pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Modeling User Behaviors in Machine Operation Tasks for Adaptive Guidance
Authors: Chen Long-fei, Yuichi Nakamura, Kazuaki Kondo
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Prototype Selection

An adaptive guidance system that supports equipment operators requires a comprehensive model, which involves a variety of user behaviors that considers different skill and knowledge levels, as well as rapid-changing task situations. In the present paper, we introduced a novel method for modeling operational tasks, aiming to integrate visual operation records provided by users with diverse experience levels and personal characteristics. For this purpose, we investigated the relationships between user behavior patterns that could be visually observed and their skill levels under machine operation conditions. We considered 144 samples of two sewing tasks performed by 12 operators using a head-mounted RGB-D camera and a static gaze tracker. Behavioral features, such as the operator's gaze and head movements, hand interactions, and hotspots, were observed with significant behavioral trends resulting from continuous user skill improvement. We used a two-step method to model the diversity of user behavior: prototype selection and experience integration based on skill ranking. The experimental results showed that several features could serve as appropriate indices for user skill evaluation, as well as providing valuable clues for revealing personal behavioral characteristics. The integration of user records with different skills and operational habits allowed developing a rich, inclusive task model that could be used flexibly to adapt to diverse user-specific needs.
Exploiting Verified Neural Networks via Floating Point Numerical Error
Authors: Kai Jia, Martin Rinard
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00

Researchers have developed neural network verification algorithms motivated by the need to characterize the robustness of deep neural networks. The verifiers aspire to answer whether a neural network guarantees certain properties with respect to all inputs in a space. However, many verifiers inaccurately model floating point arithmetic but do not thoroughly discuss the consequences. We show that the negligence of floating point error leads to unsound verification that can be systematically exploited in practice. For a pretrained neural network, we present a method that efficiently searches inputs as witnesses for the incorrectness of robustness claims made by a complete verifier. We also present a method to construct neural network architectures and weights that induce wrong results of an incomplete verifier. Our results highlight that, to achieve practically reliable verification of neural networks, any verification system must accurately (or conservatively) model the effects of any floating point computations in the network inference or verification system.
A Framework for the Computational Linguistic Analysis of Dehumanization
Authors: Julia Mendelsohn, Yulia Tsvetkov, Dan Jurafsky
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Abusive Language

Dehumanization is a pernicious psychological process that often leads to extreme intergroup bias, hate speech, and violence aimed at targeted social groups. Despite these serious consequences and the wealth of available data, dehumanization has not yet been computationally studied on a large scale. Drawing upon social psychology research, we create a computational linguistic framework for analyzing dehumanizing language by identifying linguistic correlates of salient components of dehumanization. We then apply this framework to analyze discussions of LGBTQ people in the New York Times from 1986 to 2015. Overall, we find increasingly humanizing descriptions of LGBTQ people over time. However, we find that the label homosexual has emerged to be much more strongly associated with dehumanizing attitudes than other labels, such as gay. Our proposed techniques highlight processes of linguistic variation and change in discourses surrounding marginalized groups. Furthermore, the ability to analyze dehumanizing language at a large scale has implications for automatically detecting and understanding media bias as well as abusive language online.
Communication optimization strategies for distributed deep neural network training: A survey
Authors: Shuo Ouyang, Dezun Dong, Yemao Xu, Liquan Xiao
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00

Recent trends in high-performance computing and deep learning have led to the proliferation of studies on large-scale deep neural network training. However, the frequent communication requirements among computation nodes drastically slows the overall training speeds, which causes bottlenecks in distributed training, particularly in clusters with limited network bandwidths. To mitigate the drawbacks of distributed communications, researchers have proposed various optimization strategies. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of communication strategies from both an algorithm viewpoint and a computer network perspective. Algorithm optimizations focus on reducing the communication volumes used in distributed training, while network optimizations focus on accelerating the communications between distributed devices. At the algorithm level, we describe how to reduce the number of communication rounds and transmitted bits per round. In addition, we elucidate how to overlap computation and communication. At the network level, we discuss the effects caused by network infrastructures, including logical communication schemes and network protocols. Finally, we extrapolate the potential future challenges and new research directions to accelerate communications for distributed deep neural network training.
Unifying Graph Embedding Features with Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Authors: Dong Yang, Monica Mengqi Li, Hong Fu, Jicong Fan, Zhao Zhang, Howard Leung
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Graph Embedding, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Combining skeleton structure with graph convolutional networks has achieved remarkable performance in human action recognition. Since current research focuses on designing basic graph for representing skeleton data, these embedding features contain basic topological information, which cannot learn more systematic perspectives from skeleton data. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing a novel framework, which unifies 15 graph embedding features into the graph convolutional network for human action recognition, aiming to best take advantage of graph information to distinguish key joints, bones, and body parts in human action, instead of being exclusive to a single feature or domain. Additionally, we fully investigate how to find the best graph features of skeleton structure for improving human action recognition. Besides, the topological information of the skeleton sequence is explored to further enhance the performance in a multi-stream framework. Moreover, the unified graph features are extracted by the adaptive methods on the training process, which further yields improvements. Our model is validated by three large-scale datasets, namely NTU-RGB+D, Kinetics and SYSU-3D, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Overall, our work unified graph embedding features to promotes systematic research on human action recognition.
Neural networks approach for mammography diagnosis using wavelets features
Authors: Essam A. Rashed, and Mohamed G. Awad
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00

A supervised diagnosis system for digital mammogram is developed. The diagnosis processes are done by transforming the data of the images into a feature vector using wavelets multilevel decomposition. This vector is used as the feature tailored toward separating different mammogram classes. The suggested model consists of artificial neural networks designed for classifying mammograms according to tumor type and risk level. Results are enhanced from our previous study by extracting feature vectors using multilevel decompositions instead of one level of decomposition. Radiologist-labeled images were used to evaluate the diagnosis system. Results are very promising and show possible guide for future work.
Novel Edge and Density Metrics for Link Cohesion
Authors: Cetin Savkli, Catherine Schwartz, Amanda Galante, Jonathan Cohen
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection

We present a new metric of link cohesion for measuring the strength of edges in complex, highly connected graphs. Link cohesion accounts for local small hop connections and associated node degrees and can be used to support edge scoring and graph simplification. We also present a novel graph density measure to estimate the average cohesion across nodes. Link cohesion and the density measure are employed to demonstrate community detection through graph sparsification by maximizing graph density. Link cohesion is also shown to be loosely correlated with edge betweenness centrality.
Neural-Swarm: Decentralized Close-Proximity Multirotor Control Using Learned Interactions
Authors: Guanya Shi, Wolfgang Hönig, Yisong Yue, Soon-Jo Chung
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00

In this paper, we present Neural-Swarm, a nonlinear decentralized stable controller for close-proximity flight of multirotor swarms. Close-proximity control is challenging due to the complex aerodynamic interaction effects between multirotors, such as downwash from higher vehicles to lower ones. Conventional methods often fail to properly capture these interaction effects, resulting in controllers that must maintain large safety distances between vehicles, and thus are not capable of close-proximity flight. Our approach combines a nominal dynamics model with a regularized permutation-invariant Deep Neural Network (DNN) that accurately learns the high-order multi-vehicle interactions. We design a stable nonlinear tracking controller using the learned model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed controller significantly outperforms a baseline nonlinear tracking controller with up to four times smaller worst-case height tracking errors. We also empirically demonstrate the ability of our learned model to generalize to larger swarm sizes.
TensorFlow Quantum: A Software Framework for Quantum Machine Learning
Authors: Michael Broughton, Guillaume Verdon, Trevor McCourt, Antonio J. Martinez, Jae Hyeon Yoo, Sergei V. Isakov, Philip Massey, Ramin Halavati, Murphy Yuezhen Niu, Alexander Zlokapa, Evan Peters, Owen Lockwood, Andrea Skolik, Sofiene Jerbi, Vedran Dunjko, Martin Leib, Michael Streif, David Von Dollen, Hongxiang Chen, Shuxiang Cao, Roeland Wiersema, Hsin-Yuan Huang, Jarrod R. McClean, Ryan Babbush, Sergio Boixo, Dave Bacon, Alan K. Ho, Hartmut Neven, Masoud Mohseni
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Meta-Learning, Quantum Machine Learning

We introduce TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ), an open source library for the rapid prototyping of hybrid quantum-classical models for classical or quantum data. This framework offers high-level abstractions for the design and training of both discriminative and generative quantum models under TensorFlow and supports high-performance quantum circuit simulators. We provide an overview of the software architecture and building blocks through several examples and review the theory of hybrid quantum-classical neural networks. We illustrate TFQ functionalities via several basic applications including supervised learning for quantum classification, quantum control, simulating noisy quantum circuits, and quantum approximate optimization. Moreover, we demonstrate how one can apply TFQ to tackle advanced quantum learning tasks including meta-learning, layerwise learning, Hamiltonian learning, sampling thermal states, variational quantum eigensolvers, classification of quantum phase transitions, generative adversarial networks, and reinforcement learning. We hope this framework provides the necessary tools for the quantum computing and machine learning research communities to explore models of both natural and artificial quantum systems, and ultimately discover new quantum algorithms which could potentially yield a quantum advantage.
Challenges in Supporting Exploratory Search through Voice Assistants
Authors: Xiao Ma, Ariel Liu
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00

Voice assistants have been successfully adopted for simple, routine tasks, such as asking for the weather or setting an alarm. However, as people get more familiar with voice assistants, they may increase their expectations for more complex tasks, such as exploratory search-- e.g., "What should I do when I visit Paris with kids? Oh, and ideally not too expensive." Compared to simple search tasks such as "How tall is the Eiffel Tower?", which can be answered with a single-shot answer, the response to exploratory search is more nuanced, especially through voice-based assistants. In this paper, we outline four challenges in designing voice assistants that can better support exploratory search: addressing situationally induced impairments; working with mixed-modal interactions; designing for diverse populations; and meeting users' expectations and gaining their trust. Addressing these challenges is important for developing more "intelligent" voice-based personal assistants.
Learning Complexity of Simulated Annealing
Authors: Avrim Blum, Chen Dan, Saeed Seddighin
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00

Simulated annealing is an effective and general means of optimization. It is in fact inspired by metallurgy, where the temperature of a material determines its behavior in thermodynamics. Likewise, in simulated annealing, the actions that the algorithm takes depend entirely on the value of a variable which captures the notion of temperature. Typically, simulated annealing starts with a high temperature, which makes the algorithm pretty unpredictable, and gradually cools the temperature down to become more stable. A key component that plays a crucial role in the performance of simulated annealing is the criteria under which the temperature changes namely, the cooling schedule. Motivated by this, we study the following question in this work: "Given enough samples to the instances of a specific class of optimization problems, can we design optimal (or approximately optimal) cooling schedules that minimize the runtime or maximize the success rate of the algorithm on average when the underlying problem is drawn uniformly at random from the same class?" We provide positive results both in terms of sample complexity and simulation complexity. For sample complexity, we show that $\tilde O(\sqrt{m})$ samples suffice to find an approximately optimal cooling schedule of length $m$. We complement this result by giving a lower bound of $\tilde \Omega(m^{1/3})$ on the sample complexity of any learning algorithm that provides an almost optimal cooling schedule. These results are general and rely on no assumption. For simulation complexity, however, we make additional assumptions to measure the success rate of an algorithm. To this end, we introduce the monotone stationary graph that models the performance of simulated annealing. Based on this model, we present polynomial time algorithms with provable guarantees for the learning problem.
"Other-Play" for Zero-Shot Coordination
Authors: Hengyuan Hu, Adam Lerer, Alex Peysakhovich, Jakob Foerster
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning

We consider the problem of zero-shot coordination - constructing AI agents that can coordinate with novel partners they have not seen before (e.g. humans). Standard Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods typically focus on the self-play (SP) setting where agents construct strategies by playing the game with themselves repeatedly. Unfortunately, applying SP naively to the zero-shot coordination problem can produce agents that establish highly specialized conventions that do not carry over to novel partners they have not been trained with. We introduce a novel learning algorithm called other-play (OP), that enhances self-play by looking for more robust strategies, exploiting the presence of known symmetries in the underlying problem. We characterize OP theoretically as well as experimentally. We study the cooperative card game Hanabi and show that OP agents achieve higher scores when paired with independently trained agents. In preliminary results we also show that our OP agents obtains higher average scores when paired with human players, compared to state-of-the-art SP agents.
Likelihood Regret: An Out-of-Distribution Detection Score For Variational Auto-encoder
Authors: Zhisheng Xiao, Qing Yan, Yali Amit
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Deep probabilistic generative models enable modeling the likelihoods of very high dimensional data. An important application of generative modeling should be the ability to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples by setting a threshold on the likelihood. However, some recent studies show that probabilistic generative models can, in some cases, assign higher likelihoods on certain types of OOD samples, making the OOD detection rules based on likelihood threshold problematic. To address this issue, several OOD detection methods have been proposed for deep generative models. In this paper, we make the observation that many of these methods fail when applied to generative models based on Variational Auto-encoders (VAE). As an alternative, we propose Likelihood Regret, an efficient OOD score for VAEs. We benchmark our proposed method over existing approaches, and empirical results suggest that our method obtains the best overall OOD detection performances when applied to VAEs.
S-APIR: News-based Business Sentiment Index
Authors: Kazuhiro Seki, Yusuke Ikuta
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Domain Adaptation

This paper describes our work on developing a new business sentiment index using daily newspaper articles. We adopt a recurrent neural network (RNN) with Gated Recurrent Units to predict the business sentiment of a given text. An RNN is initially trained on Economy Watchers Survey and then fine-tuned on news texts for domain adaptation. Also, a one-class support vector machine is applied to filter out texts deemed irrelevant to business sentiment. Moreover, we propose a simple approach to temporally analyzing how much and when any given factor influences the predicted business sentiment. The validity and utility of the proposed approaches are empirically demonstrated through a series of experiments on Nikkei Newspaper articles published from 2013 to 2018.
LSF-Join: Locality Sensitive Filtering for Distributed All-Pairs Set Similarity Under Skew
Authors: Cyrus Rashtchian, Aneesh Sharma, David P. Woodruff
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Recommendation Systems

All-pairs set similarity is a widely used data mining task, even for large and high-dimensional datasets. Traditionally, similarity search has focused on discovering very similar pairs, for which a variety of efficient algorithms are known. However, recent work highlights the importance of finding pairs of sets with relatively small intersection sizes. For example, in a recommender system, two users may be alike even though their interests only overlap on a small percentage of items. In such systems, some dimensions are often highly skewed because they are very popular. Together these two properties render previous approaches infeasible for large input sizes. To address this problem, we present a new distributed algorithm, LSF-Join, for approximate all-pairs set similarity. The core of our algorithm is a randomized selection procedure based on Locality Sensitive Filtering. Our method deviates from prior approximate algorithms, which are based on Locality Sensitive Hashing. Theoretically, we show that LSF-Join efficiently finds most close pairs, even for small similarity thresholds and for skewed input sets. We prove guarantees on the communication, work, and maximum load of LSF-Join, and we also experimentally demonstrate its accuracy on multiple graphs.
Forgetting Outside the Box: Scrubbing Deep Networks of Information Accessible from Input-Output Observations
Authors: Aditya Golatkar, Alessandro Achille, Stefano Soatto
Date: 2020-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8

We describe a procedure for removing dependency on a cohort of training data from a trained deep network that improves upon and generalizes previous methods to different readout functions and can be extended to ensure forgetting in the activations of the network. We introduce a new bound on how much information can be extracted per query about the forgotten cohort from a black-box network for which only the input-output behavior is observed. The proposed forgetting procedure has a deterministic part derived from the differential equations of a linearized version of the model, and a stochastic part that ensures information destruction by adding noise tailored to the geometry of the loss landscape. We exploit the connections between the activation and weight dynamics of a DNN inspired by Neural Tangent Kernels to compute the information in the activations.
From Perspective X-ray Imaging to Parallax-Robust Orthographic Stitching
Authors: Javad Fotouhi, Xingtong Liu, Mehran Armand, Nassir Navab, Mathias Unberath
Date: 2020-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Image Stitching

Stitching images acquired under perspective projective geometry is a relevant topic in computer vision with multiple applications ranging from smartphone panoramas to the construction of digital maps. Image stitching is an equally prominent challenge in medical imaging, where the limited field-of-view captured by single images prohibits holistic analysis of patient anatomy. The barrier that prevents straight-forward mosaicing of 2D images is depth mismatch due to parallax. In this work, we leverage the Fourier slice theorem to aggregate information from multiple transmission images in parallax-free domains using fundamental principles of X-ray image formation. The semantics of the stitched image are restored using a novel deep learning strategy that exploits similarity measures designed around frequency, as well as dense and sparse spatial image content. Our pipeline, not only stitches images, but also provides orthographic reconstruction that enables metric measurements of clinically relevant quantities directly on the 2D image plane.
EmpTransfo: A Multi-head Transformer Architecture for Creating Empathetic Dialog Systems
Authors: Rohola Zandie, Mohammad H. Mahoor
Date: 2020-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Understanding emotions and responding accordingly is one of the biggest challenges of dialog systems. This paper presents EmpTransfo, a multi-head Transformer architecture for creating an empathetic dialog system. EmpTransfo utilizes state-of-the-art pre-trained models (e.g., OpenAI-GPT) for language generation, though models with different sizes can be used. We show that utilizing the history of emotions and other metadata can improve the quality of generated conversations by the dialog system. Our experimental results using a challenging language corpus show that the proposed approach outperforms other models in terms of Hit@1 and PPL (Perplexity).