pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DeepFL-IQA: Weak Supervision for Deep IQA Feature Learning
Authors: Hanhe Lin, Vlad Hosu, Dietmar Saupe
Date: 2020-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Multi-Task Learning, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Multi-level deep-features have been driving state-of-the-art methods for aesthetics and image quality assessment (IQA). However, most IQA benchmarks are comprised of artificially distorted images, for which features derived from ImageNet under-perform. We propose a new IQA dataset and a weakly supervised feature learning approach to train features more suitable for IQA of artificially distorted images. The dataset, KADIS-700k, is far more extensive than similar works, consisting of 140,000 pristine images, 25 distortions types, totaling 700k distorted versions. Our weakly supervised feature learning is designed as a multi-task learning type training, using eleven existing full-reference IQA metrics as proxies for differential mean opinion scores. We also introduce a benchmark database, KADID-10k, of artificially degraded images, each subjectively annotated by 30 crowd workers. We make use of our derived image feature vectors for (no-reference) image quality assessment by training and testing a shallow regression network on this database and five other benchmark IQA databases. Our method, termed DeepFL-IQA, performs better than other feature-based no-reference IQA methods and also better than all tested full-reference IQA methods on KADID-10k. For the other five benchmark IQA databases, DeepFL-IQA matches the performance of the best existing end-to-end deep learning-based methods on average.
Convolutional Neural Networks as a Model of the Visual System: Past, Present, and Future
Authors: Grace W. Lindsay
Date: 2020-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were inspired by early findings in the study of biological vision. They have since become successful tools in computer vision and state-of-the-art models of both neural activity and behavior on visual tasks. This review highlights what, in the context of CNNs, it means to be a good model in computational neuroscience and the various ways models can provide insight. Specifically, it covers the origins of CNNs and the methods by which we validate them as models of biological vision. It then goes on to elaborate on what we can learn about biological vision by understanding and experimenting on CNNs and discusses emerging opportunities for the use of CNNS in vision research beyond basic object recognition.
Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search for Circle Bin Packing Problem
Authors: Kun He, Kevin Tole, Fei Ni, Yong Yuan, Linyun Liao
Date: 2020-01-20 00:00:00

We address a new variant of packing problem called the circle bin packing problem (CBPP), which is to find a dense packing of circle items to multiple square bins so as to minimize the number of used bins. To this end, we propose an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm, which uses our Greedy Algorithm with Corner Occupying Action (GACOA) to construct an initial layout. The greedy solution is usually in a local optimum trap, and ALNS enables multiple neighborhood search that depends on the stochastic annealing schedule to avoid getting stuck in local minimum traps. Specifically, ALNS perturbs the current layout to jump out of a local optimum by iteratively reassigns some circles and accepts the new layout with some probability during the search. The acceptance probability is adjusted adaptively using simulated annealing that fine-tunes the search direction in order to reach the global optimum. We benchmark computational results against GACOA in heterogeneous instances. ALNS always outperforms GACOA in improving the objective function, and in several cases, there is a significant reduction on the number of bins used in the packing.
Towards Comparability in Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring: On Data and Performance Evaluation
Authors: Christoph Klemenjak, Stephen Makonin, Wilfried Elmenreich
Date: 2020-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) comprises of a set of techniques that provide insights into the energy consumption of households and industrial facilities. Latest contributions show significant improvements in terms of accuracy and generalisation abilities. Despite all progress made concerning disaggregation techniques, performance evaluation and comparability remains an open research question. The lack of standardisation and consensus on evaluation procedures makes reproducibility and comparability extremely difficult. In this paper, we draw attention to comparability in NILM with a focus on highlighting the considerable differences amongst common energy datasets used to test the performance of algorithms. We divide discussion on comparability into data aspects, performance metrics, and give a close view on evaluation processes. Detailed information on pre-processing as well as data cleaning methods, the importance of unified performance reporting, and the need for complexity measures in load disaggregation are found to be the most urgent issues in NILM-related research. In addition, our evaluation suggests that datasets should be chosen carefully. We conclude by formulating suggestions for future work to enhance comparability.
An Approach for Time-aware Domain-based Social Influence Prediction
Authors: Bilal Abu-Salih, Kit Yan Chan, Omar Al-Kadi, Marwan Al-Tawil, Pornpit Wongthongtham, Tomayess Issa, Heba Saadeh, Malak Al-Hassan, Bushra Bremie, Abdulaziz Albahlal
Date: 2020-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Online Social Networks(OSNs) have established virtual platforms enabling people to express their opinions, interests and thoughts in a variety of contexts and domains, allowing legitimate users as well as spammers and other untrustworthy users to publish and spread their content. Hence, the concept of social trust has attracted the attention of information processors/data scientists and information consumers/business firms. One of the main reasons for acquiring the value of Social Big Data (SBD) is to provide frameworks and methodologies using which the credibility of OSNs users can be evaluated. These approaches should be scalable to accommodate large-scale social data. Hence, there is a need for well comprehending of social trust to improve and expand the analysis process and inferring the credibility of SBD. Given the exposed environment's settings and fewer limitations related to OSNs, the medium allows legitimate and genuine users as well as spammers and other low trustworthy users to publish and spread their content. Hence, this paper presents an approach incorporates semantic analysis and machine learning modules to measure and predict users' trustworthiness in numerous domains in different time periods. The evaluation of the conducted experiment validates the applicability of the incorporated machine learning techniques to predict highly trustworthy domain-based users.
Training Neural Network Controllers Using Control Barrier Functions in the Presence of Disturbances
Authors: Shakiba Yaghoubi, Georgios Fainekos, Sriram Sankaranarayanan
Date: 2020-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have been recently utilized in the design of provably safe feedback control laws for nonlinear systems. These feedback control methods typically compute the next control input by solving an online Quadratic Program (QP). Solving QP in real-time can be a computationally expensive process for resource constraint systems. In this work, we propose to use imitation learning to learn Neural Network-based feedback controllers which will satisfy the CBF constraints. In the process, we also develop a new class of High Order CBF for systems under external disturbances. We demonstrate the framework on a unicycle model subject to external disturbances, e.g., wind or currents.
Experiments on Manual Thesaurus based Query Expansion for Ad-hoc Monolingual Gujarati Information Retrieval Tasks
Authors: Hardik Joshi, Jyoti Pareek
Date: 2020-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

In this paper, we present the experimental work done on Query Expansion (QE) for retrieval tasks of Gujarati text documents. In information retrieval, it is very difficult to estimate the exact user need, query expansion adds terms to the original query, which provides more information about the user need. There are various approaches to query expansion. In our work, manual thesaurus based query expansion was performed to evaluate the performance of widely used information retrieval models for Gujarati text documents. Results show that query expansion improves the recall of text documents.
Active Learning over DNN: Automated Engineering Design Optimization for Fluid Dynamics Based on Self-Simulated Dataset
Authors: Yang Chen
Date: 2020-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

Optimizing fluid-dynamic performance is an important engineering task. Traditionally, experts design shapes based on empirical estimations and verify them through expensive experiments. This costly process, both in terms of time and space, may only explore a limited number of shapes and lead to sub-optimal designs. In this research, a test-proven deep learning architecture is applied to predict the performance under various restrictions and search for better shapes by optimizing the learned prediction function. The major challenge is the vast amount of data points Deep Neural Network (DNN) demands, which is improvident to simulate. To remedy this drawback, a Frequentist active learning is used to explore regions of the output space that DNN predicts promising. This operation reduces the number of data samples demanded from ~8000 to 625. The final stage, a user interface, made the model capable of optimizing with given user input of minimum area and viscosity. Flood fill is used to define a boundary area function so that the optimal shape does not bypass the minimum area. Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is employed to make sure the ultimate shape is optimized while circumventing the required area. Jointly, shapes with extremely low drags are found explored by a practical user interface with no human domain knowledge and modest computation overhead.
Complexity, Stability Properties Of Mixed Games and Dynamic Algorithms, And Learning In The Sharing Economy
Authors: Michael C. Nwogugu
Date: 2020-01-18 00:00:00

The Sharing Economy (which includes Airbnb, Apple, Alibaba, Uber, WeWork, Ebay, Didi Chuxing, Amazon) blossomed across the world, triggered structural changes in industries and significantly affected international capital flows primarily by disobeying a wide variety of statutes and laws in many countries. They also illegally reduced and changing the nature of competition in many industries often to the detriment of social welfare. This article develops new dynamic pricing models for the SEOs and derives some stability properties of mixed games and dynamic algorithms which eliminate antitrust liability and also reduce deadweight losses, greed, Regret and GPS manipulation. The new dynamic pricing models contravene the Myerson Satterthwaite Impossibility Theorem.
A utility-based analysis of equilibria in multi-objective normal form games
Authors: Roxana Rădulescu, Patrick Mannion, Yijie Zhang, Diederik M. Roijers, Ann Nowé
Date: 2020-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

In multi-objective multi-agent systems (MOMAS), agents explicitly consider the possible tradeoffs between conflicting objective functions. We argue that compromises between competing objectives in MOMAS should be analysed on the basis of the utility that these compromises have for the users of a system, where an agent's utility function maps their payoff vectors to scalar utility values. This utility-based approach naturally leads to two different optimisation criteria for agents in a MOMAS: expected scalarised returns (ESR) and scalarised expected returns (SER). In this article, we explore the differences between these two criteria using the framework of multi-objective normal form games (MONFGs). We demonstrate that the choice of optimisation criterion (ESR or SER) can radically alter the set of equilibria in a MONFG when non-linear utility functions are used.
Building high accuracy emulators for scientific simulations with deep neural architecture search
Authors: M. F. Kasim, D. Watson-Parris, L. Deaconu, S. Oliver, P. Hatfield, D. H. Froula, G. Gregori, M. Jarvis, S. Khatiwala, J. Korenaga, J. Topp-Mugglestone, E. Viezzer, S. M. Vinko
Date: 2020-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, scientific discovery, Uncertainty Quantification

Computer simulations are invaluable tools for scientific discovery. However, accurate simulations are often slow to execute, which limits their applicability to extensive parameter exploration, large-scale data analysis, and uncertainty quantification. A promising route to accelerate simulations by building fast emulators with machine learning requires large training datasets, which can be prohibitively expensive to obtain with slow simulations. Here we present a method based on neural architecture search to build accurate emulators even with a limited number of training data. The method successfully accelerates simulations by up to 2 billion times in 10 scientific cases including astrophysics, climate science, biogeochemistry, high energy density physics, fusion energy, and seismology, using the same super-architecture, algorithm, and hyperparameters. Our approach also inherently provides emulator uncertainty estimation, adding further confidence in their use. We anticipate this work will accelerate research involving expensive simulations, allow more extensive parameters exploration, and enable new, previously unfeasible computational discovery.
Algorithms for Tensor Network Contraction Ordering
Authors: Frank Schindler, Adam S. Jermyn
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Tensor Networks

Contracting tensor networks is often computationally demanding. Well-designed contraction sequences can dramatically reduce the contraction cost. We explore the performance of simulated annealing and genetic algorithms, two common discrete optimization techniques, to this ordering problem. We benchmark their performance as well as that of the commonly-used greedy search on physically relevant tensor networks. Where computationally feasible, we also compare them with the optimal contraction sequence obtained by an exhaustive search. We find that the algorithms we consider consistently outperform a greedy search given equal computational resources, with an advantage that scales with tensor network size. We compare the obtained contraction sequences and identify signs of highly non-local optimization, with the more sophisticated algorithms sacrificing run-time early in the contraction for better overall performance.
Machine Learning for Performance-Aware Virtual Network Function Placement
Authors: Dimitrios Michael Manias, Manar Jammal, Hassan Hawilo, Abdallah Shami, Parisa Heidari, Adel Larabi, Richard Brunner
Date: 2020-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

With the growing demand for data connectivity, network service providers are faced with the task of reducing their capital and operational expenses while simultaneously improving network performance and addressing the increased connectivity demand. Although Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been identified as a solution, several challenges must be addressed to ensure its feasibility. In this paper, we address the Virtual Network Function (VNF) placement problem by developing a machine learning decision tree model that learns from the effective placement of the various VNF instances forming a Service Function Chain (SFC). The model takes several performance-related features from the network as an input and selects the placement of the various VNF instances on network servers with the objective of minimizing the delay between dependent VNF instances. The benefits of using machine learning are realized by moving away from a complex mathematical modelling of the system and towards a data-based understanding of the system. Using the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) as a use case, we evaluate our model on different data center networks and compare it to the BACON algorithm in terms of the delay between interconnected components and the total delay across the SFC. Furthermore, a time complexity analysis is performed to show the effectiveness of the model in NFV applications.
AppStreamer: Reducing Storage Requirements of Mobile Games through Predictive Streaming
Authors: Nawanol Theera-Ampornpunt, Shikhar Suryavansh, Sameer Manchanda, Rajesh Panta, Kaustubh Joshi, Mostafa Ammar, Mung Chiang, Saurabh Bagchi
Date: 2019-12-16 00:00:00

Storage has become a constrained resource on smartphones. Gaming is a popular activity on mobile devices and the explosive growth in the number of games coupled with their growing size contributes to the storage crunch. Even where storage is plentiful, it takes a long time to download and install a heavy app before it can be launched. This paper presents AppStreamer, a novel technique for reducing the storage requirements or startup delay of mobile games, and heavy mobile apps in general. AppStreamer is based on the intuition that most apps do not need the entirety of its files (images, audio and video clips, etc.) at any one time. AppStreamer can, therefore, keep only a small part of the files on the device, akin to a "cache", and download the remainder from a cloud storage server or a nearby edge server when it predicts that the app will need them in the near future. AppStreamer continuously predicts file blocks for the near future as the user uses the app, and fetches them from the storage server before the user sees a stall due to missing resources. We implement AppStreamer at the Android file system layer. This ensures that the apps require no source code or modification, and the approach generalizes across apps. We evaluate AppStreamer using two popular games: Dead Effect 2, a 3D first-person shooter, and Fire Emblem Heroes, a 2D turn-based strategy role-playing game. Through a user study, 75% and 87% of the users respectively find that AppStreamer provides the same quality of user experience as the baseline where all files are stored on the device. AppStreamer cuts down the storage requirement by 87% for Dead Effect 2 and 86% for Fire Emblem Heroes.
Evaluation of some Information Retrieval models for Gujarati Ad hoc Monolingual Tasks
Authors: Hardik J. Joshi, Pareek Jyoti
Date: 2012-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This paper describes the work towards Gujarati Ad hoc Monolingual Retrieval task for widely used Information Retrieval (IR) models. We present an indexing baseline for the Gujarati Language represented by Mean Average Precision (MAP) values. Our objective is to obtain a relative picture of a better IR model for Gujarati Language. Results show that Classical IR models like Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF_IDF) performs better when compared to few recent probabilistic IR models. The experiments helped to identify the outperforming IR models for Gujarati Language.
High-dimensional omics data analysis using a variable screening protocol with prior knowledge integration (SKI)
Authors: Cong Liu, Jianping Jiang, Jianlei Gu, Zhangsheng Yu, Tao Wang & Hui Lu
Date: 2016-12-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: BMC Systems Biology 2016 12

Background
High-throughput technology could generate thousands to millions biomarker measurements in one experiment. However, results from high throughput analysis are often barely reproducible due to small sample size. Different statistical methods have been proposed to tackle this “small n and large p” scenario, for example different datasets could be pooled or integrated together to provide an effective way to improve reproducibility. However, the raw data is either unavailable or hard to integrate due to different experimental conditions, thus there is an emerging need to develop a method for “knowledge integration” in high-throughput data analysis.

Results
In this study, we proposed an integrative prescreening approach, SKI, for high-throughput data analysis. A new rank is generated based on two initial ranks: (1) knowledge based rank; and (2) marginal correlation based rank. Our simulation shows the SKI outperforms other methods without knowledge-integration in terms of higher true positive rate given the same number of variables selected. We also applied our method in a drug response study and found its performance to be better than regular screening methods.

Conclusion
The proposed method provides an effective way to integrate knowledge for high-throughput analysis. It could easily implemented with our provided R package named SKI.
DCT-Conv: Coding filters in convolutional networks with Discrete Cosine Transform
Authors: Karol Chęciński, Paweł Wawrzyński
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00

Convolutional neural networks are based on a huge number of trained weights. Consequently, they are often data-greedy, sensitive to overtraining, and learn slowly. We follow the line of research in which filters of convolutional neural layers are determined on the basis of a smaller number of trained parameters. In this paper, the trained parameters define a frequency spectrum which is transformed into convolutional filters with Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT, the same is applied in decompression from JPEG). We analyze how switching off selected components of the spectra, thereby reducing the number of trained weights of the network, affects its performance. Our experiments show that coding the filters with trained DCT parameters leads to improvement over traditional convolution. Also, the performance of the networks modified this way decreases very slowly with the increasing extent of switching off these parameters. In some experiments, a good performance is observed when even 99.9% of these parameters are switched off.
Representation Learning for Medical Data
Authors: Karol Antczak
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Disease Prediction, General Classification, Medical Diagnosis, Representation Learning

We propose a representation learning framework for medical diagnosis domain. It is based on heterogeneous network-based model of diagnostic data as well as modified metapath2vec algorithm for learning latent node representation. We compare the proposed algorithm with other representation learning methods in two practical case studies: symptom/disease classification and disease prediction. We observe a significant performance boost in these task resulting from learning representations of domain data in a form of heterogeneous network.
Transformer-based Online CTC/attention End-to-End Speech Recognition Architecture
Authors: Haoran Miao, Gaofeng Cheng, Changfeng Gao, Pengyuan Zhang, Yonghong Yan
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recently, Transformer has gained success in automatic speech recognition (ASR) field. However, it is challenging to deploy a Transformer-based end-to-end (E2E) model for online speech recognition. In this paper, we propose the Transformer-based online CTC/attention E2E ASR architecture, which contains the chunk self-attention encoder (chunk-SAE) and the monotonic truncated attention (MTA) based self-attention decoder (SAD). Firstly, the chunk-SAE splits the speech into isolated chunks. To reduce the computational cost and improve the performance, we propose the state reuse chunk-SAE. Sencondly, the MTA based SAD truncates the speech features monotonically and performs attention on the truncated features. To support the online recognition, we integrate the state reuse chunk-SAE and the MTA based SAD into online CTC/attention architecture. We evaluate the proposed online models on the HKUST Mandarin ASR benchmark and achieve a 23.66% character error rate (CER) with a 320 ms latency. Our online model yields as little as 0.19% absolute CER degradation compared with the offline baseline, and achieves significant improvement over our prior work on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based online E2E models.