pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
How to 0wn NAS in Your Spare Time
Authors: Sanghyun Hong, Michael Davinroy, Yiğitcan Kaya, Dana Dachman-Soled, Tudor Dumitraş
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Deep Learning, Malware Detection, Neural Architecture Search, parameter estimation

New data processing pipelines and novel network architectures increasingly drive the success of deep learning. In consequence, the industry considers top-performing architectures as intellectual property and devotes considerable computational resources to discovering such architectures through neural architecture search (NAS). This provides an incentive for adversaries to steal these novel architectures; when used in the cloud, to provide Machine Learning as a Service, the adversaries also have an opportunity to reconstruct the architectures by exploiting a range of hardware side channels. However, it is challenging to reconstruct novel architectures and pipelines without knowing the computational graph (e.g., the layers, branches or skip connections), the architectural parameters (e.g., the number of filters in a convolutional layer) or the specific pre-processing steps (e.g. embeddings). In this paper, we design an algorithm that reconstructs the key components of a novel deep learning system by exploiting a small amount of information leakage from a cache side-channel attack, Flush+Reload. We use Flush+Reload to infer the trace of computations and the timing for each computation. Our algorithm then generates candidate computational graphs from the trace and eliminates incompatible candidates through a parameter estimation process. We implement our algorithm in PyTorch and Tensorflow. We demonstrate experimentally that we can reconstruct MalConv, a novel data pre-processing pipeline for malware detection, and ProxylessNAS- CPU, a novel network architecture for the ImageNet classification optimized to run on CPUs, without knowing the architecture family. In both cases, we achieve 0% error. These results suggest hardware side channels are a practical attack vector against MLaaS, and more efforts should be devoted to understanding their impact on the security of deep learning systems.
Residual Continual Learning
Authors: Janghyeon Lee, Donggyu Joo, Hyeong Gwon Hong, Junmo Kim
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

We propose a novel continual learning method called Residual Continual Learning (ResCL). Our method can prevent the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon in sequential learning of multiple tasks, without any source task information except the original network. ResCL reparameterizes network parameters by linearly combining each layer of the original network and a fine-tuned network; therefore, the size of the network does not increase at all. To apply the proposed method to general convolutional neural networks, the effects of batch normalization layers are also considered. By utilizing residual-learning-like reparameterization and a special weight decay loss, the trade-off between source and target performance is effectively controlled. The proposed method exhibits state-of-the-art performance in various continual learning scenarios.
Differentiable Bandit Exploration
Authors: Craig Boutilier, Chih-Wei Hsu, Branislav Kveton, Martin Mladenov, Csaba Szepesvari, Manzil Zaheer
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Exploration policies in Bayesian bandits maximize the average reward over problem instances drawn from some distribution $\mathcal{P}$. In this work, we learn such policies for an unknown distribution $\mathcal{P}$ using samples from $\mathcal{P}$. Our approach is a form of meta-learning and exploits properties of $\mathcal{P}$ without making strong assumptions about its form. To do this, we parameterize our policies in a differentiable way and optimize them by policy gradients, an approach that is general and easy to implement. We derive effective gradient estimators and introduce novel variance reduction techniques. We also analyze and experiment with various bandit policy classes, including neural networks and a novel softmax policy. The latter has regret guarantees and is a natural starting point for our optimization. Our experiments show the versatility of our approach. We also observe that neural network policies can learn implicit biases expressed only through the sampled instances.
Unsupervised Image-generation Enhanced Adaptation for Object Detection in Thermal images
Authors: Peng Liu, Fuyu Li, Wanyi Li
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Translation

Object detection in thermal images is an important computer vision task and has many applications such as unmanned vehicles, robotics, surveillance and night vision. Deep learning based detectors have achieved major progress, which usually need large amount of labelled training data. However, labelled data for object detection in thermal images is scarce and expensive to collect. How to take advantage of the large number labelled visible images and adapt them into thermal image domain, is expected to solve. This paper proposes an unsupervised image-generation enhanced adaptation method for object detection in thermal images. To reduce the gap between visible domain and thermal domain, the proposed method manages to generate simulated fake thermal images that are similar to the target images, and preserves the annotation information of the visible source domain. The image generation includes a CycleGAN based image-to-image translation and an intensity inversion transformation. Generated fake thermal images are used as renewed source domain. And then the off-the-shelf Domain Adaptive Faster RCNN is utilized to reduce the gap between generated intermediate domain and the thermal target domain. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.
Last iterate convergence in no-regret learning: constrained min-max optimization for convex-concave landscapes
Authors: Qi Lei, Sai Ganesh Nagarajan, Ioannis Panageas, Xiao Wang
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00

In a recent series of papers it has been established that variants of Gradient Descent/Ascent and Mirror Descent exhibit last iterate convergence in convex-concave zero-sum games. Specifically, \cite{DISZ17, LiangS18} show last iterate convergence of the so called "Optimistic Gradient Descent/Ascent" for the case of \textit{unconstrained} min-max optimization. Moreover, in \cite{Metal} the authors show that Mirror Descent with an extra gradient step displays last iterate convergence for convex-concave problems (both constrained and unconstrained), though their algorithm does not follow the online learning framework; it uses extra information rather than \textit{only} the history to compute the next iteration. In this work, we show that "Optimistic Multiplicative-Weights Update (OMWU)" which follows the no-regret online learning framework, exhibits last iterate convergence locally for convex-concave games, generalizing the results of \cite{DP19} where last iterate convergence of OMWU was shown only for the \textit{bilinear case}. We complement our results with experiments that indicate fast convergence of the method.
Evolutionary Bi-objective Optimization for the Dynamic Chance-Constrained Knapsack Problem Based on Tail Bound Objectives
Authors: Hirad Assimi, Oscar Harper, Yue Xie, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Evolutionary Algorithms

Real-world combinatorial optimization problems are often stochastic and dynamic. Therefore, it is essential to make optimal and reliable decisions with a holistic approach. In this paper, we consider the dynamic chance-constrained knapsack problem where the weight of each item is stochastic, the capacity constraint changes dynamically over time, and the objective is to maximize the total profit subject to the probability that total weight exceeds the capacity. We make use of prominent tail inequalities such as Chebyshev's inequality, and Chernoff bound to approximate the probabilistic constraint. Our key contribution is to introduce an additional objective which estimates the minimal capacity bound for a given stochastic solution that still meets the chance constraint. This objective helps to cater for dynamic changes to the stochastic problem. We apply single- and multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to the problem and show how bi-objective optimization can help to deal with dynamic chance-constrained problems.
Superpixel Segmentation via Convolutional Neural Networks with Regularized Information Maximization
Authors: Teppei Suzuki
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Superpixels

We propose an unsupervised superpixel segmentation method by optimizing a randomly-initialized convolutional neural network (CNN) in inference time. Our method generates superpixels via CNN from a single image without any labels by minimizing a proposed objective function for superpixel segmentation in inference time. There are three advantages to our method compared with many of existing methods: (i) leverages an image prior of CNN for superpixel segmentation, (ii) adaptively changes the number of superpixels according to the given images, and (iii) controls the property of superpixels by adding an auxiliary cost to the objective function. We verify the advantages of our method quantitatively and qualitatively on BSDS500 and SBD datasets.
Hybrid Embedded Deep Stacked Sparse Autoencoder with w_LPPD SVM Ensemble
Authors: Yongming Li, Yan Lei, Pin Wang, Yuchuan Liu
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Deep learning is a kind of feature learning method with strong nonliear feature transformation and becomes more and more important in many fields of artificial intelligence. Deep autoencoder is one representative method of the deep learning methods, and can effectively extract abstract the information of datasets. However, it does not consider the complementarity between the deep features and original features during deep feature transformation. Besides, it suffers from small sample problem. In order to solve these problems, a novel deep autoencoder - hybrid feature embedded stacked sparse autoencoder(HESSAE) has been proposed in this paper. HFESAE is capable to learn discriminant deep features with the help of embedding original features to filter weak hidden-layer outputs during training. For the issue that class representation ability of abstract information is limited by small sample problem, a feature fusion strategy has been designed aiming to combining abstract information learned by HFESAE with original feature and obtain hybrid features for feature reduction. The strategy is hybrid feature selection strategy based on L1 regularization followed by an support vector machine(SVM) ensemble model, in which weighted local discriminant preservation projection (w_LPPD), is designed and employed on each base classifier. At the end of this paper, several representative public datasets are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrated that, the proposed feature learning method yields superior performance compared to other existing and state of art feature learning algorithms including some representative deep autoencoder methods.
Relational Message Passing for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Hongwei Wang, Hongyu Ren, Jure Leskovec
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Relation, Relation Prediction

Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. In this work, we propose a relational message passing method for knowledge graph completion. Different from existing embedding-based methods, relational message passing only considers edge features (i.e., relation types) without entity IDs in the knowledge graph, and passes relational messages among edges iteratively to aggregate neighborhood information. Specifically, two kinds of neighborhood topology are modeled for a given entity pair under the relational message passing framework: (1) Relational context, which captures the relation types of edges adjacent to the given entity pair; (2) Relational paths, which characterize the relative position between the given two entities in the knowledge graph. The two message passing modules are combined together for relation prediction. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that, our method PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. PathCon is also shown applicable to inductive settings where entities are not seen in training stage, and it is able to provide interpretable explanations for the predicted results. The code and all datasets are available at https://github.com/hwwang55/PathCon.
Unifying Graph Convolutional Neural Networks and Label Propagation
Authors: Hongwei Wang, Jure Leskovec
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Node Classification

Label Propagation (LPA) and Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCN) are both message passing algorithms on graphs. Both solve the task of node classification but LPA propagates node label information across the edges of the graph, while GCN propagates and transforms node feature information. However, while conceptually similar, theoretical relation between LPA and GCN has not yet been investigated. Here we study the relationship between LPA and GCN in terms of two aspects: (1) feature/label smoothing where we analyze how the feature/label of one node is spread over its neighbors; And, (2) feature/label influence of how much the initial feature/label of one node influences the final feature/label of another node. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose an end-to-end model that unifies GCN and LPA for node classification. In our unified model, edge weights are learnable, and the LPA serves as regularization to assist the GCN in learning proper edge weights that lead to improved classification performance. Our model can also be seen as learning attention weights based on node labels, which is more task-oriented than existing feature-based attention models. In a number of experiments on real-world graphs, our model shows superiority over state-of-the-art GCN-based methods in terms of node classification accuracy.
Unraveling Meta-Learning: Understanding Feature Representations for Few-Shot Tasks
Authors: Micah Goldblum, Steven Reich, Liam Fowl, Renkun Ni, Valeriia Cherepanova, Tom Goldstein
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Meta-Learning

Meta-learning algorithms produce feature extractors which achieve state-of-the-art performance on few-shot classification. While the literature is rich with meta-learning methods, little is known about why the resulting feature extractors perform so well. We develop a better understanding of the underlying mechanics of meta-learning and the difference between models trained using meta-learning and models which are trained classically. In doing so, we introduce and verify several hypotheses for why meta-learned models perform better. Furthermore, we develop a regularizer which boosts the performance of standard training routines for few-shot classification. In many cases, our routine outperforms meta-learning while simultaneously running an order of magnitude faster.
From Matching with Diversity Constraints to Matching with Regional Quotas
Authors: Haris Aziz, Serge Gaspers, Zhaohong Sun, Toby Walsh
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

In the past few years, several new matching models have been proposed and studied that take into account complex distributional constraints. Relevant lines of work include (1) school choice with diversity constraints where students have (possibly overlapping) types and (2) hospital-doctor matching where various regional quotas are imposed. In this paper, we present a polynomial-time reduction to transform an instance of (1) to an instance of (2) and we show how the feasibility and stability of corresponding matchings are preserved under the reduction. Our reduction provides a formal connection between two important strands of work on matching with distributional constraints. We then apply the reduction in two ways. Firstly, we show that it is NP-complete to check whether a feasible and stable outcome for (1) exists. Due to our reduction, these NP-completeness results carry over to setting (2). In view of this, we help unify some of the results that have been presented in the literature. Secondly, if we have positive results for (2), then we have corresponding results for (1). One key conclusion of our results is that further developments on axiomatic and algorithmic aspects of hospital-doctor matching with regional quotas will result in corresponding results for school choice with diversity constraints.
Learning Individually Fair Classifier with Path-Specific Causal-Effect Constraint
Authors: Yoichi Chikahara, Shinsaku Sakaue, Akinori Fujino, Hisashi Kashima
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Machine learning is used to make decisions for individuals in various fields, which require us to achieve good prediction accuracy while ensuring fairness with respect to sensitive features (e.g., race and gender). This problem, however, remains difficult in complex real-world scenarios. To quantify unfairness under such situations, existing methods utilize {\it path-specific causal effects}. However, none of them can ensure fairness for each individual without making impractical functional assumptions on the data. In this paper, we propose a far more practical framework for learning an individually fair classifier. To avoid restrictive functional assumptions, we define the {\it probability of individual unfairness} (PIU) and solve an optimization problem where PIU's upper bound, which can be estimated from data, is controlled to be close to zero. We elucidate why our method can guarantee fairness for each individual. Experimental results show that our method can learn an individually fair classifier at a slight cost of accuracy.
Individual Fairness for $k$-Clustering
Authors: Sepideh Mahabadi, Ali Vakilian
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fairness

We give a local search based algorithm for $k$-median and $k$-means (and more generally for any $k$-clustering with $\ell_p$ norm cost function) from the perspective of individual fairness. More precisely, for a point $x$ in a point set $P$ of size $n$, let $r(x)$ be the minimum radius such that the ball of radius $r(x)$ centered at $x$ has at least $n/k$ points from $P$. Intuitively, if a set of $k$ random points are chosen from $P$ as centers, every point $x\in P$ expects to have a center within radius $r(x)$. An individually fair clustering provides such a guarantee for every point $x\in P$. This notion of fairness was introduced in [Jung et al., 2019] where they showed how to get an approximately feasible $k$-clustering with respect to this fairness condition. In this work, we show how to get a bicriteria approximation for fair $k$-clustering: The $k$-median ($k$-means) cost of our solution is within a constant factor of the cost of an optimal fair $k$-clustering, and our solution approximately satisfies the fairness condition (also within a constant factor). Further, we complement our theoretical bounds with empirical evaluation.
Multiple Flat Projections for Cross-manifold Clustering
Authors: Lan Bai, Yuan-Hai Shao, Wei-Jie Chen, Zhen Wang, Nai-Yang Deng
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Cross-manifold clustering is a hard topic and many traditional clustering methods fail because of the cross-manifold structures. In this paper, we propose a Multiple Flat Projections Clustering (MFPC) to deal with cross-manifold clustering problems. In our MFPC, the given samples are projected into multiple subspaces to discover the global structures of the implicit manifolds. Thus, the cross-manifold clusters are distinguished from the various projections. Further, our MFPC is extended to nonlinear manifold clustering via kernel tricks to deal with more complex cross-manifold clustering. A series of non-convex matrix optimization problems in MFPC are solved by a proposed recursive algorithm. The synthetic tests show that our MFPC works on the cross-manifold structures well. Moreover, experimental results on the benchmark datasets show the excellent performance of our MFPC compared with some state-of-the-art clustering methods.
Directional Deep Embedding and Appearance Learning for Fast Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Yingjie Yin, De Xu, Xingang Wang, Lei Zhang
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, One-shot visual object segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Most recent semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) methods rely on fine-tuning deep convolutional neural networks online using the given mask of the first frame or predicted masks of subsequent frames. However, the online fine-tuning process is usually time-consuming, limiting the practical use of such methods. We propose a directional deep embedding and appearance learning (DDEAL) method, which is free of the online fine-tuning process, for fast VOS. First, a global directional matching module, which can be efficiently implemented by parallel convolutional operations, is proposed to learn a semantic pixel-wise embedding as an internal guidance. Second, an effective directional appearance model based statistics is proposed to represent the target and background on a spherical embedding space for VOS. Equipped with the global directional matching module and the directional appearance model learning module, DDEAL learns static cues from the labeled first frame and dynamically updates cues of the subsequent frames for object segmentation. Our method exhibits state-of-the-art VOS performance without using online fine-tuning. Specifically, it achieves a J & F mean score of 74.8% on DAVIS 2017 dataset and an overall score G of 71.3% on the large-scale YouTube-VOS dataset, while retaining a speed of 25 fps with a single NVIDIA TITAN Xp GPU. Furthermore, our faster version runs 31 fps with only a little accuracy loss. Our code and trained networks are available at https://github.com/YingjieYin/Directional-Deep-Embedding-and-Appearance-Learning-for-Fast-Video-Object-Segmentation.
SpotTheFake: An Initial Report on a New CNN-Enhanced Platform for Counterfeit Goods Detection
Authors: Alexandru Şerban, George Ilaş, George-Cosmin Poruşniuc
Date: 2020-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The counterfeit goods trade represents nowadays more than 3.3% of the whole world trade and thus it's a problem that needs now more than ever a lot of attention and a reliable solution that would reduce the negative impact it has over the modern society. This paper presents the design and early stage development of a novel counterfeit goods detection platform that makes use of the outstsanding learning capabilities of the classical VGG16 convolutional model trained through the process of "transfer learning" and a multi-stage fake detection procedure that proved to be not only reliable but also very robust in the experiments we have conducted so far using an image dataset of various goods which we gathered ourselves.