pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Health Aware Control Strategy
Authors: Mayank Shekhar Jha, Philippe Weber, Didier Theilliol, Jean-Christophe Ponsart, Didier Maquin
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Health-aware control (HAC) has emerged as one of the domains where control synthesis is sought based upon the failure prognostics of system/component or the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) predictions of critical components. The fact that mathematical dynamic (transition) models of RUL are rarely available, makes it difficult for RUL information to be incorporated into the control paradigm. A novel framework for health aware control is presented in this paper where reinforcement learning based approach is used to learn an optimal control policy in face of component degradation by integrating global system transition data (generated by an analytical model that mimics the real system) and RUL predictions. The RUL predictions generated at each step, is tracked to a desired value of RUL. The latter is integrated within a cost function which is maximized to learn the optimal control. The proposed method is studied using simulation of a DC motor and shaft wear.
DeepWiPHY: Deep Learning-based Receiver Design and Dataset for IEEE 802.11ax Systems
Authors: Yi Zhang, Akash Doshi, Rob Liston, Wai-tian Tan, Xiaoqing Zhu, Jeffrey G. Andrews, Robert W. Heath
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00

In this work, we develop DeepWiPHY, a deep learning-based architecture to replace the channel estimation, common phase error (CPE) correction, sampling rate offset (SRO) correction, and equalization modules of IEEE 802.11ax based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receivers. We first train DeepWiPHY with a synthetic dataset, which is generated using representative indoor channel models and includes typical radio frequency (RF) impairments that are the source of nonlinearity in wireless systems. To further train and evaluate DeepWiPHY with real-world data, we develop a passive sniffing-based data collection testbed composed of Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs) and commercially available IEEE 802.11ax products. The comprehensive evaluation of DeepWiPHY with synthetic and real-world datasets (110 million synthetic OFDM symbols and 14 million real-world OFDM symbols) confirms that, even without fine-tuning the neural network's architecture parameters, DeepWiPHY achieves comparable performance to or outperforms the conventional WLAN receivers, in terms of both bit error rate (BER) and packet error rate (PER), under a wide range of channel models, signal-to-noise (SNR) levels, and modulation schemes.
Reweighting samples under covariate shift using a Wasserstein distance criterion
Authors: Julien Reygner, Adrien Touboul
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

Considering two random variables with different laws to which we only have access through finite size iid samples, we address how to reweight the first sample so that its empirical distribution converges towards the true law of the second sample as the size of both samples goes to infinity. We study an optimal reweighting that minimizes the Wasserstein distance between the empirical measures of the two samples, and leads to an expression of the weights in terms of Nearest Neighbors. The consistency and some asymptotic convergence rates in terms of expected Wasserstein distance are derived, and do not need the assumption of absolute continuity of one random variable with respect to the other. These results have some application in Uncertainty Quantification for decoupled estimation and in the bound of the generalization error for the Nearest Neighbor Regression under covariate shift.
Estimating Stochastic Linear Combination of Non-linear Regressions Efficiently and Scalably
Authors: Di Wang, Xiangyu Guo, Chaowen Guan, Shi Li, Jinhui Xu
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

Recently, many machine learning and statistical models such as non-linear regressions, the Single Index, Multi-index, Varying Coefficient Index Models and Two-layer Neural Networks can be reduced to or be seen as a special case of a new model which is called the \textit{Stochastic Linear Combination of Non-linear Regressions} model. However, due to the high non-convexity of the problem, there is no previous work study how to estimate the model. In this paper, we provide the first study on how to estimate the model efficiently and scalably. Specifically, we first show that with some mild assumptions, if the variate vector $x$ is multivariate Gaussian, then there is an algorithm whose output vectors have $\ell_2$-norm estimation errors of $O(\sqrt{\frac{p}{n}})$ with high probability, where $p$ is the dimension of $x$ and $n$ is the number of samples. The key idea of the proof is based on an observation motived by the Stein's lemma. Then we extend our result to the case where $x$ is bounded and sub-Gaussian using the zero-bias transformation, which could be seen as a generalization of the classic Stein's lemma. We also show that with some additional assumptions there is an algorithm whose output vectors have $\ell_\infty$-norm estimation errors of $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{p}}+\sqrt{\frac{p}{n}})$ with high probability. We also provide a concrete example to show that there exists some link function which satisfies the previous assumptions. Finally, for both Gaussian and sub-Gaussian cases we propose a faster sub-sampling based algorithm and show that when the sub-sample sizes are large enough then the estimation errors will not be sacrificed by too much. Experiments for both cases support our theoretical results. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that studies and provides theoretical guarantees for the stochastic linear combination of non-linear regressions model.
Query-aware Tip Generation for Vertical Search
Authors: Yang Yang, Junmei Hao, Canjia Li, Zili Wang, Jingang Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Rao Fu, Peixu Hou, Gong Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Decoder

As a concise form of user reviews, tips have unique advantages to explain the search results, assist users' decision making, and further improve user experience in vertical search scenarios. Existing work on tip generation does not take query into consideration, which limits the impact of tips in search scenarios. To address this issue, this paper proposes a query-aware tip generation framework, integrating query information into encoding and subsequent decoding processes. Two specific adaptations of Transformer and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are proposed. For Transformer, the query impact is incorporated into the self-attention computation of both the encoder and the decoder. As for RNN, the query-aware encoder adopts a selective network to distill query-relevant information from the review, while the query-aware decoder integrates the query information into the attention computation during decoding. The framework consistently outperforms the competing methods on both public and real-world industrial datasets. Last but not least, online deployment experiments on Dianping demonstrate the advantage of the proposed framework for tip generation as well as its online business values.
Dimsum @LaySumm 20: BART-based Approach for Scientific Document Summarization
Authors: Tiezheng Yu, Dan Su, Wenliang Dai, Pascale Fung
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, Lay Summarization, Scientific Document Summarization, Sentence

Lay summarization aims to generate lay summaries of scientific papers automatically. It is an essential task that can increase the relevance of science for all of society. In this paper, we build a lay summary generation system based on the BART model. We leverage sentence labels as extra supervision signals to improve the performance of lay summarization. In the CL-LaySumm 2020 shared task, our model achieves 46.00\% Rouge1-F1 score.
Improving Company Valuations with Automated Knowledge Discovery, Extraction and Fusion
Authors: Albert Weichselbraun, Philipp Kuntschik, Sandro Hörler
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing

Performing company valuations within the domain of biotechnology, pharmacy and medical technology is a challenging task, especially when considering the unique set of risks biotech start-ups face when entering new markets. Companies specialized in global valuation services, therefore, combine valuation models and past experience with heterogeneous metrics and indicators that provide insights into a company's performance. This paper illustrates how automated knowledge discovery, extraction and data fusion can be used to (i) obtain additional indicators that provide insights into the success of a company's product development efforts, and (ii) support labor-intensive data curation processes. We apply deep web knowledge acquisition methods to identify and harvest data on clinical trials that is hidden behind proprietary search interfaces and integrate the extracted data into the industry partner's company valuation ontology. In addition, focused Web crawls and shallow semantic parsing yield information on the company's key personnel and respective contact data, notifying domain experts of relevant changes that get then incorporated into the industry partner's company data.
Taking Over the Stock Market: Adversarial Perturbations Against Algorithmic Traders
Authors: Elior Nehemya, Yael Mathov, Asaf Shabtai, Yuval Elovici
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Algorithmic Trading, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Inference Attack, Real-World Adversarial Attack

In recent years, machine learning has become prevalent in numerous tasks, including algorithmic trading. Stock market traders utilize machine learning models to predict the market's behavior and execute an investment strategy accordingly. However, machine learning models have been shown to be susceptible to input manipulations called adversarial examples. Despite this risk, the trading domain remains largely unexplored in the context of adversarial learning. In this study, we present a realistic scenario in which an attacker influences algorithmic trading systems by using adversarial learning techniques to manipulate the input data stream in real time. The attacker creates a universal perturbation that is agnostic to the target model and time of use, which, when added to the input stream, remains imperceptible. We evaluate our attack on a real-world market data stream and target three different trading algorithms. We show that when added to the input stream, our perturbation can fool the trading algorithms at future unseen data points, in both white-box and black-box settings. Finally, we present various mitigation methods and discuss their limitations, which stem from the algorithmic trading domain. We believe that these findings should serve as an alert to the finance community about the threats in this area and promote further research on the risks associated with using automated learning models in the trading domain.
Extraction of Discrete Spectra Modes from Video Data Using a Deep Convolutional Koopman Network
Authors: Scott Leask, Vincent McDonell
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00

Recent deep learning extensions in Koopman theory have enabled compact, interpretable representations of nonlinear dynamical systems which are amenable to linear analysis. Deep Koopman networks attempt to learn the Koopman eigenfunctions which capture the coordinate transformation to globally linearize system dynamics. These eigenfunctions can be linked to underlying system modes which govern the dynamical behavior of the system. While many related techniques have demonstrated their efficacy on canonical systems and their associated state variables, in this work the system dynamics are observed optically (i.e. in video format). We demonstrate the ability of a deep convolutional Koopman network (CKN) in automatically identifying independent modes for dynamical systems with discrete spectra. Practically, this affords flexibility in system data collection as the data are easily obtainable observable variables. The learned models are able to successfully and robustly identify the underlying modes governing the system, even with a redundantly large embedding space. Modal disaggregation is encouraged using a simple masking procedure. All of the systems analyzed in this work use an identical network architecture.
MCGKT-Net: Multi-level Context Gating Knowledge Transfer Network for Single Image Deraining
Authors: Kohei Yamamichi, Xian-Hua Han
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Rain Removal, Single Image Deraining, Transfer Learning

Rain streak removal in a single image is a very challenging task due to its ill-posed nature in essence. Recently, the end-to-end learning techniques with deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) have made great progress in this task. However, the conventional DCNN-based deraining methods have struggled to exploit deeper and more complex network architectures for pursuing better performance. This study proposes a novel MCGKT-Net for boosting deraining performance, which is a naturally multi-scale learning framework being capable of exploring multi-scale attributes of rain streaks and different semantic structures of the clear images. In order to obtain high representative features inside MCGKT-Net, we explore internal knowledge transfer module using ConvLSTM unit for conducting interaction learning between different layers and investigate external knowledge transfer module for leveraging the knowledge already learned in other task domains. Furthermore, to dynamically select useful features in learning procedure, we propose a multi-scale context gating module in the MCGKT-Net using squeeze-and-excitation block. Experiments on three benchmark datasets: Rain100H, Rain100L, and Rain800, manifest impressive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Multi-hop Question Generation with Graph Convolutional Network
Authors: Dan Su, Yan Xu, Wenliang Dai, Ziwei Ji, Tiezheng Yu, Pascale Fung
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation, Sentence

Multi-hop Question Generation (QG) aims to generate answer-related questions by aggregating and reasoning over multiple scattered evidence from different paragraphs. It is a more challenging yet under-explored task compared to conventional single-hop QG, where the questions are generated from the sentence containing the answer or nearby sentences in the same paragraph without complex reasoning. To address the additional challenges in multi-hop QG, we propose Multi-Hop Encoding Fusion Network for Question Generation (MulQG), which does context encoding in multiple hops with Graph Convolutional Network and encoding fusion via an Encoder Reasoning Gate. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to tackle the challenge of multi-hop reasoning over paragraphs without any sentence-level information. Empirical results on HotpotQA dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, in comparison with baselines on automatic evaluation metrics. Moreover, from the human evaluation, our proposed model is able to generate fluent questions with high completeness and outperforms the strongest baseline by 20.8% in the multi-hop evaluation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/MulQG}{https://github.com/HLTCHKUST/MulQG .
Statistical guarantees for generative models without domination
Authors: Nicolas Schreuder, Victor-Emmanuel Brunel, Arnak Dalalyan
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

In this paper, we introduce a convenient framework for studying (adversarial) generative models from a statistical perspective. It consists in modeling the generative device as a smooth transformation of the unit hypercube of a dimension that is much smaller than that of the ambient space and measuring the quality of the generative model by means of an integral probability metric. In the particular case of integral probability metric defined through a smoothness class, we establish a risk bound quantifying the role of various parameters. In particular, it clearly shows the impact of dimension reduction on the error of the generative model.
Continual Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Joonhyuk Kim, Sahng-Min Yoo, Gyeong-Moon Park, Jong-Hwan Kim
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Continual Learning, Domain Adaptation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation has been favorably applied to real-world scenarios in which pixel-level labels are hard to be obtained. In most of the existing UDA methods, all target data are assumed to be introduced simultaneously. Yet, the data are usually presented sequentially in the real world. Moreover, Continual UDA, which deals with more practical scenarios with multiple target domains in the continual learning setting, has not been actively explored. In this light, we propose Continual UDA for semantic segmentation based on a newly designed Expanding Target-specific Memory (ETM) framework. Our novel ETM framework contains Target-specific Memory (TM) for each target domain to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, a proposed Double Hinge Adversarial (DHA) loss leads the network to produce better UDA performance overall. Our design of the TM and training objectives let the semantic segmentation network adapt to the current target domain while preserving the knowledge learned on previous target domains. The model with the proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art models in continual learning settings on standard benchmarks such as GTA5, SYNTHIA, CityScapes, IDD, and Cross-City datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/joonh-kim/ETM.
Ensemble Chinese End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding for Abnormal Event Detection from audio stream
Authors: Haoran Wei, Fei Tao, Runze Su, Sen yang, Ji Liu
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Event Detection, Natural Language Understanding, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Spoken Language Understanding

Conventional spoken language understanding (SLU) consist of two stages, the first stage maps speech to text by automatic speech recognition (ASR), and the second stage maps text to intent by natural language understanding (NLU). End-to-end SLU maps speech directly to intent through a single deep learning model. Previous end-to-end SLU models are primarily used for English environment due to lacking large scale SLU dataset in Chines, and use only one ASR model to extract features from speech. With the help of Kuaishou technology, a large scale SLU dataset in Chinese is collected to detect abnormal event in their live audio stream. Based on this dataset, this paper proposed a ensemble end-to-end SLU model used for Chinese environment. This ensemble SLU models extracted hierarchies features using multiple pre-trained ASR models, leading to better representation of phoneme level and word level information. This proposed approached achieve 9.7% increase of accuracy compared to previous end-to-end SLU model.
Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes for Inferring Topics and Visualization
Authors: Dang Pham, Tuan M. V. Le
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Visualization and topic modeling are widely used approaches for text analysis. Traditional visualization methods find low-dimensional representations of documents in the visualization space (typically 2D or 3D) that can be displayed using a scatterplot. In contrast, topic modeling aims to discover topics from text, but for visualization, one needs to perform a post-hoc embedding using dimensionality reduction methods. Recent approaches propose using a generative model to jointly find topics and visualization, allowing the semantics to be infused in the visualization space for a meaningful interpretation. A major challenge that prevents these methods from being used practically is the scalability of their inference algorithms. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first fast Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes based inference method for jointly inferring topics and visualization. Since our method is black box, it can handle model changes efficiently with little mathematical rederivation effort. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method on real-world large datasets and compare it with existing baselines.
CT-CPP: Coverage Path Planning for 3D Terrain Reconstruction Using Dynamic Coverage Trees
Authors: Zongyuan Shen, Junnan Song, Khushboo Mittal, Shalabh Gupta
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00

This letter addresses the 3D coverage path planning (CPP) problem for terrain reconstruction of unknown obstacle rich environments. Due to sensing limitations, the proposed method, called CT-CPP, performs layered scanning of the 3D region to collect terrain data, where the traveling sequence is optimized using the concept of a coverage tree (CT) with a TSP-inspired tree traversal strategy. The CT-CPP method is validated on a high-fidelity underwater simulator and the results are compared to an existing terrain following CPP method. The results show that CT-CPP yields significant reduction in trajectory length, energy consumption, and reconstruction error.
Intelligent Reference Curation for Visual Place Recognition via Bayesian Selective Fusion
Authors: Timothy L. Molloy, Tobias Fischer, Michael Milford, Girish N. Nair
Date: 2020-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Place Recognition

A key challenge in visual place recognition (VPR) is recognizing places despite drastic visual appearance changes due to factors such as time of day, season, weather or lighting conditions. Numerous approaches based on deep-learnt image descriptors, sequence matching, domain translation, and probabilistic localization have had success in addressing this challenge, but most rely on the availability of carefully curated representative reference images of the possible places. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, dubbed Bayesian Selective Fusion, for actively selecting and fusing informative reference images to determine the best place match for a given query image. The selective element of our approach avoids the counterproductive fusion of every reference image and enables the dynamic selection of informative reference images in environments with changing visual conditions (such as indoors with flickering lights, outdoors during sunshowers or over the day-night cycle). The probabilistic element of our approach provides a means of fusing multiple reference images that accounts for their varying uncertainty via a novel training-free likelihood function for VPR. On difficult query images from two benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our approach matches and exceeds the performance of several alternative fusion approaches along with state-of-the-art techniques that are provided with prior (unfair) knowledge of the best reference images. Our approach is well suited for long-term robot autonomy where dynamic visual environments are commonplace since it is training-free, descriptor-agnostic, and complements existing techniques such as sequence matching.