pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SinReQ: Generalized Sinusoidal Regularization for Low-Bitwidth Deep Quantized Training
Authors: Ahmed T. Elthakeb, Prannoy Pilligundla, Hadi Esmaeilzadeh
Date: 2019-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Deep quantization of neural networks (below eight bits) offers significant promise in reducing their compute and storage cost. Albeit alluring, without special techniques for training and optimization, deep quantization results in significant accuracy loss. To further mitigate this loss, we propose a novel sinusoidal regularization, called SinReQ1, for deep quantized training. SinReQ adds a periodic term to the original objective function of the underlying training algorithm. SinReQ exploits the periodicity, differentiability, and the desired convexity profile in sinusoidal functions to automatically propel weights towards values that are inherently closer to quantization levels. Since, this technique does not require invasive changes to the training procedure, SinReQ can harmoniously enhance quantized training algorithms. SinReQ offers generality and flexibility as it is not limited to a certain bitwidth or a uniform assignment of bitwidths across layers. We carry out experimentation using the AlexNet, CIFAR-10, ResNet-18, ResNet-20, SVHN, and VGG-11 DNNs with three to five bits for quantization and show the versatility of SinReQ in enhancing multiple quantized training algorithms, DoReFa [32] and WRPN [24]. Averaging across all the bit configurations shows that SinReQ closes the accuracy gap between these two techniques and the full-precision runs by 32.4% and 27.5%, respectively. That is improving the absolute accuracy of DoReFa and WRPN by 2.8% and 2.1%, respectively.
ARSM: Augment-REINFORCE-Swap-Merge Estimator for Gradient Backpropagation Through Categorical Variables
Authors: Mingzhang Yin, Yuguang Yue, Mingyuan Zhou
Date: 2019-05-04 00:00:00

To address the challenge of backpropagating the gradient through categorical variables, we propose the augment-REINFORCE-swap-merge (ARSM) gradient estimator that is unbiased and has low variance. ARSM first uses variable augmentation, REINFORCE, and Rao-Blackwellization to re-express the gradient as an expectation under the Dirichlet distribution, then uses variable swapping to construct differently expressed but equivalent expectations, and finally shares common random numbers between these expectations to achieve significant variance reduction. Experimental results show ARSM closely resembles the performance of the true gradient for optimization in univariate settings; outperforms existing estimators by a large margin when applied to categorical variational auto-encoders; and provides a "try-and-see self-critic" variance reduction method for discrete-action policy gradient, which removes the need of estimating baselines by generating a random number of pseudo actions and estimating their action-value functions.
Model reconstruction from temporal data for coupled oscillator networks
Authors: Mark J Panaggio, Maria-Veronica Ciocanel, Lauren Lazarus, Chad M Topaz, Bin Xu
Date: 2019-05-04 00:00:00

In a complex system, the interactions between individual agents often lead to emergent collective behavior like spontaneous synchronization, swarming, and pattern formation. The topology of the network of interactions can have a dramatic influence over those dynamics. In many studies, researchers start with a specific model for both the intrinsic dynamics of each agent and the interaction network, and attempt to learn about the dynamics that can be observed in the model. Here we consider the inverse problem: given the dynamics of a system, can one learn about the underlying network? We investigate arbitrary networks of coupled phase-oscillators whose dynamics are characterized by synchronization. We demonstrate that, given sufficient observational data on the transient evolution of each oscillator, one can use machine learning methods to reconstruct the interaction network and simultaneously identify the parameters of a model for the intrinsic dynamics of the oscillators and their coupling.
On the Difficulty of Evaluating Baselines: A Study on Recommender Systems
Authors: Steffen Rendle, Li Zhang, Yehuda Koren
Date: 2019-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

Numerical evaluations with comparisons to baselines play a central role when judging research in recommender systems. In this paper, we show that running baselines properly is difficult. We demonstrate this issue on two extensively studied datasets. First, we show that results for baselines that have been used in numerous publications over the past five years for the Movielens 10M benchmark are suboptimal. With a careful setup of a vanilla matrix factorization baseline, we are not only able to improve upon the reported results for this baseline but even outperform the reported results of any newly proposed method. Secondly, we recap the tremendous effort that was required by the community to obtain high quality results for simple methods on the Netflix Prize. Our results indicate that empirical findings in research papers are questionable unless they were obtained on standardized benchmarks where baselines have been tuned extensively by the research community.
A Survey on Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Martin Wistuba, Ambrish Rawat, Tejaswini Pedapati
Date: 2019-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Evolutionary Algorithms, Neural Architecture Search, Reinforcement Learning, Survey

The growing interest in both the automation of machine learning and deep learning has inevitably led to the development of a wide variety of automated methods for neural architecture search. The choice of the network architecture has proven to be critical, and many advances in deep learning spring from its immediate improvements. However, deep learning techniques are computationally intensive and their application requires a high level of domain knowledge. Therefore, even partial automation of this process helps to make deep learning more accessible to both researchers and practitioners. With this survey, we provide a formalism which unifies and categorizes the landscape of existing methods along with a detailed analysis that compares and contrasts the different approaches. We achieve this via a comprehensive discussion of the commonly adopted architecture search spaces and architecture optimization algorithms based on principles of reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms along with approaches that incorporate surrogate and one-shot models. Additionally, we address the new research directions which include constrained and multi-objective architecture search as well as automated data augmentation, optimizer and activation function search.
Deep Tensor Factorization for Spatially-Aware Scene Decomposition
Authors: Jonah Casebeer, Michael Colomb, Paris Smaragdis
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We propose a completely unsupervised method to understand audio scenes observed with random microphone arrangements by decomposing the scene into its constituent sources and their relative presence in each microphone. To this end, we formulate a neural network architecture that can be interpreted as a nonnegative tensor factorization of a multi-channel audio recording. By clustering on the learned network parameters corresponding to channel content, we can learn sources' individual spectral dictionaries and their activation patterns over time. Our method allows us to leverage deep learning advances like end-to-end training, while also allowing stochastic minibatch training so that we can feasibly decompose realistic audio scenes that are intractable to decompose using standard methods. This neural network architecture is easily extensible to other kinds of tensor factorizations.
PhaseDNN - A Parallel Phase Shift Deep Neural Network for Adaptive Wideband Learning
Authors: Wei Cai, Xiaoguang Li, Lizuo Liu
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a phase shift deep neural network (PhaseDNN) which provides a wideband convergence in approximating a high dimensional function during its training of the network. The PhaseDNN utilizes the fact that many DNN achieves convergence in the low frequency range first, thus, a series of moderately-sized of DNNs are constructed and trained in parallel for ranges of higher frequencies. With the help of phase shifts in the frequency domain, implemented through a simple phase factor multiplication on the training data, each DNN in the series will be trained to approximate the target function's higher frequency content over a specific range. Due to the phase shift, each DNN achieves the speed of convergence as in the low frequency range. As a result, the proposed PhaseDNN system is able to convert wideband frequency learning to low frequency learning, thus allowing a uniform learning to wideband high dimensional functions with frequency adaptive training. Numerical results have demonstrated the capability of PhaseDNN in learning information of a target function from low to high frequency uniformly.
FlowSAN: Privacy-enhancing Semi-Adversarial Networks to Confound Arbitrary Face-based Gender Classifiers
Authors: Vahid Mirjalili, Sebastian Raschka, Arun Ross
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Privacy concerns in the modern digital age have prompted researchers to develop techniques that allow users to selectively suppress certain information in collected data while allowing for other information to be extracted. In this regard, Semi-Adversarial Networks (SAN) have recently emerged as a method for imparting soft-biometric privacy to face images. SAN enables modifications of input face images so that the resulting face images can still be reliably used by arbitrary conventional face matchers for recognition purposes, while attribute classifiers, such as gender classifiers, are confounded. However, the generalizability of SANs across arbitrary gender classifiers has remained an open concern. In this work, we propose a new method, FlowSAN, for allowing SANs to generalize to multiple unseen gender classifiers. We propose combining a diverse set of SAN models to compensate each other's weaknesses, thereby, forming a robust model with improved generalization capability. Extensive experiments using different unseen gender classifiers and face matchers demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed paradigm in imparting gender privacy to face images.
Personalized Query Auto-Completion Through a Lightweight Representation of the User Context
Authors: Manojkumar Rangasamy Kannadasan, Grigor Aslanyan
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00

Query Auto-Completion (QAC) is a widely used feature in many domains, including web and eCommerce search, suggesting full queries based on a prefix typed by the user. QAC has been extensively studied in the literature in the recent years, and it has been consistently shown that adding personalization features can significantly improve the performance of QAC. In this work we propose a novel method for personalized QAC that uses lightweight embeddings learnt through fastText. We construct an embedding for the user context queries, which are the last few queries issued by the user. We also use the same model to get the embedding for the candidate queries to be ranked. We introduce ranking features that compute the distance between the candidate queries and the context queries in the embedding space. These features are then combined with other commonly used QAC ranking features to learn a ranking model. We apply our method to a large eCommerce search engine (eBay) and show that the ranker with our proposed feature significantly outperforms the baselines on all of the offline metrics measured, which includes Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), Success Rate (SR), Mean Average Precision (MAP), and Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). Our baselines include the Most Popular Completion (MPC) model as well as a ranking model without our proposed features. The ranking model with the proposed features results in a $20-30\%$ improvement over the MPC model on all metrics. We obtain up to a $5\%$ improvement over the baseline ranking model for all the sessions, which goes up to about $10\%$ when we restrict to sessions that contain the user context. Moreover, our proposed features also significantly outperform text based personalization features studied in the literature before, and adding text based features on top of our proposed embedding based features results only in minor improvements.
Steadiface: Real-Time Face-Centric Stabilization on Mobile Phones
Authors: Fuhao Shi, Sung-Fang Tsai, Youyou Wang, Chia-Kai Liang
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation, Video Stabilization

We present Steadiface, a new real-time face-centric video stabilization method that simultaneously removes hand shake and keeps subject's head stable. We use a CNN to estimate the face landmarks and use them to optimize a stabilized head center. We then formulate an optimization problem to find a virtual camera pose that locates the face to the stabilized head center while retains smooth rotation and translation transitions across frames. We test the proposed method on fieldtest videos and show it stabilizes both the head motion and background. It is robust to large head pose, occlusion, facial appearance variations, and different kinds of camera motions. We show our method advances the state of art in selfie video stabilization by comparing against alternative methods. The whole process runs very efficiently on a modern mobile phone (8.1 ms/frame).
Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Automatic Seizure Detection
Authors: Ian Covert, Balu Krishnan, Imad Najm, Jiening Zhan, Matthew Shore, John Hixson, Ming Jack Po
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Seizure Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Seizure detection from EEGs is a challenging and time consuming clinical problem that would benefit from the development of automated algorithms. EEGs can be viewed as structural time series, because they are multivariate time series where the placement of leads on a patient's scalp provides prior information about the structure of interactions. Commonly used deep learning models for time series don't offer a way to leverage structural information, but this would be desirable in a model for structural time series. To address this challenge, we propose the temporal graph convolutional network (TGCN), a model that leverages structural information and has relatively few parameters. TGCNs apply feature extraction operations that are localized and shared over both time and space, thereby providing a useful inductive bias in tasks where one expects similar features to be discriminative across the different sequences. In our experiments we focus on metrics that are most important to seizure detection, and demonstrate that TGCN matches the performance of related models that have been shown to be state of the art in other tasks. Additionally, we investigate interpretability advantages of TGCN by exploring approaches for helping clinicians determine when precisely seizures occur, and the parts of the brain that are most involved.
Static Activation Function Normalization
Authors: Pierre H. Richemond, Yike Guo
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00

Recent seminal work at the intersection of deep neural networks practice and random matrix theory has linked the convergence speed and robustness of these networks with the combination of random weight initialization and nonlinear activation function in use. Building on those principles, we introduce a process to transform an existing activation function into another one with better properties. We term such transform \emph{static activation normalization}. More specifically we focus on this normalization applied to the ReLU unit, and show empirically that it significantly promotes convergence robustness, maximum training depth, and anytime performance. We verify these claims by examining empirical eigenvalue distributions of networks trained with those activations. Our static activation normalization provides a first step towards giving benefits similar in spirit to schemes like batch normalization, but without computational cost.
Controllable Artistic Text Style Transfer via Shape-Matching GAN
Authors: Shuai Yang, Zhangyang Wang, Zhaowen Wang, Ning Xu, Jiaying Liu, Zongming Guo
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Style Transfer, Text Style Transfer

Artistic text style transfer is the task of migrating the style from a source image to the target text to create artistic typography. Recent style transfer methods have considered texture control to enhance usability. However, controlling the stylistic degree in terms of shape deformation remains an important open challenge. In this paper, we present the first text style transfer network that allows for real-time control of the crucial stylistic degree of the glyph through an adjustable parameter. Our key contribution is a novel bidirectional shape matching framework to establish an effective glyph-style mapping at various deformation levels without paired ground truth. Based on this idea, we propose a scale-controllable module to empower a single network to continuously characterize the multi-scale shape features of the style image and transfer these features to the target text. The proposed method demonstrates its superiority over previous state-of-the-arts in generating diverse, controllable and high-quality stylized text.
Auditing ImageNet: Towards a Model-driven Framework for Annotating Demographic Attributes of Large-Scale Image Datasets
Authors: Chris Dulhanty, Alexander Wong
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

The ImageNet dataset ushered in a flood of academic and industry interest in deep learning for computer vision applications. Despite its significant impact, there has not been a comprehensive investigation into the demographic attributes of images contained within the dataset. Such a study could lead to new insights on inherent biases within ImageNet, particularly important given it is frequently used to pretrain models for a wide variety of computer vision tasks. In this work, we introduce a model-driven framework for the automatic annotation of apparent age and gender attributes in large-scale image datasets. Using this framework, we conduct the first demographic audit of the 2012 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) subset of ImageNet and the "person" hierarchical category of ImageNet. We find that 41.62% of faces in ILSVRC appear as female, 1.71% appear as individuals above the age of 60, and males aged 15 to 29 account for the largest subgroup with 27.11%. We note that the presented model-driven framework is not fair for all intersectional groups, so annotation are subject to bias. We present this work as the starting point for future development of unbiased annotation models and for the study of downstream effects of imbalances in the demographics of ImageNet. Code and annotations are available at: http://bit.ly/ImageNetDemoAudit
Effectiveness of Self Normalizing Neural Networks for Text Classification
Authors: Avinash Madasu, Vijjini Anvesh Rao
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Self Normalizing Neural Networks(SNN) proposed on Feed Forward Neural Networks(FNN) outperform regular FNN architectures in various machine learning tasks. Particularly in the domain of Computer Vision, the activation function Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU) proposed for SNNs, perform better than other non linear activations such as ReLU. The goal of SNN is to produce a normalized output for a normalized input. Established neural network architectures like feed forward networks and Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) lack the intrinsic nature of normalizing outputs. Hence, requiring additional layers such as Batch Normalization. Despite the success of SNNs, their characteristic features on other network architectures like CNN haven't been explored, especially in the domain of Natural Language Processing. In this paper we aim to show the effectiveness of proposed, Self Normalizing Convolutional Neural Networks(SCNN) on text classification. We analyze their performance with the standard CNN architecture used on several text classification datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that SCNN achieves comparable results to standard CNN model with significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore it also outperforms CNN with equal number of parameters.
Data-efficient Learning of Morphology and Controller for a Microrobot
Authors: Thomas Liao, Grant Wang, Brian Yang, Rene Lee, Kristofer Pister, Sergey Levine, Roberto Calandra
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Robot design is often a slow and difficult process requiring the iterative construction and testing of prototypes, with the goal of sequentially optimizing the design. For most robots, this process is further complicated by the need, when validating the capabilities of the hardware to solve the desired task, to already have an appropriate controller, which is in turn designed and tuned for the specific hardware. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, HPC-BBO, to efficiently and automatically design hardware configurations, and evaluate them by also automatically tuning the corresponding controller. HPC-BBO is based on a hierarchical Bayesian optimization process which iteratively optimizes morphology configurations (based on the performance of the previous designs during the controller learning process) and subsequently learns the corresponding controllers (exploiting the knowledge collected from optimizing for previous morphologies). Moreover, HPC-BBO can select a "batch" of multiple morphology designs at once, thus parallelizing hardware validation and reducing the number of time-consuming production cycles. We validate HPC-BBO on the design of the morphology and controller for a simulated 6-legged microrobot. Experimental results show that HPC-BBO outperforms multiple competitive baselines, and yields a $360\%$ reduction in production cycles over standard Bayesian optimization, thus reducing the hypothetical manufacturing time of our microrobot from 21 to 4 months.
DeepSignals: Predicting Intent of Drivers Through Visual Signals
Authors: Davi Frossard, Eric Kee, Raquel Urtasun
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00

Detecting the intention of drivers is an essential task in self-driving, necessary to anticipate sudden events like lane changes and stops. Turn signals and emergency flashers communicate such intentions, providing seconds of potentially critical reaction time. In this paper, we propose to detect these signals in video sequences by using a deep neural network that reasons about both spatial and temporal information. Our experiments on more than a million frames show high per-frame accuracy in very challenging scenarios.
TensorNetwork on TensorFlow: A Spin Chain Application Using Tree Tensor Networks
Authors: Ashley Milsted, Martin Ganahl, Stefan Leichenauer, Jack Hidary, Guifre Vidal
Date: 2019-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Tensor Networks

TensorNetwork is an open source library for implementing tensor network algorithms in TensorFlow. We describe a tree tensor network (TTN) algorithm for approximating the ground state of either a periodic quantum spin chain (1D) or a lattice model on a thin torus (2D), and implement the algorithm using TensorNetwork. We use a standard energy minimization procedure over a TTN ansatz with bond dimension $\chi$, with a computational cost that scales as $O(\chi^4)$. Using bond dimension $\chi \in [32,256]$ we compare the use of CPUs with GPUs and observe significant computational speed-ups, up to a factor of $100$, using a GPU and the TensorNetwork library.