pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Secure Architectures Implementing Trusted Coalitions for Blockchained Distributed Learning (TCLearn)
Authors: Sebastien Lugan, Paul Desbordes, Luis Xavier Ramos Tormo, Axel Legay, Benoit Macq
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Optimization

Distributed learning across a coalition of organizations allows the members of the coalition to train and share a model without sharing the data used to optimize this model. In this paper, we propose new secure architectures that guarantee preservation of data privacy, trustworthy sequence of iterative learning and equitable sharing of the learned model among each member of the coalition by using adequate encryption and blockchain mechanisms. We exemplify its deployment in the case of the distributed optimization of a deep learning convolutional neural network trained on medical images.
Expressing Visual Relationships via Language
Authors: Hao Tan, Franck Dernoncourt, Zhe Lin, Trung Bui, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Decoder, Image Captioning, Retrieval

Describing images with text is a fundamental problem in vision-language research. Current studies in this domain mostly focus on single image captioning. However, in various real applications (e.g., image editing, difference interpretation, and retrieval), generating relational captions for two images, can also be very useful. This important problem has not been explored mostly due to lack of datasets and effective models. To push forward the research in this direction, we first introduce a new language-guided image editing dataset that contains a large number of real image pairs with corresponding editing instructions. We then propose a new relational speaker model based on an encoder-decoder architecture with static relational attention and sequential multi-head attention. We also extend the model with dynamic relational attention, which calculates visual alignment while decoding. Our models are evaluated on our newly collected and two public datasets consisting of image pairs annotated with relationship sentences. Experimental results, based on both automatic and human evaluation, demonstrate that our model outperforms all baselines and existing methods on all the datasets.
Parameterized quantum circuits as machine learning models
Authors: Marcello Benedetti, Erika Lloyd, Stefan Sack, Mattia Fiorentini
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Hybrid quantum-classical systems make it possible to utilize existing quantum computers to their fullest extent. Within this framework, parameterized quantum circuits can be regarded as machine learning models with remarkable expressive power. This Review presents the components of these models and discusses their application to a variety of data-driven tasks, such as supervised learning and generative modeling. With an increasing number of experimental demonstrations carried out on actual quantum hardware and with software being actively developed, this rapidly growing field is poised to have a broad spectrum of real-world applications.
Multiclass segmentation as multitask learning for drusen segmentation in retinal optical coherence tomography
Authors: Rhona Asgari, José Ignacio Orlando, Sebastian Waldstein, Ferdinand Schlanitz, Magdalena Baratsits, Ursula Schmidt-Erfurth, Hrvoje Bogunović
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation

Automated drusen segmentation in retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) scans is relevant for understanding age-related macular degeneration (AMD) risk and progression. This task is usually performed by segmenting the top/bottom anatomical interfaces that define drusen, the outer boundary of the retinal pigment epithelium (OBRPE) and the Bruch's membrane (BM), respectively. In this paper we propose a novel multi-decoder architecture that tackles drusen segmentation as a multitask problem. Instead of training a multiclass model for OBRPE/BM segmentation, we use one decoder per target class and an extra one aiming for the area between the layers. We also introduce connections between each class-specific branch and the additional decoder to increase the regularization effect of this surrogate task. We validated our approach on private/public data sets with 166 early/intermediate AMD Spectralis, and 200 AMD and control Bioptigen OCT volumes, respectively. Our method consistently outperformed several baselines in both layer and drusen segmentation evaluations.
Weather Influence and Classification with Automotive Lidar Sensors
Authors: Robin Heinzler, Philipp Schindler, Jürgen Seekircher, Werner Ritter, Wilhelm Stork
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Classification, General Classification

Lidar sensors are often used in mobile robots and autonomous vehicles to complement camera, radar and ultrasonic sensors for environment perception. Typically, perception algorithms are trained to only detect moving and static objects as well as ground estimation, but intentionally ignore weather effects to reduce false detections. In this work, we present an in-depth analysis of automotive lidar performance under harsh weather conditions, i.e. heavy rain and dense fog. An extensive data set has been recorded for various fog and rain conditions, which is the basis for the conducted in-depth analysis of the point cloud under changing environmental conditions. In addition, we introduce a novel approach to detect and classify rain or fog with lidar sensors only and achieve an mean union over intersection of 97.14 % for a data set in controlled environments. The analysis of weather influences on the performance of lidar sensors and the weather detection are important steps towards improving safety levels for autonomous driving in adverse weather conditions by providing reliable information to adapt vehicle behavior.
ADA-Tucker: Compressing Deep Neural Networks via Adaptive Dimension Adjustment Tucker Decomposition
Authors: Zhisheng Zhong, Fangyin Wei, Zhouchen Lin, Chao Zhang
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00

Despite the recent success of deep learning models in numerous applications, their widespread use on mobile devices is seriously impeded by storage and computational requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel network compression method called Adaptive Dimension Adjustment Tucker decomposition (ADA-Tucker). With learnable core tensors and transformation matrices, ADA-Tucker performs Tucker decomposition of arbitrary-order tensors. Furthermore, we propose that weight tensors in networks with proper order and balanced dimension are easier to be compressed. Therefore, the high flexibility in decomposition choice distinguishes ADA-Tucker from all previous low-rank models. To compress more, we further extend the model to Shared Core ADA-Tucker (SCADA-Tucker) by defining a shared core tensor for all layers. Our methods require no overhead of recording indices of non-zero elements. Without loss of accuracy, our methods reduce the storage of LeNet-5 and LeNet-300 by ratios of 691 times and 233 times, respectively, significantly outperforming state of the art. The effectiveness of our methods is also evaluated on other three benchmarks (CIFAR-10, SVHN, ILSVRC12) and modern newly deep networks (ResNet, Wide-ResNet).
Intrinsic dimension estimation for locally undersampled data
Authors: Vittorio Erba, Marco Gherardi, Pietro Rotondo
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

High-dimensional data are ubiquitous in contemporary science and finding methods to compress them is one of the primary goals of machine learning. Given a dataset lying in a high-dimensional space (in principle hundreds to several thousands of dimensions), it is often useful to project it onto a lower-dimensional manifold, without loss of information. Identifying the minimal dimension of such manifold is a challenging problem known in the literature as intrinsic dimension estimation (IDE). Traditionally, most IDE algorithms are either based on multiscale principal component analysis (PCA) or on the notion of correlation dimension (and more in general on k-nearest-neighbors distances). These methods are affected, in different ways, by a severe curse of dimensionality. In particular, none of the existing algorithms can provide accurate ID estimates in the extreme locally undersampled regime, i.e. in the limit where the number of samples in any local patch of the manifold is less than (or of the same order of) the ID of the dataset. Here we introduce a new ID estimator that leverages on simple properties of the tangent space of a manifold to overcome these shortcomings. The method is based on the full correlation integral, going beyond the limit of small radius used for the estimation of the correlation dimension. Our estimator alleviates the extreme undersampling problem, intractable with other methods. Based on this insight, we explore a multiscale generalization of the algorithm. We show that it is capable of (i) identifying multiple dimensionalities in a dataset, and (ii) providing accurate estimates of the ID of extremely curved manifolds. In particular, we test the method on manifolds generated from global transformations of high-contrast images, relevant for invariant object recognition and considered a challenge for state-of-the-art ID estimators.
Better transfer learning with inferred successor maps
Authors: Tamas J. Madarasz
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Hippocampus, Multi-Task Learning, Transfer Learning

Humans and animals show remarkable flexibility in adjusting their behaviour when their goals, or rewards in the environment change. While such flexibility is a hallmark of intelligent behaviour, these multi-task scenarios remain an important challenge for machine learning algorithms and neurobiological models alike. We investigated two approaches that could enable this flexibility: factorized representations, which abstract away general aspects of a task from those prone to change, and nonparametric, memory-based approaches, which can provide a principled way of using similarity to past experiences to guide current behaviour. In particular, we combine the successor representation (SR) that factors the value of actions into expected outcomes and corresponding rewards with evaluating task similarity through clustering the space of reward functions. The proposed algorithm inverts a generative model over tasks, and dynamically samples from a flexible number of distinct SR maps while accumulating evidence about the current task context through amortized inference. It improves SR's transfer capabilities and outperforms competing algorithms and baselines in settings with both known and unsignalled rewards changes. Further, as a neurobiological model of spatial coding in the hippocampus, it explains important signatures of this representation, such as the "flickering" behaviour of hippocampal maps, and trajectory-dependent place cells (so-called splitter cells) and their dynamics. We thus provide a novel algorithmic approach for multi-task learning, as well as a common normative framework that links together these different characteristics of the brain's spatial representation.
State-of-the-Art Vietnamese Word Segmentation
Authors: Song Nguyen Duc Cong, Quoc Hung Ngo, Rachsuda Jiamthapthaksin
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Segmentation, Vietnamese Word Segmentation

Word segmentation is the first step of any tasks in Vietnamese language processing. This paper reviews stateof-the-art approaches and systems for word segmentation in Vietnamese. To have an overview of all stages from building corpora to developing toolkits, we discuss building the corpus stage, approaches applied to solve the word segmentation and existing toolkits to segment words in Vietnamese sentences. In addition, this study shows clearly the motivations on building corpus and implementing machine learning techniques to improve the accuracy for Vietnamese word segmentation. According to our observation, this study also reports a few of achivements and limitations in existing Vietnamese word segmentation systems.
Estimating a Manifold from a Tangent Bundle Learner
Authors: Bharathkumar Ramachandra, Benjamin Dutton, Ranga Raju Vatsavai
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Manifold hypotheses are typically used for tasks such as dimensionality reduction, interpolation, or improving classification performance. In the less common problem of manifold estimation, the task is to characterize the geometric structure of the manifold in the original ambient space from a sample. We focus on the role that tangent bundle learners (TBL) can play in estimating the underlying manifold from which data is assumed to be sampled. Since the unbounded tangent spaces natively represent a poor manifold estimate, the problem reduces to one of estimating regions in the tangent space where it acts as a relatively faithful linear approximator to the surface of the manifold. Local PCA methods, such as the Mixtures of Probabilistic Principal Component Analyzers method of Tipping and Bishop produce a subset of the tangent bundle of the manifold along with an assignment function that assigns points in the training data used by the TBL to elements of the estimated tangent bundle. We formulate three methods that use the data assigned to each tangent space to estimate the underlying bounded subspaces for which the tangent space is a faithful estimate of the manifold and offer thoughts on how this perspective is theoretically grounded in the manifold assumption. We seek to explore the conceptual and technical challenges that arise in trying to utilize simple TBL methods to arrive at reliable estimates of the underlying manifold.
Consistency of semi-supervised learning algorithms on graphs: Probit and one-hot methods
Authors: Franca Hoffmann, Bamdad Hosseini, Zhi Ren, Andrew M. Stuart
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, General Classification, Multi-class Classification

Graph-based semi-supervised learning is the problem of propagating labels from a small number of labelled data points to a larger set of unlabelled data. This paper is concerned with the consistency of optimization-based techniques for such problems, in the limit where the labels have small noise and the underlying unlabelled data is well clustered. We study graph-based probit for binary classification, and a natural generalization of this method to multi-class classification using one-hot encoding. The resulting objective function to be optimized comprises the sum of a quadratic form defined through a rational function of the graph Laplacian, involving only the unlabelled data, and a fidelity term involving only the labelled data. The consistency analysis sheds light on the choice of the rational function defining the optimization.
Scheduled Sampling for Transformers
Authors: Tsvetomila Mihaylova, André F. T. Martins
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Sentence

Scheduled sampling is a technique for avoiding one of the known problems in sequence-to-sequence generation: exposure bias. It consists of feeding the model a mix of the teacher forced embeddings and the model predictions from the previous step in training time. The technique has been used for improving the model performance with recurrent neural networks (RNN). In the Transformer model, unlike the RNN, the generation of a new word attends to the full sentence generated so far, not only to the last word, and it is not straightforward to apply the scheduled sampling technique. We propose some structural changes to allow scheduled sampling to be applied to Transformer architecture, via a two-pass decoding strategy. Experiments on two language pairs achieve performance close to a teacher-forcing baseline and show that this technique is promising for further exploration.
Weakly Supervised Clustering by Exploiting Unique Class Count
Authors: Mustafa Umit Oner, Hwee Kuan Lee, Wing-Kin Sung
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Clustering, Multiple Instance Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-supervised Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

A weakly supervised learning based clustering framework is proposed in this paper. As the core of this framework, we introduce a novel multiple instance learning task based on a bag level label called unique class count ($ucc$), which is the number of unique classes among all instances inside the bag. In this task, no annotations on individual instances inside the bag are needed during training of the models. We mathematically prove that with a perfect $ucc$ classifier, perfect clustering of individual instances inside the bags is possible even when no annotations on individual instances are given during training. We have constructed a neural network based $ucc$ classifier and experimentally shown that the clustering performance of our framework with our weakly supervised $ucc$ classifier is comparable to that of fully supervised learning models where labels for all instances are known. Furthermore, we have tested the applicability of our framework to a real world task of semantic segmentation of breast cancer metastases in histological lymph node sections and shown that the performance of our weakly supervised framework is comparable to the performance of a fully supervised Unet model.
3D Geometric salient patterns analysis on 3D meshes
Authors: Alice Othmani, Fakhri Torkhani, Jean-Marie Favreau
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Texture Classification

Pattern analysis is a wide domain that has wide applicability in many fields. In fact, texture analysis is one of those fields, since the texture is defined as a set of repetitive or quasi-repetitive patterns. Despite its importance in analyzing 3D meshes, geometric texture analysis is less studied by geometry processing community. This paper presents a new efficient approach for geometric texture analysis on 3D triangular meshes. The proposed method is a scale-aware approach that takes as input a 3D mesh and a user-scale. It provides, as a result, a similarity-based clustering of texels in meaningful classes. Experimental results of the proposed algorithm are presented for both real-world and synthetic meshes within various textures. Furthermore, the efficiency of the proposed approach was experimentally demonstrated under mesh simplification and noise addition on the mesh surface. In this paper, we present a practical application for semantic annotation of 3D geometric salient texels.
Towards White-box Benchmarks for Algorithm Control
Authors: André Biedenkapp, H. Furkan Bozkurt, Frank Hutter, Marius Lindauer
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), valid

The performance of many algorithms in the fields of hard combinatorial problem solving, machine learning or AI in general depends on tuned hyperparameter configurations. Automated methods have been proposed to alleviate users from the tedious and error-prone task of manually searching for performance-optimized configurations across a set of problem instances. However there is still a lot of untapped potential through adjusting an algorithm's hyperparameters online since different hyperparameters are potentially optimal at different stages of the algorithm. We formulate the problem of adjusting an algorithm's hyperparameters for a given instance on the fly as a contextual MDP, making reinforcement learning (RL) the prime candidate to solve the resulting algorithm control problem in a data-driven way. Furthermore, inspired by applications of algorithm configuration, we introduce new white-box benchmarks suitable to study algorithm control. We show that on short sequences, algorithm configuration is a valid choice, but that with increasing sequence length a black-box view on the problem quickly becomes infeasible and RL performs better.
From Clustering to Cluster Explanations via Neural Networks
Authors: Jacob Kauffmann, Malte Esders, Lukas Ruff, Grégoire Montavon, Wojciech Samek, Klaus-Robert Müller
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

A recent trend in machine learning has been to enrich learned models with the ability to explain their own predictions. The emerging field of Explainable AI (XAI) has so far mainly focused on supervised learning, in particular, deep neural network classifiers. In many practical problems however, label information is not given and the goal is instead to discover the underlying structure of the data, for example, its clusters. While powerful methods exist for extracting the cluster structure in data, they typically do not answer the question why a certain data point has been assigned to a given cluster. We propose a new framework that can, for the first time, explain cluster assignments in terms of input features in an efficient and reliable manner. It is based on the novel insight that clustering models can be rewritten as neural networks - or 'neuralized'. Cluster predictions of the obtained networks can then be quickly and accurately attributed to the input features. Several showcases demonstrate the ability of our method to assess the quality of learned clusters and to extract novel insights from the analyzed data and representations.
Model Explanations under Calibration
Authors: Rishabh Jain, Pranava Madhyastha
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Recommendation Systems, valid

Explaining and interpreting the decisions of recommender systems are becoming extremely relevant both, for improving predictive performance, and providing valid explanations to users. While most of the recent interest has focused on providing local explanations, there has been a much lower emphasis on studying the effects of model dynamics and its impact on explanation. In this paper, we perform a focused study on the impact of model interpretability in the context of calibration. Specifically, we address the challenges of both over-confident and under-confident predictions with interpretability using attention distribution. Our results indicate that the means of using attention distributions for interpretability are highly unstable for un-calibrated models. Our empirical analysis on the stability of attention distribution raises questions on the utility of attention for explainability.
Simple Algorithms for Dueling Bandits
Authors: Tyler Lekang, Andrew Lamperski
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00

In this paper, we present simple algorithms for Dueling Bandits. We prove that the algorithms have regret bounds for time horizon T of order O(T^rho ) with 1/2 <= rho <= 3/4, which importantly do not depend on any preference gap between actions, Delta. Dueling Bandits is an important extension of the Multi-Armed Bandit problem, in which the algorithm must select two actions at a time and only receives binary feedback for the duel outcome. This is analogous to comparisons in which the rater can only provide yes/no or better/worse type responses. We compare our simple algorithms to the current state-of-the-art for Dueling Bandits, ISS and DTS, discussing complexity and regret upper bounds, and conducting experiments on synthetic data that demonstrate their regret performance, which in some cases exceeds state-of-the-art.