pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Detecting organized eCommerce fraud using scalable categorical clustering
Authors: Samuel Marchal, Sebastian Szyller
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fraud Detection

Online retail, eCommerce, frequently falls victim to fraud conducted by malicious customers (fraudsters) who obtain goods or services through deception. Fraud coordinated by groups of professional fraudsters that place several fraudulent orders to maximize their gain is referred to as organized fraud. Existing approaches to fraud detection typically analyze orders in isolation and they are not effective at identifying groups of fraudulent orders linked to organized fraud. These also wrongly identify many legitimate orders as fraud, which hinders their usage for automated fraud cancellation. We introduce a novel solution to detect organized fraud by analyzing orders in bulk. Our approach is based on clustering and aims to group together fraudulent orders placed by the same group of fraudsters. It selectively uses two existing techniques, agglomerative clustering and sampling to recursively group orders into small clusters in a reasonable amount of time. We assess our clustering technique on real-world orders placed on the Zalando website, the largest online apparel retailer in Europe1. Our clustering processes 100,000s of orders in a few hours and groups 35-45% of fraudulent orders together. We propose a simple technique built on top of our clustering that detects 26.2% of fraud while raising false alarms for only 0.1% of legitimate orders.
Orthogonality Constrained Multi-Head Attention For Keyword Spotting
Authors: Mingu Lee, Jinkyu Lee, Hye Jin Jang, Byeonggeun Kim, Wonil Chang, Kyuwoong Hwang
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Spotting

Multi-head attention mechanism is capable of learning various representations from sequential data while paying attention to different subsequences, e.g., word-pieces or syllables in a spoken word. From the subsequences, it retrieves richer information than a single-head attention which only summarizes the whole sequence into one context vector. However, a naive use of the multi-head attention does not guarantee such richness as the attention heads may have positional and representational redundancy. In this paper, we propose a regularization technique for multi-head attention mechanism in an end-to-end neural keyword spotting system. Augmenting regularization terms which penalize positional and contextual non-orthogonality between the attention heads encourages to output different representations from separate subsequences, which in turn enables leveraging structured information without explicit sequence models such as hidden Markov models. In addition, intra-head contextual non-orthogonality regularization encourages each attention head to have similar representations across keyword examples, which helps classification by reducing feature variability. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed regularization technique significantly improves the keyword spotting performance for the keyword "Hey Snapdragon".
DeGNN: Characterizing and Improving Graph Neural Networks with Graph Decomposition
Authors: Xupeng Miao, Nezihe Merve Gürel, Wentao Zhang, Zhichao Han, Bo Li, Wei Min, Xi Rao, Hansheng Ren, Yinan Shan, Yingxia Shao, Yujie Wang, Fan Wu, Hui Xue, Yaming Yang, Zitao Zhang, Yang Zhao, Shuai Zhang, Yujing Wang, Bin Cui, Ce Zhang
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Despite the wide application of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), one major limitation is that it does not benefit from the increasing depth and suffers from the oversmoothing problem. In this work, we first characterize this phenomenon from the information-theoretic perspective and show that under certain conditions, the mutual information between the output after $l$ layers and the input of GCN converges to 0 exponentially with respect to $l$. We also show that, on the other hand, graph decomposition can potentially weaken the condition of such convergence rate, which enabled our analysis for GraphCNN. While different graph structures can only benefit from the corresponding decomposition, in practice, we propose an automatic connectivity-aware graph decomposition algorithm, DeGNN, to improve the performance of general graph neural networks. Extensive experiments on widely adopted benchmark datasets demonstrate that DeGNN can not only significantly boost the performance of corresponding GNNs, but also achieves the state-of-the-art performances.
Strategic Coalitions in Stochastic Games
Authors: Pavel Naumov, Kevin Ros
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00

The article introduces a notion of a stochastic game with failure states and proposes two logical systems with modality "coalition has a strategy to transition to a non-failure state with a given probability while achieving a given goal." The logical properties of this modality depend on whether the modal language allows the empty coalition. The main technical results are a completeness theorem for a logical system with the empty coalition, a strong completeness theorem for the logical system without the empty coalition, and an incompleteness theorem which shows that there is no strongly complete logical system in the language with the empty coalition.
Semi-Supervised Variational Autoencoder for Survival Prediction
Authors: Sveinn Pálsson, Stefano Cerri, Andrea Dittadi, Koen van Leemput
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Prediction, Segmentation, Survival Analysis, Survival Prediction, Tumor Segmentation

In this paper we propose a semi-supervised variational autoencoder for classification of overall survival groups from tumor segmentation masks. The model can use the output of any tumor segmentation algorithm, removing all assumptions on the scanning platform and the specific type of pulse sequences used, thereby increasing its generalization properties. Due to its semi-supervised nature, the method can learn to classify survival time by using a relatively small number of labeled subjects. We validate our model on the publicly available dataset from the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge (BraTS) 2019.
Tree-Wasserstein Barycenter for Large-Scale Multilevel Clustering and Scalable Bayes
Authors: Tam Le, Viet Huynh, Nhat Ho, Dinh Phung, Makoto Yamada
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We study in this paper a variant of Wasserstein barycenter problem, which we refer to as tree-Wasserstein barycenter, by leveraging a specific class of ground metrics, namely tree metrics, for Wasserstein distance. Drawing on the tree structure, we propose an efficient algorithmic approach to solve the tree-Wasserstein barycenter and its variants. The proposed approach is not only fast for computation but also efficient for memory usage. Exploiting the tree-Wasserstein barycenter and its variants, we scale up multi-level clustering and scalable Bayes, especially for large-scale applications where the number of supports in probability measures is large. Empirically, we test our proposed approach against other baselines on large-scale synthetic and real datasets.
Image Super-Resolution via Attention based Back Projection Networks
Authors: Zhi-Song Liu, Li-Wen Wang, Chu-Tak Li, Wan-Chi Siu, Yui-Lam Chan
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Deep learning based image Super-Resolution (SR) has shown rapid development due to its ability of big data digestion. Generally, deeper and wider networks can extract richer feature maps and generate SR images with remarkable quality. However, the more complex network we have, the more time consumption is required for practical applications. It is important to have a simplified network for efficient image SR. In this paper, we propose an Attention based Back Projection Network (ABPN) for image super-resolution. Similar to some recent works, we believe that the back projection mechanism can be further developed for SR. Enhanced back projection blocks are suggested to iteratively update low- and high-resolution feature residues. Inspired by recent studies on attention models, we propose a Spatial Attention Block (SAB) to learn the cross-correlation across features at different layers. Based on the assumption that a good SR image should be close to the original LR image after down-sampling. We propose a Refined Back Projection Block (RBPB) for final reconstruction. Extensive experiments on some public and AIM2019 Image Super-Resolution Challenge datasets show that the proposed ABPN can provide state-of-the-art or even better performance in both quantitative and qualitative measurements.
Multi-Stage Pathological Image Classification using Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Shusuke Takahama, Yusuke Kurose, Yusuke Mukuta, Hiroyuki Abe, Masashi Fukayama, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Masanobu Kitagawa, Tatsuya Harada
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, GPU, image-classification, Image Classification, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, whole slide images

Histopathological image analysis is an essential process for the discovery of diseases such as cancer. However, it is challenging to train CNN on whole slide images (WSIs) of gigapixel resolution considering the available memory capacity. Most of the previous works divide high resolution WSIs into small image patches and separately input them into the model to classify it as a tumor or a normal tissue. However, patch-based classification uses only patch-scale local information but ignores the relationship between neighboring patches. If we consider the relationship of neighboring patches and global features, we can improve the classification performance. In this paper, we propose a new model structure combining the patch-based classification model and whole slide-scale segmentation model in order to improve the prediction performance of automatic pathological diagnosis. We extract patch features from the classification model and input them into the segmentation model to obtain a whole slide tumor probability heatmap. The classification model considers patch-scale local features, and the segmentation model can take global information into account. We also propose a new optimization method that retains gradient information and trains the model partially for end-to-end learning with limited GPU memory capacity. We apply our method to the tumor/normal prediction on WSIs and the classification performance is improved compared with the conventional patch-based method.
Searching for A Robust Neural Architecture in Four GPU Hours
Authors: Xuanyi Dong, Yi Yang
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2019 6
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search, Reinforcement Learning

Conventional neural architecture search (NAS) approaches are based on reinforcement learning or evolutionary strategy, which take more than 3000 GPU hours to find a good model on CIFAR-10. We propose an efficient NAS approach learning to search by gradient descent. Our approach represents the search space as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This DAG contains billions of sub-graphs, each of which indicates a kind of neural architecture. To avoid traversing all the possibilities of the sub-graphs, we develop a differentiable sampler over the DAG. This sampler is learnable and optimized by the validation loss after training the sampled architecture. In this way, our approach can be trained in an end-to-end fashion by gradient descent, named Gradient-based search using Differentiable Architecture Sampler (GDAS). In experiments, we can finish one searching procedure in four GPU hours on CIFAR-10, and the discovered model obtains a test error of 2.82\% with only 2.5M parameters, which is on par with the state-of-the-art. Code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/D-X-Y/NAS-Projects.
PAC-Bayesian Contrastive Unsupervised Representation Learning
Authors: Kento Nozawa, Pascal Germain, Benjamin Guedj
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Contrastive unsupervised representation learning (CURL) is the state-of-the-art technique to learn representations (as a set of features) from unlabelled data. While CURL has collected several empirical successes recently, theoretical understanding of its performance was still missing. In a recent work, Arora et al. (2019) provide the first generalisation bounds for CURL, relying on a Rademacher complexity. We extend their framework to the flexible PAC-Bayes setting, allowing us to deal with the non-iid setting. We present PAC-Bayesian generalisation bounds for CURL, which are then used to derive a new representation learning algorithm. Numerical experiments on real-life datasets illustrate that our algorithm achieves competitive accuracy, and yields non-vacuous generalisation bounds.
Flow-based Alignment Approaches for Probability Measures in Different Spaces
Authors: Tam Le, Nhat Ho, Makoto Yamada
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00

Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) is a powerful tool to compare probability measures whose supports are in different metric spaces. GW suffers however from a computational drawback since it requires to solve a complex non-convex quadratic program. We consider in this work a specific family of cost metrics, namely \textit{tree metrics} for a space of supports of each probability measure, and aim for developing efficient and scalable discrepancies between the probability measures. By leveraging a tree structure, we propose to align \textit{flows} from a root to each support instead of pair-wise tree metrics of supports, i.e., flows from a support to another, in GW. Consequently, we propose a novel discrepancy, named Flow-based Alignment (\FlowAlign), by matching the flows of the probability measures. We show that \FlowAlign~shares a similar structure as a univariate optimal transport distance. Therefore, \FlowAlign~is fast for computation and scalable for large-scale applications. By further exploring tree structures, we propose a variant of \FlowAlign, named Depth-based Alignment (\DepthAlign), by aligning the flows hierarchically along each depth level of the tree structures. Theoretically, we prove that both \FlowAlign~and \DepthAlign~are pseudo-distances. Moreover, we also derive tree-sliced variants, computed by averaging the corresponding \FlowAlign~/ \DepthAlign~using random tree metrics, built adaptively in spaces of supports. Empirically, we test our proposed discrepancies against other baselines on some benchmark tasks.
Still no free lunches: the price to pay for tighter PAC-Bayes bounds
Authors: Benjamin Guedj, Louis Pujol
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00

"No free lunch" results state the impossibility of obtaining meaningful bounds on the error of a learning algorithm without prior assumptions and modelling. Some models are expensive (strong assumptions, such as as subgaussian tails), others are cheap (simply finite variance). As it is well known, the more you pay, the more you get: in other words, the most expensive models yield the more interesting bounds. Recent advances in robust statistics have investigated procedures to obtain tight bounds while keeping the cost minimal. The present paper explores and exhibits what the limits are for obtaining tight PAC-Bayes bounds in a robust setting for cheap models, addressing the question: is PAC-Bayes good value for money?
Breathing deformation model -- application to multi-resolution abdominal MRI
Authors: Chompunuch Sarasaen, Soumick Chatterjee, Mario Breitkopf, Domenico Iuso, Georg Rose, Oliver Speck
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

Dynamic MRI is a technique of acquiring a series of images continuously to follow the physiological changes over time. However, such fast imaging results in low resolution images. In this work, abdominal deformation model computed from dynamic low resolution images have been applied to high resolution image, acquired previously, to generate dynamic high resolution MRI. Dynamic low resolution images were simulated into different breathing phases (inhale and exhale). Then, the image registration between breathing time points was performed using the B-spline SyN deformable model and using cross-correlation as a similarity metric. The deformation model between different breathing phases were estimated from highly undersampled data. This deformation model was then applied to the high resolution images to obtain high resolution images of different breathing phases. The results indicated that the deformation model could be computed from relatively very low resolution images.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Advantage-Based Auxiliary Rewards
Authors: Siyuan Li, Rui Wang, Minxue Tang, Chongjie Zhang
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require domain-specific information to define low-level rewards. In this paper, we aim to adapt low-level skills to downstream tasks while maintaining the generality of reward design. We propose an HRL framework which sets auxiliary rewards for low-level skill training based on the advantage function of the high-level policy. This auxiliary reward enables efficient, simultaneous learning of the high-level policy and low-level skills without using task-specific knowledge. In addition, we also theoretically prove that optimizing low-level skills with this auxiliary reward will increase the task return for the joint policy. Experimental results show that our algorithm dramatically outperforms other state-of-the-art HRL methods in Mujoco domains. We also find both low-level and high-level policies trained by our algorithm transferable.
A Multi-view Dimensionality Reduction Algorithm Based on Smooth Representation Model
Authors: Haohao Li, Huibing Wang
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed a large family of algorithms that have been designed to provide different solutions to the problem of dimensionality reduction (DR). The DR is an essential tool to excavate the important information from the high-dimensional data by mapping the data to a low-dimensional subspace. Furthermore, for the diversity of varied high-dimensional data, the multi-view features can be utilized for improving the learning performance. However, many DR methods fail to integrating multiple views. Although the features from different views are extracted by different manners, they are utilized to describe the same sample, which implies that they are highly related. Therefore, how to learn the subspace for high-dimensional features by utilizing the consistency and complementary properties of multi-view features is important in the present. In this paper, we propose an effective multi-view dimensionality reduction algorithm named Multi-view Smooth Preserve Projection. Firstly, we construct a single view DR method named Smooth Preserve Projection based on the Smooth Representation model. The proposed method aims to find a subspace for the high-dimensional data, in which the smooth reconstructive weights are preserved as much as possible. Then, we extend it to a multi-view version in which we exploits Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion to jointly learn one common subspace for all views. A plenty of experiments on multi-view datasets show the excellent performance of the proposed method.
Model-free prediction of spatiotemporal dynamical systems with recurrent neural networks: Role of network spectral radius
Authors: Junjie Jiang, Ying-Cheng Lai
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

A common difficulty in applications of machine learning is the lack of any general principle for guiding the choices of key parameters of the underlying neural network. Focusing on a class of recurrent neural networks - reservoir computing systems that have recently been exploited for model-free prediction of nonlinear dynamical systems, we uncover a surprising phenomenon: the emergence of an interval in the spectral radius of the neural network in which the prediction error is minimized. In a three-dimensional representation of the error versus time and spectral radius, the interval corresponds to the bottom region of a "valley." Such a valley arises for a variety of spatiotemporal dynamical systems described by nonlinear partial differential equations, regardless of the structure and the edge-weight distribution of the underlying reservoir network. We also find that, while the particular location and size of the valley would depend on the details of the target system to be predicted, the interval tends to be larger for undirected than for directed networks. The valley phenomenon can be beneficial to the design of optimal reservoir computing, representing a small step forward in understanding these machine-learning systems.
Contract Statements Knowledge Service for Chatbots
Authors: Boris Ruf, Matteo Sammarco, Marcin Detyniecki
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Towards conversational agents that are capable of handling more complex questions on contractual conditions, formalizing contract statements in a machine readable way is crucial. However, constructing a formal model which captures the full scope of a contract proves difficult due to the overall complexity its set of rules represent. Instead, this paper presents a top-down approach to the problem. After identifying the most relevant contract statements, we model their underlying rules in a novel knowledge engineering method. A user-friendly tool we developed for this purpose allows to do so easily and at scale. Then, we expose the statements as service so they can get smoothly integrated in any chatbot framework.
Learning beyond Predefined Label Space via Bayesian Nonparametric Topic Modelling
Authors: Changying Du, Fuzhen Zhuang, Jia He, Qing He, Guoping Long
Date: 2019-10-10 00:00:00

In real world machine learning applications, testing data may contain some meaningful new categories that have not been seen in labeled training data. To simultaneously recognize new data categories and assign most appropriate category labels to the data actually from known categories, existing models assume the number of unknown new categories is pre-specified, though it is difficult to determine in advance. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric topic model to automatically infer this number, based on the hierarchical Dirichlet process and the notion of latent Dirichlet allocation. Exact inference in our model is intractable, so we provide an efficient collapsed Gibbs sampling algorithm for approximate posterior inference. Extensive experiments on various text data sets show that: (a) compared with parametric approaches that use pre-specified true number of new categories, the proposed nonparametric approach can yield comparable performance; and (b) when the exact number of new categories is unavailable, i.e. the parametric approaches only have a rough idea about the new categories, our approach has evident performance advantages.