pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An empirical study of the relation between network architecture and complexity
Authors: Emir Konuk, Kevin Smith
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Relation

In this preregistration submission, we propose an empirical study of how networks handle changes in complexity of the data. We investigate the effect of network capacity on generalization performance in the face of increasing data complexity. For this, we measure the generalization error for an image classification task where the number of classes steadily increases. We compare a number of modern architectures at different scales in this setting. The methodology, setup, and hypotheses described in this proposal were evaluated by peer review before experiments were conducted.
TANDA: Transfer and Adapt Pre-Trained Transformer Models for Answer Sentence Selection
Authors: Siddhant Garg, Thuy Vu, Alessandro Moschitti
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: AAAI 2020 2019 11
Tasks: Natural Questions, Question Answering, Sentence

We propose TANDA, an effective technique for fine-tuning pre-trained Transformer models for natural language tasks. Specifically, we first transfer a pre-trained model into a model for a general task by fine-tuning it with a large and high-quality dataset. We then perform a second fine-tuning step to adapt the transferred model to the target domain. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach for answer sentence selection, which is a well-known inference task in Question Answering. We built a large scale dataset to enable the transfer step, exploiting the Natural Questions dataset. Our approach establishes the state of the art on two well-known benchmarks, WikiQA and TREC-QA, achieving MAP scores of 92% and 94.3%, respectively, which largely outperform the previous highest scores of 83.4% and 87.5%, obtained in very recent work. We empirically show that TANDA generates more stable and robust models reducing the effort required for selecting optimal hyper-parameters. Additionally, we show that the transfer step of TANDA makes the adaptation step more robust to noise. This enables a more effective use of noisy datasets for fine-tuning. Finally, we also confirm the positive impact of TANDA in an industrial setting, using domain specific datasets subject to different types of noise.
Text classification with pixel embedding
Authors: Bin Liu, Guosheng Yin, Wenbin Du
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Classification, General Classification, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

We propose a novel framework to understand the text by converting sentences or articles into video-like 3-dimensional tensors. Each frame, corresponding to a slice of the tensor, is a word image that is rendered by the word's shape. The length of the tensor equals to the number of words in the sentence or article. The proposed transformation from the text to a 3-dimensional tensor makes it very convenient to implement an $n$-gram model with convolutional neural networks for text analysis. Concretely, we impose a 3-dimensional convolutional kernel on the 3-dimensional text tensor. The first two dimensions of the convolutional kernel size equal the size of the word image and the last dimension of the kernel size is $n$. That is, every time when we slide the 3-dimensional kernel over a word sequence, the convolution covers $n$ word images and outputs a scalar. By iterating this process continuously for each $n$-gram along with the sentence or article with multiple kernels, we obtain a 2-dimensional feature map. A subsequent 1-dimensional max-over-time pooling is applied to this feature map, and three fully-connected layers are used for conducting text classification finally. Experiments of several text classification datasets demonstrate surprisingly superior performances using the proposed model in comparison with existing methods.
A unified sequence-to-sequence front-end model for Mandarin text-to-speech synthesis
Authors: Junjie Pan, Xiang Yin, Zhiling Zhang, Shichao Liu, Yang Zhang, Zejun Ma, Yuxuan Wang
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Polyphone disambiguation, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

In Mandarin text-to-speech (TTS) system, the front-end text processing module significantly influences the intelligibility and naturalness of synthesized speech. Building a typical pipeline-based front-end which consists of multiple individual components requires extensive efforts. In this paper, we proposed a unified sequence-to-sequence front-end model for Mandarin TTS that converts raw texts to linguistic features directly. Compared to the pipeline-based front-end, our unified front-end can achieve comparable performance in polyphone disambiguation and prosody word prediction, and improve intonation phrase prediction by 0.0738 in F1 score. We also implemented the unified front-end with Tacotron and WaveRNN to build a Mandarin TTS system. The synthesized speech by that got a comparable MOS (4.38) with the pipeline-based front-end (4.37) and close to human recordings (4.49).
Context-aware Active Multi-Step Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Gang Chen, Dingcheng Li, ran Xu
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning has attracted great attention recently, especially policy gradient algorithms, which have been demonstrated on challenging decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we propose an active multi-step TD algorithm with adaptive stepsizes to learn actor and critic. Specifically, our model consists of two components: active stepsize learning and adaptive multi-step TD algorithm. Firstly, we divide the time horizon into chunks and actively select state and action inside each chunk. Then given the selected samples, we propose the adaptive multi-step TD, which generalizes TD($\lambda$), but adaptively switch on/off the backups from future returns of different steps. Particularly, the adaptive multi-step TD introduces a context-aware mechanism, here a binary classifier, which decides whether or not to turn on its future backups based on the context changes. Thus, our model is kind of combination of active learning and multi-step TD algorithm, which has the capacity for learning off-policy without the need of importance sampling. We evaluate our approach on both discrete and continuous space tasks in an off-policy setting respectively, and demonstrate competitive results compared to other reinforcement learning baselines.
Activity Monitoring of Islamic Prayer (Salat) Postures using Deep Learning
Authors: Anis Koubaa, Adel Ammar, Bilel Benjdira, Abdullatif Al-Hadid, Belal Kawaf, Saleh Ali Al-Yahri, Abdelrahman Babiker, Koutaiba Assaf, Mohannad Ba Ras
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Deep Learning, Human Activity Recognition

In the Muslim community, the prayer (i.e. Salat) is the second pillar of Islam, and it is the most essential and fundamental worshiping activity that believers have to perform five times a day. From a gestures' perspective, there are predefined human postures that must be performed in a precise manner. However, for several people, these postures are not correctly performed, due to being new to Salat or even having learned prayers in an incorrect manner. Furthermore, the time spent in each posture has to be balanced. To address these issues, we propose to develop an artificial intelligence assistive framework that guides worshippers to evaluate the correctness of the postures of their prayers. This paper represents the first step to achieve this objective and addresses the problem of the recognition of the basic gestures of Islamic prayer using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The contribution of this paper lies in building a dataset for the basic Salat positions, and train a YOLOv3 neural network for the recognition of the gestures. Experimental results demonstrate that the mean average precision attains 85% for a training dataset of 764 images of the different postures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses human activity recognition of Salat using deep learning.
Collaborative Homomorphic Computation on Data Encrypted under Multiple Keys
Authors: Asma Aloufi, Peizhao Hu
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a promising cryptographic technique for enabling secure collaborative machine learning in the cloud. However, support for homomorphic computation on ciphertexts under multiple keys is inefficient. Current solutions often require key setup before any computation or incur large ciphertext size (at best, grow linearly to the number of involved keys). In this paper, we proposed a new approach that leverages threshold and multi-key HE to support computations on ciphertexts under different keys. Our new approach removes the need for key setup between each client and the set of model owners. At the same time, this approach reduces the number of encrypted models to be offloaded to the cloud evaluator, and the ciphertext size with a dimension reduction from (N+1)x2 to 2x2. We present the details of each step and discuss the complexity and security of our approach.
Beyond Similarity: Relation Embedding with Dual Attentions for Item-based Recommendation
Authors: Liang Zhang, Guannan Liu, Junjie Wu
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Relation, Representation Learning, valid

Given the effectiveness and ease of use, Item-based Collaborative Filtering (ICF) methods have been broadly used in industry in recent years. The key of ICF lies in the similarity measurement between items, which however is a coarse-grained numerical value that can hardly capture users' fine-grained preferences toward different latent aspects of items from a representation learning perspective. In this paper, we propose a model called REDA (latent Relation Embedding with Dual Attentions) to address this challenge. REDA is essentially a deep learning based recommendation method that employs an item relation embedding scheme through a neural network structure for inter-item relations representation. A relational user embedding is then proposed by aggregating the relation embeddings between all purchased items of a user, which not only better characterizes user preferences but also alleviates the data sparsity problem. Moreover, to capture valid meta-knowledge that reflects users' desired latent aspects and meanwhile suppress their explosive growth towards overfitting, we further propose a dual attentions mechanism, including a memory attention and a weight attention. A relation-wise optimization method is finally developed for model inference by constructing a personalized ranking loss for item relations. Extensive experiments are implemented on real-world datasets and the proposed model is shown to greatly outperform state-of-the-art methods, especially when the data is sparse.
SMIX($λ$): Enhancing Centralized Value Functions for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xinghu Yao, Chao Wen, Yuhui Wang, Xiaoyang Tan
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), SMAC, SMAC+, Starcraft

Learning a stable and generalizable centralized value function (CVF) is a crucial but challenging task in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as it has to deal with the issue that the joint action space increases exponentially with the number of agents in such scenarios. This paper proposes an approach, named SMIX(${\lambda}$), to address the issue using an efficient off-policy centralized training method within a flexible learner search space. As importance sampling for such off-policy training is both computationally costly and numerically unstable, we proposed to use the ${\lambda}$-return as a proxy to compute the TD error. With this new loss function objective, we adopt a modified QMIX network structure as the base to train our model. By further connecting it with the ${Q(\lambda)}$ approach from an unified expectation correction viewpoint, we show that the proposed SMIX(${\lambda}$) is equivalent to ${Q(\lambda)}$ and hence shares its convergence properties, while without being suffered from the aforementioned curse of dimensionality problem inherent in MARL. Experiments on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) benchmark demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms several state-of-the-art MARL methods by a large margin, but also can be used as a general tool to improve the overall performance of other CTDE-type algorithms by enhancing their CVFs.
Seismic data interpolation based on U-net with texture loss
Authors: Wenqian Fang, Lihua Fu, Meng Zhang, Zhiming Li
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00

Missing traces in acquired seismic data is a common occurrence during the collection of seismic data. Deep neural network (DNN) has shown considerable promise in restoring incomplete seismic data. However, several DNN-based approaches ignore the specific characteristics of seismic data itself, and only focus on reducing the difference between the recovered and the original signals. In this study, a novel Seismic U-net InterpolaTor (SUIT) is proposed to preserve the seismic texture information while reconstructing the missing traces. Aside from minimizing the reconstruction error, SUIT enhances the texture consistency between the recovery and the original completely seismic data, by designing a pre-trained U-Net to extract the texture information. The experiments show that our method outperforms the classic state-of-art methods in terms of robustness.
DialogAct2Vec: Towards End-to-End Dialogue Agent by Multi-Task Representation Learning
Authors: Zhuoxuan Jiang, Ziming Huang, Dong Sheng Li, Xian-Ling Mao
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Representation Learning

In end-to-end dialogue modeling and agent learning, it is important to (1) effectively learn knowledge from data, and (2) fully utilize heterogeneous information, e.g., dialogue act flow and utterances. However, the majority of existing methods cannot simultaneously satisfy the two conditions. For example, rule definition and data labeling during system design take too much manual work, and sequence-to-sequence methods only model one-side utterance information. In this paper, we propose a novel joint end-to-end model by multi-task representation learning, which can capture the knowledge from heterogeneous information through automatically learning knowledgeable low-dimensional embeddings from data, named with DialogAct2Vec. The model requires little manual work for intervention in system design and we find that the multi-task learning can greatly improve the effectiveness of representation learning. Extensive experiments on a public dataset for restaurant reservation show that the proposed method leads to significant improvements against the state-of-the-art baselines on both the act prediction task and utterance prediction task.
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue Systems with Transferable Latent Variables
Authors: Zihan Liu, Jamin Shin, Yan Xu, Genta Indra Winata, Peng Xu, Andrea Madotto, Pascale Fung
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Intent Detection, Natural Language Understanding, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Despite the surging demands for multilingual task-oriented dialog systems (e.g., Alexa, Google Home), there has been less research done in multilingual or cross-lingual scenarios. Hence, we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-oriented dialogue system to low-resource languages. To tackle this challenge, we first use a set of very few parallel word pairs to refine the aligned cross-lingual word-level representations. We then employ a latent variable model to cope with the variance of similar sentences across different languages, which is induced by imperfect cross-lingual alignments and inherent differences in languages. Finally, the experimental results show that even though we utilize much less external resources, our model achieves better adaptation performance for natural language understanding task (i.e., the intent detection and slot filling) compared to the current state-of-the-art model in the zero-shot scenario.
BP-Transformer: Modelling Long-Range Context via Binary Partitioning
Authors: Zihao Ye, Qipeng Guo, Quan Gan, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification, Translation

The Transformer model is widely successful on many natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention limit its application on long text. In this paper, adopting a fine-to-coarse attention mechanism on multi-scale spans via binary partitioning (BP), we propose BP-Transformer (BPT for short). BPT yields $O(k\cdot n\log (n/k))$ connections where $k$ is a hyperparameter to control the density of attention. BPT has a good balance between computation complexity and model capacity. A series of experiments on text classification, machine translation and language modeling shows BPT has a superior performance for long text than previous self-attention models. Our code, hyperparameters and CUDA kernels for sparse attention are available in PyTorch.
Generative Autoregressive Networks for 3D Dancing Move Synthesis from Music
Authors: Hyemin Ahn, Jaehun Kim, Kihyun Kim, Songhwai Oh
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00

This paper proposes a framework which is able to generate a sequence of three-dimensional human dance poses for a given music. The proposed framework consists of three components: a music feature encoder, a pose generator, and a music genre classifier. We focus on integrating these components for generating a realistic 3D human dancing move from music, which can be applied to artificial agents and humanoid robots. The trained dance pose generator, which is a generative autoregressive model, is able to synthesize a dance sequence longer than 5,000 pose frames. Experimental results of generated dance sequences from various songs show how the proposed method generates human-like dancing move to a given music. In addition, a generated 3D dance sequence is applied to a humanoid robot, showing that the proposed framework can make a robot to dance just by listening to music.
Learning to Order Sub-questions for Complex Question Answering
Authors: Yunan Zhang, Xiang Cheng, Yufeng Zhang, Zihan Wang, Zhengqi Fang, Xiaoyan Wang, Zhenya Huang, ChengXiang Zhai
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Answering complex questions involving multiple entities and relations is a challenging task. Logically, the answer to a complex question should be derived by decomposing the complex question into multiple simple sub-questions and then answering those sub-questions. Existing work has followed this strategy but has not attempted to optimize the order of how those sub-questions are answered. As a result, the sub-questions are answered in an arbitrary order, leading to larger search space and a higher risk of missing an answer. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning(RL) approach to answering complex questions that can learn a policy to dynamically decide which sub-question should be answered at each stage of reasoning. We lever-age the expected value-variance criterion to enable the learned policy to balance between the risk and utility of answering a sub-question. Experiment results show that the RL approach can substantially improve the optimality of ordering the sub-questions, leading to improved accuracy of question answering. The proposed method for learning to order sub-questions is general and can thus be potentially combined with many existing ideas for answering complex questions to enhance their performance.
LMLFM: Longitudinal Multi-Level Factorization Machine
Authors: Junjie Liang, Dongkuan Xu, Yiwei Sun, Vasant Honavar
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Variable Selection

We consider the problem of learning predictive models from longitudinal data, consisting of irregularly repeated, sparse observations from a set of individuals over time. Such data often exhibit {\em longitudinal correlation} (LC) (correlations among observations for each individual over time), {\em cluster correlation} (CC) (correlations among individuals that have similar characteristics), or both. These correlations are often accounted for using {\em mixed effects models} that include {\em fixed effects} and {\em random effects}, where the fixed effects capture the regression parameters that are shared by all individuals, whereas random effects capture those parameters that vary across individuals. However, the current state-of-the-art methods are unable to select the most predictive fixed effects and random effects from a large number of variables, while accounting for complex correlation structure in the data and non-linear interactions among the variables. We propose Longitudinal Multi-Level Factorization Machine (LMLFM), to the best of our knowledge, the first model to address these challenges in learning predictive models from longitudinal data. We establish the convergence properties, and analyze the computational complexity, of LMLFM. We present results of experiments with both simulated and real-world longitudinal data which show that LMLFM outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of predictive accuracy, variable selection ability, and scalability to data with large number of variables. The code and supplemental material is available at \url{https://github.com/junjieliang672/LMLFM}.
Accurate Uncertainty Estimation and Decomposition in Ensemble Learning
Authors: Jeremiah Zhe Liu, John Paisley, Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, Brent Coull
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Bias Detection, Ensemble Learning, valid

Ensemble learning is a standard approach to building machine learning systems that capture complex phenomena in real-world data. An important aspect of these systems is the complete and valid quantification of model uncertainty. We introduce a Bayesian nonparametric ensemble (BNE) approach that augments an existing ensemble model to account for different sources of model uncertainty. BNE augments a model's prediction and distribution functions using Bayesian nonparametric machinery. It has a theoretical guarantee in that it robustly estimates the uncertainty patterns in the data distribution, and can decompose its overall predictive uncertainty into distinct components that are due to different sources of noise and error. We show that our method achieves accurate uncertainty estimates under complex observational noise, and illustrate its real-world utility in terms of uncertainty decomposition and model bias detection for an ensemble in predict air pollution exposures in Eastern Massachusetts, USA.
Invariant Representations through Adversarial Forgetting
Authors: Ayush Jaiswal, Daniel Moyer, Greg Ver Steeg, Wael Abd-Almageed, Premkumar Natarajan
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00

We propose a novel approach to achieving invariance for deep neural networks in the form of inducing amnesia to unwanted factors of data through a new adversarial forgetting mechanism. We show that the forgetting mechanism serves as an information-bottleneck, which is manipulated by the adversarial training to learn invariance to unwanted factors. Empirical results show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance at learning invariance in both nuisance and bias settings on a diverse collection of datasets and tasks.