pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reinforcement Learning with Feedback Graphs
Authors: Christoph Dann, Yishay Mansour, Mehryar Mohri, Ayush Sekhari, Karthik Sridharan
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We study episodic reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes when the agent receives additional feedback per step in the form of several transition observations. Such additional observations are available in a range of tasks through extended sensors or prior knowledge about the environment (e.g., when certain actions yield similar outcome). We formalize this setting using a feedback graph over state-action pairs and show that model-based algorithms can leverage the additional feedback for more sample-efficient learning. We give a regret bound that, ignoring logarithmic factors and lower-order terms, depends only on the size of the maximum acyclic subgraph of the feedback graph, in contrast with a polynomial dependency on the number of states and actions in the absence of a feedback graph. Finally, we highlight challenges when leveraging a small dominating set of the feedback graph as compared to the bandit setting and propose a new algorithm that can use knowledge of such a dominating set for more sample-efficient learning of a near-optimal policy.
ProSelfLC: Progressive Self Label Correction for Training Robust Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Xinshao Wang, Yang Hua, Elyor Kodirov, David A. Clifton, Neil M. Robertson
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Self-Knowledge Distillation

To train robust deep neural networks (DNNs), we systematically study several target modification approaches, which include output regularisation, self and non-self label correction (LC). Two key issues are discovered: (1) Self LC is the most appealing as it exploits its own knowledge and requires no extra models. However, how to automatically decide the trust degree of a learner as training goes is not well answered in the literature? (2) Some methods penalise while the others reward low-entropy predictions, prompting us to ask which one is better? To resolve the first issue, taking two well-accepted propositions--deep neural networks learn meaningful patterns before fitting noise [3] and minimum entropy regularisation principle [10]--we propose a novel end-to-end method named ProSelfLC, which is designed according to learning time and entropy. Specifically, given a data point, we progressively increase trust in its predicted label distribution versus its annotated one if a model has been trained for enough time and the prediction is of low entropy (high confidence). For the second issue, according to ProSelfLC, we empirically prove that it is better to redefine a meaningful low-entropy status and optimise the learner toward it. This serves as a defence of entropy minimisation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ProSelfLC through extensive experiments in both clean and noisy settings. The source code is available at https://github.com/XinshaoAmosWang/ProSelfLC-CVPR2021. Keywords: entropy minimisation, maximum entropy, confidence penalty, self knowledge distillation, label correction, label noise, semi-supervised learning, output regularisation
A Gaussian Process Upsampling Model for Improvements in Optical Character Recognition
Authors: Steven I Reeves, Dongwook Lee, Anurag Singh, Kunal Verma
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Optical Character Recognition and extraction is a key tool in the automatic evaluation of documents in a financial context. However, the image data provided to automated systems can have unreliable quality, and can be inherently low-resolution or downsampled and compressed by a transmitting program. In this paper, we illustrate the efficacy of a Gaussian Process upsampling model for the purposes of improving OCR and extraction through upsampling low resolution documents.
LGSVL Simulator: A High Fidelity Simulator for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Guodong Rong, Byung Hyun Shin, Hadi Tabatabaee, Qiang Lu, Steve Lemke, Mārtiņš Možeiko, Eric Boise, Geehoon Uhm, Mark Gerow, Shalin Mehta, Eugene Agafonov, Tae Hyung Kim, Eric Sterner, Keunhae Ushiroda, Michael Reyes, Dmitry Zelenkovsky, Seonman Kim
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Testing autonomous driving algorithms on real autonomous vehicles is extremely costly and many researchers and developers in the field cannot afford a real car and the corresponding sensors. Although several free and open-source autonomous driving stacks, such as Autoware and Apollo are available, choices of open-source simulators to use with them are limited. In this paper, we introduce the LGSVL Simulator which is a high fidelity simulator for autonomous driving. The simulator engine provides end-to-end, full-stack simulation which is ready to be hooked up to Autoware and Apollo. In addition, simulator tools are provided with the core simulation engine which allow users to easily customize sensors, create new types of controllable objects, replace some modules in the core simulator, and create digital twins of particular environments.
Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences
Authors: Yang Li, Jiacong He, Xin Zhou, Yuan Zhang, Jason Baldridge
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Position

We present a new problem: grounding natural language instructions to mobile user interface actions, and create three new datasets for it. For full task evaluation, we create PIXELHELP, a corpus that pairs English instructions with actions performed by people on a mobile UI emulator. To scale training, we decouple the language and action data by (a) annotating action phrase spans in HowTo instructions and (b) synthesizing grounded descriptions of actions for mobile user interfaces. We use a Transformer to extract action phrase tuples from long-range natural language instructions. A grounding Transformer then contextually represents UI objects using both their content and screen position and connects them to object descriptions. Given a starting screen and instruction, our model achieves 70.59% accuracy on predicting complete ground-truth action sequences in PIXELHELP.
Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs
Authors: Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: TACL 2020 1

We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity---bits per phoneme---that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the international phonetic alphabet, and a statistical model trained on a sample of word types from the language, we can approximately measure bits per phoneme using the negative log-probability of that word under the model. This simple measure allows us to compare the entropy across languages, giving insight into how complex a language's phonotactics are. Using a collection of 1016 basic concept words across 106 languages, we demonstrate a very strong negative correlation of -0.74 between bits per phoneme and the average length of words.
Minority Class Oversampling for Tabular Data with Deep Generative Models
Authors: Ramiro Camino, Christian Hammerschmidt, Radu State
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: imbalanced classification

In practice, machine learning experts are often confronted with imbalanced data. Without accounting for the imbalance, common classifiers perform poorly and standard evaluation metrics mislead the practitioners on the model's performance. A common method to treat imbalanced datasets is under- and oversampling. In this process, samples are either removed from the majority class or synthetic samples are added to the minority class. In this paper, we follow up on recent developments in deep learning. We take proposals of deep generative models, including our own, and study the ability of these approaches to provide realistic samples that improve performance on imbalanced classification tasks via oversampling. Across 160K+ experiments, we show that all of the new methods tend to perform better than simple baseline methods such as SMOTE, but require different under- and oversampling ratios to do so. Our experiments show that the way the method of sampling does not affect quality, but runtime varies widely. We also observe that the improvements in terms of performance metric, while shown to be significant when ranking the methods, often are minor in absolute terms, especially compared to the required effort. Furthermore, we notice that a large part of the improvement is due to undersampling, not oversampling. We make our code and testing framework available.
Planning from Images with Deep Latent Gaussian Process Dynamics
Authors: Nathanael Bosch, Jan Achterhold, Laura Leal-Taixé, Jörg Stückler
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: L4DC 2020 6
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Transfer Learning

Planning is a powerful approach to control problems with known environment dynamics. In unknown environments the agent needs to learn a model of the system dynamics to make planning applicable. This is particularly challenging when the underlying states are only indirectly observable through images. We propose to learn a deep latent Gaussian process dynamics (DLGPD) model that learns low-dimensional system dynamics from environment interactions with visual observations. The method infers latent state representations from observations using neural networks and models the system dynamics in the learned latent space with Gaussian processes. All parts of the model can be trained jointly by optimizing a lower bound on the likelihood of transitions in image space. We evaluate the proposed approach on the pendulum swing-up task while using the learned dynamics model for planning in latent space in order to solve the control problem. We also demonstrate that our method can quickly adapt a trained agent to changes in the system dynamics from just a few rollouts. We compare our approach to a state-of-the-art purely deep learning based method and demonstrate the advantages of combining Gaussian processes with deep learning for data efficiency and transfer learning.
A Data-Driven Approach for Discovering Stochastic Dynamical Systems with Non-Gaussian Levy Noise
Authors: Yang Li, Jinqiao Duan
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00

With the rapid increase of valuable observational, experimental and simulating data for complex systems, great efforts are being devoted to discovering governing laws underlying the evolution of these systems. However, the existing techniques are limited to extract governing laws from data as either deterministic differential equations or stochastic differential equations with Gaussian noise. In the present work, we develop a new data-driven approach to extract stochastic dynamical systems with non-Gaussian symmetric L\'evy noise, as well as Gaussian noise. First, we establish a feasible theoretical framework, by expressing the drift coefficient, diffusion coefficient and jump measure (i.e., anomalous diffusion) for the underlying stochastic dynamical system in terms of sample paths data. We then design a numerical algorithm to compute the drift, diffusion coefficient and jump measure, and thus extract a governing stochastic differential equation with Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of our approach by applying to several prototypical one-, two- and three-dimensional systems. This new approach will become a tool in discovering governing dynamical laws from noisy data sets, from observing or simulating complex phenomena, such as rare events triggered by random fluctuations with heavy as well as light tail statistical features.
Deep Learning Interfacial Momentum Closures in Coarse-Mesh CFD Two-Phase Flow Simulation Using Validation Data
Authors: Han Bao, Jinyong Feng, Nam Dinh, Hongbin Zhang
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00

Multiphase flow phenomena have been widely observed in the industrial applications, yet it remains a challenging unsolved problem. Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approaches resolve of the flow fields on finer spatial and temporal scales, which can complement dedicated experimental study. However, closures must be introduced to reflect the underlying physics in multiphase flow. Among them, the interfacial forces, including drag, lift, turbulent-dispersion and wall-lubrication forces, play an important role in bubble distribution and migration in liquid-vapor two-phase flows. Development of those closures traditionally rely on the experimental data and analytical derivation with simplified assumptions that usually cannot deliver a universal solution across a wide range of flow conditions. In this paper, a data-driven approach, named as feature-similarity measurement (FSM), is developed and applied to improve the simulation capability of two-phase flow with coarse-mesh CFD approach. Interfacial momentum transfer in adiabatic bubbly flow serves as the focus of the present study. Both a mature and a simplified set of interfacial closures are taken as the low-fidelity data. Validation data (including relevant experimental data and validated fine-mesh CFD simulations results) are adopted as high-fidelity data. Qualitative and quantitative analysis are performed in this paper. These reveal that FSM can substantially improve the prediction of the coarse-mesh CFD model, regardless of the choice of interfacial closures, and it provides scalability and consistency across discontinuous flow regimes. It demonstrates that data-driven methods can aid the multiphase flow modeling by exploring the connections between local physical features and simulation errors.
FEQA: A Question Answering Evaluation Framework for Faithfulness Assessment in Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Esin Durmus, He He, Mona Diab
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Neural abstractive summarization models are prone to generate content inconsistent with the source document, i.e. unfaithful. Existing automatic metrics do not capture such mistakes effectively. We tackle the problem of evaluating faithfulness of a generated summary given its source document. We first collected human annotations of faithfulness for outputs from numerous models on two datasets. We find that current models exhibit a trade-off between abstractiveness and faithfulness: outputs with less word overlap with the source document are more likely to be unfaithful. Next, we propose an automatic question answering (QA) based metric for faithfulness, FEQA, which leverages recent advances in reading comprehension. Given question-answer pairs generated from the summary, a QA model extracts answers from the document; non-matched answers indicate unfaithful information in the summary. Among metrics based on word overlap, embedding similarity, and learned language understanding models, our QA-based metric has significantly higher correlation with human faithfulness scores, especially on highly abstractive summaries.
Inference, Prediction, and Entropy-Rate Estimation of Continuous-time, Discrete-event Processes
Authors: S. E. Marzen, J. P. Crutchfield
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00

Inferring models, predicting the future, and estimating the entropy rate of discrete-time, discrete-event processes is well-worn ground. However, a much broader class of discrete-event processes operates in continuous-time. Here, we provide new methods for inferring, predicting, and estimating them. The methods rely on an extension of Bayesian structural inference that takes advantage of neural network's universal approximation power. Based on experiments with complex synthetic data, the methods are competitive with the state-of-the-art for prediction and entropy-rate estimation.
Recognizing Magnification Levels in Microscopic Snapshots
Authors: Manit Zaveri, Shivam Kalra, Morteza Babaie, Sultaan Shah, Savvas Damskinos, Hany Kashani, H. R. Tizhoosh
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Recent advances in digital imaging has transformed computer vision and machine learning to new tools for analyzing pathology images. This trend could automate some of the tasks in the diagnostic pathology and elevate the pathologist workload. The final step of any cancer diagnosis procedure is performed by the expert pathologist. These experts use microscopes with high level of optical magnification to observe minute characteristics of the tissue acquired through biopsy and fixed on glass slides. Switching between different magnifications, and finding the magnification level at which they identify the presence or absence of malignant tissues is important. As the majority of pathologists still use light microscopy, compared to digital scanners, in many instance a mounted camera on the microscope is used to capture snapshots from significant field-of-views. Repositories of such snapshots usually do not contain the magnification information. In this paper, we extract deep features of the images available on TCGA dataset with known magnification to train a classifier for magnification recognition. We compared the results with LBP, a well-known handcrafted feature extraction method. The proposed approach achieved a mean accuracy of 96% when a multi-layer perceptron was trained as a classifier.
Effective Data Fusion with Generalized Vegetation Index: Evidence from Land Cover Segmentation in Agriculture
Authors: Hao Sheng, Xiao Chen, Jingyi Su, Ram Rajagopal, Andrew Ng
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00

How can we effectively leverage the domain knowledge from remote sensing to better segment agriculture land cover from satellite images? In this paper, we propose a novel, model-agnostic, data-fusion approach for vegetation-related computer vision tasks. Motivated by the various Vegetation Indices (VIs), which are introduced by domain experts, we systematically reviewed the VIs that are widely used in remote sensing and their feasibility to be incorporated in deep neural networks. To fully leverage the Near-Infrared channel, the traditional Red-Green-Blue channels, and Vegetation Index or its variants, we propose a Generalized Vegetation Index (GVI), a lightweight module that can be easily plugged into many neural network architectures to serve as an additional information input. To smoothly train models with our GVI, we developed an Additive Group Normalization (AGN) module that does not require extra parameters of the prescribed neural networks. Our approach has improved the IoUs of vegetation-related classes by 0.9-1.3 percent and consistently improves the overall mIoU by 2 percent on our baseline.
Lenia and Expanded Universe
Authors: Bert Wang-Chak Chan
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Artificial Life

We report experimental extensions of Lenia, a continuous cellular automata family capable of producing lifelike self-organizing autonomous patterns. The rule of Lenia was generalized into higher dimensions, multiple kernels, and multiple channels. The final architecture approaches what can be seen as a recurrent convolutional neural network. Using semi-automatic search e.g. genetic algorithm, we discovered new phenomena like polyhedral symmetries, individuality, self-replication, emission, growth by ingestion, and saw the emergence of "virtual eukaryotes" that possess internal division of labor and type differentiation. We discuss the results in the contexts of biology, artificial life, and artificial intelligence.
The Strong Screening Rule for SLOPE
Authors: Johan Larsson, Małgorzata Bogdan, Jonas Wallin
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: regression

Extracting relevant features from data sets where the number of observations ($n$) is much smaller then the number of predictors ($p$) is a major challenge in modern statistics. Sorted L-One Penalized Estimation (SLOPE), a generalization of the lasso, is a promising method within this setting. Current numerical procedures for SLOPE, however, lack the efficiency that respective tools for the lasso enjoy, particularly in the context of estimating a complete regularization path. A key component in the efficiency of the lasso is predictor screening rules: rules that allow predictors to be discarded before estimating the model. This is the first paper to establish such a rule for SLOPE. We develop a screening rule for SLOPE by examining its subdifferential and show that this rule is a generalization of the strong rule for the lasso. Our rule is heuristic, which means that it may discard predictors erroneously. We present conditions under which this may happen and show that such situations are rare and easily safeguarded against by a simple check of the optimality conditions. Our numerical experiments show that the rule performs well in practice, leading to improvements by orders of magnitude for data in the $p \gg n$ domain, as well as incurring no additional computational overhead when $n \gg p$. We also examine the effect of correlation structures in the design matrix on the rule and discuss algorithmic strategies for employing the rule. Finally, we provide an efficient implementation of the rule in our R package SLOPE.
Lower bounds in multiple testing: A framework based on derandomized proxies
Authors: Max Rabinovich, Michael. I. Jordan, Martin J. Wainwright
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00

The large bulk of work in multiple testing has focused on specifying procedures that control the false discovery rate (FDR), with relatively less attention being paid to the corresponding Type II error known as the false non-discovery rate (FNR). A line of more recent work in multiple testing has begun to investigate the tradeoffs between the FDR and FNR and to provide lower bounds on the performance of procedures that depend on the model structure. Lacking thus far, however, has been a general approach to obtaining lower bounds for a broad class of models. This paper introduces an analysis strategy based on derandomization, illustrated by applications to various concrete models. Our main result is meta-theorem that gives a general recipe for obtaining lower bounds on the combination of FDR and FNR. We illustrate this meta-theorem by deriving explicit bounds for several models, including instances with dependence, scale-transformed alternatives, and non-Gaussian-like distributions. We provide numerical simulations of some of these lower bounds, and show a close relation to the actual performance of the Benjamini-Hochberg (BH) algorithm.
SUPERT: Towards New Frontiers in Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Multi-Document Summarization
Authors: Yang Gao, Wei Zhao, Steffen Eger
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Document Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

We study unsupervised multi-document summarization evaluation metrics, which require neither human-written reference summaries nor human annotations (e.g. preferences, ratings, etc.). We propose SUPERT, which rates the quality of a summary by measuring its semantic similarity with a pseudo reference summary, i.e. selected salient sentences from the source documents, using contextualized embeddings and soft token alignment techniques. Compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised evaluation metrics, SUPERT correlates better with human ratings by 18-39%. Furthermore, we use SUPERT as rewards to guide a neural-based reinforcement learning summarizer, yielding favorable performance compared to the state-of-the-art unsupervised summarizers. All source code is available at https://github.com/yg211/acl20-ref-free-eval.