pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Read, Highlight and Summarize: A Hierarchical Neural Semantic Encoder-based Approach
Authors: Rajeev Bhatt Ambati, Saptarashmi Bandyopadhyay, Prasenjit Mitra
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, GPU, Hard Attention, LEMMA, Machine Translation, POS, Reinforcement Learning, Sentence, Text Summarization

Traditional sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models and other variations of the attention-mechanism such as hierarchical attention have been applied to the text summarization problem. Though there is a hierarchy in the way humans use language by forming paragraphs from sentences and sentences from words, hierarchical models have usually not worked that much better than their traditional seq2seq counterparts. This effect is mainly because either the hierarchical attention mechanisms are too sparse using hard attention or noisy using soft attention. In this paper, we propose a method based on extracting the highlights of a document; a key concept that is conveyed in a few sentences. In a typical text summarization dataset consisting of documents that are 800 tokens in length (average), capturing long-term dependencies is very important, e.g., the last sentence can be grouped with the first sentence of a document to form a summary. LSTMs (Long Short-Term Memory) proved useful for machine translation. However, they often fail to capture long-term dependencies while modeling long sequences. To address these issues, we have adapted Neural Semantic Encoders (NSE) to text summarization, a class of memory-augmented neural networks by improving its functionalities and proposed a novel hierarchical NSE that outperforms similar previous models significantly. The quality of summarization was improved by augmenting linguistic factors, namely lemma, and Part-of-Speech (PoS) tags, to each word in the dataset for improved vocabulary coverage and generalization. The hierarchical NSE model on factored dataset outperformed the state-of-the-art by nearly 4 ROUGE points. We further designed and used the first GPU-based self-critical Reinforcement Learning model.
SesameBERT: Attention for Anywhere
Authors: Ta-Chun Su, Hsiang-Chih Cheng
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1

Fine-tuning with pre-trained models has achieved exceptional results for many language tasks. In this study, we focused on one such self-attention network model, namely BERT, which has performed well in terms of stacking layers across diverse language-understanding benchmarks. However, in many downstream tasks, information between layers is ignored by BERT for fine-tuning. In addition, although self-attention networks are well-known for their ability to capture global dependencies, room for improvement remains in terms of emphasizing the importance of local contexts. In light of these advantages and disadvantages, this paper proposes SesameBERT, a generalized fine-tuning method that (1) enables the extraction of global information among all layers through Squeeze and Excitation and (2) enriches local information by capturing neighboring contexts via Gaussian blurring. Furthermore, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach in the HANS dataset, which is used to determine whether models have adopted shallow heuristics instead of learning underlying generalizations. The experiments revealed that SesameBERT outperformed BERT with respect to GLUE benchmark and the HANS evaluation set.
MIM: Mutual Information Machine
Authors: Micha Livne, Kevin Swersky, David J. Fleet
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Decoder

We introduce the Mutual Information Machine (MIM), a probabilistic auto-encoder for learning joint distributions over observations and latent variables. MIM reflects three design principles: 1) low divergence, to encourage the encoder and decoder to learn consistent factorizations of the same underlying distribution; 2) high mutual information, to encourage an informative relation between data and latent variables; and 3) low marginal entropy, or compression, which tends to encourage clustered latent representations. We show that a combination of the Jensen-Shannon divergence and the joint entropy of the encoding and decoding distributions satisfies these criteria, and admits a tractable cross-entropy bound that can be optimized directly with Monte Carlo and stochastic gradient descent. We contrast MIM learning with maximum likelihood and VAEs. Experiments show that MIM learns representations with high mutual information, consistent encoding and decoding distributions, effective latent clustering, and data log likelihood comparable to VAE, while avoiding posterior collapse.
Deep Multiphase Level Set for Scene Parsing
Authors: Pingping Zhang, Wei Liu, Yinjie Lei, Hongyu Wang, Huchuan Lu
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Scene Parsing, Semantic Segmentation

Recently, Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) seems to be the go-to architecture for image segmentation, including semantic scene parsing. However, it is difficult for a generic FCN to discriminate pixels around the object boundaries, thus FCN based methods may output parsing results with inaccurate boundaries. Meanwhile, level set based active contours are superior to the boundary estimation due to the sub-pixel accuracy that they achieve. However, they are quite sensitive to initial settings. To address these limitations, in this paper we propose a novel Deep Multiphase Level Set (DMLS) method for semantic scene parsing, which efficiently incorporates multiphase level sets into deep neural networks. The proposed method consists of three modules, i.e., recurrent FCNs, adaptive multiphase level set, and deeply supervised learning. More specifically, recurrent FCNs learn multi-level representations of input images with different contexts. Adaptive multiphase level set drives the discriminative contour for each semantic class, which makes use of the advantages of both global and local information. In each time-step of the recurrent FCNs, deeply supervised learning is incorporated for model training. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks have shown that our proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performances.
xYOLO: A Model For Real-Time Object Detection In Humanoid Soccer On Low-End Hardware
Authors: Daniel Barry, Munir Shah, Merel Keijsers, Humayun Khan, Banon Hopman
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Edge-computing, GPU, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Raspberry Pi 3, Real-Time Object Detection

With the emergence of onboard vision processing for areas such as the internet of things (IoT), edge computing and autonomous robots, there is increasing demand for computationally efficient convolutional neural network (CNN) models to perform real-time object detection on resource constraints hardware devices. Tiny-YOLO is generally considered as one of the faster object detectors for low-end devices and is the basis for our work. Our experiments on this network have shown that Tiny-YOLO can achieve 0.14 frames per second(FPS) on the Raspberry Pi 3 B, which is too slow for soccer playing autonomous humanoid robots detecting goal and ball objects. In this paper we propose an adaptation to the YOLO CNN model named xYOLO, that can achieve object detection at a speed of 9.66 FPS on the Raspberry Pi 3 B. This is achieved by trading an acceptable amount of accuracy, making the network approximately 70 times faster than Tiny-YOLO. Greater inference speed-ups were also achieved on a desktop CPU and GPU. Additionally we contribute an annotated Darknet dataset for goal and ball detection.
Model-based Behavioral Cloning with Future Image Similarity Learning
Authors: Alan Wu, AJ Piergiovanni, Michael S. Ryoo
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

We present a visual imitation learning framework that enables learning of robot action policies solely based on expert samples without any robot trials. Robot exploration and on-policy trials in a real-world environment could often be expensive/dangerous. We present a new approach to address this problem by learning a future scene prediction model solely on a collection of expert trajectories consisting of unlabeled example videos and actions, and by enabling generalized action cloning using future image similarity. The robot learns to visually predict the consequences of taking an action, and obtains the policy by evaluating how similar the predicted future image is to an expert image. We develop a stochastic action-conditioned convolutional autoencoder, and present how we take advantage of future images for robot learning. We conduct experiments in simulated and real-life environments using a ground mobility robot with and without obstacles, and compare our models to multiple baseline methods.
Sample Elicitation
Authors: Jiaheng Wei, Zuyue Fu, Yang Liu, Xingyu Li, Zhuoran Yang, Zhaoran Wang
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00

It is important to collect credible training samples $(x,y)$ for building data-intensive learning systems (e.g., a deep learning system). Asking people to report complex distribution $p(x)$, though theoretically viable, is challenging in practice. This is primarily due to the cognitive loads required for human agents to form the report of this highly complicated information. While classical elicitation mechanisms apply to eliciting a complex and generative (and continuous) distribution $p(x)$, we are interested in eliciting samples $x_i \sim p(x)$ from agents directly. We coin the above problem "sample elicitation". This paper introduces a deep learning aided method to incentivize credible sample contributions from self-interested and rational agents. We show that with an accurate estimation of a certain $f$-divergence function we can achieve approximate incentive compatibility in eliciting truthful samples. We then present an efficient estimator with theoretical guarantees via studying the variational forms of the $f$-divergence function. We also show a connection between this sample elicitation problem and $f$-GAN, and how this connection can help reconstruct an estimator of the distribution based on collected samples. Experiments on synthetic data, MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that our mechanism elicits truthful samples. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/weijiaheng/Credible-sample-elicitation.git.
GetNet: Get Target Area for Image Pairing
Authors: Henry H. Yu, Jiang Liu, Hao Sun, Ziwen Wang, Haotian Zhang
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

Image pairing is an important research task in the field of computer vision. And finding image pairs containing objects of the same category is the basis of many tasks such as tracking and person re-identification, etc., and it is also the focus of our research. Existing traditional methods and deep learning-based methods have some degree of defects in speed or accuracy. In this paper, we made improvements on the Siamese network and proposed GetNet. The proposed method GetNet combines STN and Siamese network to get the target area first and then perform subsequent processing. Experiments show that our method achieves competitive results in speed and accuracy.
ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Qilong Wang, Banggu Wu, Pengfei Zhu, Peihua Li, WangMeng Zuo, QinGhua Hu
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Recently, channel attention mechanism has demonstrated to offer great potential in improving the performance of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, most existing methods dedicate to developing more sophisticated attention modules for achieving better performance, which inevitably increase model complexity. To overcome the paradox of performance and complexity trade-off, this paper proposes an Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) module, which only involves a handful of parameters while bringing clear performance gain. By dissecting the channel attention module in SENet, we empirically show avoiding dimensionality reduction is important for learning channel attention, and appropriate cross-channel interaction can preserve performance while significantly decreasing model complexity. Therefore, we propose a local cross-channel interaction strategy without dimensionality reduction, which can be efficiently implemented via $1D$ convolution. Furthermore, we develop a method to adaptively select kernel size of $1D$ convolution, determining coverage of local cross-channel interaction. The proposed ECA module is efficient yet effective, e.g., the parameters and computations of our modules against backbone of ResNet50 are 80 vs. 24.37M and 4.7e-4 GFLOPs vs. 3.86 GFLOPs, respectively, and the performance boost is more than 2% in terms of Top-1 accuracy. We extensively evaluate our ECA module on image classification, object detection and instance segmentation with backbones of ResNets and MobileNetV2. The experimental results show our module is more efficient while performing favorably against its counterparts.
Tactical Reward Shaping: Bypassing Reinforcement Learning with Strategy-Based Goals
Authors: Yizheng Zhang, Andre Rosendo
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal". We demonstrate that by setting the goal/target of competition in a counter-intuitive but intelligent way, instead of heuristically trying solutions through many hours the DRL simulation can quickly converge into a winning strategy. The ICRA-DJI RoboMaster AI Challenge is a game of cooperation and competition between robots in a partially observable environment, quite similar to the Counter-Strike game. Unlike the traditional approach to games, where the reward is given at winning the match or hitting the enemy, our DRL algorithm rewards our robots when in a geometric-strategic advantage, which implicitly increases the winning chances. Furthermore, we use Deep Q Learning (DQL) to generate multi-agent paths for moving, which improves the cooperation between two robots by avoiding the collision. Finally, we implement a variant A* algorithm with the same implicit geometric goal as DQL and compare results. We conclude that a well-set goal can put in question the need for learning algorithms, with geometric-based searches outperforming DQL in many orders of magnitude.
On Polyhedral and Second-Order Cone Decompositions of Semidefinite Optimization Problems
Authors: Dimitris Bertsimas, Ryan Cory-Wright
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00

We study a cutting-plane method for semidefinite optimization problems (SDOs), and supply a proof of the method's convergence, under a boundedness assumption. By relating the method's rate of convergence to an initial outer approximation's diameter, we argue that the method performs well when initialized with a second-order-cone approximation, instead of a linear approximation. We invoke the method to provide bound gaps of 0.5-6.5% for sparse PCA problems with $1000$s of covariates, and solve nuclear norm problems over 500x500 matrices.
Detecting AI Trojans Using Meta Neural Analysis
Authors: Xiaojun Xu, Qi. Wang, Huichen Li, Nikita Borisov, Carl A. Gunter, Bo Li
Date: 2019-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning

In machine learning Trojan attacks, an adversary trains a corrupted model that obtains good performance on normal data but behaves maliciously on data samples with certain trigger patterns. Several approaches have been proposed to detect such attacks, but they make undesirable assumptions about the attack strategies or require direct access to the trained models, which restricts their utility in practice. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a Meta Neural Trojan Detection (MNTD) pipeline that does not make assumptions on the attack strategies and only needs black-box access to models. The strategy is to train a meta-classifier that predicts whether a given target model is Trojaned. To train the meta-model without knowledge of the attack strategy, we introduce a technique called jumbo learning that samples a set of Trojaned models following a general distribution. We then dynamically optimize a query set together with the meta-classifier to distinguish between Trojaned and benign models. We evaluate MNTD with experiments on vision, speech, tabular data and natural language text datasets, and against different Trojan attacks such as data poisoning attack, model manipulation attack, and latent attack. We show that MNTD achieves 97% detection AUC score and significantly outperforms existing detection approaches. In addition, MNTD generalizes well and achieves high detection performance against unforeseen attacks. We also propose a robust MNTD pipeline which achieves 90% detection AUC even when the attacker aims to evade the detection with full knowledge of the system.
Capturing Argument Interaction in Semantic Role Labeling with Capsule Networks
Authors: Xinchi Chen, Chunchuan Lyu, Ivan Titov
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling, Sentence

Semantic role labeling (SRL) involves extracting propositions (i.e. predicates and their typed arguments) from natural language sentences. State-of-the-art SRL models rely on powerful encoders (e.g., LSTMs) and do not model non-local interaction between arguments. We propose a new approach to modeling these interactions while maintaining efficient inference. Specifically, we use Capsule Networks: each proposition is encoded as a tuple of \textit{capsules}, one capsule per argument type (i.e. role). These tuples serve as embeddings of entire propositions. In every network layer, the capsules interact with each other and with representations of words in the sentence. Each iteration results in updated proposition embeddings and updated predictions about the SRL structure. Our model substantially outperforms the non-refinement baseline model on all 7 CoNLL-2019 languages and achieves state-of-the-art results on 5 languages (including English) for dependency SRL. We analyze the types of mistakes corrected by the refinement procedure. For example, each role is typically (but not always) filled with at most one argument. Whereas enforcing this approximate constraint is not useful with the modern SRL system, iterative procedure corrects the mistakes by capturing this intuition in a flexible and context-sensitive way.
DexPilot: Vision Based Teleoperation of Dexterous Robotic Hand-Arm System
Authors: Ankur Handa, Karl Van Wyk, Wei Yang, Jacky Liang, Yu-Wei Chao, Qian Wan, Stan Birchfield, Nathan Ratliff, Dieter Fox
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

Teleoperation offers the possibility of imparting robotic systems with sophisticated reasoning skills, intuition, and creativity to perform tasks. However, current teleoperation solutions for high degree-of-actuation (DoA), multi-fingered robots are generally cost-prohibitive, while low-cost offerings usually provide reduced degrees of control. Herein, a low-cost, vision based teleoperation system, DexPilot, was developed that allows for complete control over the full 23 DoA robotic system by merely observing the bare human hand. DexPilot enables operators to carry out a variety of complex manipulation tasks that go beyond simple pick-and-place operations. This allows for collection of high dimensional, multi-modality, state-action data that can be leveraged in the future to learn sensorimotor policies for challenging manipulation tasks. The system performance was measured through speed and reliability metrics across two human demonstrators on a variety of tasks. The videos of the experiments can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/dex-pilot.
Partial Separability and Functional Graphical Models for Multivariate Gaussian Processes
Authors: Javier Zapata, Sang-Yun Oh, Alexander Petersen
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes

The covariance structure of multivariate functional data can be highly complex, especially if the multivariate dimension is large, making extensions of statistical methods for standard multivariate data to the functional data setting challenging. For example, Gaussian graphical models have recently been extended to the setting of multivariate functional data by applying multivariate methods to the coefficients of truncated basis expansions. However, a key difficulty compared to multivariate data is that the covariance operator is compact, and thus not invertible. The methodology in this paper addresses the general problem of covariance modeling for multivariate functional data, and functional Gaussian graphical models in particular. As a first step, a new notion of separability for the covariance operator of multivariate functional data is proposed, termed partial separability, leading to a novel Karhunen-Lo\`eve-type expansion for such data. Next, the partial separability structure is shown to be particularly useful in order to provide a well-defined functional Gaussian graphical model that can be identified with a sequence of finite-dimensional graphical models, each of identical fixed dimension. This motivates a simple and efficient estimation procedure through application of the joint graphical lasso. Empirical performance of the method for graphical model estimation is assessed through simulation and analysis of functional brain connectivity during a motor task. %Empirical performance of the method for graphical model estimation is assessed through simulation and analysis of functional brain connectivity during a motor task.
Generating valid Euclidean distance matrices
Authors: Moritz Hoffmann, Frank Noé
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation, valid

Generating point clouds, e.g., molecular structures, in arbitrary rotations, translations, and enumerations remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, neural networks utilizing symmetry invariant layers have been shown to be able to optimize their training objective in a data-efficient way. In this spirit, we present an architecture which allows to produce valid Euclidean distance matrices, which by construction are already invariant under rotation and translation of the described object. Motivated by the goal to generate molecular structures in Cartesian space, we use this architecture to construct a Wasserstein GAN utilizing a permutation invariant critic network. This makes it possible to generate molecular structures in a one-shot fashion by producing Euclidean distance matrices which have a three-dimensional embedding.