pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Climbing down Charney's ladder: Machine Learning and the post-Dennard era of computational climate science
Authors: V. Balaji
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Weather Forecasting

The advent of digital computing in the 1950s sparked a revolution in the science of weather and climate. Meteorology, long based on extrapolating patterns in space and time, gave way to computational methods in a decade of advances in numerical weather forecasting. Those same methods also gave rise to computational climate science, studying the behaviour of those same numerical equations over intervals much longer than weather events, and changes in external boundary conditions. Several subsequent decades of exponential growth in computational power have brought us to the present day, where models ever grow in resolution and complexity, capable of mastery of many small-scale phenomena with global repercussions, and ever more intricate feedbacks in the Earth system. The current juncture in computing, seven decades later, heralds an end to what is called Dennard scaling, the physics behind ever smaller computational units and ever faster arithmetic. This is prompting a fundamental change in our approach to the simulation of weather and climate, potentially as revolutionary as that wrought by John von Neumann in the 1950s. One approach could return us to an earlier era of pattern recognition and extrapolation, this time aided by computational power. Another approach could lead us to insights that continue to be expressed in mathematical equations. In either approach, or any synthesis of those, it is clearly no longer the steady march of the last few decades, continuing to add detail to ever more elaborate models. In this prospectus, we attempt to show the outlines of how this may unfold in the coming decades, a new harnessing of physical knowledge, computation, and data.
ON-TRAC Consortium for End-to-End and Simultaneous Speech Translation Challenge Tasks at IWSLT 2020
Authors: Maha Elbayad, Ha Nguyen, Fethi Bougares, Natalia Tomashenko, Antoine Caubrière, Benjamin Lecouteux, Yannick Estève, Laurent Besacier
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decoder, Speech-to-Text, Translation

This paper describes the ON-TRAC Consortium translation systems developed for two challenge tracks featured in the Evaluation Campaign of IWSLT 2020, offline speech translation and simultaneous speech translation. ON-TRAC Consortium is composed of researchers from three French academic laboratories: LIA (Avignon Universit\'e), LIG (Universit\'e Grenoble Alpes), and LIUM (Le Mans Universit\'e). Attention-based encoder-decoder models, trained end-to-end, were used for our submissions to the offline speech translation track. Our contributions focused on data augmentation and ensembling of multiple models. In the simultaneous speech translation track, we build on Transformer-based wait-k models for the text-to-text subtask. For speech-to-text simultaneous translation, we attach a wait-k MT system to a hybrid ASR system. We propose an algorithm to control the latency of the ASR+MT cascade and achieve a good latency-quality trade-off on both subtasks.
Predicting COVID-19 Pneumonia Severity on Chest X-ray with Deep Learning
Authors: Joseph Paul Cohen, Lan Dao, Paul Morrison, Karsten Roth, Yoshua Bengio, Beiyi Shen, Almas Abbasi, Mahsa Hoshmand-Kochi, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Haifang Li, Tim Q Duong
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Purpose: The need to streamline patient management for COVID-19 has become more pressing than ever. Chest X-rays provide a non-invasive (potentially bedside) tool to monitor the progression of the disease. In this study, we present a severity score prediction model for COVID-19 pneumonia for frontal chest X-ray images. Such a tool can gauge severity of COVID-19 lung infections (and pneumonia in general) that can be used for escalation or de-escalation of care as well as monitoring treatment efficacy, especially in the ICU. Methods: Images from a public COVID-19 database were scored retrospectively by three blinded experts in terms of the extent of lung involvement as well as the degree of opacity. A neural network model that was pre-trained on large (non-COVID-19) chest X-ray datasets is used to construct features for COVID-19 images which are predictive for our task. Results: This study finds that training a regression model on a subset of the outputs from an this pre-trained chest X-ray model predicts our geographic extent score (range 0-8) with 1.14 mean absolute error (MAE) and our lung opacity score (range 0-6) with 0.78 MAE. Conclusions: These results indicate that our model's ability to gauge severity of COVID-19 lung infections could be used for escalation or de-escalation of care as well as monitoring treatment efficacy, especially in the intensive care unit (ICU). A proper clinical trial is needed to evaluate efficacy. To enable this we make our code, labels, and data available online at https://github.com/mlmed/torchxrayvision/tree/master/scripts/covid-severity and https://github.com/ieee8023/covid-chestxray-dataset
Model-free Reinforcement Learning for Stochastic Stackelberg Security Games
Authors: Deepanshu Vasal
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we consider a sequential stochastic Stackelberg game with two players, a leader and a follower. The follower has access to the state of the system while the leader does not. Assuming that the players act in their respective best interests, the follower's strategy is to play the best response to the leader's strategy. In such a scenario, the leader has the advantage of committing to a policy which maximizes its own returns given the knowledge that the follower is going to play the best response to its policy. Thus, both players converge to a pair of policies that form the Stackelberg equilibrium of the game. Recently,~[1] provided a sequential decomposition algorithm to compute the Stackelberg equilibrium for such games which allow for the computation of Markovian equilibrium policies in linear time as opposed to double exponential, as before. In this paper, we extend the idea to an MDP whose dynamics are not known to the players, to propose an RL algorithm based on Expected Sarsa that learns the Stackelberg equilibrium policy by simulating a model of the MDP. We use particle filters to estimate the belief update for a common agent which computes the optimal policy based on the information which is common to both the players. We present a security game example to illustrate the policy learned by our algorithm. by simulating a model of the MDP. We use particle filters to estimate the belief update for a common agent which computes the optimal policy based on the information which is common to both the players. We present a security game example to illustrate the policy learned by our algorithm.
Stronger Baselines for Grammatical Error Correction Using Pretrained Encoder-Decoder Model
Authors: Satoru Katsumata, Mamoru Komachi
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Grammatical Error Correction

Studies on grammatical error correction (GEC) have reported the effectiveness of pretraining a Seq2Seq model with a large amount of pseudodata. However, this approach requires time-consuming pretraining for GEC because of the size of the pseudodata. In this study, we explore the utility of bidirectional and auto-regressive transformers (BART) as a generic pretrained encoder-decoder model for GEC. With the use of this generic pretrained model for GEC, the time-consuming pretraining can be eliminated. We find that monolingual and multilingual BART models achieve high performance in GEC, with one of the results being comparable to the current strong results in English GEC. Our implementations are publicly available at GitHub (https://github.com/Katsumata420/generic-pretrained-GEC).
How Does That Sound? Multi-Language SpokenName2Vec Algorithm Using Speech Generation and Deep Learning
Authors: Aviad Elyashar, Rami Puzis, Michael Fire
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00

Searching for information about a specific person is an online activity frequently performed by many users. In most cases, users are aided by queries containing a name and sending back to the web search engines for finding their will. Typically, Web search engines provide just a few accurate results associated with a name-containing query. Currently, most solutions for suggesting synonyms in online search are based on pattern matching and phonetic encoding, however very often, the performance of such solutions is less than optimal. In this paper, we propose SpokenName2Vec, a novel and generic approach which addresses the similar name suggestion problem by utilizing automated speech generation, and deep learning to produce spoken name embeddings. This sophisticated and innovative embeddings captures the way people pronounce names in any language and accent. Utilizing the name pronunciation can be helpful for both differentiating and detecting names that sound alike, but are written differently. The proposed approach was demonstrated on a large-scale dataset consisting of 250,000 forenames and evaluated using a machine learning classifier and 7,399 names with their verified synonyms. The performance of the proposed approach was found to be superior to 10 other algorithms evaluated in this study, including well used phonetic and string similarity algorithms, and two recently proposed algorithms. The results obtained suggest that the proposed approach could serve as a useful and valuable tool for solving the similar name suggestion problem.
Proper Learning, Helly Number, and an Optimal SVM Bound
Authors: Olivier Bousquet, Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Nikita Zhivotovskiy
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: PAC learning

The classical PAC sample complexity bounds are stated for any Empirical Risk Minimizer (ERM) and contain an extra logarithmic factor $\log(1/{\epsilon})$ which is known to be necessary for ERM in general. It has been recently shown by Hanneke (2016) that the optimal sample complexity of PAC learning for any VC class C is achieved by a particular improper learning algorithm, which outputs a specific majority-vote of hypotheses in C. This leaves the question of when this bound can be achieved by proper learning algorithms, which are restricted to always output a hypothesis from C. In this paper we aim to characterize the classes for which the optimal sample complexity can be achieved by a proper learning algorithm. We identify that these classes can be characterized by the dual Helly number, which is a combinatorial parameter that arises in discrete geometry and abstract convexity. In particular, under general conditions on C, we show that the dual Helly number is bounded if and only if there is a proper learner that obtains the optimal joint dependence on $\epsilon$ and $\delta$. As further implications of our techniques we resolve a long-standing open problem posed by Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1974) on the performance of the Support Vector Machine by proving that the sample complexity of SVM in the realizable case is $\Theta((n/{\epsilon})+(1/{\epsilon})\log(1/{\delta}))$, where $n$ is the dimension. This gives the first optimal PAC bound for Halfspaces achieved by a proper learning algorithm, and moreover is computationally efficient.
Monitoring and Diagnosability of Perception Systems
Authors: Pasquale Antonante, David I. Spivak, Luca Carlone
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, Self-Driving Cars

Perception is a critical component of high-integrity applications of robotics and autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars. In these applications, failure of perception systems may put human life at risk, and a broad adoption of these technologies relies on the development of methodologies to guarantee and monitor safe operation as well as detect and mitigate failures. Despite the paramount importance of perception systems, currently there is no formal approach for system-level monitoring. In this work, we propose a mathematical model for runtime monitoring and fault detection of perception systems. Towards this goal, we draw connections with the literature on self-diagnosability for multiprocessor systems, and generalize it to (i) account for modules with heterogeneous outputs, and (ii) add a temporal dimension to the problem, which is crucial to model realistic perception systems where modules interact over time. This contribution results in a graph-theoretic approach that, given a perception system, is able to detect faults at runtime and allows computing an upper-bound on the number of faulty modules that can be detected. Our second contribution is to show that the proposed monitoring approach can be elegantly described with the language of topos theory, which allows formulating diagnosability over arbitrary time intervals.
Recognizing Families through Images with Pretrained Encoder
Authors: Tuan-Duy H. Nguyen, Huu-Nghia H. Nguyen, Hieu Dao
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Kinship Verification, Retrieval

Kinship verification and kinship retrieval are emerging tasks in computer vision. Kinship verification aims at determining whether two facial images are from related people or not, while kinship retrieval is the task of retrieving possible related facial images to a person from a gallery of images. They introduce unique challenges because of the hidden relations and features that carry inherent characteristics between the facial images. We employ 3 methods, FaceNet, Siamese VGG-Face, and a combination of FaceNet and VGG-Face models as feature extractors, to achieve the 9th standing for kinship verification and the 5th standing for kinship retrieval in the Recognizing Family in The Wild 2020 competition. We then further experimented using StyleGAN2 as another encoder, with no improvement in the result.
Learning visual servo policies via planner cloning
Authors: Ulrich Viereck, Kate Saenko, Robert Platt
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00

Learning control policies for visual servoing in novel environments is an important problem. However, standard model-free policy learning methods are slow. This paper explores planner cloning: using behavior cloning to learn policies that mimic the behavior of a full-state motion planner in simulation. We propose Penalized Q Cloning (PQC), a new behavior cloning algorithm. We show that it outperforms several baselines and ablations on some challenging problems involving visual servoing in novel environments while avoiding obstacles. Finally, we demonstrate that these policies can be transferred effectively onto a real robotic platform, achieving approximately an 87% success rate both in simulation and on a real robot.
Functional Space Variational Inference for Uncertainty Estimation in Computer Aided Diagnosis
Authors: Pranav Poduval, Hrushikesh Loya, Amit Sethi
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: MIDL 2019 7
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Lesion Classification, Medical Image Analysis, Skin Lesion Classification, Variational Inference

Deep neural networks have revolutionized medical image analysis and disease diagnosis. Despite their impressive performance, it is difficult to generate well-calibrated probabilistic outputs for such networks, which makes them uninterpretable black boxes. Bayesian neural networks provide a principled approach for modelling uncertainty and increasing patient safety, but they have a large computational overhead and provide limited improvement in calibration. In this work, by taking skin lesion classification as an example task, we show that by shifting Bayesian inference to the functional space we can craft meaningful priors that give better calibrated uncertainty estimates at a much lower computational cost.
Vision-based control of a knuckle boom crane with online cable length estimation
Authors: Geir Ole Tysse, Andrej Cibicik, Olav Egeland
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00

A vision-based controller for a knuckle boom crane is presented. The controller is used to control the motion of the crane tip and at the same time compensate for payload oscillations. The oscillations of the payload are measured with three cameras that are fixed to the crane king and are used to track two spherical markers fixed to the payload cable. Based on color and size information, each camera identifies the image points corresponding to the markers. The payload angles are then determined using linear triangulation of the image points. An extended Kalman filter is used for estimation of payload angles and angular velocity. The length of the payload cable is also estimated using a least squares technique with projection. The crane is controlled by a linear cascade controller where the inner control loop is designed to damp out the pendulum oscillation, and the crane tip is controlled by the outer loop. The control variable of the controller is the commanded crane tip acceleration, which is converted to a velocity command using a velocity loop. The performance of the control system is studied experimentally using a scaled laboratory version of a knuckle boom crane.
Common Sense or World Knowledge? Investigating Adapter-Based Knowledge Injection into Pretrained Transformers
Authors: Anne Lauscher, Olga Majewska, Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro, Iryna Gurevych, Nikolai Rozanov, Goran Glavaš
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (DeeLIO) 2020 11
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, World Knowledge

Following the major success of neural language models (LMs) such as BERT or GPT-2 on a variety of language understanding tasks, recent work focused on injecting (structured) knowledge from external resources into these models. While on the one hand, joint pretraining (i.e., training from scratch, adding objectives based on external knowledge to the primary LM objective) may be prohibitively computationally expensive, post-hoc fine-tuning on external knowledge, on the other hand, may lead to the catastrophic forgetting of distributional knowledge. In this work, we investigate models for complementing the distributional knowledge of BERT with conceptual knowledge from ConceptNet and its corresponding Open Mind Common Sense (OMCS) corpus, respectively, using adapter training. While overall results on the GLUE benchmark paint an inconclusive picture, a deeper analysis reveals that our adapter-based models substantially outperform BERT (up to 15-20 performance points) on inference tasks that require the type of conceptual knowledge explicitly present in ConceptNet and OMCS. All code and experiments are open sourced under: https://github.com/wluper/retrograph .
Deep Convolutional Neural Network-based Bernoulli Heatmap for Head Pose Estimation
Authors: Zhongxu Hu, Yang Xing, Chen Lv, Peng Hang, Jie Liu
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Head pose estimation is a crucial problem for many tasks, such as driver attention, fatigue detection, and human behaviour analysis. It is well known that neural networks are better at handling classification problems than regression problems. It is an extremely nonlinear process to let the network output the angle value directly for optimization learning, and the weight constraint of the loss function will be relatively weak. This paper proposes a novel Bernoulli heatmap for head pose estimation from a single RGB image. Our method can achieve the positioning of the head area while estimating the angles of the head. The Bernoulli heatmap makes it possible to construct fully convolutional neural networks without fully connected layers and provides a new idea for the output form of head pose estimation. A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) structure with multiscale representations is adopted to maintain high-resolution information and low-resolution information in parallel. This kind of structure can maintain rich, high-resolution representations. In addition, channelwise fusion is adopted to make the fusion weights learnable instead of simple addition with equal weights. As a result, the estimation is spatially more precise and potentially more accurate. The effectiveness of the proposed method is empirically demonstrated by comparing it with other state-of-the-art methods on public datasets.
Acoustic Word Embedding System for Code-Switching Query-by-example Spoken Term Detection
Authors: Murong Ma, Haiwei Wu, Xuyang Wang, Lin Yang, Jun-Jie Wang, Ming Li
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network-based acoustic word embedding system on code-switching query by example spoken term detection. Different from previous configurations, we combine audio data in two languages for training instead of only using one single language. We transform the acoustic features of keyword templates and searching content to fixed-dimensional vectors and calculate the distances between keyword segments and searching content segments obtained in a sliding manner. An auxiliary variability-invariant loss is also applied to training data within the same word but different speakers. This strategy is used to prevent the extractor from encoding undesired speaker- or accent-related information into the acoustic word embeddings. Experimental results show that our proposed system produces promising searching results in the code-switching test scenario. With the increased number of templates and the employment of variability-invariant loss, the searching performance is further enhanced.
Deep learning approach to describe and classify fungi microscopic images
Authors: Bartosz Zieliński, Agnieszka Sroka-Oleksiak, Dawid Rymarczyk, Adam Piekarczyk, Monika Brzychczy-Włoch
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: MIDL 2019 7
Tasks: Deep Learning

Preliminary diagnosis of fungal infections can rely on microscopic examination. However, in many cases, it does not allow unambiguous identification of the species by microbiologist due to their visual similarity. Therefore, it is usually necessary to use additional biochemical tests. That involves additional costs and extends the identification process up to 10 days. Such a delay in the implementation of targeted therapy may be grave in consequence as the mortality rate for immunosuppressed patients is high. In this paper, we apply a machine learning approach based on deep neural networks and Fisher Vector (advanced bag-of-words method) to classify microscopic images of various fungi species. Our approach has the potential to make the last stage of biochemical identification redundant, shortening the identification process by 2-3 days, and reducing the cost of the diagnosis.
Longitudinal Deep Kernel Gaussian Process Regression
Authors: Junjie Liang, Yanting Wu, Dongkuan Xu, Vasant Honavar
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, regression, Variational Inference

Gaussian processes offer an attractive framework for predictive modeling from longitudinal data, i.e., irregularly sampled, sparse observations from a set of individuals over time. However, such methods have two key shortcomings: (i) They rely on ad hoc heuristics or expensive trial and error to choose the effective kernels, and (ii) They fail to handle multilevel correlation structure in the data. We introduce Longitudinal deep kernel Gaussian process regression (L-DKGPR), which to the best of our knowledge, is the only method to overcome these limitations by fully automating the discovery of complex multilevel correlation structure from longitudinal data. Specifically, L-DKGPR eliminates the need for ad hoc heuristics or trial and error using a novel adaptation of deep kernel learning that combines the expressive power of deep neural networks with the flexibility of non-parametric kernel methods. L-DKGPR effectively learns the multilevel correlation with a novel addictive kernel that simultaneously accommodates both time-varying and the time-invariant effects. We derive an efficient algorithm to train L-DKGPR using latent space inducing points and variational inference. Results of extensive experiments on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that L-DKGPR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art longitudinal data analysis (LDA) methods.