pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A scalable noisy speech dataset and online subjective test framework
Authors: Chandan K. A. Reddy, Ebrahim Beyrami, Jamie Pool, Ross Cutler, Sriram Srinivasan, Johannes Gehrke
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Background noise is a major source of quality impairments in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) calls. Recent work shows the efficacy of deep learning for noise suppression, but the datasets have been relatively small compared to those used in other domains (e.g., ImageNet) and the associated evaluations have been more focused. In order to better facilitate deep learning research in Speech Enhancement, we present a noisy speech dataset (MS-SNSD) that can scale to arbitrary sizes depending on the number of speakers, noise types, and Speech to Noise Ratio (SNR) levels desired. We show that increasing dataset sizes increases noise suppression performance as expected. In addition, we provide an open-source evaluation methodology to evaluate the results subjectively at scale using crowdsourcing, with a reference algorithm to normalize the results. To demonstrate the dataset and evaluation framework we apply it to several noise suppressors and compare the subjective Mean Opinion Score (MOS) with objective quality measures such as SNR, PESQ, POLQA, and VISQOL and show why MOS is still required. Our subjective MOS evaluation is the first large scale evaluation of Speech Enhancement algorithms that we are aware of.
Big Data Analytics for Large Scale Wireless Networks: Challenges and Opportunities
Authors: Hong-Ning Dai, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong, Hao Wang, Zibin Zheng, Athanasios V. Vasilakos
Date: 2019-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

The wide proliferation of various wireless communication systems and wireless devices has led to the arrival of big data era in large scale wireless networks. Big data of large scale wireless networks has the key features of wide variety, high volume, real-time velocity and huge value leading to the unique research challenges that are different from existing computing systems. In this paper, we present a survey of the state-of-art big data analytics (BDA) approaches for large scale wireless networks. In particular, we categorize the life cycle of BDA into four consecutive stages: Data Acquisition, Data Preprocessing, Data Storage and Data Analytics. We then present a detailed survey of the technical solutions to the challenges in BDA for large scale wireless networks according to each stage in the life cycle of BDA. Moreover, we discuss the open research issues and outline the future directions in this promising area.
Learned-SBL: A Deep Learning Architecture for Sparse Signal Recovery
Authors: Rubin Jose Peter, Chandra R. Murthy
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this paper, we present a computationally efficient sparse signal recovery scheme using Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The architecture of the introduced neural network is inspired from sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) and named as Learned-SBL (L-SBL). We design a common architecture to recover sparse as well as block sparse vectors from single measurement vector (SMV) or multiple measurement vectors (MMV) depending on the nature of the training data. In the MMV model, the L-SBL network can be trained to learn any underlying sparsity pattern among the vectors including joint sparsity, block sparsity, etc. In particular, for block sparse recovery, learned-SBL does not require any prior knowledge of block boundaries. In each layer of the L-SBL, an estimate of the signal covariance matrix is obtained as the output of a neural network. Then a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimator of the unknown sparse vector is implemented with non-trainable parameters. In many applications, the measurement matrix may be time-varying. The existing DNN based sparse signal recovery schemes demand the retraining of the neural network using current measurement matrix. The architecture of L-SBL allows it to accept the measurement matrix as an input to the network, and thereby avoids the need for retraining. We also evaluate the performance of Learned-SBL in the detection of an extended target using a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed approach offers superior sparse recovery performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
BigData Applications from Graph Analytics to Machine Learning by Aggregates in Recursion
Authors: Ariyam Das, Youfu Li, Jin Wang, Mingda Li, Carlo Zaniolo
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In the past, the semantic issues raised by the non-monotonic nature of aggregates often prevented their use in the recursive statements of logic programs and deductive databases. However, the recently introduced notion of Pre-mappability (PreM) has shown that, in key applications of interest, aggregates can be used in recursion to optimize the perfect-model semantics of aggregate-stratified programs. Therefore we can preserve the declarative formal semantics of such programs while achieving a highly efficient operational semantics that is conducive to scalable implementations on parallel and distributed platforms. In this paper, we show that with PreM, a wide spectrum of classical algorithms of practical interest, ranging from graph analytics and dynamic programming based optimization problems to data mining and machine learning applications can be concisely expressed in declarative languages by using aggregates in recursion. Our examples are also used to show that PreM can be checked using simple techniques and templatized verification strategies. A wide range of advanced BigData applications can now be expressed declaratively in logic-based languages, including Datalog, Prolog, and even SQL, while enabling their execution with superior performance and scalability.
Towards Ethical Machines Via Logic Programming
Authors: Abeer Dyoub, Stefania Costantini, Francesca A. Lisi
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00

Autonomous intelligent agents are playing increasingly important roles in our lives. They contain information about us and start to perform tasks on our behalves. Chatbots are an example of such agents that need to engage in a complex conversations with humans. Thus, we need to ensure that they behave ethically. In this work we propose a hybrid logic-based approach for ethical chatbots.
A Lexical, Syntactic, and Semantic Perspective for Understanding Style in Text
Authors: Gaurav Verma, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution

With a growing interest in modeling inherent subjectivity in natural language, we present a linguistically-motivated process to understand and analyze the writing style of individuals from three perspectives: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We discuss the stylistically expressive elements within each of these levels and use existing methods to quantify the linguistic intuitions related to some of these elements. We show that such a multi-level analysis is useful for developing a well-knit understanding of style - which is independent of the natural language task at hand, and also demonstrate its value in solving three downstream tasks: authors' style analysis, authorship attribution, and emotion prediction. We conduct experiments on a variety of datasets, comprising texts from social networking sites, user reviews, legal documents, literary books, and newswire. The results on the aforementioned tasks and datasets illustrate that such a multi-level understanding of style, which has been largely ignored in recent works, models style-related subjectivity in text and can be leveraged to improve performance on multiple downstream tasks both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Graph Neural Networks for Maximum Constraint Satisfaction
Authors: Jan Toenshoff, Martin Ritzert, Hinrikus Wolf, Martin Grohe
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Graph Neural Network

Many combinatorial optimization problems can be phrased in the language of constraint satisfaction problems. We introduce a graph neural network architecture for solving such optimization problems. The architecture is generic; it works for all binary constraint satisfaction problems. Training is unsupervised, and it is sufficient to train on relatively small instances; the resulting networks perform well on much larger instances (at least 10-times larger). We experimentally evaluate our approach for a variety of problems, including Maximum Cut and Maximum Independent Set. Despite being generic, we show that our approach matches or surpasses most greedy and semi-definite programming based algorithms and sometimes even outperforms state-of-the-art heuristics for the specific problems.
DeepGait: Planning and Control of Quadrupedal Gaits using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Vassilios Tsounis, Mitja Alge, Joonho Lee, Farbod Farshidian, Marco Hutter
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Motion Planning, Policy Gradient Methods, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper addresses the problem of legged locomotion in non-flat terrain. As legged robots such as quadrupeds are to be deployed in terrains with geometries which are difficult to model and predict, the need arises to equip them with the capability to generalize well to unforeseen situations. In this work, we propose a novel technique for training neural-network policies for terrain-aware locomotion, which combines state-of-the-art methods for model-based motion planning and reinforcement learning. Our approach is centered on formulating Markov decision processes using the evaluation of dynamic feasibility criteria in place of physical simulation. We thus employ policy-gradient methods to independently train policies which respectively plan and execute foothold and base motions in 3D environments using both proprioceptive and exteroceptive measurements. We apply our method within a challenging suite of simulated terrain scenarios which contain features such as narrow bridges, gaps and stepping-stones, and train policies which succeed in locomoting effectively in all cases.
Musical Instrument Classification via Low-Dimensional Feature Vectors
Authors: Zishuo Zhao, Haoyun Wang
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Music is a mysterious language that conveys feeling and thoughts via different tones and timbre. For better understanding of timbre in music, we chose music data of 6 representative instruments, analysed their timbre features and classified them. Instead of the current trend of Neural Network for black-box classification, our project is based on a combination of MFCC and LPC, and augmented with a 6-dimensional feature vector designed by ourselves from observation and attempts. In our white-box model, we observed significant patterns of sound that distinguish different timbres, and discovered some connection between objective data and subjective senses. With a totally 32-dimensional feature vector and a naive all-pairs SVM, we achieved improved classification accuracy compared to a single tool. We also attempted to analyze music pieces downloaded from the Internet, found out different performance on different instruments, explored the reasons and suggested possible ways to improve the performance.
Simple, Scalable Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Ankur Bapna, Naveen Arivazhagan, Orhan Firat
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Fine-tuning pre-trained Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models is the dominant approach for adapting to new languages and domains. However, fine-tuning requires adapting and maintaining a separate model for each target task. We propose a simple yet efficient approach for adaptation in NMT. Our proposed approach consists of injecting tiny task specific adapter layers into a pre-trained model. These lightweight adapters, with just a small fraction of the original model size, adapt the model to multiple individual tasks simultaneously. We evaluate our approach on two tasks: (i) Domain Adaptation and (ii) Massively Multilingual NMT. Experiments on domain adaptation demonstrate that our proposed approach is on par with full fine-tuning on various domains, dataset sizes and model capacities. On a massively multilingual dataset of 103 languages, our adaptation approach bridges the gap between individual bilingual models and one massively multilingual model for most language pairs, paving the way towards universal machine translation.
Word Recognition, Competition, and Activation in a Model of Visually Grounded Speech
Authors: William N. Havard, Jean-Pierre Chevrot, Laurent Besacier
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2019 11

In this paper, we study how word-like units are represented and activated in a recurrent neural model of visually grounded speech. The model used in our experiments is trained to project an image and its spoken description in a common representation space. We show that a recurrent model trained on spoken sentences implicitly segments its input into word-like units and reliably maps them to their correct visual referents. We introduce a methodology originating from linguistics to analyse the representation learned by neural networks -- the gating paradigm -- and show that the correct representation of a word is only activated if the network has access to first phoneme of the target word, suggesting that the network does not rely on a global acoustic pattern. Furthermore, we find out that not all speech frames (MFCC vectors in our case) play an equal role in the final encoded representation of a given word, but that some frames have a crucial effect on it. Finally, we suggest that word representation could be activated through a process of lexical competition.
Cutting Music Source Separation Some Slakh: A Dataset to Study the Impact of Training Data Quality and Quantity
Authors: Ethan Manilow, Gordon Wichern, Prem Seetharaman, Jonathan Le Roux
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Music Source Separation

Music source separation performance has greatly improved in recent years with the advent of approaches based on deep learning. Such methods typically require large amounts of labelled training data, which in the case of music consist of mixtures and corresponding instrument stems. However, stems are unavailable for most commercial music, and only limited datasets have so far been released to the public. It can thus be difficult to draw conclusions when comparing various source separation methods, as the difference in performance may stem as much from better data augmentation techniques or training tricks to alleviate the limited availability of training data, as from intrinsically better model architectures and objective functions. In this paper, we present the synthesized Lakh dataset (Slakh) as a new tool for music source separation research. Slakh consists of high-quality renderings of instrumental mixtures and corresponding stems generated from the Lakh MIDI dataset (LMD) using professional-grade sample-based virtual instruments. A first version, Slakh2100, focuses on 2100 songs, resulting in 145 hours of mixtures. While not fully comparable because it is purely instrumental, this dataset contains an order of magnitude more data than MUSDB18, the {\it de facto} standard dataset in the field. We show that Slakh can be used to effectively augment existing datasets for musical instrument separation, while opening the door to a wide array of data-intensive music signal analysis tasks.
Statistical and machine learning ensemble modelling to forecast sea surface temperature
Authors: Stefan Wolff, Fearghal O'Donncha, Bei Chen
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Feature Engineering, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Feature Engineering, Weather Forecasting

In situ and remotely sensed observations have potential to facilitate data-driven predictive models for oceanography. A suite of machine learning models, including regression, decision tree and deep learning approaches were developed to estimate sea surface temperatures (SST). Training data consisted of satellite-derived SST and atmospheric data from The Weather Company. Models were evaluated in terms of accuracy and computational complexity. Predictive skill were assessed against observations and a state-of-the-art, physics-based model from the European Centre for Medium Weather Forecasting. Results demonstrated that by combining automated feature engineering with machine-learning approaches, accuracy comparable to existing state-of-the-art can be achieved. Models captured seasonal patterns in the data and qualitatively reproduce short-term variations driven by atmospheric forcing. Further, it demonstrated that machine-learning-based approaches can be used as transportable prediction tools for ocean variables -- the data-driven nature of the approach naturally integrates with automatic deployment frameworks, where model deployments are guided by data rather than user-parametrisation and expertise. The low computational cost of inference makes the approach particularly attractive for edge-based computing where predictive models could be deployed on low-power devices in the marine environment.
ModelicaGym: Applying Reinforcement Learning to Modelica Models
Authors: Oleh Lukianykhin, Tetiana Bogodorova
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper presents ModelicaGym toolbox that was developed to employ Reinforcement Learning (RL) for solving optimization and control tasks in Modelica models. The developed tool allows connecting models using Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) toOpenAI Gym toolkit in order to exploit Modelica equation-based modelling and co-simulation together with RL algorithms as a functionality of the tools correspondingly. Thus, ModelicaGym facilitates fast and convenient development of RL algorithms and their comparison when solving optimal control problem for Modelicadynamic models. Inheritance structure ofModelicaGymtoolbox's classes and the implemented methods are discussed in details. The toolbox functionality validation is performed on Cart-Pole balancing problem. This includes physical system model description and its integration using the toolbox, experiments on selection and influence of the model parameters (i.e. force magnitude, Cart-pole mass ratio, reward ratio, and simulation time step) on the learning process of Q-learning algorithm supported with the discussion of the simulation results.
Exploring Scholarly Data by Semantic Query on Knowledge Graph Embedding Space
Authors: Hung Nghiep Tran, Atsuhiro Takasu
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Question Answering, Recommendation Systems

The trends of open science have enabled several open scholarly datasets which include millions of papers and authors. Managing, exploring, and utilizing such large and complicated datasets effectively are challenging. In recent years, the knowledge graph has emerged as a universal data format for representing knowledge about heterogeneous entities and their relationships. The knowledge graph can be modeled by knowledge graph embedding methods, which represent entities and relations as embedding vectors in semantic space, then model the interactions between these embedding vectors. However, the semantic structures in the knowledge graph embedding space are not well-studied, thus knowledge graph embedding methods are usually only used for knowledge graph completion but not data representation and analysis. In this paper, we propose to analyze these semantic structures based on the well-studied word embedding space and use them to support data exploration. We also define the semantic queries, which are algebraic operations between the embedding vectors in the knowledge graph embedding space, to solve queries such as similarity and analogy between the entities on the original datasets. We then design a general framework for data exploration by semantic queries and discuss the solution to some traditional scholarly data exploration tasks. We also propose some new interesting tasks that can be solved based on the uncanny semantic structures of the embedding space.
Exploiting Partial Knowledge in Declarative Domain-Specific Heuristics for ASP
Authors: Richard Taupe, Konstantin Schekotihin, Peter Schüller, Antonius Weinzierl, Gerhard Friedrich
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Negation

Domain-specific heuristics are an important technique for solving combinatorial problems efficiently. We propose a novel semantics for declarative specifications of domain-specific heuristics in Answer Set Programming (ASP). Decision procedures that are based on a partial solution are a frequent ingredient of existing domain-specific heuristics, e.g., for placing an item that has not been placed yet in bin packing. Therefore, in our novel semantics negation as failure and aggregates in heuristic conditions are evaluated on a partial solver state. State-of-the-art solvers do not allow such a declarative specification. Our implementation in the lazy-grounding ASP system Alpha supports heuristic directives under this semantics. By that, we also provide the first implementation for incorporating declaratively specified domain-specific heuristics in a lazy-grounding setting. Experiments confirm that the combination of ASP solving with lazy grounding and our novel heuristics can be a vital ingredient for solving industrial-size problems.
Value of Information in Probabilistic Logic Programs
Authors: Sarthak Ghosh, C. R. Ramakrishnan
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Medical Diagnosis

In medical decision making, we have to choose among several expensive diagnostic tests such that the certainty about a patient's health is maximized while remaining within the bounds of resources like time and money. The expected increase in certainty in the patient's condition due to performing a test is called the value of information (VoI) for that test. In general, VoI relates to acquiring additional information to improve decision-making based on probabilistic reasoning in an uncertain system. This paper presents a framework for acquiring information based on VoI in uncertain systems modeled as Probabilistic Logic Programs (PLPs). Optimal decision-making in uncertain systems modeled as PLPs have already been studied before. But, acquiring additional information to further improve the results of making the optimal decision has remained open in this context. We model decision-making in an uncertain system with a PLP and a set of top-level queries, with a set of utility measures over the distributions of these queries. The PLP is annotated with a set of atoms labeled as "observable"; in the medical diagnosis example, the observable atoms will be results of diagnostic tests. Each observable atom has an associated cost. This setting of optimally selecting observations based on VoI is more general than that considered by any prior work. Given a limited budget, optimally choosing observable atoms based on VoI is intractable in general. We give a greedy algorithm for constructing a "conditional plan" of observations: a schedule where the selection of what atom to observe next depends on earlier observations. We show that, preempting the algorithm anytime before completion provides a usable result, the result improves over time, and, in the absence of a well-defined budget, converges to the optimal solution.