pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhanced Convolutional Neural Tangent Kernels
Authors: Zhiyuan Li, Ruosong Wang, Dingli Yu, Simon S. Du, Wei Hu, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Sanjeev Arora
Date: 2019-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, regression

Recent research shows that for training with $\ell_2$ loss, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) whose width (number of channels in convolutional layers) goes to infinity correspond to regression with respect to the CNN Gaussian Process kernel (CNN-GP) if only the last layer is trained, and correspond to regression with respect to the Convolutional Neural Tangent Kernel (CNTK) if all layers are trained. An exact algorithm to compute CNTK (Arora et al., 2019) yielded the finding that classification accuracy of CNTK on CIFAR-10 is within 6-7% of that of that of the corresponding CNN architecture (best figure being around 78%) which is interesting performance for a fixed kernel. Here we show how to significantly enhance the performance of these kernels using two ideas. (1) Modifying the kernel using a new operation called Local Average Pooling (LAP) which preserves efficient computability of the kernel and inherits the spirit of standard data augmentation using pixel shifts. Earlier papers were unable to incorporate naive data augmentation because of the quadratic training cost of kernel regression. This idea is inspired by Global Average Pooling (GAP), which we show for CNN-GP and CNTK is equivalent to full translation data augmentation. (2) Representing the input image using a pre-processing technique proposed by Coates et al. (2011), which uses a single convolutional layer composed of random image patches. On CIFAR-10, the resulting kernel, CNN-GP with LAP and horizontal flip data augmentation, achieves 89% accuracy, matching the performance of AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al., 2012). Note that this is the best such result we know of for a classifier that is not a trained neural network. Similar improvements are obtained for Fashion-MNIST.
Generalizing to unseen domains via distribution matching
Authors: Isabela Albuquerque, João Monteiro, Mohammad Darvishi, Tiago H. Falk, Ioannis Mitliagkas
Date: 2019-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, LEMMA, Object Recognition, Representation Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Supervised learning results typically rely on assumptions of i.i.d. data. Unfortunately, those assumptions are commonly violated in practice. In this work, we tackle such problem by focusing on domain generalization: a formalization where the data generating process at test time may yield samples from never-before-seen domains (distributions). Our work relies on the following lemma: by minimizing a notion of discrepancy between all pairs from a set of given domains, we also minimize the discrepancy between any pairs of mixtures of domains. Using this result, we derive a generalization bound for our setting. We then show that low risk over unseen domains can be achieved by representing the data in a space where (i) the training distributions are indistinguishable, and (ii) relevant information for the task at hand is preserved. Minimizing the terms in our bound yields an adversarial formulation which estimates and minimizes pairwise discrepancies. We validate our proposed strategy on standard domain generalization benchmarks, outperforming a number of recently introduced methods. Notably, we tackle a real-world application where the underlying data corresponds to multi-channel electroencephalography time series from different subjects, each considered as a distinct domain.
Efficient Global Multi-object Tracking Under Minimum-cost Circulation Framework
Authors: Congchao Wang, Yizhi Wang, Guoqiang Yu
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking

We developed a minimum-cost circulation framework for solving the global data association problem, which plays a key role in the tracking-by-detection paradigm of multi-object tracking. The global data association problem was extensively studied under the minimum-cost flow framework, which is theoretically attractive as being flexible and globally solvable. However, the high computational burden has been a long-standing obstacle to its wide adoption in practice. While enjoying the same theoretical advantages and maintaining the same optimal solution as the minimum-cost flow framework, our new framework has a better theoretical complexity bound and leads to orders of practical efficiency improvement. This new framework is motivated by the observation that minimum-cost flow only partially models the data association problem and must be accompanied by an additional and time-consuming searching scheme to determine the optimal object number. By employing a minimum-cost circulation framework, we eliminate the searching step and naturally integrate the number of objects into the optimization problem. By exploring the special property of the associated graph, that is, an overwhelming majority of the vertices are with unit capacity, we designed an implementation of the framework and proved it has the best theoretical complexity so far for the global data association problem. We evaluated our method with 40 experiments on five MOT benchmark datasets. Our method was always the most efficient and averagely 53 to 1,192 times faster than the three state-of-the-art methods. When our method served as a sub-module for global data association methods using higher-order constraints, similar efficiency improvement was attained. We further illustrated through several case studies how the improved computational efficiency enables more sophisticated tracking models and yields better tracking accuracy.
An Algorithm for Routing Capsules in All Domains
Authors: Franz A. Heinsen
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Image Classification, Sentiment Analysis

Building on recent work on capsule networks, we propose a new, general-purpose form of "routing by agreement" that activates output capsules in a layer as a function of their net benefit to use and net cost to ignore input capsules from earlier layers. To illustrate the usefulness of our routing algorithm, we present two capsule networks that apply it in different domains: vision and language. The first network achieves new state-of-the-art accuracy of 99.1% on the smallNORB visual recognition task with fewer parameters and an order of magnitude less training than previous capsule models, and we find evidence that it learns to perform a form of "reverse graphics." The second network achieves new state-of-the-art accuracies on the root sentences of the Stanford Sentiment Treebank: 58.5% on fine-grained and 95.6% on binary labels with a single-task model that routes frozen embeddings from a pretrained transformer as capsules. In both domains, we train with the same regime. Code is available at https://github.com/glassroom/heinsen_routing along with replication instructions.
Ethical Dilemmas in Strategic Games
Authors: Pavel Naumov, Rui-Jie Yew
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00

An agent, or a coalition of agents, faces an ethical dilemma between several statements if she is forced to make a conscious choice between which of these statements will be true. This paper proposes to capture ethical dilemmas as a modality in strategic game settings with and without limit on sacrifice and for perfect and imperfect information games. The authors show that the dilemma modality cannot be defined through the earlier proposed blameworthiness modality. The main technical result is a sound and complete axiomatization of the properties of this modality with sacrifice in games with perfect information.
A Stealthy Hardware Trojan Exploiting the Architectural Vulnerability of Deep Learning Architectures: Input Interception Attack (IIA)
Authors: Tolulope A. Odetola, Hawzhin Raoof Mohammed, Syed Rafay Hasan
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing

Deep learning architectures (DLA) have shown impressive performance in computer vision, natural language processing and so on. Many DLA make use of cloud computing to achieve classification due to the high computation and memory requirements. Privacy and latency concerns resulting from cloud computing has inspired the deployment of DLA on embedded hardware accelerators. To achieve short time-to-market and have access to global experts, state-of-the-art techniques of DLA deployment on hardware accelerators are outsourced to untrusted third parties. This outsourcing raises security concerns as hardware Trojans can be inserted into the hardware design of the mapped DLA of the hardware accelerator. We argue that existing hardware Trojan attacks highlighted in literature have no qualitative means how definite they are of the triggering of the Trojan. Also, most inserted Trojans show a obvious spike in the number of hardware resources utilized on the accelerator at the time of triggering the Trojan or when the payload is active. In this paper, we introduce a hardware Trojan attack called Input Interception Attack (IIA). In this attack, we make use of the statistical properties of layer-by-layer output to ensure that asides from being stealthy. Our IIA is able to trigger with some measure of definiteness. Moreover, this IIA attack is tested on DLA used to classify MNIST and Cifar-10 data sets. The attacked design utilizes approximately up to 2% more LUTs respectively compared to the un-compromised designs. Finally, this paper discusses potential defensive mechanisms that could be used to combat such hardware Trojans based attack in hardware accelerators for DLA.
Laplacian Smoothing Stochastic Gradient Markov Chain Monte Carlo
Authors: Bao Wang, Difan Zou, Quanquan Gu, Stanley Osher
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00

As an important Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) algorithm has achieved great success in Bayesian learning and posterior sampling. However, SGLD typically suffers from slow convergence rate due to its large variance caused by the stochastic gradient. In order to alleviate these drawbacks, we leverage the recently developed Laplacian Smoothing (LS) technique and propose a Laplacian smoothing stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (LS-SGLD) algorithm. We prove that for sampling from both log-concave and non-log-concave densities, LS-SGLD achieves strictly smaller discretization error in $2$-Wasserstein distance, although its mixing rate can be slightly slower. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets verify our theoretical results, and demonstrate the superior performance of LS-SGLD on different machine learning tasks including posterior sampling, Bayesian logistic regression and training Bayesian convolutional neural networks. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/BaoWangMath/LS-MCMC}.
Ten-year Survival Prediction for Breast Cancer Patients
Authors: Changmao Li, Han He, Yunze Hao, Caleb Ziems
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Prediction, Survival Prediction

This report assesses different machine learning approaches to 10-year survival prediction of breast cancer patients.
Design and Challenges of Cloze-Style Reading Comprehension Tasks on Multiparty Dialogue
Authors: Changmao Li, Tianhao Liu, Jinho D. Choi
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

This paper analyzes challenges in cloze-style reading comprehension on multiparty dialogue and suggests two new tasks for more comprehensive predictions of personal entities in daily conversations. We first demonstrate that there are substantial limitations to the evaluation methods of previous work, namely that randomized assignment of samples to training and test data substantially decreases the complexity of cloze-style reading comprehension. According to our analysis, replacing the random data split with a chronological data split reduces test accuracy on previous single-variable passage completion task from 72\% to 34\%, that leaves much more room to improve. Our proposed tasks extend the previous single-variable passage completion task by replacing more character mentions with variables. Several deep learning models are developed to validate these three tasks. A thorough error analysis is provided to understand the challenges and guide the future direction of this research.
Robustness and Imperceptibility Enhancement in Watermarked Images by Color Transformation
Authors: Maedeh Jamali, Mahnoosh Bagheri, Nader Karimi, Shadrokh Samavi
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00

One of the effective methods for the preservation of copyright ownership of digital media is watermarking. Different watermarking techniques try to set a tradeoff between robustness and transparency of the process. In this research work, we have used color space conversion and frequency transform to achieve high robustness and transparency. Due to the distribution of image information in the RGB domain, we use the YUV color space, which concentrates the visual information in the Y channel. Embedding of the watermark is performed in the DCT coefficients of the specific wavelet subbands. Experimental results show high transparency and robustness of the proposed method.
Learning to Infer Implicit Surfaces without 3D Supervision
Authors: Shichen Liu, Shunsuke Saito, Weikai Chen, Hao Li
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: 3D Shape Generation

Recent advances in 3D deep learning have shown that it is possible to train highly effective deep models for 3D shape generation, directly from 2D images. This is particularly interesting since the availability of 3D models is still limited compared to the massive amount of accessible 2D images, which is invaluable for training. The representation of 3D surfaces itself is a key factor for the quality and resolution of the 3D output. While explicit representations, such as point clouds and voxels, can span a wide range of shape variations, their resolutions are often limited. Mesh-based representations are more efficient but are limited by their ability to handle varying topologies. Implicit surfaces, however, can robustly handle complex shapes, topologies, and also provide flexible resolution control. We address the fundamental problem of learning implicit surfaces for shape inference without the need of 3D supervision. Despite their advantages, it remains nontrivial to (1) formulate a differentiable connection between implicit surfaces and their 2D renderings, which is needed for image-based supervision; and (2) ensure precise geometric properties and control, such as local smoothness. In particular, sampling implicit surfaces densely is also known to be a computationally demanding and very slow operation. To this end, we propose a novel ray-based field probing technique for efficient image-to-field supervision, as well as a general geometric regularizer for implicit surfaces, which provides natural shape priors in unconstrained regions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on the task of single-view image-based 3D shape digitization and show how we outperform state-of-the-art techniques both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Adaptive Statistical Learning with Bayesian Differential Privacy
Authors: Jun Zhao
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Holdout Set

In statistical learning, a dataset is often partitioned into two parts: the training set and the holdout (i.e., testing) set. For instance, the training set is used to learn a predictor, and then the holdout set is used for estimating the accuracy of the predictor on the true distribution. However, often in practice, the holdout dataset is reused and the estimates tested on the holdout dataset are chosen adaptively based on the results of prior estimates, leading to that the predictor may become dependent of the holdout set. Hence, overfitting may occur, and the learned models may not generalize well to the unseen datasets. Prior studies have established connections between the stability of a learning algorithm and its ability to generalize, but the traditional generalization is not robust to adaptive composition. Recently, Dwork et al. in NIPS, STOC, and Science 2015 show that the holdout dataset from i.i.d. data samples can be reused in adaptive statistical learning, if the estimates are perturbed and coordinated using techniques developed for differential privacy, which is a widely used notion to quantify privacy. Yet, the results of Dwork et al. are applicable to only the case of i.i.d. samples. In contrast, correlations between data samples exist because of various behavioral, social, and genetic relationships between users. Our results in adaptive statistical learning generalize the results of Dwork et al. for i.i.d. data samples to arbitrarily correlated data. Specifically, we show that the holdout dataset from correlated samples can be reused in adaptive statistical learning, if the estimates are perturbed and coordinated using techniques developed for Bayesian differential privacy, which is a privacy notion recently introduced by Yang et al. in SIGMOD 2015 to broaden the application scenarios of differential privacy when data records are correlated.
Single-Shot Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Mark Weber, Jonathon Luiten, Bastian Leibe
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present a novel end-to-end single-shot method that segments countable object instances (things) as well as background regions (stuff) into a non-overlapping panoptic segmentation at almost video frame rate. Current state-of-the-art methods are far from reaching video frame rate and mostly rely on merging instance segmentation with semantic background segmentation, making them impractical to use in many applications such as robotics. Our approach relaxes this requirement by using an object detector but is still able to resolve inter- and intra-class overlaps to achieve a non-overlapping segmentation. On top of a shared encoder-decoder backbone, we utilize multiple branches for semantic segmentation, object detection, and instance center prediction. Finally, our panoptic head combines all outputs into a panoptic segmentation and can even handle conflicting predictions between branches as well as certain false predictions. Our network achieves 32.6% PQ on MS-COCO at 23.5 FPS, opening up panoptic segmentation to a broader field of applications.
GRAPHENE: A Precise Biomedical Literature Retrieval Engine with Graph Augmented Deep Learning and External Knowledge Empowerment
Authors: Sendong Zhao, Chang Su, Andrea Sboner, Fei Wang
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Learning-To-Rank, Representation Learning, Retrieval

Effective biomedical literature retrieval (BLR) plays a central role in precision medicine informatics. In this paper, we propose GRAPHENE, which is a deep learning based framework for precise BLR. GRAPHENE consists of three main different modules 1) graph-augmented document representation learning; 2) query expansion and representation learning and 3) learning to rank biomedical articles. The graph-augmented document representation learning module constructs a document-concept graph containing biomedical concept nodes and document nodes so that global biomedical related concept from external knowledge source can be captured, which is further connected to a BiLSTM so both local and global topics can be explored. Query expansion and representation learning module expands the query with abbreviations and different names, and then builds a CNN-based model to convolve the expanded query and obtain a vector representation for each query. Learning to rank minimizes a ranking loss between biomedical articles with the query to learn the retrieval function. Experimental results on applying our system to TREC Precision Medicine track data are provided to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Variational Bayesian inference of hidden stochastic processes with unknown parameters
Authors: Komlan Atitey, Pavel Loskot, Lyudmila Mihaylova
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Missing Values, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Estimating hidden processes from non-linear noisy observations is particularly difficult when the parameters of these processes are not known. This paper adopts a machine learning approach to devise variational Bayesian inference for such scenarios. In particular, a random process generated by the autoregressive moving average (ARMA) linear model is inferred from non-linearity noise observations. The posterior distribution of hidden states are approximated by a set of weighted particles generated by the sequential Monte carlo (SMC) algorithm involving sampling with importance sampling resampling (SISR). Numerical efficiency and estimation accuracy of the proposed inference method are evaluated by computer simulations. Furthermore, the proposed inference method is demonstrated on a practical problem of estimating the missing values in the gene expression time series assuming vector autoregressive (VAR) data model.
Beta DVBF: Learning State-Space Models for Control from High Dimensional Observations
Authors: Neha Das, Maximilian Karl, Philip Becker-Ehmck, Patrick van der Smagt
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making, State Space Models

Learning a model of dynamics from high-dimensional images can be a core ingredient for success in many applications across different domains, especially in sequential decision making. However, currently prevailing methods based on latent-variable models are limited to working with low resolution images only. In this work, we show that some of the issues with using high-dimensional observations arise from the discrepancy between the dimensionality of the latent and observable space, and propose solutions to overcome them.
Self-supervised Deformation Modeling for Facial Expression Editing
Authors: ShahRukh Athar, Zhixin Shu, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2019-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Facial Editing, Image Generation, Texture Synthesis

Recent advances in deep generative models have demonstrated impressive results in photo-realistic facial image synthesis and editing. Facial expressions are inherently the result of muscle movement. However, existing neural network-based approaches usually only rely on texture generation to edit expressions and largely neglect the motion information. In this work, we propose a novel end-to-end network that disentangles the task of facial editing into two steps: a " "motion-editing" step and a "texture-editing" step. In the "motion-editing" step, we explicitly model facial movement through image deformation, warping the image into the desired expression. In the "texture-editing" step, we generate necessary textures, such as teeth and shading effects, for a photo-realistic result. Our physically-based task-disentanglement system design allows each step to learn a focused task, removing the need of generating texture to hallucinate motion. Our system is trained in a self-supervised manner, requiring no ground truth deformation annotation. Using Action Units [8] as the representation for facial expression, our method improves the state-of-the-art facial expression editing performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.