pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Rosetta: Large scale system for text detection and recognition in images
Authors: Fedor Borisyuk, Albert Gordo, Viswanath Sivakumar
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text Detection

In this paper we present a deployed, scalable optical character recognition (OCR) system, which we call Rosetta, designed to process images uploaded daily at Facebook scale. Sharing of image content has become one of the primary ways to communicate information among internet users within social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and the understanding of such media, including its textual information, is of paramount importance to facilitate search and recommendation applications. We present modeling techniques for efficient detection and recognition of text in images and describe Rosetta's system architecture. We perform extensive evaluation of presented technologies, explain useful practical approaches to build an OCR system at scale, and provide insightful intuitions as to why and how certain components work based on the lessons learnt during the development and deployment of the system.
Sparse Reduced-Rank Regression for Simultaneous Rank and Variable Selection via Manifold Optimization
Authors: Kohei Yoshikawa, Shuichi. Kawano
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Variable Selection

We consider the problem of constructing a reduced-rank regression model whose coefficient parameter is represented as a singular value decomposition with sparse singular vectors. The traditional estimation procedure for the coefficient parameter often fails when the true rank of the parameter is high. To overcome this issue, we develop an estimation algorithm with rank and variable selection via sparse regularization and manifold optimization, which enables us to obtain an accurate estimation of the coefficient parameter even if the true rank of the coefficient parameter is high. Using sparse regularization, we can also select an optimal value of the rank. We conduct Monte Carlo experiments and real data analysis to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Multi-Task Learning for Conversational Question Answering over a Large-Scale Knowledge Base
Authors: Tao Shen, Xiubo Geng, Tao Qin, Daya Guo, Duyu Tang, Nan Duan, Guodong Long, Daxin Jiang
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Multi-Task Learning, Question Answering, Semantic Parsing

We consider the problem of conversational question answering over a large-scale knowledge base. To handle huge entity vocabulary of a large-scale knowledge base, recent neural semantic parsing based approaches usually decompose the task into several subtasks and then solve them sequentially, which leads to following issues: 1) errors in earlier subtasks will be propagated and negatively affect downstream ones; and 2) each subtask cannot naturally share supervision signals with others. To tackle these issues, we propose an innovative multi-task learning framework where a pointer-equipped semantic parsing model is designed to resolve coreference in conversations, and naturally empower joint learning with a novel type-aware entity detection model. The proposed framework thus enables shared supervisions and alleviates the effect of error propagation. Experiments on a large-scale conversational question answering dataset containing 1.6M question answering pairs over 12.8M entities show that the proposed framework improves overall F1 score from 67% to 79% compared with previous state-of-the-art work.
A Theory of Relation Learning and Cross-domain Generalization
Authors: Leonidas A. A. Doumas, Guillermo Puebla, Andrea E. Martin, John E. Hummel
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Domain Generalization, Relation, Zero-Shot Learning

People readily generalize knowledge to novel domains and stimuli. We present a theory, instantiated in a computational model, based on the idea that cross-domain generalization in humans is a case of analogical inference over structured (i.e., symbolic) relational representations. The model is an extension of the LISA and DORA models of relational inference and learning. The resulting model learns both the content and format (i.e., structure) of relational representations from non-relational inputs without supervision, when augmented with the capacity for reinforcement learning, leverages these representations to learn individual domains, and then generalizes to new domains on the first exposure (i.e., zero-shot learning) via analogical inference. We demonstrate the capacity of the model to learn structured relational representations from a variety of simple visual stimuli, and to perform cross-domain generalization between video games (Breakout and Pong) and between several psychological tasks. We demonstrate that the model's trajectory closely mirrors the trajectory of children as they learn about relations, accounting for phenomena from the literature on the development of children's reasoning and analogy making. The model's ability to generalize between domains demonstrates the flexibility afforded by representing domains in terms of their underlying relational structure, rather than simply in terms of the statistical relations between their inputs and outputs.
Keyphrase Generation: A Multi-Aspect Survey
Authors: Erion Çano, Ondřej Bojar
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Keyphrase Generation, Survey, Text Summarization

Extractive keyphrase generation research has been around since the nineties, but the more advanced abstractive approach based on the encoder-decoder framework and sequence-to-sequence learning has been explored only recently. In fact, more than a dozen of abstractive methods have been proposed in the last three years, producing meaningful keyphrases and achieving state-of-the-art scores. In this survey, we examine various aspects of the extractive keyphrase generation methods and focus mostly on the more recent abstractive methods that are based on neural networks. We pay particular attention to the mechanisms that have driven the perfection of the later. A huge collection of scientific article metadata and the corresponding keyphrases is created and released for the research community. We also present various keyphrase generation and text summarization research patterns and trends of the last two decades.
Noise as a Resource for Learning in Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Elahe Arani, Fahad Sarfraz, Bahram Zonooz
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

While noise is commonly considered a nuisance in computing systems, a number of studies in neuroscience have shown several benefits of noise in the nervous system from enabling the brain to carry out computations such as probabilistic inference as well as carrying additional information about the stimuli. Similarly, noise has been shown to improve the performance of deep neural networks. In this study, we further investigate the effect of adding noise in the knowledge distillation framework because of its resemblance to collaborative subnetworks in the brain regions. We empirically show that injecting constructive noise at different levels in the collaborative learning framework enables us to train the model effectively and distill desirable characteristics in the student model. In doing so, we propose three different methods that target the common challenges in deep neural networks: minimizing the performance gap between a compact model and large model (Fickle Teacher), training high performance compact adversarially robust models (Soft Randomization), and training models efficiently under label noise (Messy Collaboration). Our findings motivate further study in the role of noise as a resource for learning in a collaborative learning framework.
Green Deep Reinforcement Learning for Radio Resource Management: Architecture, Algorithm Compression and Challenge
Authors: Zhiyong Du, Yansha Deng, Weisi Guo, Arumugam Nallanathan, Qihui Wu
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

AI heralds a step-change in the performance and capability of wireless networks and other critical infrastructures. However, it may also cause irreversible environmental damage due to their high energy consumption. Here, we address this challenge in the context of 5G and beyond, where there is a complexity explosion in radio resource management (RRM). On the one hand, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a powerful tool for scalable optimization for high dimensional RRM problems in a dynamic environment. On the other hand, DRL algorithms consume a high amount of energy over time and risk compromising progress made in green radio research. This paper reviews and analyzes how to achieve green DRL for RRM via both architecture and algorithm innovations. Architecturally, a cloud based training and distributed decision-making DRL scheme is proposed, where RRM entities can make lightweight deep local decisions whilst assisted by on-cloud training and updating. On the algorithm level, compression approaches are introduced for both deep neural networks and the underlying Markov Decision Processes, enabling accurate low-dimensional representations of challenges. To scale learning across geographic areas, a spatial transfer learning scheme is proposed to further promote the learning efficiency of distributed DRL entities by exploiting the traffic demand correlations. Together, our proposed architecture and algorithms provide a vision for green and on-demand DRL capability.
BiPaR: A Bilingual Parallel Dataset for Multilingual and Cross-lingual Reading Comprehension on Novels
Authors: Yimin Jing, Deyi Xiong, Yan Zhen
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, Sentence

This paper presents BiPaR, a bilingual parallel novel-style machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset, developed to support multilingual and cross-lingual reading comprehension. The biggest difference between BiPaR and existing reading comprehension datasets is that each triple (Passage, Question, Answer) in BiPaR is written parallelly in two languages. We collect 3,667 bilingual parallel paragraphs from Chinese and English novels, from which we construct 14,668 parallel question-answer pairs via crowdsourced workers following a strict quality control procedure. We analyze BiPaR in depth and find that BiPaR offers good diversification in prefixes of questions, answer types and relationships between questions and passages. We also observe that answering questions of novels requires reading comprehension skills of coreference resolution, multi-sentence reasoning, and understanding of implicit causality, etc. With BiPaR, we build monolingual, multilingual, and cross-lingual MRC baseline models. Even for the relatively simple monolingual MRC on this dataset, experiments show that a strong BERT baseline is over 30 points behind human in terms of both EM and F1 score, indicating that BiPaR provides a challenging testbed for monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual MRC on novels. The dataset is available at https://multinlp.github.io/BiPaR/.
CHD:Consecutive Horizontal Dropout for Human Gait Feature Extraction
Authors: Chengtao Cai, Yueyuan Zhou, Yanming Wang
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Gait Recognition, Person Re-Identification

Despite gait recognition and person re-identification researches have made a lot of progress, the accuracy of identification is not high enough in some specific situations, for example, people carrying bags or changing coats. In order to alleviate above situations, we propose a simple but effective Consecutive Horizontal Dropout (CHD) method apply on human feature extraction in deep learning network to avoid overfitting. Within the CHD, we intensify the robust of deep learning network for cross-view gait recognition and person re-identification. The experiments illustrate that the rank-1 accuracy on cross-view gait recognition task has been increased about 10% from 68.0% to 78.201% and 8% from 83.545% to 91.364% in person re-identification task in wearing coat or jacket condition. In addition, 100% accuracy of NM condition was first obtained with CHD. On the benchmarks of CASIA-B, above accuracies are state-of-the-arts.
Group, Extract and Aggregate: Summarizing a Large Amount of Finance News for Forex Movement Prediction
Authors: Deli Chen, Shuming Ma, Keiko Harimoto, Ruihan Bao, Qi Su, Xu sun
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 11
Tasks: Extractive Summarization, Stock Market Prediction

Incorporating related text information has proven successful in stock market prediction. However, it is a huge challenge to utilize texts in the enormous forex (foreign currency exchange) market because the associated texts are too redundant. In this work, we propose a BERT-based Hierarchical Aggregation Model to summarize a large amount of finance news to predict forex movement. We firstly group news from different aspects: time, topic and category. Then we extract the most crucial news in each group by the SOTA extractive summarization method. Finally, we conduct interaction between the news and the trade data with attention to predict the forex movement. The experimental results show that the category based method performs best among three grouping methods and outperforms all the baselines. Besides, we study the influence of essential news attributes (category and region) by statistical analysis and summarize the influence patterns for different currency pairs.
Finding Interpretable Concept Spaces in Node Embeddings using Knowledge Bases
Authors: Maximilian Idahl, Megha Khosla, Avishek Anand
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00

In this paper we propose and study the novel problem of explaining node embeddings by finding embedded human interpretable subspaces in already trained unsupervised node representation embeddings. We use an external knowledge base that is organized as a taxonomy of human-understandable concepts over entities as a guide to identify subspaces in node embeddings learned from an entity graph derived from Wikipedia. We propose a method that given a concept finds a linear transformation to a subspace where the structure of the concept is retained. Our initial experiments show that we obtain low error in finding fine-grained concepts.
Customizing Sequence Generation with Multi-Task Dynamical Systems
Authors: Alex Bird, Christopher K. I. Williams
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Dynamical system models (including RNNs) often lack the ability to adapt the sequence generation or prediction to a given context, limiting their real-world application. In this paper we show that hierarchical multi-task dynamical systems (MTDSs) provide direct user control over sequence generation, via use of a latent code $\mathbf{z}$ that specifies the customization to the individual data sequence. This enables style transfer, interpolation and morphing within generated sequences. We show the MTDS can improve predictions via latent code interpolation, and avoid the long-term performance degradation of standard RNN approaches.
Shooting Labels: 3D Semantic Labeling by Virtual Reality
Authors: Pierluigi Zama Ramirez, Claudio Paternesi, Luca De Luigi, Luigi Lella, Daniele De Gregorio, Luigi Di Stefano
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Availability of a few, large-size, annotated datasets, like ImageNet, Pascal VOC and COCO, has lead deep learning to revolutionize computer vision research by achieving astonishing results in several vision tasks.We argue that new tools to facilitate generation of annotated datasets may help spreading data-driven AI throughout applications and domains. In this work we propose Shooting Labels, the first 3D labeling tool for dense 3D semantic segmentation which exploits Virtual Reality to render the labeling task as easy and fun as playing a video-game. Our tool allows for semantically labeling large scale environments very expeditiously, whatever the nature of the 3D data at hand (e.g. point clouds, mesh). Furthermore, Shooting Labels efficiently integrates multiusers annotations to improve the labeling accuracy automatically and compute a label uncertainty map. Besides, within our framework the 3D annotations can be projected into 2D images, thereby speeding up also a notoriously slow and expensive task such as pixel-wise semantic labeling. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our tool in two different scenarios: an indoor workspace provided by Matterport3D and a large-scale outdoor environment reconstructed from 1000+ KITTI images.
Verification of Neural Networks: Specifying Global Robustness using Generative Models
Authors: Nathanaël Fijalkow, Mohit Kumar Gupta
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00

The success of neural networks across most machine learning tasks and the persistence of adversarial examples have made the verification of such models an important quest. Several techniques have been successfully developed to verify robustness, and are now able to evaluate neural networks with thousands of nodes. The main weakness of this approach is in the specification: robustness is asserted on a validation set consisting of a finite set of examples, i.e. locally. We propose a notion of global robustness based on generative models, which asserts the robustness on a very large and representative set of examples. We show how this can be used for verifying neural networks. In this paper we experimentally explore the merits of this approach, and show how it can be used to construct realistic adversarial examples.
Automatic segmentation of texts into units of meaning for reading assistance
Authors: Jean-Claude Houbart, Solen Quiniou, Marion Berthaut, Béatrice Daille, Claire Salomé
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Transfer Learning

The emergence of the digital book is a major step forward in providing access to reading, and therefore often to the common culture and the labour market. By allowing the enrichment of texts with cognitive crutches, EPub 3 compatible accessibility formats such as FROG have proven their effectiveness in alleviating but also reducing dyslexic disorders. In this paper, we show how Artificial Intelligence and particularly Transfer Learning with Google BERT can automate the division into units of meaning, and thus facilitate the creation of enriched digital books at a moderate cost.
Inundation Modeling in Data Scarce Regions
Authors: Zvika Ben-Haim, Vladimir Anisimov, Aaron Yonas, Varun Gulshan, Yusef Shafi, Stephan Hoyer, Sella Nevo
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00

Flood forecasts are crucial for effective individual and governmental protective action. The vast majority of flood-related casualties occur in developing countries, where providing spatially accurate forecasts is a challenge due to scarcity of data and lack of funding. This paper describes an operational system providing flood extent forecast maps covering several flood-prone regions in India, with the goal of being sufficiently scalable and cost-efficient to facilitate the establishment of effective flood forecasting systems globally.
Learning from demonstration with model-based Gaussian process
Authors: Noémie Jaquier, David Ginsbourger, Sylvain Calinon
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: model

In learning from demonstrations, it is often desirable to adapt the behavior of the robot as a function of the variability retrieved from human demonstrations and the (un)certainty encoded in different parts of the task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-output Gaussian process (MOGP) based on Gaussian mixture regression (GMR). The proposed approach encapsulates the variability retrieved from the demonstrations in the covariance of the MOGP. Leveraging the generative nature of GP models, our approach can efficiently modulate trajectories towards new start-, via- or end-points defined by the task. Our framework allows the robot to precisely track via-points while being compliant in regions of high variability. We illustrate the proposed approach in simulated examples and validate it in a real-robot experiment.
Generalized Planning With Procedural Domain Control Knowledge
Authors: Javier Segovia-Aguas, Sergio Jiménez, Anders Jonsson
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Generalized planning is the task of generating a single solution that is valid for a set of planning problems. In this paper we show how to represent and compute generalized plans using procedural Domain Control Knowledge (DCK). We define a {\it divide and conquer} approach that first generates the procedural DCK solving a set of planning problems representative of certain subtasks and then compile it as callable procedures of the overall generalized planning problem. Our procedure calling mechanism allows nested and recursive procedure calls and is implemented in PDDL so that classical planners can compute and exploit procedural DCK. Experiments show that an off-the-shelf classical planner, using procedural DCK as callable procedures, can compute generalized plans in a wide range of domains including non-trivial ones, such as sorting variable-size lists or DFS traversal of binary trees with variable size.
Bayesian Optimization Meets Riemannian Manifolds in Robot Learning
Authors: Noémie Jaquier, Leonel Rozo, Sylvain Calinon, Mathias Bürger
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Reinforcement Learning

Bayesian optimization (BO) recently became popular in robotics to optimize control parameters and parametric policies in direct reinforcement learning due to its data efficiency and gradient-free approach. However, its performance may be seriously compromised when the parameter space is high-dimensional. A way to tackle this problem is to introduce domain knowledge into the BO framework. We propose to exploit the geometry of non-Euclidean parameter spaces, which often arise in robotics (e.g. orientation, stiffness matrix). Our approach, built on Riemannian manifold theory, allows BO to properly measure similarities in the parameter space through geometry-aware kernel functions and to optimize the acquisition function on the manifold as an unconstrained problem. We test our approach in several benchmark artificial landscapes and using a 7-DOF simulated robot to learn orientation and impedance parameters for manipulation skills.
End-to-End Defect Detection in Automated Fiber Placement Based on Artificially Generated Data
Authors: Sebastian Zambal, Christoph Heindl, Christian Eitzinger, Josef Scharinger
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Automated fiber placement (AFP) is an advanced manufacturing technology that increases the rate of production of composite materials. At the same time, the need for adaptable and fast inline control methods of such parts raises. Existing inspection systems make use of handcrafted filter chains and feature detectors, tuned for a specific measurement methods by domain experts. These methods hardly scale to new defects or different measurement devices. In this paper, we propose to formulate AFP defect detection as an image segmentation problem that can be solved in an end-to-end fashion using artificially generated training data. We employ a probabilistic graphical model to generate training images and annotations. We then train a deep neural network based on recent architectures designed for image segmentation. This leads to an appealing method that scales well with new defect types and measurement devices and requires little real world data for training.