pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Explainable Reinforcement Learning Through a Causal Lens
Authors: Prashan Madumal, Tim Miller, Liz Sonenberg, Frank Vetere
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Starcraft, Starcraft II

Prevalent theories in cognitive science propose that humans understand and represent the knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In making sense of the world, we build causal models in our mind to encode cause-effect relations of events and use these to explain why new events happen. In this paper, we use causal models to derive causal explanations of behaviour of reinforcement learning agents. We present an approach that learns a structural causal model during reinforcement learning and encodes causal relationships between variables of interest. This model is then used to generate explanations of behaviour based on counterfactual analysis of the causal model. We report on a study with 120 participants who observe agents playing a real-time strategy game (Starcraft II) and then receive explanations of the agents' behaviour. We investigated: 1) participants' understanding gained by explanations through task prediction; 2) explanation satisfaction and 3) trust. Our results show that causal model explanations perform better on these measures compared to two other baseline explanation models.
Enhancing Item Response Theory for Cognitive Diagnosis
Authors: Song Cheng, Qi Liu
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: cognitive diagnosis

Cognitive diagnosis is a fundamental and crucial task in many educational applications, e.g., computer adaptive test and cognitive assignments. Item Response Theory (IRT) is a classical cognitive diagnosis method which can provide interpretable parameters (i.e., student latent trait, question discrimination, and difficulty) for analyzing student performance. However, traditional IRT ignores the rich information in question texts, cannot diagnose knowledge concept proficiency, and it is inaccurate to diagnose the parameters for the questions which only appear several times. To this end, in this paper, we propose a general Deep Item Response Theory (DIRT) framework to enhance traditional IRT for cognitive diagnosis by exploiting semantic representation from question texts with deep learning. In DIRT, we first use a proficiency vector to represent students' proficiency in knowledge concepts and embed question texts and knowledge concepts to dense vectors by Word2Vec. Then, we design a deep diagnosis module to diagnose parameters in traditional IRT by deep learning techniques. Finally, with the diagnosed parameters, we input them into the logistic-like formula of IRT to predict student performance. Extensive experimental results on real-world data clearly demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretation power of DIRT framework.
Dynamically Visual Disambiguation of Keyword-based Image Search
Authors: Yazhou Yao, Zeren Sun, Fumin Shen, Li Liu, Li-Min Wang, Fan Zhu, Lizhong Ding, Gangshan Wu, Ling Shao
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Image Retrieval

Due to the high cost of manual annotation, learning directly from the web has attracted broad attention. One issue that limits their performance is the problem of visual polysemy. To address this issue, we present an adaptive multi-model framework that resolves polysemy by visual disambiguation. Compared to existing methods, the primary advantage of our approach lies in that our approach can adapt to the dynamic changes in the search results. Our proposed framework consists of two major steps: we first discover and dynamically select the text queries according to the image search results, then we employ the proposed saliency-guided deep multi-instance learning network to remove outliers and learn classification models for visual disambiguation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach.
Transcribing Content from Structural Images with Spotlight Mechanism
Authors: Yu Yin, Zhenya Huang, Enhong Chen, Qi Liu, Fuzheng Zhang, Xing Xie, Guoping Hu
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00

Transcribing content from structural images, e.g., writing notes from music scores, is a challenging task as not only the content objects should be recognized, but the internal structure should also be preserved. Existing image recognition methods mainly work on images with simple content (e.g., text lines with characters), but are not capable to identify ones with more complex content (e.g., structured symbols), which often follow a fine-grained grammar. To this end, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical Spotlight Transcribing Network (STN) framework followed by a two-stage "where-to-what" solution. Specifically, we first decide "where-to-look" through a novel spotlight mechanism to focus on different areas of the original image following its structure. Then, we decide "what-to-write" by developing a GRU based network with the spotlight areas for transcribing the content accordingly. Moreover, we propose two implementations on the basis of STN, i.e., STNM and STNR, where the spotlight movement follows the Markov property and Recurrent modeling, respectively. We also design a reinforcement method to refine the framework by self-improving the spotlight mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments on many structural image datasets, where the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of STN framework.
FOBE and HOBE: First- and High-Order Bipartite Embeddings
Authors: Justin Sybrandt, Ilya Safro
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization, Drug Discovery, Link Prediction, Recommendation Systems, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Typical graph embeddings may not capture type-specific bipartite graph features that arise in such areas as recommender systems, data visualization, and drug discovery. Machine learning methods utilized in these applications would be better served with specialized embedding techniques. We propose two embeddings for bipartite graphs that decompose edges into sets of indirect relationships between node neighborhoods. When sampling higher-order relationships, we reinforce similarities through algebraic distance on graphs. We also introduce ensemble embeddings to combine both into a "best of both worlds" embedding. The proposed methods are evaluated on link prediction and recommendation tasks and compared with other state-of-the-art embeddings. While being all highly beneficial in applications, we demonstrate that none of the considered embeddings is clearly superior (in contrast to what is claimed in many papers), and discuss the trade offs present among them. Reproducibility: Our code, data sets, and results are all publicly available online at: http://sybrandt.com/2020/fobe_hobe.
Incremental Learning Using a Grow-and-Prune Paradigm with Efficient Neural Networks
Authors: Xiaoliang Dai, Hongxu Yin, Niraj K. Jha
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become a widely deployed model for numerous machine learning applications. However, their fixed architecture, substantial training cost, and significant model redundancy make it difficult to efficiently update them to accommodate previously unseen data. To solve these problems, we propose an incremental learning framework based on a grow-and-prune neural network synthesis paradigm. When new data arrive, the neural network first grows new connections based on the gradients to increase the network capacity to accommodate new data. Then, the framework iteratively prunes away connections based on the magnitude of weights to enhance network compactness, and hence recover efficiency. Finally, the model rests at a lightweight DNN that is both ready for inference and suitable for future grow-and-prune updates. The proposed framework improves accuracy, shrinks network size, and significantly reduces the additional training cost for incoming data compared to conventional approaches, such as training from scratch and network fine-tuning. For the LeNet-300-100 and LeNet-5 neural network architectures derived for the MNIST dataset, the framework reduces training cost by up to 64% (63%) and 67% (63%) compared to training from scratch (network fine-tuning), respectively. For the ResNet-18 architecture derived for the ImageNet dataset and DeepSpeech2 for the AN4 dataset, the corresponding training cost reductions against training from scratch (network fine-tunning) are 64% (60%) and 67% (62%), respectively. Our derived models contain fewer network parameters but achieve higher accuracy relative to conventional baselines.
On the Evaluation Metric for Hashing
Authors: Qing-Yuan Jiang, Ming-Wei Li, Wu-Jun Li
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Due to its low storage cost and fast query speed, hashing has been widely used for large-scale approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. Bucket search, also called hash lookup, can achieve fast query speed with a sub-linear time cost based on the inverted index table constructed from hash codes. Many metrics have been adopted to evaluate hashing algorithms. However, all existing metrics are improper to evaluate the hash codes for bucket search. On one hand, all existing metrics ignore the retrieval time cost which is an important factor reflecting the performance of search. On the other hand, some of them, such as mean average precision (MAP), suffer from the uncertainty problem as the ranked list is based on integer-valued Hamming distance, and are insensitive to Hamming radius as these metrics only depend on relative Hamming distance. Other metrics, such as precision at Hamming radius R, fail to evaluate global performance as these metrics only depend on one specific Hamming radius. In this paper, we first point out the problems of existing metrics which have been ignored by the hashing community, and then propose a novel evaluation metric called radius aware mean average precision (RAMAP) to evaluate hash codes for bucket search. Furthermore, two coding strategies are also proposed to qualitatively show the problems of existing metrics. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed RAMAP can provide more proper evaluation than existing metrics.
QuesNet: A Unified Representation for Heterogeneous Test Questions
Authors: Yu Yin, Qi Liu, Zhenya Huang, Enhong Chen, Wei Tong, Shijin Wang, Yu Su
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

Understanding learning materials (e.g. test questions) is a crucial issue in online learning systems, which can promote many applications in education domain. Unfortunately, many supervised approaches suffer from the problem of scarce human labeled data, whereas abundant unlabeled resources are highly underutilized. To alleviate this problem, an effective solution is to use pre-trained representations for question understanding. However, existing pre-training methods in NLP area are infeasible to learn test question representations due to several domain-specific characteristics in education. First, questions usually comprise of heterogeneous data including content text, images and side information. Second, there exists both basic linguistic information as well as domain logic and knowledge. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method, namely QuesNet, for comprehensively learning question representations. Specifically, we first design a unified framework to aggregate question information with its heterogeneous inputs into a comprehensive vector. Then we propose a two-level hierarchical pre-training algorithm to learn better understanding of test questions in an unsupervised way. Here, a novel holed language model objective is developed to extract low-level linguistic features, and a domain-oriented objective is proposed to learn high-level logic and knowledge. Moreover, we show that QuesNet has good capability of being fine-tuned in many question-based tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on large-scale real-world question data, where the experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of QuesNet for question understanding as well as its superior applicability.
Provably Efficient Imitation Learning from Observation Alone
Authors: Wen Sun, Anirudh Vemula, Byron Boots, J. Andrew Bagnell
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, OpenAI Gym, Reinforcement Learning

We study Imitation Learning (IL) from Observations alone (ILFO) in large-scale MDPs. While most IL algorithms rely on an expert to directly provide actions to the learner, in this setting the expert only supplies sequences of observations. We design a new model-free algorithm for ILFO, Forward Adversarial Imitation Learning (FAIL), which learns a sequence of time-dependent policies by minimizing an Integral Probability Metric between the observation distributions of the expert policy and the learner. FAIL is the first provably efficient algorithm in ILFO setting, which learns a near-optimal policy with a number of samples that is polynomial in all relevant parameters but independent of the number of unique observations. The resulting theory extends the domain of provably sample efficient learning algorithms beyond existing results, which typically only consider tabular reinforcement learning settings or settings that require access to a near-optimal reset distribution. We also investigate the extension of FAIL in a model-based setting. Finally we demonstrate the efficacy of FAIL on multiple OpenAI Gym control tasks.
Graph Neural Networks Exponentially Lose Expressive Power for Node Classification
Authors: Kenta Oono, Taiji Suzuki
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Node Classification

Graph Neural Networks (graph NNs) are a promising deep learning approach for analyzing graph-structured data. However, it is known that they do not improve (or sometimes worsen) their predictive performance as we pile up many layers and add non-lineality. To tackle this problem, we investigate the expressive power of graph NNs via their asymptotic behaviors as the layer size tends to infinity. Our strategy is to generalize the forward propagation of a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), which is a popular graph NN variant, as a specific dynamical system. In the case of a GCN, we show that when its weights satisfy the conditions determined by the spectra of the (augmented) normalized Laplacian, its output exponentially approaches the set of signals that carry information of the connected components and node degrees only for distinguishing nodes. Our theory enables us to relate the expressive power of GCNs with the topological information of the underlying graphs inherent in the graph spectra. To demonstrate this, we characterize the asymptotic behavior of GCNs on the Erd\H{o}s -- R\'{e}nyi graph. We show that when the Erd\H{o}s -- R\'{e}nyi graph is sufficiently dense and large, a broad range of GCNs on it suffers from the "information loss" in the limit of infinite layers with high probability. Based on the theory, we provide a principled guideline for weight normalization of graph NNs. We experimentally confirm that the proposed weight scaling enhances the predictive performance of GCNs in real data. Code is available at https://github.com/delta2323/gnn-asymptotics.
Learning with Succinct Common Representation Based on Wyner's Common Information
Authors: J. Jon Ryu, Yoojin Choi, Young-Han Kim, Mostafa El-Khamy, Jungwon Lee
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Ratio Estimation, Image Retrieval, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Zero-shot Image Retrieval

A new bimodal generative model is proposed for generating conditional and joint samples, accompanied with a training method with learning a succinct bottleneck representation. The proposed model, dubbed as the variational Wyner model, is designed based on two classical problems in network information theory -- distributed simulation and channel synthesis -- in which Wyner's common information arises as the fundamental limit on the succinctness of the common representation. The model is trained by minimizing the symmetric Kullback--Leibler divergence between variational and model distributions with regularization terms for common information, reconstruction consistency, and latent space matching terms, which is carried out via an adversarial density ratio estimation technique. The utility of the proposed approach is demonstrated through experiments for joint and conditional generation with synthetic and real-world datasets, as well as a challenging zero-shot image retrieval task.
Identity Connections in Residual Nets Improve Noise Stability
Authors: Shuzhi Yu, Carlo Tomasi
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00

Residual Neural Networks (ResNets) achieve state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision problems. Compared to plain networks without residual connections (PlnNets), ResNets train faster, generalize better, and suffer less from the so-called degradation problem. We introduce simplified (but still nonlinear) versions of ResNets and PlnNets for which these discrepancies still hold, although to a lesser degree. We establish a 1-1 mapping between simplified ResNets and simplified PlnNets, and show that they are exactly equivalent to each other in expressive power for the same computational complexity. We conjecture that ResNets generalize better because they have better noise stability, and empirically support it for both simplified and fully-fledged networks.
Distributionally Robust Optimization and Generalization in Kernel Methods
Authors: Matthew Staib, Stefanie Jegelka
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) has attracted attention in machine learning due to its connections to regularization, generalization, and robustness. Existing work has considered uncertainty sets based on phi-divergences and Wasserstein distances, each of which have drawbacks. In this paper, we study DRO with uncertainty sets measured via maximum mean discrepancy (MMD). We show that MMD DRO is roughly equivalent to regularization by the Hilbert norm and, as a byproduct, reveal deep connections to classic results in statistical learning. In particular, we obtain an alternative proof of a generalization bound for Gaussian kernel ridge regression via a DRO lense. The proof also suggests a new regularizer. Our results apply beyond kernel methods: we derive a generically applicable approximation of MMD DRO, and show that it generalizes recent work on variance-based regularization.
PNUNet: Anomaly Detection using Positive-and-Negative Noise based on Self-Training Procedure
Authors: Masanari Kimura
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

We propose the novel framework for anomaly detection in images. Our new framework, PNUNet, is based on many normal data and few anomalous data. We assume that some noises are added to the input images and learn to remove the noise. In addition, the proposed method achieves significant performance improvement by updating the noise assumed in the inputs using a self-training framework. The experimental results for the benchmark datasets show the usefulness of our new anomaly detection framework.
Communication-Efficient Distributed Blockwise Momentum SGD with Error-Feedback
Authors: Shuai Zheng, Ziyue Huang, James T. Kwok
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Quantization

Communication overhead is a major bottleneck hampering the scalability of distributed machine learning systems. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in using gradient compression to improve the communication efficiency of distributed neural network training. Using 1-bit quantization, signSGD with majority vote achieves a 32x reduction on communication cost. However, its convergence is based on unrealistic assumptions and can diverge in practice. In this paper, we propose a general distributed compressed SGD with Nesterov's momentum. We consider two-way compression, which compresses the gradients both to and from workers. Convergence analysis on nonconvex problems for general gradient compressors is provided. By partitioning the gradient into blocks, a blockwise compressor is introduced such that each gradient block is compressed and transmitted in 1-bit format with a scaling factor, leading to a nearly 32x reduction on communication. Experimental results show that the proposed method converges as fast as full-precision distributed momentum SGD and achieves the same testing accuracy. In particular, on distributed ResNet training with 7 workers on the ImageNet, the proposed algorithm achieves the same testing accuracy as momentum SGD using full-precision gradients, but with $46\%$ less wall clock time.
Sequential Graph Dependency Parser
Authors: Sean Welleck, Kyunghyun Cho
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: RANLP 2019 9
Tasks: Dependency Parsing

We propose a method for non-projective dependency parsing by incrementally predicting a set of edges. Since the edges do not have a pre-specified order, we propose a set-based learning method. Our method blends graph, transition, and easy-first parsing, including a prior state of the parser as a special case. The proposed transition-based method successfully parses near the state of the art on both projective and non-projective languages, without assuming a certain parsing order.
Temporal-difference learning with nonlinear function approximation: lazy training and mean field regimes
Authors: Andrea Agazzi, Jianfeng Lu
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00

We discuss the approximation of the value function for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Reward Processes (MRP) with nonlinear functions trained with the Temporal-Difference (TD) learning algorithm. We first consider this problem under a certain scaling of the approximating function, leading to a regime called lazy training. In this regime, the parameters of the model vary only slightly during the learning process, a feature that has recently been observed in the training of neural networks, where the scaling we study arises naturally, implicit in the initialization of their parameters. Both in the under- and over-parametrized frameworks, we prove exponential convergence to local, respectively global minimizers of the above algorithm in the lazy training regime. We then compare this scaling of the parameters to the mean-field regime, where the approximately linear behavior of the model is lost. Under this alternative scaling we prove that all fixed points of the dynamics in parameter space are global minimizers. We finally give examples of our convergence results in the case of models that diverge if trained with non-lazy TD learning, and in the case of neural networks.
SpecNet: Spectral Domain Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Bochen Guan, Jinnian Zhang, William A. Sethares, Richard Kijowski, Fang Liu
Date: 2019-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

The memory consumption of most Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures grows rapidly with increasing depth of the network, which is a major constraint for efficient network training on modern GPUs with limited memory, embedded systems, and mobile devices. Several studies show that the feature maps (as generated after the convolutional layers) are the main bottleneck in this memory problem. Often, these feature maps mimic natural photographs in the sense that their energy is concentrated in the spectral domain. Although embedding CNN architectures in the spectral domain is widely exploited to accelerate the training process, we demonstrate that it is also possible to use the spectral domain to reduce the memory footprint, a method we call Spectral Domain Convolutional Neural Network (SpecNet) that performs both the convolution and the activation operations in the spectral domain. The performance of SpecNet is evaluated on three competitive object recognition benchmark tasks (CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet), and compared with several state-of-the-art implementations. Overall, SpecNet is able to reduce memory consumption by about 60% without significant loss of performance for all tested networks.