pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
EX-RAY: Distinguishing Injected Backdoor from Natural Features in Neural Networks by Examining Differential Feature Symmetry
Authors: Yingqi Liu, Guangyu Shen, Guanhong Tao, Zhenting Wang, Shiqing Ma, Xiangyu Zhang
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack

Backdoor attack injects malicious behavior to models such that inputs embedded with triggers are misclassified to a target label desired by the attacker. However, natural features may behave like triggers, causing misclassification once embedded. While they are inevitable, mis-recognizing them as injected triggers causes false warnings in backdoor scanning. A prominent challenge is hence to distinguish natural features and injected backdoors. We develop a novel symmetric feature differencing method that identifies a smallest set of features separating two classes. A backdoor is considered injected if the corresponding trigger consists of features different from the set of features distinguishing the victim and target classes. We evaluate the technique on thousands of models, including both clean and trojaned models, from the TrojAI rounds 2-4 competitions and a number of models on ImageNet. Existing backdoor scanning techniques may produce hundreds of false positives (i.e., clean models recognized as trojaned). Our technique removes 78-100% of the false positives (by a state-of-the-art scanner ABS) with a small increase of false negatives by 0-30%, achieving 17-41% overall accuracy improvement, and facilitates achieving top performance on the leaderboard. It also boosts performance of other scanners. It outperforms false positive removal methods using L2 distance and attribution techniques. We also demonstrate its potential in detecting a number of semantic backdoor attacks.
A Novel Paper Recommendation Method Empowered by Knowledge Graph: for Research Beginners
Authors: Bangchao Wang, Ziyang Weng, Yanping Wang
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Searching for papers from different academic databases is the most commonly used method by research beginners to obtain cross-domain technical solutions. However, it is usually inefficient and sometimes even useless because traditional search methods neither consider knowledge heterogeneity in different domains nor build the bottom layer of search, including but not limited to the characteristic description text of target solutions and solutions to be excluded. To alleviate this problem, a novel paper recommendation method is proposed herein by introducing "master-slave" domain knowledge graphs, which not only help users express their requirements more accurately but also helps the recommendation system better express knowledge. Specifically, it is not restricted by the cold start problem and is a challenge-oriented method. To identify the rationality and usefulness of the proposed method, we selected two cross-domains and three different academic databases for verification. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining new technical papers in the cross-domain scenario by research beginners using the proposed method. Further, a new research paradigm for research beginners in the early stages is proposed herein.
Soft and subspace robust multivariate rank tests based on entropy regularized optimal transport
Authors: Shoaib Bin Masud, Boyang Lyu, Shuchin Aeron
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Point Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In this paper, we extend the recently proposed multivariate rank energy distance, based on the theory of optimal transport, for statistical testing of distributional similarity, to soft rank energy distance. Being differentiable, this in turn allows us to extend the rank energy to a subspace robust rank energy distance, dubbed Projected soft-Rank Energy distance, which can be computed via optimization over the Stiefel manifold. We show via experiments that using projected soft rank energy one can trade-off the detection power vs the false alarm via projections onto an appropriately selected low dimensional subspace. We also show the utility of the proposed tests on unsupervised change point detection in multivariate time series data. All codes are publicly available at the link provided in the experiment section.
Robustly Optimized and Distilled Training for Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Haytham ElFadeel, Stan Peshterliev
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Reading Comprehension, Multi-Task Learning, Natural Language Inference, Natural Language Understanding, Reading Comprehension

In this paper, we explore multi-task learning (MTL) as a second pretraining step to learn enhanced universal language representation for transformer language models. We use the MTL enhanced representation across several natural language understanding tasks to improve performance and generalization. Moreover, we incorporate knowledge distillation (KD) in MTL to further boost performance and devise a KD variant that learns effectively from multiple teachers. By combining MTL and KD, we propose Robustly Optimized and Distilled (ROaD) modeling framework. We use ROaD together with the ELECTRA model to obtain state-of-the-art results for machine reading comprehension and natural language inference.
Track to Detect and Segment: An Online Multi-Object Tracker
Authors: Jialian Wu, Jiale Cao, Liangchen Song, Yu Wang, Ming Yang, Junsong Yuan
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: 3D Multi-Object Tracking, Instance Segmentation, Multi-Object Tracking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking, Online Multi-Object Tracking, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Instance Segmentation

Most online multi-object trackers perform object detection stand-alone in a neural net without any input from tracking. In this paper, we present a new online joint detection and tracking model, TraDeS (TRAck to DEtect and Segment), exploiting tracking clues to assist detection end-to-end. TraDeS infers object tracking offset by a cost volume, which is used to propagate previous object features for improving current object detection and segmentation. Effectiveness and superiority of TraDeS are shown on 4 datasets, including MOT (2D tracking), nuScenes (3D tracking), MOTS and Youtube-VIS (instance segmentation tracking). Project page: https://jialianwu.com/projects/TraDeS.html.
Parareal Neural Networks Emulating a Parallel-in-time Algorithm
Authors: Chang-Ock Lee, Youngkyu Lee, Jongho Park
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

As deep neural networks (DNNs) become deeper, the training time increases. In this perspective, multi-GPU parallel computing has become a key tool in accelerating the training of DNNs. In this paper, we introduce a novel methodology to construct a parallel neural network that can utilize multiple GPUs simultaneously from a given DNN. We observe that layers of DNN can be interpreted as the time step of a time-dependent problem and can be parallelized by emulating a parallel-in-time algorithm called parareal. The parareal algorithm consists of fine structures which can be implemented in parallel and a coarse structure which gives suitable approximations to the fine structures. By emulating it, the layers of DNN are torn to form a parallel structure which is connected using a suitable coarse network. We report accelerated and accuracy-preserved results of the proposed methodology applied to VGG-16 and ResNet-1001 on several datasets.
Flow-based Self-supervised Density Estimation for Anomalous Sound Detection
Authors: Kota Dohi, Takashi Endo, Harsh Purohit, Ryo Tanabe, Yohei Kawaguchi
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Density Estimation, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

To develop a machine sound monitoring system, a method for detecting anomalous sound is proposed. Exact likelihood estimation using Normalizing Flows is a promising technique for unsupervised anomaly detection, but it can fail at out-of-distribution detection since the likelihood is affected by the smoothness of the data. To improve the detection performance, we train the model to assign higher likelihood to target machine sounds and lower likelihood to sounds from other machines of the same machine type. We demonstrate that this enables the model to incorporate a self-supervised classification-based approach. Experiments conducted using the DCASE 2020 Challenge Task2 dataset showed that the proposed method improves the AUC by 4.6% on average when using Masked Autoregressive Flow (MAF) and by 5.8% when using Glow, which is a significant improvement over the previous method.
Predicting Opioid Use Disorder from Longitudinal Healthcare Data using Multi-stream Transformer
Authors: Sajjad Fouladvand, Jeffery Talbert, Linda P. Dwoskin, Heather Bush, Amy Lynn Meadows, Lars E. Peterson, Ramakanth Kavuluru, Jin Chen
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00

Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) is a public health crisis costing the US billions of dollars annually in healthcare, lost workplace productivity, and crime. Analyzing longitudinal healthcare data is critical in addressing many real-world problems in healthcare. Leveraging the real-world longitudinal healthcare data, we propose a novel multi-stream transformer model called MUPOD for OUD identification. MUPOD is designed to simultaneously analyze multiple types of healthcare data streams, such as medications and diagnoses, by attending to segments within and across these data streams. Our model tested on the data from 392,492 patients with long-term back pain problems showed significantly better performance than the traditional models and recently developed deep learning models.
Data-driven Thermal Anomaly Detection for Batteries using Unsupervised Shape Clustering
Authors: Xiaojun Li, Jianwei Li, Ali Abdollahi, Trevor Jones
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Clustering

For electric vehicles (EV) and energy storage (ES) batteries, thermal runaway is a critical issue as it can lead to uncontrollable fires or even explosions. Thermal anomaly detection can identify problematic battery packs that may eventually undergo thermal runaway. However, there are common challenges like data unavailability, environment and configuration variations, and battery aging. We propose a data-driven method to detect battery thermal anomaly based on comparing shape-similarity between thermal measurements. Based on their shapes, the measurements are continuously being grouped into different clusters. Anomaly is detected by monitoring deviations within the clusters. Unlike model-based or other data-driven methods, the proposed method is robust to data loss and requires minimal reference data for different pack configurations. As the initial experimental results show, the method not only can be more accurate than the onboard BMS and but also can detect unforeseen anomalies at the early stage.
Fairness and Transparency in Recommendation: The Users' Perspective
Authors: Nasim Sonboli, Jessie J. Smith, Florencia Cabral Berenfus, Robin Burke, Casey Fiesler
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Recommendation Systems

Though recommender systems are defined by personalization, recent work has shown the importance of additional, beyond-accuracy objectives, such as fairness. Because users often expect their recommendations to be purely personalized, these new algorithmic objectives must be communicated transparently in a fairness-aware recommender system. While explanation has a long history in recommender systems research, there has been little work that attempts to explain systems that use a fairness objective. Even though the previous work in other branches of AI has explored the use of explanations as a tool to increase fairness, this work has not been focused on recommendation. Here, we consider user perspectives of fairness-aware recommender systems and techniques for enhancing their transparency. We describe the results of an exploratory interview study that investigates user perceptions of fairness, recommender systems, and fairness-aware objectives. We propose three features -- informed by the needs of our participants -- that could improve user understanding of and trust in fairness-aware recommender systems.
LightningDOT: Pre-training Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Real-Time Image-Text Retrieval
Authors: Siqi Sun, Yen-Chun Chen, Linjie Li, Shuohang Wang, Yuwei Fang, Jingjing Liu
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Image-text Retrieval, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Multimodal pre-training has propelled great advancement in vision-and-language research. These large-scale pre-trained models, although successful, fatefully suffer from slow inference speed due to enormous computation cost mainly from cross-modal attention in Transformer architecture. When applied to real-life applications, such latency and computation demand severely deter the practical use of pre-trained models. In this paper, we study Image-text retrieval (ITR), the most mature scenario of V+L application, which has been widely studied even prior to the emergence of recent pre-trained models. We propose a simple yet highly effective approach, LightningDOT that accelerates the inference time of ITR by thousands of times, without sacrificing accuracy. LightningDOT removes the time-consuming cross-modal attention by pre-training on three novel learning objectives, extracting feature indexes offline, and employing instant dot-product matching with further re-ranking, which significantly speeds up retrieval process. In fact, LightningDOT achieves new state of the art across multiple ITR benchmarks such as Flickr30k, COCO and Multi30K, outperforming existing pre-trained models that consume 1000x magnitude of computational hours. Code and pre-training checkpoints are available at https://github.com/intersun/LightningDOT.
dictNN: A Dictionary-Enhanced CNN Approach for Classifying Hate Speech on Twitter
Authors: Maximilian Kupi, Michael Bodnar, Nikolas Schmidt, Carlos Eduardo Posada
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00

Hate speech on social media is a growing concern, and automated methods have so far been sub-par at reliably detecting it. A major challenge lies in the potentially evasive nature of hate speech due to the ambiguity and fast evolution of natural language. To tackle this, we introduce a vectorisation based on a crowd-sourced and continuously updated dictionary of hate words and propose fusing this approach with standard word embedding in order to improve the classification performance of a CNN model. To train and test our model we use a merge of two established datasets (110,748 tweets in total). By adding the dictionary-enhanced input, we are able to increase the CNN model's predictive power and increase the F1 macro score by seven percentage points.
Unconstrained Face-Mask & Face-Hand Datasets: Building a Computer Vision System to Help Prevent the Transmission of COVID-19
Authors: Fevziye Irem Eyiokur, Hazim Kemal Ekenel, Alexander Waibel
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Health organizations advise social distancing, wearing face mask, and avoiding touching face to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Based on these protective measures, we developed a computer vision system to help prevent the transmission of COVID-19. Specifically, the developed system performs face mask detection, face-hand interaction detection, and measures social distance. To train and evaluate the developed system, we collected and annotated images that represent face mask usage and face-hand interaction in the real world. Besides assessing the performance of the developed system on our own datasets, we also tested it on existing datasets in the literature without performing any adaptation on them. In addition, we proposed a module to track social distance between people. Experimental results indicate that our datasets represent the real-world's diversity well. The proposed system achieved very high performance and generalization capacity for face mask usage detection, face-hand interaction detection, and measuring social distance in a real-world scenario on unseen data. The datasets will be available at https://github.com/iremeyiokur/COVID-19-Preventions-Control-System.
Fast and Accurate: Video Enhancement using Sparse Depth
Authors: Yu Feng, Patrick Hansen, Paul N. Whatmough, Guoyu Lu, Yuhao Zhu
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Image Reconstruction, Motion Estimation, Super-Resolution, Video Enhancement

This paper presents a general framework to build fast and accurate algorithms for video enhancement tasks such as super-resolution, deblurring, and denoising. Essential to our framework is the realization that the accuracy, rather than the density, of pixel flows is what is required for high-quality video enhancement. Most of prior works take the opposite approach: they estimate dense (per-pixel)-but generally less robust-flows, mostly using computationally costly algorithms. Instead, we propose a lightweight flow estimation algorithm; it fuses the sparse point cloud data and (even sparser and less reliable) IMU data available in modern autonomous agents to estimate the flow information. Building on top of the flow estimation, we demonstrate a general framework that integrates the flows in a plug-and-play fashion with different task-specific layers. Algorithms built in our framework achieve 1.78x - 187.41x speedup while providing a 0.42 dB - 6.70 dB quality improvement over competing methods.
Modeling Weather-induced Home Insurance Risks with Support Vector Machine Regression
Authors: Asim K. Dey, Vyacheslav Lyubchich, Yulia R. Gel
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Management, regression

Insurance industry is one of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change. Assessment of future number of claims and incurred losses is critical for disaster preparedness and risk management. In this project, we study the effect of precipitation on a joint dynamics of weather-induced home insurance claims and losses. We discuss utility and limitations of such machine learning procedures as Support Vector Machines and Artificial Neural Networks, in forecasting future claim dynamics and evaluating associated uncertainties. We illustrate our approach by application to attribution analysis and forecasting of weather-induced home insurance claims in a middle-sized city in the Canadian Prairies.
A Transition-based Parser for Unscoped Episodic Logical Forms
Authors: Gene Louis Kim, Viet Duong, Xin Lu, Lenhart Schubert
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: IWCS (ACL) 2021 6

"Episodic Logic:Unscoped Logical Form" (EL-ULF) is a semantic representation capturing predicate-argument structure as well as more challenging aspects of language within the Episodic Logic formalism. We present the first learned approach for parsing sentences into ULFs, using a growing set of annotated examples. The results provide a strong baseline for future improvement. Our method learns a sequence-to-sequence model for predicting the transition action sequence within a modified cache transition system. We evaluate the efficacy of type grammar-based constraints, a word-to-symbol lexicon, and transition system state features in this task. Our system is available at https://github.com/genelkim/ulf-transition-parser We also present the first official annotated ULF dataset at https://www.cs.rochester.edu/u/gkim21/ulf/resources/.
Revisiting Dynamic Convolution via Matrix Decomposition
Authors: Yunsheng Li, Yinpeng Chen, Xiyang Dai, Mengchen Liu, Dongdong Chen, Ye Yu, Lu Yuan, Zicheng Liu, Mei Chen, Nuno Vasconcelos
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Recent research in dynamic convolution shows substantial performance boost for efficient CNNs, due to the adaptive aggregation of K static convolution kernels. It has two limitations: (a) it increases the number of convolutional weights by K-times, and (b) the joint optimization of dynamic attention and static convolution kernels is challenging. In this paper, we revisit it from a new perspective of matrix decomposition and reveal the key issue is that dynamic convolution applies dynamic attention over channel groups after projecting into a higher dimensional latent space. To address this issue, we propose dynamic channel fusion to replace dynamic attention over channel groups. Dynamic channel fusion not only enables significant dimension reduction of the latent space, but also mitigates the joint optimization difficulty. As a result, our method is easier to train and requires significantly fewer parameters without sacrificing accuracy. Source code is at https://github.com/liyunsheng13/dcd.
Embedding Code Contexts for Cryptographic API Suggestion:New Methodologies and Comparisons
Authors: Ya Xiao, Salman Ahmed, Wenjia Song, Xinyang Ge, Bimal Viswanath, Danfeng Yao
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

Despite recent research efforts, the vision of automatic code generation through API recommendation has not been realized. Accuracy and expressiveness challenges of API recommendation needs to be systematically addressed. We present a new neural network-based approach, Multi-HyLSTM for API recommendation --targeting cryptography-related code. Multi-HyLSTM leverages program analysis to guide the API embedding and recommendation. By analyzing the data dependence paths of API methods, we train embedding and specialize a multi-path neural network architecture for API recommendation tasks that accurately predict the next API method call. We address two previously unreported programming language-specific challenges, differentiating functionally similar APIs and capturing low-frequency long-range influences. Our results confirm the effectiveness of our design choices, including program-analysis-guided embedding, multi-path code suggestion architecture, and low-frequency long-range-enhanced sequence learning, with high accuracy on top-1 recommendations. We achieve a top-1 accuracy of 91.41% compared with 77.44% from the state-of-the-art tool SLANG. In an analysis of 245 test cases, compared with the commercial tool Codota, we achieve a top-1 recommendation accuracy of 88.98%, which is significantly better than Codota's accuracy of 64.90%. We publish our data and code as a large Java cryptographic code dataset.
S3Net: 3D LiDAR Sparse Semantic Segmentation Network
Authors: Ran Cheng, Ryan Razani, Yuan Ren, Liu Bingbing
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decoder, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic Segmentation is a crucial component in the perception systems of many applications, such as robotics and autonomous driving that rely on accurate environmental perception and understanding. In literature, several approaches are introduced to attempt LiDAR semantic segmentation task, such as projection-based (range-view or birds-eye-view), and voxel-based approaches. However, they either abandon the valuable 3D topology and geometric relations and suffer from information loss introduced in the projection process or are inefficient. Therefore, there is a need for accurate models capable of processing the 3D driving-scene point cloud in 3D space. In this paper, we propose S3Net, a novel convolutional neural network for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation. It adopts an encoder-decoder backbone that consists of Sparse Intra-channel Attention Module (SIntraAM), and Sparse Inter-channel Attention Module (SInterAM) to emphasize the fine details of both within each feature map and among nearby feature maps. To extract the global contexts in deeper layers, we introduce Sparse Residual Tower based upon sparse convolution that suits varying sparsity of LiDAR point cloud. In addition, geo-aware anisotrophic loss is leveraged to emphasize the semantic boundaries and penalize the noise within each predicted regions, leading to a robust prediction. Our experimental results show that the proposed method leads to a large improvement (12\%) compared to its baseline counterpart (MinkNet42 \cite{choy20194d}) on SemanticKITTI \cite{DBLP:conf/iccv/BehleyGMQBSG19} test set and achieves state-of-the-art mIoU accuracy of semantic segmentation approaches.