pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving BERT with Self-Supervised Attention
Authors: Yiren Chen, Xiaoyu Kou, Jiangang Bai, Yunhai Tong
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

One of the most popular paradigms of applying large pre-trained NLP models such as BERT is to fine-tune it on a smaller dataset. However, one challenge remains as the fine-tuned model often overfits on smaller datasets. A symptom of this phenomenon is that irrelevant or misleading words in the sentence, which are easy to understand for human beings, can substantially degrade the performance of these finetuned BERT models. In this paper, we propose a novel technique, called Self-Supervised Attention (SSA) to help facilitate this generalization challenge. Specifically, SSA automatically generates weak, token-level attention labels iteratively by probing the fine-tuned model from the previous iteration. We investigate two different ways of integrating SSA into BERT and propose a hybrid approach to combine their benefits. Empirically, through a variety of public datasets, we illustrate significant performance improvement using our SSA-enhanced BERT model.
SciWING -- A Software Toolkit for Scientific Document Processing
Authors: Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap, Min-Yen Kan
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

We introduce SciWING, an open-source software toolkit which provides access to pre-trained models for scientific document processing tasks, inclusive of citation string parsing and logical structure recovery. SciWING enables researchers to rapidly experiment with different models by swapping and stacking different modules. It also enables them declare and run models from a configuration file. It enables researchers to perform production-ready transfer learning from general, pre-trained transformers (i.e., BERT, SciBERT etc), and aids development of end-user applications. It includes ready-to-use web and terminal-based applications and demonstrations (Available from http://sciwing.io).
State of the Art on Neural Rendering
Authors: Ayush Tewari, Ohad Fried, Justus Thies, Vincent Sitzmann, Stephen Lombardi, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Ricardo Martin-Brualla, Tomas Simon, Jason Saragih, Matthias Nießner, Rohit Pandey, Sean Fanello, Gordon Wetzstein, Jun-Yan Zhu, Christian Theobalt, Maneesh Agrawala, Eli Shechtman, Dan B. Goldman, Michael Zollhöfer
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Image Generation, Neural Rendering, Novel View Synthesis

Efficient rendering of photo-realistic virtual worlds is a long standing effort of computer graphics. Modern graphics techniques have succeeded in synthesizing photo-realistic images from hand-crafted scene representations. However, the automatic generation of shape, materials, lighting, and other aspects of scenes remains a challenging problem that, if solved, would make photo-realistic computer graphics more widely accessible. Concurrently, progress in computer vision and machine learning have given rise to a new approach to image synthesis and editing, namely deep generative models. Neural rendering is a new and rapidly emerging field that combines generative machine learning techniques with physical knowledge from computer graphics, e.g., by the integration of differentiable rendering into network training. With a plethora of applications in computer graphics and vision, neural rendering is poised to become a new area in the graphics community, yet no survey of this emerging field exists. This state-of-the-art report summarizes the recent trends and applications of neural rendering. We focus on approaches that combine classic computer graphics techniques with deep generative models to obtain controllable and photo-realistic outputs. Starting with an overview of the underlying computer graphics and machine learning concepts, we discuss critical aspects of neural rendering approaches. This state-of-the-art report is focused on the many important use cases for the described algorithms such as novel view synthesis, semantic photo manipulation, facial and body reenactment, relighting, free-viewpoint video, and the creation of photo-realistic avatars for virtual and augmented reality telepresence. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the social implications of such technology and investigate open research problems.
HybridDNN: A Framework for High-Performance Hybrid DNN Accelerator Design and Implementation
Authors: Hanchen Ye, Xiaofan Zhang, Zhize Huang, Gengsheng Chen, Deming Chen
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00

To speedup Deep Neural Networks (DNN) accelerator design and enable effective implementation, we propose HybridDNN, a framework for building high-performance hybrid DNN accelerators and delivering FPGA-based hardware implementations. Novel techniques include a highly flexible and scalable architecture with a hybrid Spatial/Winograd convolution (CONV) Processing Engine (PE), a comprehensive design space exploration tool, and a complete design flow to fully support accelerator design and implementation. Experimental results show that the accelerators generated by HybridDNN can deliver 3375.7 and 83.3 GOPS on a high-end FPGA (VU9P) and an embedded FPGA (PYNQ-Z1), respectively, which achieve a 1.8x higher performance improvement compared to the state-of-art accelerator designs. This demonstrates that HybridDNN is flexible and scalable and can target both cloud and embedded hardware platforms with vastly different resource constraints.
Mixture Density Conditional Generative Adversarial Network Models (MD-CGAN)
Authors: Jaleh Zand, Stephen Roberts
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gained significant attention in recent years, with impressive applications highlighted in computer vision in particular. Compared to such examples, however, there have been more limited applications of GANs to time series modelling, including forecasting. In this work, we present the Mixture Density Conditional Generative Adversarial Model (MD-CGAN), with a focus on time series forecasting. We show that our model is capable of estimating a probabilistic posterior distribution over forecasts and that, in comparison to a set of benchmark methods, the MD-CGAN model performs well, particularly in situations where noise is a significant component of the observed time series. Further, by using a Gaussian mixture model as the output distribution, MD-CGAN offers posterior predictions that are non-Gaussian.
DMLO: Deep Matching LiDAR Odometry
Authors: Zhichao Li, Naiyan Wang
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Pose Estimation

LiDAR odometry is a fundamental task for various areas such as robotics, autonomous driving. This problem is difficult since it requires the systems to be highly robust running in noisy real-world data. Existing methods are mostly local iterative methods. Feature-based global registration methods are not preferred since extracting accurate matching pairs in the nonuniform and sparse LiDAR data remains challenging. In this paper, we present Deep Matching LiDAR Odometry (DMLO), a novel learning-based framework which makes the feature matching method applicable to LiDAR odometry task. Unlike many recent learning-based methods, DMLO explicitly enforces geometry constraints in the framework. Specifically, DMLO decomposes the 6-DoF pose estimation into two parts, a learning-based matching network which provides accurate correspondences between two scans and rigid transformation estimation with a close-formed solution by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Comprehensive experimental results on real-world datasets KITTI and Argoverse demonstrate that our DMLO dramatically outperforms existing learning-based methods and comparable with the state-of-the-art geometry based approaches.
CALM: Continuous Adaptive Learning for Language Modeling
Authors: Kristjan Arumae, Parminder Bhatia
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Training large language representation models has become a standard in the natural language processing community. This allows for fine tuning on any number of specific tasks, however, these large high capacity models can continue to train on domain specific unlabeled data to make initialization even more robust for supervised tasks. We demonstrate that in practice these pre-trained models present performance deterioration in the form of catastrophic forgetting when evaluated on tasks from a general domain such as GLUE. In this work we propose CALM, Continuous Adaptive Learning for Language Modeling: techniques to render models which retain knowledge across multiple domains. With these methods, we are able to reduce the performance gap across supervised tasks introduced by task specific models which we demonstrate using a continual learning setting in biomedical and clinical domains.
A Dynamic Observation Strategy for Multi-agent Multi-armed Bandit Problem
Authors: Udari Madhushani, Naomi Ehrich Leonard
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

We define and analyze a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in which decision-making agents can observe the choices and rewards of their neighbors under a linear observation cost. Neighbors are defined by a network graph that encodes the inherent observation constraints of the system. We define a cost associated with observations such that at every instance an agent makes an observation it receives a constant observation regret. We design a sampling algorithm and an observation protocol for each agent to maximize its own expected cumulative reward through minimizing expected cumulative sampling regret and expected cumulative observation regret. For our proposed protocol, we prove that total cumulative regret is logarithmically bounded. We verify the accuracy of analytical bounds using numerical simulations.
Learning A Single Network for Scale-Arbitrary Super-Resolution
Authors: Longguang Wang, Yingqian Wang, Zaiping Lin, Jungang Yang, Wei An, Yulan Guo
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution, Transfer Learning

Recently, the performance of single image super-resolution (SR) has been significantly improved with powerful networks. However, these networks are developed for image SR with a single specific integer scale (e.g., x2;x3,x4), and cannot be used for non-integer and asymmetric SR. In this paper, we propose to learn a scale-arbitrary image SR network from scale-specific networks. Specifically, we propose a plug-in module for existing SR networks to perform scale-arbitrary SR, which consists of multiple scale-aware feature adaption blocks and a scale-aware upsampling layer. Moreover, we introduce a scale-aware knowledge transfer paradigm to transfer knowledge from scale-specific networks to the scale-arbitrary network. Our plug-in module can be easily adapted to existing networks to achieve scale-arbitrary SR. These networks plugged with our module can achieve promising results for non-integer and asymmetric SR while maintaining state-of-the-art performance for SR with integer scale factors. Besides, the additional computational and memory cost of our module is very small.
Satirical News Detection with Semantic Feature Extraction and Game-theoretic Rough Sets
Authors: Yue Zhou, Yan Zhang, JingTao Yao
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Misinformation

Satirical news detection is an important yet challenging task to prevent spread of misinformation. Many feature based and end-to-end neural nets based satirical news detection systems have been proposed and delivered promising results. Existing approaches explore comprehensive word features from satirical news articles, but lack semantic metrics using word vectors for tweet form satirical news. Moreover, the vagueness of satire and news parody determines that a news tweet can hardly be classified with a binary decision, that is, satirical or legitimate. To address these issues, we collect satirical and legitimate news tweets, and propose a semantic feature based approach. Features are extracted by exploring inconsistencies in phrases, entities, and between main and relative clauses. We apply game-theoretic rough set model to detect satirical news, in which probabilistic thresholds are derived by game equilibrium and repetition learning mechanism. Experimental results on the collected dataset show the robustness and improvement of the proposed approach compared with Pawlak rough set model and SVM.
Downstream Model Design of Pre-trained Language Model for Relation Extraction Task
Authors: Cheng Li, Ye Tian
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Relation, Relation Extraction

Supervised relation extraction methods based on deep neural network play an important role in the recent information extraction field. However, at present, their performance still fails to reach a good level due to the existence of complicated relations. On the other hand, recently proposed pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in multiple tasks of natural language processing through fine-tuning when combined with the model of downstream tasks. However, original standard tasks of PLM do not include the relation extraction task yet. We believe that PLMs can also be used to solve the relation extraction problem, but it is necessary to establish a specially designed downstream task model or even loss function for dealing with complicated relations. In this paper, a new network architecture with a special loss function is designed to serve as a downstream model of PLMs for supervised relation extraction. Experiments have shown that our method significantly exceeded the current optimal baseline models across multiple public datasets of relation extraction.
Survey for Trust-aware Recommender Systems: A Deep Learning Perspective
Authors: Manqing Dong, Feng Yuan, Lina Yao, Xianzhi Wang, Xiwei Xu, Liming Zhu
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Recommendation Systems

A significant remaining challenge for existing recommender systems is that users may not trust the recommender systems for either lack of explanation or inaccurate recommendation results. Thus, it becomes critical to embrace a trustworthy recommender system. This survey provides a systemic summary of three categories of trust-aware recommender systems: social-aware recommender systems that leverage users' social relationships; robust recommender systems that filter untruthful noises (e.g., spammers and fake information) or enhance attack resistance; explainable recommender systems that provide explanations of recommended items. We focus on the work based on deep learning techniques, an emerging area in the recommendation research.
Generating Narrative Text in a Switching Dynamical System
Authors: Noah Weber, Leena Shekhar, Heeyoung Kwon, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Nathanael Chambers
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2020
Tasks: Text Generation

Early work on narrative modeling used explicit plans and goals to generate stories, but the language generation itself was restricted and inflexible. Modern methods use language models for more robust generation, but often lack an explicit representation of the scaffolding and dynamics that guide a coherent narrative. This paper introduces a new model that integrates explicit narrative structure with neural language models, formalizing narrative modeling as a Switching Linear Dynamical System (SLDS). A SLDS is a dynamical system in which the latent dynamics of the system (i.e. how the state vector transforms over time) is controlled by top-level discrete switching variables. The switching variables represent narrative structure (e.g., sentiment or discourse states), while the latent state vector encodes information on the current state of the narrative. This probabilistic formulation allows us to control generation, and can be learned in a semi-supervised fashion using both labeled and unlabeled data. Additionally, we derive a Gibbs sampler for our model that can fill in arbitrary parts of the narrative, guided by the switching variables. Our filled-in (English language) narratives outperform several baselines on both automatic and human evaluations.
Adaptive Transformers in RL
Authors: Shakti Kumar, Jerrod Parker, Panteha Naderian
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent developments in Transformers have opened new interesting areas of research in partially observable reinforcement learning tasks. Results from late 2019 showed that Transformers are able to outperform LSTMs on both memory intense and reactive tasks. In this work we first partially replicate the results shown in Stabilizing Transformers in RL on both reactive and memory based environments. We then show performance improvement coupled with reduced computation when adding adaptive attention span to this Stable Transformer on a challenging DMLab30 environment. The code for all our experiments and models is available at https://github.com/jerrodparker20/adaptive-transformers-in-rl.
DialBERT: A Hierarchical Pre-Trained Model for Conversation Disentanglement
Authors: Tianda Li, Jia-Chen Gu, Xiaodan Zhu, Quan Liu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Zhiming Su, Si Wei
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversation Disentanglement, Disentanglement

Disentanglement is a problem in which multiple conversations occur in the same channel simultaneously, and the listener should decide which utterance is part of the conversation he will respond to. We propose a new model, named Dialogue BERT (DialBERT), which integrates local and global semantics in a single stream of messages to disentangle the conversations that mixed together. We employ BERT to capture the matching information in each utterance pair at the utterance-level, and use a BiLSTM to aggregate and incorporate the context-level information. With only a 3% increase in parameters, a 12% improvement has been attained in comparison to BERT, based on the F1-Score. The model achieves a state-of-the-art result on the a new dataset proposed by IBM and surpasses previous work by a substantial margin.
DashCam Pay: A System for In-vehicle Payments Using Face and Voice
Authors: Cori Tymoszek, Sunpreet S. Arora, Kim Wagner, Anil K. Jain
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

We present our ongoing work on developing a system, called DashCam Pay, that enables in-vehicle payments in a seamless and secure manner using face and voice biometrics. A plug-and-play device (dashcam) mounted in the vehicle is used to capture face images and voice commands of passengers. Privacy-preserving biometric comparison techniques are used to compare the biometric data captured by the dashcam with the biometric data enrolled on the users' mobile devices over a wireless interface (e.g., Bluetooth or Wi-Fi Direct) to determine the payer. Once the payer is identified, payment is conducted using the enrolled payment credential on the mobile device of the payer. We conduct preliminary analysis on data collected using a commercially available dashcam to show the feasibility of building the proposed system. A prototype of the proposed system is also developed in Android. DashCam Pay can be integrated as a software solution by dashcam or vehicle manufacturers to enable open loop in-vehicle payments.
Understanding Knowledge Gaps in Visual Question Answering: Implications for Gap Identification and Testing
Authors: Goonmeet Bajaj, Bortik Bandyopadhyay, Daniel Schmidt, Pranav Maneriker, Christopher Myers, Srinivasan Parthasarathy
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation, TAG, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are tasked with answering natural language questions corresponding to a presented image. Traditional VQA datasets typically contain questions related to the spatial information of objects, object attributes, or general scene questions. Recently, researchers have recognized the need to improve the balance of such datasets to reduce the system's dependency on memorized linguistic features and statistical biases, while aiming for enhanced visual understanding. However, it is unclear whether any latent patterns exist to quantify and explain these failures. As an initial step towards better quantifying our understanding of the performance of VQA models, we use a taxonomy of Knowledge Gaps (KGs) to tag questions with one or more types of KGs. Each Knowledge Gap (KG) describes the reasoning abilities needed to arrive at a resolution. After identifying KGs for each question, we examine the skew in the distribution of questions for each KG. We then introduce a targeted question generation model to reduce this skew, which allows us to generate new types of questions for an image. These new questions can be added to existing VQA datasets to increase the diversity of questions and reduce the skew.
Weighted Aggregating Stochastic Gradient Descent for Parallel Deep Learning
Authors: Pengzhan Guo, Zeyang Ye, Keli Xiao, Wei Zhu
Date: 2020-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Stochastic Optimization

This paper investigates the stochastic optimization problem with a focus on developing scalable parallel algorithms for deep learning tasks. Our solution involves a reformation of the objective function for stochastic optimization in neural network models, along with a novel parallel strategy, coined weighted aggregating stochastic gradient descent (WASGD). Following a theoretical analysis on the characteristics of the new objective function, WASGD introduces a decentralized weighted aggregating scheme based on the performance of local workers. Without any center variable, the new method automatically assesses the importance of local workers and accepts them according to their contributions. Furthermore, we have developed an enhanced version of the method, WASGD+, by (1) considering a designed sample order and (2) applying a more advanced weight evaluating function. To validate the new method, we benchmark our schemes against several popular algorithms including the state-of-the-art techniques (e.g., elastic averaging SGD) in training deep neural networks for classification tasks. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on four classic datasets, including the CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, Fashion-MNIST, and MNIST. The subsequent results suggest the superiority of the WASGD scheme in accelerating the training of deep architecture. Better still, the enhanced version, WASGD+, has been shown to be a significant improvement over its basic version.
COVID_MTNet: COVID-19 Detection with Multi-Task Deep Learning Approaches
Authors: Md Zahangir Alom, M M Shaifur Rahman, Mst Shamima Nasrin, Tarek M. Taha, Vijayan K. Asari
Date: 2020-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis, Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

COVID-19 is currently one the most life-threatening problems around the world. The fast and accurate detection of the COVID-19 infection is essential to identify, take better decisions and ensure treatment for the patients which will help save their lives. In this paper, we propose a fast and efficient way to identify COVID-19 patients with multi-task deep learning (DL) methods. Both X-ray and CT scan images are considered to evaluate the proposed technique. We employ our Inception Residual Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network with Transfer Learning (TL) approach for COVID-19 detection and our NABLA-N network model for segmenting the regions infected by COVID-19. The detection model shows around 84.67% testing accuracy from X-ray images and 98.78% accuracy in CT-images. A novel quantitative analysis strategy is also proposed in this paper to determine the percentage of infected regions in X-ray and CT images. The qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate promising results for COVID-19 detection and infected region localization.