pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Gutenberg Dialogue Dataset
Authors: Richard Csaky, Gabor Recski
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2

Large datasets are essential for neural modeling of many NLP tasks. Current publicly available open-domain dialogue datasets offer a trade-off between quality (e.g., DailyDialog) and size (e.g., Opensubtitles). We narrow this gap by building a high-quality dataset of 14.8M utterances in English, and smaller datasets in German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Hungarian. We extract and process dialogues from public-domain books made available by Project Gutenberg. We describe our dialogue extraction pipeline, analyze the effects of the various heuristics used, and present an error analysis of extracted dialogues. Finally, we conduct experiments showing that better response quality can be achieved in zero-shot and finetuning settings by training on our data than on the larger but much noisier Opensubtitles dataset. Our open-source pipeline (https://github.com/ricsinaruto/gutenberg-dialog) can be extended to further languages with little additional effort. Researchers can also build their versions of existing datasets by adjusting various trade-off parameters. We also built a web demo for interacting with our models: https://ricsinaruto.github.io/chatbot.html.
MATE: A Model-based Algorithm Tuning Engine
Authors: Mohamed El Yafrani, Marcella Scoczynski Ribeiro Martins, Inkyung Sung, Markus Wagner, Carola Doerr, Peter Nielsen
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Symbolic Regression

In this paper, we introduce a Model-based Algorithm Turning Engine, namely MATE, where the parameters of an algorithm are represented as expressions of the features of a target optimisation problem. In contrast to most static (feature-independent) algorithm tuning engines such as irace and SPOT, our approach aims to derive the best parameter configuration of a given algorithm for a specific problem, exploiting the relationships between the algorithm parameters and the features of the problem. We formulate the problem of finding the relationships between the parameters and the problem features as a symbolic regression problem and we use genetic programming to extract these expressions. For the evaluation, we apply our approach to configuration of the (1+1) EA and RLS algorithms for the OneMax, LeadingOnes, BinValue and Jump optimisation problems, where the theoretically optimal algorithm parameters to the problems are available as functions of the features of the problems. Our study shows that the found relationships typically comply with known theoretical results, thus demonstrating a new opportunity to consider model-based parameter tuning as an effective alternative to the static algorithm tuning engines.
Augmenting Transformers with KNN-Based Composite Memory for Dialogue
Authors: Angela Fan, Claire Gardent, Chloe Braud, Antoine Bordes
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00

Various machine learning tasks can benefit from access to external information of different modalities, such as text and images. Recent work has focused on learning architectures with large memories capable of storing this knowledge. We propose augmenting generative Transformer neural networks with KNN-based Information Fetching (KIF) modules. Each KIF module learns a read operation to access fixed external knowledge. We apply these modules to generative dialog modeling, a challenging task where information must be flexibly retrieved and incorporated to maintain the topic and flow of conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by identifying relevant knowledge required for knowledgeable but engaging dialog from Wikipedia, images, and human-written dialog utterances, and show that leveraging this retrieved information improves model performance, measured by automatic and human evaluation.
An Epistemic Approach to the Formal Specification of Statistical Machine Learning
Authors: Yusuke Kawamoto
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, General Classification

We propose an epistemic approach to formalizing statistical properties of machine learning. Specifically, we introduce a formal model for supervised learning based on a Kripke model where each possible world corresponds to a possible dataset and modal operators are interpreted as transformation and testing on datasets. Then we formalize various notions of the classification performance, robustness, and fairness of statistical classifiers by using our extension of statistical epistemic logic (StatEL). In this formalization, we show relationships among properties of classifiers, and relevance between classification performance and robustness. As far as we know, this is the first work that uses epistemic models and logical formulas to express statistical properties of machine learning, and would be a starting point to develop theories of formal specification of machine learning.
Personalized Recommendation of PoIs to People with Autism
Authors: Noemi Mauro, Liliana Ardissono, Federica Cena
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

The suggestion of Points of Interest to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) challenges recommender systems research because these users' perception of places is influenced by idiosyncratic sensory aversions which can mine their experience by causing stress and anxiety. Therefore, managing individual preferences is not enough to provide these people with suitable recommendations. In order to address this issue, we propose a Top-N recommendation model that combines the user's idiosyncratic aversions with her/his preferences in a personalized way to suggest the most compatible and likable Points of Interest for her/him. We are interested in finding a user-specific balance of compatibility and interest within a recommendation model that integrates heterogeneous evaluation criteria to appropriately take these aspects into account. We tested our model on both ASD and "neurotypical" people. The evaluation results show that, on both groups, our model outperforms in accuracy and ranking capability the recommender systems based on item compatibility, on user preferences, or which integrate these two aspects by means of a uniform evaluation model.
Lifelong Learning Process: Self-Memory Supervising and Dynamically Growing Networks
Authors: Youcheng Huang, Tangchen Wei, Jundong Zhou, Chunxin Yang
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning

From childhood to youth, human gradually come to know the world. But for neural networks, this growing process seems difficult. Trapped in catastrophic forgetting, current researchers feed data of all categories to a neural network which remains the same structure in the whole training process. We compare this training process with human learing patterns, and find two major conflicts. In this paper, we study how to solve these conflicts on generative models based on the conditional variational autoencoder(CVAE) model. To solve the uncontinuous conflict, we apply memory playback strategy to maintain the model's recognizing and generating ability on invisible used categories. And we extend the traditional one-way CVAE to a circulatory mode to better accomplish memory playback strategy. To solve the `dead' structure conflict, we rewrite the CVAE formula then are able to make a novel interpretation about the funtions of different parts in CVAE models. Based on the new understanding, we find ways to dynamically extend the network structure when training on new categories. We verify the effectiveness of our methods on MNIST and Fashion MNIST and display some very insteresting results.
EAO-SLAM: Monocular Semi-Dense Object SLAM Based on Ensemble Data Association
Authors: Yanmin Wu, Yunzhou Zhang, Delong Zhu, Yonghui Feng, Sonya Coleman, Dermot Kerr
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object SLAM, Pose Estimation, Semantic SLAM

Object-level data association and pose estimation play a fundamental role in semantic SLAM, which remain unsolved due to the lack of robust and accurate algorithms. In this work, we propose an ensemble data associate strategy for integrating the parametric and nonparametric statistic tests. By exploiting the nature of different statistics, our method can effectively aggregate the information of different measurements, and thus significantly improve the robustness and accuracy of data association. We then present an accurate object pose estimation framework, in which an outliers-robust centroid and scale estimation algorithm and an object pose initialization algorithm are developed to help improve the optimality of pose estimation results. Furthermore, we build a SLAM system that can generate semi-dense or lightweight object-oriented maps with a monocular camera. Extensive experiments are conducted on three publicly available datasets and a real scenario. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in accuracy and robustness. The source code is available on: https://github.com/yanmin-wu/EAO-SLAM.
Screenplay Summarization Using Latent Narrative Structure
Authors: Pinelopi Papalampidi, Frank Keller, Lea Frermann, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Articles, Document Summarization, Extractive Summarization, Extractive Text Summarization, Position, Text Summarization, Turning Point Identification

Most general-purpose extractive summarization models are trained on news articles, which are short and present all important information upfront. As a result, such models are biased on position and often perform a smart selection of sentences from the beginning of the document. When summarizing long narratives, which have complex structure and present information piecemeal, simple position heuristics are not sufficient. In this paper, we propose to explicitly incorporate the underlying structure of narratives into general unsupervised and supervised extractive summarization models. We formalize narrative structure in terms of key narrative events (turning points) and treat it as latent in order to summarize screenplays (i.e., extract an optimal sequence of scenes). Experimental results on the CSI corpus of TV screenplays, which we augment with scene-level summarization labels, show that latent turning points correlate with important aspects of a CSI episode and improve summarization performance over general extractive algorithms leading to more complete and diverse summaries.
BLEU Neighbors: A Reference-less Approach to Automatic Evaluation
Authors: Kawin Ethayarajh, Dorsa Sadigh
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (Eval4NLP) 2020 11
Tasks: Diversity, Machine Translation, Sentence, Text Generation, Translation

Evaluation is a bottleneck in the development of natural language generation (NLG) models. Automatic metrics such as BLEU rely on references, but for tasks such as open-ended generation, there are no references to draw upon. Although language diversity can be estimated using statistical measures such as perplexity, measuring language quality requires human evaluation. However, because human evaluation at scale is slow and expensive, it is used sparingly; it cannot be used to rapidly iterate on NLG models, in the way BLEU is used for machine translation. To this end, we propose BLEU Neighbors, a nearest neighbors model for estimating language quality by using the BLEU score as a kernel function. On existing datasets for chitchat dialogue and open-ended sentence generation, we find that -- on average -- the quality estimation from a BLEU Neighbors model has a lower mean squared error and higher Spearman correlation with the ground truth than individual human annotators. Despite its simplicity, BLEU Neighbors even outperforms state-of-the-art models on automatically grading essays, including models that have access to a gold-standard reference essay.
Semantic Neighborhood-Aware Deep Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Yongjian Fu, Xintian Wu, Xi Li, Zhijie Pan, Daxin Luo
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Different from many other attributes, facial expression can change in a continuous way, and therefore, a slight semantic change of input should also lead to the output fluctuation limited in a small scale. This consistency is important. However, current Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets may have the extreme imbalance problem, as well as the lack of data and the excessive amounts of noise, hindering this consistency and leading to a performance decreasing when testing. In this paper, we not only consider the prediction accuracy on sample points, but also take the neighborhood smoothness of them into consideration, focusing on the stability of the output with respect to slight semantic perturbations of the input. A novel method is proposed to formulate semantic perturbation and select unreliable samples during training, reducing the bad effect of them. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed method and state-of-the-art results are reported, getting closer to an upper limit than the state-of-the-art methods by a factor of 30\% in AffectNet, the largest in-the-wild FER database by now.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Multiple Domain Discriminators and Adaptive Self-Training
Authors: Teo Spadotto, Marco Toldo, Umberto Michieli, Pietro Zanuttigh
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims at improving the generalization capability of a model trained on a source domain to perform well on a target domain for which no labeled data is available. In this paper, we consider the semantic segmentation of urban scenes and we propose an approach to adapt a deep neural network trained on synthetic data to real scenes addressing the domain shift between the two different data distributions. We introduce a novel UDA framework where a standard supervised loss on labeled synthetic data is supported by an adversarial module and a self-training strategy aiming at aligning the two domain distributions. The adversarial module is driven by a couple of fully convolutional discriminators dealing with different domains: the first discriminates between ground truth and generated maps, while the second between segmentation maps coming from synthetic or real world data. The self-training module exploits the confidence estimated by the discriminators on unlabeled data to select the regions used to reinforce the learning process. Furthermore, the confidence is thresholded with an adaptive mechanism based on the per-class overall confidence. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in adapting a segmentation network trained on synthetic datasets like GTA5 and SYNTHIA, to real world datasets like Cityscapes and Mapillary.
GraftNet: An Engineering Implementation of CNN for Fine-grained Multi-label Task
Authors: Chunhua Jia, Lei Zhang, Hui Huang, Weiwei Cai, Hao Hu, Rohan Adivarekar
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Multi-label networks with branches are proved to perform well in both accuracy and speed, but lacks flexibility in providing dynamic extension onto new labels due to the low efficiency of re-work on annotating and training. For multi-label classification task, to cover new labels we need to annotate not only newly collected images, but also the previous whole dataset to check presence of these new labels. Also training on whole re-annotated dataset costs much time. In order to recognize new labels more effectively and accurately, we propose GraftNet, which is a customizable tree-like network with its trunk pretrained with a dynamic graph for generic feature extraction, and branches separately trained on sub-datasets with single label to improve accuracy. GraftNet could reduce cost, increase flexibility, and incrementally handle new labels. Experimental results show that it has good performance on our human attributes recognition task, which is fine-grained multi-label classification.
Semantic Graphs for Generating Deep Questions
Authors: Liangming Pan, Yuxi Xie, Yansong Feng, Tat-Seng Chua, Min-Yen Kan
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation

This paper proposes the problem of Deep Question Generation (DQG), which aims to generate complex questions that require reasoning over multiple pieces of information of the input passage. In order to capture the global structure of the document and facilitate reasoning, we propose a novel framework which first constructs a semantic-level graph for the input document and then encodes the semantic graph by introducing an attention-based GGNN (Att-GGNN). Afterwards, we fuse the document-level and graph-level representations to perform joint training of content selection and question decoding. On the HotpotQA deep-question centric dataset, our model greatly improves performance over questions requiring reasoning over multiple facts, leading to state-of-the-art performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/WING-NUS/SG-Deep-Question-Generation.
On indirect assessment of heart rate in video
Authors: Mikhail Kopeliovich, Konstantin Kalinin, Yuriy Mironenko, Mikhail Petrushan
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, regression

Problem of indirect assessment of heart rate in video is addressed. Several methods of indirect evaluations (adaptive baselines) were examined on Remote Physiological Signal Sensing challenge. Particularly, regression models of dependency of heart rate on estimated age and motion intensity were obtained on challenge's train set. Accounting both motion and age in regression model led to top-quarter position in the leaderboard. Practical value of such adaptive baseline approaches is discussed. Although such approaches are considered as non-applicable in medicine, they are valuable as baseline for the photoplethysmography problem.
In-Vehicle Object Detection in the Wild for Driverless Vehicles
Authors: Ranjith Dinakaran, Li Zhang, Richard Jiang
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

In-vehicle human object identification plays an important role in vision-based automated vehicle driving systems while objects such as pedestrians and vehicles on roads or streets are the primary targets to protect from driverless vehicles. A challenge is the difficulty to detect objects in moving under the wild conditions, while illumination and image quality could drastically vary. In this work, to address this challenge, we exploit Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGANs) with Single Shot Detector (SSD) to handle with the wild conditions. In our work, a GAN was trained with low-quality images to handle with the challenges arising from the wild conditions in smart cities, while a cascaded SSD is employed as the object detector to perform with the GAN. We used tested our approach under wild conditions using taxi driver videos on London street in both daylight and night times, and the tests from in-vehicle videos demonstrate that this strategy can drastically achieve a better detection rate under the wild conditions.
Reconstructing normal section profiles of 3D revolving structures via pose-unconstrained multi-line structured-light vision
Authors: Junhua Sun, Zhou Zhang, Jie Zhang
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00

The wheel of the train is a 3D revolving geometrical structure. Reconstructing the normal section profile is an effective approach to determine the critical geometric parameter and wear of the wheel in the community of railway safety. The existing reconstruction methods typically require a sensor working in a constrained position and pose, suffering poor flexibility and limited viewangle. This paper proposes a pose-unconstrained normal section profile reconstruction framework for 3D revolving structures via multiple 3D general section profiles acquired by a multi-line structured light vision sensor. First, we establish a model to estimate the axis of 3D revolving geometrical structure and the normal section profile using corresponding points. Then, we embed the model into an iterative algorithm to optimize the corresponding points and finally reconstruct the accurate normal section profile. We conducted real experiment on reconstructing the normal section profile of a 3D wheel. The results demonstrate that our algorithm reaches the mean precision of 0.068mm and good repeatability with the STD of 0.007mm. It is also robust to varying pose variations of the sensor. Our proposed framework and models are generalized to any 3D wheeltype revolving components.
Empirical Bayes Transductive Meta-Learning with Synthetic Gradients
Authors: Shell Xu Hu, Pablo G. Moreno, Yang Xiao, Xi Shen, Guillaume Obozinski, Neil D. Lawrence, Andreas Damianou
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Variational Inference, Zero-Shot Learning

We propose a meta-learning approach that learns from multiple tasks in a transductive setting, by leveraging the unlabeled query set in addition to the support set to generate a more powerful model for each task. To develop our framework, we revisit the empirical Bayes formulation for multi-task learning. The evidence lower bound of the marginal log-likelihood of empirical Bayes decomposes as a sum of local KL divergences between the variational posterior and the true posterior on the query set of each task. We derive a novel amortized variational inference that couples all the variational posteriors via a meta-model, which consists of a synthetic gradient network and an initialization network. Each variational posterior is derived from synthetic gradient descent to approximate the true posterior on the query set, although where we do not have access to the true gradient. Our results on the Mini-ImageNet and CIFAR-FS benchmarks for episodic few-shot classification outperform previous state-of-the-art methods. Besides, we conduct two zero-shot learning experiments to further explore the potential of the synthetic gradient.
Remote Photoplethysmography: Rarely Considered Factors
Authors: Yuriy Mironenko, Konstantin Kalinin, Mikhail Kopeliovich, Mikhail Petrushan
Date: 2020-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Compression

Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a fast-growing technique of vital sign estimation by analyzing video of a person. Several major phenomena affecting rPPG signals have been studied (e.g. video compression, distance from person to camera, skin tone, head motions). However, to develop a highly accurate rPPG method, new, minor, factors should be investigated. First considered factor is irregular frame rate of video recordings. Despite of PPG signal transformation by frame rate irregularity, no significant distortion of PPG signal spectra was found in the experiments. Second factor is rolling shutter effect which generates tiny phase shift of the same PPG signal in different parts of the frame caused by progressive scanning. In particular conditions effect of this artifact could be of the same order of magnitude as physiologically caused phase shifts. Third factor is a size of temporal windows, which could significantly influence the estimated error of vital sign evaluation. It follows that one should account difference in size of processing windows when comparing rPPG methods. Short series of experiments were conducted to estimate importance of these phenomena and to determine necessity of their further comprehensive study.