian carcinoma. We further show that this makes the relevance map -- a way of visualizing the discriminative parts of the mass spectrum -- sparser, thereby making the classifier easier to interpret
Magnitude and Uncertainty Pruning Criterion for Neural Networks
Authors: Vinnie Ko, Stefan Oehmcke, Fabian Gieseke
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00

Neural networks have achieved dramatic improvements in recent years and depict the state-of-the-art methods for many real-world tasks nowadays. One drawback is, however, that many of these models are overparameterized, which makes them both computationally and memory intensive. Furthermore, overparameterization can also lead to undesired overfitting side-effects. Inspired by recently proposed magnitude-based pruning schemes and the Wald test from the field of statistics, we introduce a novel magnitude and uncertainty (M&U) pruning criterion that helps to lessen such shortcomings. One important advantage of our M&U pruning criterion is that it is scale-invariant, a phenomenon that the magnitude-based pruning criterion suffers from. In addition, we present a ``pseudo bootstrap'' scheme, which can efficiently estimate the uncertainty of the weights by using their update information during training. Our experimental evaluation, which is based on various neural network architectures and datasets, shows that our new criterion leads to more compressed models compared to models that are solely based on magnitude-based pruning criteria, with, at the same time, less loss in predictive power.
Quantifying the Chaos Level of Infants' Environment via Unsupervised Learning
Authors: Priyanka Khante, Mai Lee Chang, Domingo Martinez, Kaya de Barbaro, Edison Thomaz
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering

Acoustic environments vary dramatically within the home setting. They can be a source of comfort and tranquility or chaos that can lead to less optimal cognitive development in children. Research to date has only subjectively measured household chaos. In this work, we use three unsupervised machine learning techniques to quantify household chaos in infants' homes. These unsupervised techniques include hierarchical clustering using K-Means, clustering using self-organizing map (SOM) and deep learning. We evaluated these techniques using data from 9 participants which is a total of 197 hours. Results show that these techniques are promising to quantify household chaos.
Feature Relevance Determination for Ordinal Regression in the Context of Feature Redundancies and Privileged Information
Authors: Lukas Pfannschmidt, Jonathan Jakob, Fabian Hinder, Michael Biehl, Peter Tino, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, regression

Advances in machine learning technologies have led to increasingly powerful models in particular in the context of big data. Yet, many application scenarios demand for robustly interpretable models rather than optimum model accuracy; as an example, this is the case if potential biomarkers or causal factors should be discovered based on a set of given measurements. In this contribution, we focus on feature selection paradigms, which enable us to uncover relevant factors of a given regularity based on a sparse model. We focus on the important specific setting of linear ordinal regression, i.e.\ data have to be ranked into one of a finite number of ordered categories by a linear projection. Unlike previous work, we consider the case that features are potentially redundant, such that no unique minimum set of relevant features exists. We aim for an identification of all strongly and all weakly relevant features as well as their type of relevance (strong or weak); we achieve this goal by determining feature relevance bounds, which correspond to the minimum and maximum feature relevance, respectively, if searched over all equivalent models. In addition, we discuss how this setting enables us to substitute some of the features, e.g.\ due to their semantics, and how to extend the framework of feature relevance intervals to the setting of privileged information, i.e.\ potentially relevant information is available for training purposes only, but cannot be used for the prediction itself.