pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Lupulus: A Flexible Hardware Accelerator for Neural Networks
Authors: Andreas Toftegaard Kristensen, Robert Giterman, Alexios Balatsoukas-Stimming, Andreas Burg
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Neural networks have become indispensable for a wide range of applications, but they suffer from high computational- and memory-requirements, requiring optimizations from the algorithmic description of the network to the hardware implementation. Moreover, the high rate of innovation in machine learning makes it important that hardware implementations provide a high level of programmability to support current and future requirements of neural networks. In this work, we present a flexible hardware accelerator for neural networks, called Lupulus, supporting various methods for scheduling and mapping of operations onto the accelerator. Lupulus was implemented in a 28nm FD-SOI technology and demonstrates a peak performance of 380 GOPS/GHz with latencies of 21.4ms and 183.6ms for the convolutional layers of AlexNet and VGG-16, respectively.
Feature-metric Registration: A Fast Semi-supervised Approach for Robust Point Cloud Registration without Correspondences
Authors: Xiaoshui Huang, Guofeng Mei, Jian Zhang
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration

We present a fast feature-metric point cloud registration framework, which enforces the optimisation of registration by minimising a feature-metric projection error without correspondences. The advantage of the feature-metric projection error is robust to noise, outliers and density difference in contrast to the geometric projection error. Besides, minimising the feature-metric projection error does not need to search the correspondences so that the optimisation speed is fast. The principle behind the proposed method is that the feature difference is smallest if point clouds are aligned very well. We train the proposed method in a semi-supervised or unsupervised approach, which requires limited or no registration label data. Experiments demonstrate our method obtains higher accuracy and robustness than the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, experimental results show that the proposed method can handle significant noise and density difference, and solve both same-source and cross-source point cloud registration.
An Accurate Model for Predicting the (Graded) Effect of Context in Word Similarity Based on Bert
Authors: Wei Bao, Hongshu Che, Jiandong Zhang
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Similarity

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been widely used in the semantic analysis in recent years. Our paper mainly discusses a methodology to analyze the effect that context has on human perception of similar words, which is the third task of SemEval 2020. We apply several methods in calculating the distance between two embedding vector generated by Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT). Our team will_go won the 1st place in Finnish language track of subtask1, the second place in English track of subtask1.
Explaining How Deep Neural Networks Forget by Deep Visualization
Authors: Giang Nguyen, Shuan Chen, Tae Joon Jun, Daeyoung Kim
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Explainable artificial intelligence, Interpretable Machine Learning

Explaining the behaviors of deep neural networks, usually considered as black boxes, is critical especially when they are now being adopted over diverse aspects of human life. Taking the advantages of interpretable machine learning (interpretable ML), this paper proposes a novel tool called Catastrophic Forgetting Dissector (or CFD) to explain catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. We also introduce a new method called Critical Freezing based on the observations of our tool. Experiments on ResNet articulate how catastrophic forgetting happens, particularly showing which components of this famous network are forgetting. Our new continual learning algorithm defeats various recent techniques by a significant margin, proving the capability of the investigation. Critical freezing not only attacks catastrophic forgetting but also exposes explainability.
Physical reservoir computing -- An introductory perspective
Authors: Kohei Nakajima
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Understanding the fundamental relationships between physics and its information-processing capability has been an active research topic for many years. Physical reservoir computing is a recently introduced framework that allows one to exploit the complex dynamics of physical systems as information-processing devices. This framework is particularly suited for edge computing devices, in which information processing is incorporated at the edge (e.g., into sensors) in a decentralized manner to reduce the adaptation delay caused by data transmission overhead. This paper aims to illustrate the potentials of the framework using examples from soft robotics and to provide a concise overview focusing on the basic motivations for introducing it, which stem from a number of fields, including machine learning, nonlinear dynamical systems, biological science, materials science, and physics.
Encoder-Decoder Models Can Benefit from Pre-trained Masked Language Models in Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Masahiro Kaneko, Masato Mita, Shun Kiyono, Jun Suzuki, Kentaro Inui
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Decoder, Grammatical Error Correction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

This paper investigates how to effectively incorporate a pre-trained masked language model (MLM), such as BERT, into an encoder-decoder (EncDec) model for grammatical error correction (GEC). The answer to this question is not as straightforward as one might expect because the previous common methods for incorporating a MLM into an EncDec model have potential drawbacks when applied to GEC. For example, the distribution of the inputs to a GEC model can be considerably different (erroneous, clumsy, etc.) from that of the corpora used for pre-training MLMs; however, this issue is not addressed in the previous methods. Our experiments show that our proposed method, where we first fine-tune a MLM with a given GEC corpus and then use the output of the fine-tuned MLM as additional features in the GEC model, maximizes the benefit of the MLM. The best-performing model achieves state-of-the-art performances on the BEA-2019 and CoNLL-2014 benchmarks. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/kanekomasahiro/bert-gec.
Using Artificial Intelligence to Analyze Fashion Trends
Authors: Mengyun Shi, Van Dyk Lewis
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Analyzing fashion trends is essential in the fashion industry. Current fashion forecasting firms, such as WGSN, utilize the visual information from around the world to analyze and predict fashion trends. However, analyzing fashion trends is time-consuming and extremely labor intensive, requiring individual employees' manual editing and classification. To improve the efficiency of data analysis of such image-based information and lower the cost of analyzing fashion images, this study proposes a data-driven quantitative abstracting approach using an artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm. Specifically, an A.I. model was trained on fashion images from a large-scale dataset under different scenarios, for example in online stores and street snapshots. This model was used to detect garments and classify clothing attributes such as textures, garment style, and details for runway photos and videos. It was found that the A.I. model can generate rich attribute descriptions of detected regions and accurately bind the garments in the images. Adoption of A.I. algorithm demonstrated promising results and the potential to classify garment types and details automatically, which can make the process of trend forecasting more cost-effective and faster.
Joint-SRVDNet: Joint Super Resolution and Vehicle Detection Network
Authors: Moktari Mostofa, Syeda Nyma Ferdous, Benjamin S. Riggan, Nasser M. Nasrabadi
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution, vehicle detection

In many domestic and military applications, aerial vehicle detection and super-resolutionalgorithms are frequently developed and applied independently. However, aerial vehicle detection on super-resolved images remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in the super-resolved images. To address this problem, we propose a Joint Super-Resolution and Vehicle DetectionNetwork (Joint-SRVDNet) that tries to generate discriminative, high-resolution images of vehicles fromlow-resolution aerial images. First, aerial images are up-scaled by a factor of 4x using a Multi-scaleGenerative Adversarial Network (MsGAN), which has multiple intermediate outputs with increasingresolutions. Second, a detector is trained on super-resolved images that are upscaled by factor 4x usingMsGAN architecture and finally, the detection loss is minimized jointly with the super-resolution loss toencourage the target detector to be sensitive to the subsequent super-resolution training. The network jointlylearns hierarchical and discriminative features of targets and produces optimal super-resolution results. Weperform both quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our proposed network on VEDAI, xView and DOTAdatasets. The experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves better visual quality than thestate-of-the-art methods for aerial super-resolution with 4x up-scaling factor and improves the accuracy ofaerial vehicle detection.
How Does Selective Mechanism Improve Self-Attention Networks?
Authors: Xinwei Geng, Long-Yue Wang, Xing Wang, Bing Qin, Ting Liu, Zhaopeng Tu
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Machine Translation, Natural Language Inference, Sentence, Translation

Self-attention networks (SANs) with selective mechanism has produced substantial improvements in various NLP tasks by concentrating on a subset of input words. However, the underlying reasons for their strong performance have not been well explained. In this paper, we bridge the gap by assessing the strengths of selective SANs (SSANs), which are implemented with a flexible and universal Gumbel-Softmax. Experimental results on several representative NLP tasks, including natural language inference, semantic role labelling, and machine translation, show that SSANs consistently outperform the standard SANs. Through well-designed probing experiments, we empirically validate that the improvement of SSANs can be attributed in part to mitigating two commonly-cited weaknesses of SANs: word order encoding and structure modeling. Specifically, the selective mechanism improves SANs by paying more attention to content words that contribute to the meaning of the sentence. The code and data are released at https://github.com/xwgeng/SSAN.
A Concise yet Effective model for Non-Aligned Incomplete Multi-view and Missing Multi-label Learning
Authors: Xiang Li, Songcan Chen
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Missing Labels, Model Selection, Multi-Label Learning

In reality, learning from multi-view multi-label data inevitably confronts three challenges: missing labels, incomplete views, and non-aligned views. Existing methods mainly concern the first two and commonly need multiple assumptions to attack them, making even state-of-the-arts involve at least two explicit hyper-parameters such that model selection is quite difficult. More roughly, they will fail in handling the third challenge, let alone addressing the three jointly. In this paper, we aim at meeting these under the least assumption by building a concise yet effective model with just one hyper-parameter. To ease insufficiency of available labels, we exploit not only the consensus of multiple views but also the global and local structures hidden among multiple labels. Specifically, we introduce an indicator matrix to tackle the first two challenges in a regression form while aligning the same individual labels and all labels of different views in a common label space to battle the third challenge. In aligning, we characterize the global and local structures of multiple labels to be high-rank and low-rank, respectively. Subsequently, an efficient algorithm with linear time complexity in the number of samples is established. Finally, even without view-alignment, our method substantially outperforms state-of-the-arts with view-alignment on five real datasets.
Efficient Second-Order TreeCRF for Neural Dependency Parsing
Authors: Yu Zhang, Zhenghua Li, Min Zhang
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: ARC, Chinese Dependency Parsing, Dependency Parsing

In the deep learning (DL) era, parsing models are extremely simplified with little hurt on performance, thanks to the remarkable capability of multi-layer BiLSTMs in context representation. As the most popular graph-based dependency parser due to its high efficiency and performance, the biaffine parser directly scores single dependencies under the arc-factorization assumption, and adopts a very simple local token-wise cross-entropy training loss. This paper for the first time presents a second-order TreeCRF extension to the biaffine parser. For a long time, the complexity and inefficiency of the inside-outside algorithm hinder the popularity of TreeCRF. To address this issue, we propose an effective way to batchify the inside and Viterbi algorithms for direct large matrix operation on GPUs, and to avoid the complex outside algorithm via efficient back-propagation. Experiments and analysis on 27 datasets from 13 languages clearly show that techniques developed before the DL era, such as structural learning (global TreeCRF loss) and high-order modeling are still useful, and can further boost parsing performance over the state-of-the-art biaffine parser, especially for partially annotated training data. We release our code at https://github.com/yzhangcs/crfpar.
Lossy Event Compression based on Image-derived Quad Trees and Poisson Disk Sampling
Authors: Srutarshi Banerjee, Zihao W. Wang, Henry H. Chopp, Oliver Cossairt, Aggelos Katsaggelos
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Event-based vision, Image Reconstruction, Video Compression

With several advantages over conventional RGB cameras, event cameras have provided new opportunities for tackling visual tasks under challenging scenarios with fast motion, high dynamic range, and/or power constraint. Yet unlike image/video compression, the performance of event compression algorithm is far from satisfying and practical. The main challenge for compressing events is the unique event data form, i.e., a stream of asynchronously fired event tuples each encoding the 2D spatial location, timestamp, and polarity (denoting an increase or decrease in brightness). Since events only encode temporal variations, they lack spatial structure which is crucial for compression. To address this problem, we propose a novel event compression algorithm based on a quad tree (QT) segmentation map derived from the adjacent intensity images. The QT informs 2D spatial priority within the 3D space-time volume. In the event encoding step, events are first aggregated over time to form polarity-based event histograms. The histograms are then variably sampled via Poisson Disk Sampling prioritized by the QT based segmentation map. Next, differential encoding and run length encoding are employed for encoding the spatial and polarity information of the sampled events, respectively, followed by Huffman encoding to produce the final encoded events. Our Poisson Disk Sampling based Lossy Event Compression (PDS-LEC) algorithm performs rate-distortion based optimal allocation. On average, our algorithm achieves greater than 6x compression compared to the state of the art.
Unsupervised Morphological Paradigm Completion
Authors: Huiming Jin, Liwei Cai, Yihui Peng, Chen Xia, Arya D. McCarthy, Katharina Kann
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: LEMMA, Retrieval

We propose the task of unsupervised morphological paradigm completion. Given only raw text and a lemma list, the task consists of generating the morphological paradigms, i.e., all inflected forms, of the lemmas. From a natural language processing (NLP) perspective, this is a challenging unsupervised task, and high-performing systems have the potential to improve tools for low-resource languages or to assist linguistic annotators. From a cognitive science perspective, this can shed light on how children acquire morphological knowledge. We further introduce a system for the task, which generates morphological paradigms via the following steps: (i) EDIT TREE retrieval, (ii) additional lemma retrieval, (iii) paradigm size discovery, and (iv) inflection generation. We perform an evaluation on 14 typologically diverse languages. Our system outperforms trivial baselines with ease and, for some languages, even obtains a higher accuracy than minimally supervised systems.
Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints
Authors: Zhenyi Wang, Xiaoyang Wang, Bang An, Dong Yu, Changyou Chen
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Data-to-Text Generation, Table-to-Text Generation, Text Generation

Text generation from a knowledge base aims to translate knowledge triples to natural language descriptions. Most existing methods ignore the faithfulness between a generated text description and the original table, leading to generated information that goes beyond the content of the table. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel Transformer-based generation framework to achieve the goal. The core techniques in our method to enforce faithfulness include a new table-text optimal-transport matching loss and a table-text embedding similarity loss based on the Transformer model. Furthermore, to evaluate faithfulness, we propose a new automatic metric specialized to the table-to-text generation problem. We also provide detailed analysis on each component of our model in our experiments. Automatic and human evaluations show that our framework can significantly outperform state-of-the-art by a large margin.
Boundary-aware Context Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Ruxin Wang, Shuyuan Chen, Chaojie Ji, Jianping Fan, Ye Li
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation can provide a reliable basis for further clinical analysis and disease diagnosis. The performance of medical image segmentation has been significantly advanced with the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, most existing CNNs-based methods often produce unsatisfactory segmentation mask without accurate object boundaries. This is caused by the limited context information and inadequate discriminative feature maps after consecutive pooling and convolution operations. In that the medical image is characterized by the high intra-class variation, inter-class indistinction and noise, extracting powerful context and aggregating discriminative features for fine-grained segmentation are still challenging today. In this paper, we formulate a boundary-aware context neural network (BA-Net) for 2D medical image segmentation to capture richer context and preserve fine spatial information. BA-Net adopts encoder-decoder architecture. In each stage of encoder network, pyramid edge extraction module is proposed for obtaining edge information with multiple granularities firstly. Then we design a mini multi-task learning module for jointly learning to segment object masks and detect lesion boundaries. In particular, a new interactive attention is proposed to bridge two tasks for achieving information complementarity between different tasks, which effectively leverages the boundary information for offering a strong cue to better segmentation prediction. At last, a cross feature fusion module aims to selectively aggregate multi-level features from the whole encoder network. By cascaded three modules, richer context and fine-grain features of each stage are encoded. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that the proposed BA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
Double-Hard Debias: Tailoring Word Embeddings for Gender Bias Mitigation
Authors: Tianlu Wang, Xi Victoria Lin, Nazneen Fatema Rajani, Bryan McCann, Vicente Ordonez, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Word Embeddings

Word embeddings derived from human-generated corpora inherit strong gender bias which can be further amplified by downstream models. Some commonly adopted debiasing approaches, including the seminal Hard Debias algorithm, apply post-processing procedures that project pre-trained word embeddings into a subspace orthogonal to an inferred gender subspace. We discover that semantic-agnostic corpus regularities such as word frequency captured by the word embeddings negatively impact the performance of these algorithms. We propose a simple but effective technique, Double Hard Debias, which purifies the word embeddings against such corpus regularities prior to inferring and removing the gender subspace. Experiments on three bias mitigation benchmarks show that our approach preserves the distributional semantics of the pre-trained word embeddings while reducing gender bias to a significantly larger degree than prior approaches.
On the Inference Calibration of Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Shuo Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Shuming Shi, Yang Liu
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Confidence calibration, which aims to make model predictions equal to the true correctness measures, is important for neural machine translation (NMT) because it is able to offer useful indicators of translation errors in the generated output. While prior studies have shown that NMT models trained with label smoothing are well-calibrated on the ground-truth training data, we find that miscalibration still remains a severe challenge for NMT during inference due to the discrepancy between training and inference. By carefully designing experiments on three language pairs, our work provides in-depth analyses of the correlation between calibration and translation performance as well as linguistic properties of miscalibration and reports a number of interesting findings that might help humans better analyze, understand and improve NMT models. Based on these observations, we further propose a new graduated label smoothing method that can improve both inference calibration and translation performance.
Gender Gap in Natural Language Processing Research: Disparities in Authorship and Citations
Authors: Saif M. Mohammad
Date: 2020-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6

Disparities in authorship and citations across gender can have substantial adverse consequences not just on the disadvantaged genders, but also on the field of study as a whole. Measuring gender gaps is a crucial step towards addressing them. In this work, we examine female first author percentages and the citations to their papers in Natural Language Processing (1965 to 2019). We determine aggregate-level statistics using an existing manually curated author--gender list as well as first names strongly associated with a gender. We find that only about 29% of first authors are female and only about 25% of last authors are female. Notably, this percentage has not improved since the mid 2000s. We also show that, on average, female first authors are cited less than male first authors, even when controlling for experience and area of research. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations involved in automatic demographic analysis.