pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DNS Typo-squatting Domain Detection: A Data Analytics & Machine Learning Based Approach
Authors: Abdallah Moubayed, MohammadNoor Injadat, Abdallah Shami, Hanan Lutfiyya
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, Ensemble Learning

Domain Name System (DNS) is a crucial component of current IP-based networks as it is the standard mechanism for name to IP resolution. However, due to its lack of data integrity and origin authentication processes, it is vulnerable to a variety of attacks. One such attack is Typosquatting. Detecting this attack is particularly important as it can be a threat to corporate secrets and can be used to steal information or commit fraud. In this paper, a machine learning-based approach is proposed to tackle the typosquatting vulnerability. To that end, exploratory data analytics is first used to better understand the trends observed in eight domain name-based extracted features. Furthermore, a majority voting-based ensemble learning classifier built using five classification algorithms is proposed that can detect suspicious domains with high accuracy. Moreover, the observed trends are validated by studying the same features in an unlabeled dataset using K-means clustering algorithm and through applying the developed ensemble learning classifier. Results show that legitimate domains have a smaller domain name length and fewer unique characters. Moreover, the developed ensemble learning classifier performs better in terms of accuracy, precision, and F-score. Furthermore, it is shown that similar trends are observed when clustering is used. However, the number of domains identified as potentially suspicious is high. Hence, the ensemble learning classifier is applied with results showing that the number of domains identified as potentially suspicious is reduced by almost a factor of five while still maintaining the same trends in terms of features' statistics.
Early Indicators of Scientific Impact: Predicting Citations with Altmetrics
Authors: Akhil Pandey Akella, Hamed Alhoori, Pavan Ravikanth Kondamudi, Cole Freeman, Haiming Zhou
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00

Identifying important scholarly literature at an early stage is vital to the academic research community and other stakeholders such as technology companies and government bodies. Due to the sheer amount of research published and the growth of ever-changing interdisciplinary areas, researchers need an efficient way to identify important scholarly work. The number of citations a given research publication has accrued has been used for this purpose, but these take time to occur and longer to accumulate. In this article, we use altmetrics to predict the short-term and long-term citations that a scholarly publication could receive. We build various classification and regression models and evaluate their performance, finding neural networks and ensemble models to perform best for these tasks. We also find that Mendeley readership is the most important factor in predicting the early citations, followed by other factors such as the academic status of the readers (e.g., student, postdoc, professor), followers on Twitter, online post length, author count, and the number of mentions on Twitter, Wikipedia, and across different countries.
Inception Convolution with Efficient Dilation Search
Authors: Jie Liu, Chuming Li, Feng Liang, Chen Lin, Ming Sun, Junjie Yan, Wanli Ouyang, Dong Xu
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Human Detection, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Pose Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

As a variant of standard convolution, a dilated convolution can control effective receptive fields and handle large scale variance of objects without introducing additional computational costs. To fully explore the potential of dilated convolution, we proposed a new type of dilated convolution (referred to as inception convolution), where the convolution operations have independent dilation patterns among different axes, channels and layers. To develop a practical method for learning complex inception convolution based on the data, a simple but effective search algorithm, referred to as efficient dilation optimization (EDO), is developed. Based on statistical optimization, the EDO method operates in a low-cost manner and is extremely fast when it is applied on large scale datasets. Empirical results validate that our method achieves consistent performance gains for image recognition, object detection, instance segmentation, human detection, and human pose estimation. For instance, by simply replacing the 3x3 standard convolution in the ResNet-50 backbone with inception convolution, we significantly improve the AP of Faster R-CNN from 36.4% to 39.2% on MS COCO.
Deep Learning Methods for Screening Pulmonary Tuberculosis Using Chest X-rays
Authors: Chirath Dasanayakaa, Maheshi Buddhinee Dissanayake
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Image Augmentation, Specificity

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious bacterial airborne disease, and is one of the top 10 causes of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 1.8 billion people are infected with TB and 1.6 million deaths were reported in 2018. More importantly,95% of cases and deaths were from developing countries. Yet, TB is a completely curable disease through early diagnosis. To achieve this goal one of the key requirements is efficient utilization of existing diagnostic technologies, among which chest X-ray is the first line of diagnostic tool used for screening for active TB. The presented deep learning pipeline consists of three different state of the art deep learning architectures, to generate, segment and classify lung X-rays. Apart from this image preprocessing, image augmentation, genetic algorithm based hyper parameter tuning and model ensembling were used to to improve the diagnostic process. We were able to achieve classification accuracy of 97.1% (Youden's index-0.941,sensitivity of 97.9% and specificity of 96.2%) which is a considerable improvement compared to the existing work in the literature. In our work, we present an highly accurate, automated TB screening system using chest X-rays, which would be helpful especially for low income countries with low access to qualified medical professionals.
Camouflaged Object Detection and Tracking: A Survey
Authors: Ajoy Mondal
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Moving Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Survey

Moving object detection and tracking have various applications, including surveillance, anomaly detection, vehicle navigation, etc. The literature on object detection and tracking is rich enough, and several essential survey papers exist. However, the research on camouflage object detection and tracking limited due to the complexity of the problem. Existing work on this problem has been done based on either biological characteristics of the camouflaged objects or computer vision techniques. In this article, we review the existing camouflaged object detection and tracking techniques using computer vision algorithms from the theoretical point of view. This article also addresses several issues of interest as well as future research direction on this area. We hope this review will help the reader to learn the recent advances in camouflaged object detection and tracking.
Three-dimensional Simultaneous Shape and Pose Estimation for Extended Objects Using Spherical Harmonics
Authors: Gerhard Kurz, Florian Faion, Florian Pfaff, Antonio Zea, Uwe D. Hanebeck
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation

We propose a new recursive method for simultaneous estimation of both the pose and the shape of a three-dimensional extended object. The key idea of the presented method is to represent the shape of the object using spherical harmonics, similar to the way Fourier series can be used in the two-dimensional case. This allows us to derive a measurement equation that can be used within the framework of nonlinear filters such as the UKF. We provide both simulative and experimental evaluations of the novel techniques.
LOREN: Logic-Regularized Reasoning for Interpretable Fact Verification
Authors: Jiangjie Chen, Qiaoben Bao, Changzhi Sun, Xinbo Zhang, Jiaze Chen, Hao Zhou, Yanghua Xiao, Lei LI
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Claim Verification, Fact Verification, Question Answering

Given a natural language statement, how to verify its veracity against a large-scale textual knowledge source like Wikipedia? Most existing neural models make predictions without giving clues about which part of a false claim goes wrong. In this paper, we propose LOREN, an approach for interpretable fact verification. We decompose the verification of the whole claim at phrase-level, where the veracity of the phrases serves as explanations and can be aggregated into the final verdict according to logical rules. The key insight of LOREN is to represent claim phrase veracity as three-valued latent variables, which are regularized by aggregation logical rules. The final claim verification is based on all latent variables. Thus, LOREN enjoys the additional benefit of interpretability -- it is easy to explain how it reaches certain results with claim phrase veracity. Experiments on a public fact verification benchmark show that LOREN is competitive against previous approaches while enjoying the merit of faithful and accurate interpretability. The resources of LOREN are available at: https://github.com/jiangjiechen/LOREN.
Revisiting Edge Detection in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Minh Le, Subhradeep Kayal
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Edge Detection

The ability to detect edges is a fundamental attribute necessary to truly capture visual concepts. In this paper, we prove that edges cannot be represented properly in the first convolutional layer of a neural network, and further show that they are poorly captured in popular neural network architectures such as VGG-16 and ResNet. The neural networks are found to rely on color information, which might vary in unexpected ways outside of the datasets used for their evaluation. To improve their robustness, we propose edge-detection units and show that they reduce performance loss and generate qualitatively different representations. By comparing various models, we show that the robustness of edge detection is an important factor contributing to the robustness of models against color noise.
Contextual Temperature for Language Modeling
Authors: Pei-Hsin Wang, Sheng-Iou Hsieh, Shih-Chieh Chang, Yu-Ting Chen, Jia-Yu Pan, Wei Wei, Da-Chang Juan
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Temperature scaling has been widely used as an effective approach to control the smoothness of a distribution, which helps the model performance in various tasks. Current practices to apply temperature scaling assume either a fixed, or a manually-crafted dynamically changing schedule. However, our studies indicate that the individual optimal trajectory for each class can change with the context. To this end, we propose contextual temperature, a generalized approach that learns an optimal temperature trajectory for each vocabulary over the context. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method significantly improves state-of-the-art language models, achieving a perplexity of 55.31 and 62.89 on the test set of Penn Treebank and WikiText-2, respectively. In-depth analyses show that the behaviour of the learned temperature schedules varies dramatically by vocabulary, and that the optimal schedules help in controlling the uncertainties. These evidences further justify the need for the proposed method and its advantages over fixed temperature schedules.
Technical Report: Flushing Strategies in Drinking Water Systems
Authors: Margarita Rebolledo, Sowmya Chandrasekaran, Thomas Bartz-Beielstein
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00

Drinking water supply and distribution systems are critical infrastructure that has to be well maintained for the safety of the public. One important tool in the maintenance of water distribution systems (WDS) is flushing. Flushing is a process carried out in a periodic fashion to clean sediments and other contaminants in the water pipes. Given the different topographies, water composition and supply demand between WDS no single flushing strategy is suitable for all of them. In this report a non-exhaustive overview of optimization methods for flushing in WDS is given. Implementation of optimization methods for the flushing procedure and the flushing planing are presented. Suggestions are given as a possible option to optimise existing flushing planing frameworks.
Robustness, Privacy, and Generalization of Adversarial Training
Authors: Fengxiang He, Shaopeng Fu, Bohan Wang, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Privacy Preserving

Adversarial training can considerably robustify deep neural networks to resist adversarial attacks. However, some works suggested that adversarial training might comprise the privacy-preserving and generalization abilities. This paper establishes and quantifies the privacy-robustness trade-off and generalization-robustness trade-off in adversarial training from both theoretical and empirical aspects. We first define a notion, {\it robustified intensity} to measure the robustness of an adversarial training algorithm. This measure can be approximate empirically by an asymptotically consistent empirical estimator, {\it empirical robustified intensity}. Based on the robustified intensity, we prove that (1) adversarial training is $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differentially private, where the magnitude of the differential privacy has a positive correlation with the robustified intensity; and (2) the generalization error of adversarial training can be upper bounded by an $\mathcal O(\sqrt{\log N}/N)$ on-average bound and an $\mathcal O(1/\sqrt{N})$ high-probability bound, both of which have positive correlations with the robustified intensity. Additionally, our generalization bounds do not explicitly rely on the parameter size which would be prohibitively large in deep learning. Systematic experiments on standard datasets, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, are in full agreement with our theories. The source code package is available at \url{https://github.com/fshp971/RPG}.
Using the Naive Bayes as a discriminative classifier
Authors: Elie Azeraf, Emmanuel Monfrini, Wojciech Pieczynski
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

For classification tasks, probabilistic models can be categorized into two disjoint classes: generative or discriminative. It depends on the posterior probability computation of the label $x$ given the observation $y$, $p(x | y)$. On the one hand, generative classifiers, like the Naive Bayes or the Hidden Markov Model (HMM), need the computation of the joint probability p(x,y), before using the Bayes rule to compute $p(x | y)$. On the other hand, discriminative classifiers compute $p(x | y)$ directly, regardless of the observations' law. They are intensively used nowadays, with models as Logistic Regression, Conditional Random Fields (CRF), and Artificial Neural Networks. However, the recent Entropic Forward-Backward algorithm shows that the HMM, considered as a generative model, can also match the discriminative one's definition. This example leads to question if it is the case for other generative models. In this paper, we show that the Naive Bayes classifier can also match the discriminative classifier definition, so it can be used in either a generative or a discriminative way. Moreover, this observation also discusses the notion of Generative-Discriminative pairs, linking, for example, Naive Bayes and Logistic Regression, or HMM and CRF. Related to this point, we show that the Logistic Regression can be viewed as a particular case of the Naive Bayes used in a discriminative way.
Dynamic-K Recommendation with Personalized Decision Boundary
Authors: Yan Gao, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan, Huaming Liao
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00

In this paper, we investigate the recommendation task in the most common scenario with implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, purchases). State-of-the-art methods in this direction usually cast the problem as to learn a personalized ranking on a set of items (e.g., webpages, products). The top-N results are then provided to users as recommendations, where the N is usually a fixed number pre-defined by the system according to some heuristic criteria (e.g., page size, screen size). There is one major assumption underlying this fixed-number recommendation scheme, i.e., there are always sufficient relevant items to users' preferences. Unfortunately, this assumption may not always hold in real-world scenarios. In some applications, there might be very limited candidate items to recommend, and some users may have very high relevance requirement in recommendation. In this way, even the top-1 ranked item may not be relevant to a user's preference. Therefore, we argue that it is critical to provide a dynamic-K recommendation, where the K should be different with respect to the candidate item set and the target user. We formulate this dynamic-K recommendation task as a joint learning problem with both ranking and classification objectives. The ranking objective is the same as existing methods, i.e., to create a ranking list of items according to users' interests. The classification objective is unique in this work, which aims to learn a personalized decision boundary to differentiate the relevant items from irrelevant items. Based on these ideas, we extend two state-of-the-art ranking-based recommendation methods, i.e., BPRMF and HRM, to the corresponding dynamic-K versions, namely DK-BPRMF and DK-HRM. Our experimental results on two datasets show that the dynamic-K models are more effective than the original fixed-N recommendation methods.
Towards a Universal Continuous Knowledge Base
Authors: Gang Chen, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, text-classification, Text Classification, Transfer Learning

In artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge is the information required by an intelligent system to accomplish tasks. While traditional knowledge bases use discrete, symbolic representations, detecting knowledge encoded in the continuous representations learned from data has received increasing attention recently. In this work, we propose a method for building a continuous knowledge base (CKB) that can store knowledge imported from multiple, diverse neural networks. The key idea of our approach is to define an interface for each neural network and cast knowledge transferring as a function simulation problem. Experiments on text classification show promising results: the CKB imports knowledge from a single model and then exports the knowledge to a new model, achieving comparable performance with the original model. More interesting, we import the knowledge from multiple models to the knowledge base, from which the fused knowledge is exported back to a single model, achieving a higher accuracy than the original model. With the CKB, it is also easy to achieve knowledge distillation and transfer learning. Our work opens the door to building a universal continuous knowledge base to collect, store, and organize all continuous knowledge encoded in various neural networks trained for different AI tasks.
Implicit Feature Pyramid Network for Object Detection
Authors: Tiancai Wang, Xiangyu Zhang, Jian Sun
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In this paper, we present an implicit feature pyramid network (i-FPN) for object detection. Existing FPNs stack several cross-scale blocks to obtain large receptive field. We propose to use an implicit function, recently introduced in deep equilibrium model (DEQ), to model the transformation of FPN. We develop a residual-like iteration to updates the hidden states efficiently. Experimental results on MS COCO dataset show that i-FPN can significantly boost detection performance compared to baseline detectors with ResNet-50-FPN: +3.4, +3.2, +3.5, +4.2, +3.2 mAP on RetinaNet, Faster-RCNN, FCOS, ATSS and AutoAssign, respectively.
Understanding Team Collaboration in Artificial Intelligence from the perspective of Geographic Distance
Authors: Xuli Tang, Xin Li, Ying Ding, Feicheng Ma
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00

This paper analyzes team collaboration in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) from the perspective of geographic distance. We obtained 1,584,175 AI related publications during 1950-2019 from the Microsoft Academic Graph. Three latitude-and-longitude-based indicators were employed to quantify the geographic distance of collaborations in AI over time at domestic and international levels. The results show team collaborations in AI has been more popular in the field over time with around 42,000 (38.4%) multiple-affiliation AI publications in 2019. The changes in geographic distances of team collaborations indicate the increase of breadth and density for both domestic and international collaborations in AI over time. In addition, the United States produced the largest number of single-country and internationally collaborated AI publications, and China has played an important role in international collaborations in AI after 2010.
Intuitiveness in Active Teaching
Authors: Jan Philip Göpfert, Ulrike Kuhl, Lukas Hindemith, Heiko Wersing, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

While Machine learning gives rise to astonishing results in automated systems, it is usually at the cost of large data requirements. This makes many successful algorithms from machine learning unsuitable for human-machine interaction, where the machine must learn from a small number of training samples that can be provided by a user within a reasonable time frame. Fortunately, the user can tailor the training data they create to be as useful as possible, severely limiting its necessary size -- as long as they know about the machine's requirements and limitations. Of course, acquiring this knowledge can in turn be cumbersome and costly. This raises the question of how easy machine learning algorithms are to interact with. In this work, we address this issue by analyzing the intuitiveness of certain algorithms when they are actively taught by users. After developing a theoretical framework of intuitiveness as a property of algorithms, we introduce an active teaching paradigm involving a prototypical two-dimensional spatial learning task as a method to judge the efficacy of human-machine interactions. Finally, we present and discuss the results of a large-scale user study into the performance and teaching strategies of 800 users interacting with two prominent machine learning algorithms in our system, providing first evidence for the role of intuition as an important factor impacting human-machine interaction.
Distributional Ground Truth: Non-Redundant Crowdsourcing Data Quality Control in UI Labeling Tasks
Authors: Maxim Bakaev, Sebastian Heil, Martin Gaedke
Date: 2020-12-25 00:00:00

HCI increasingly employs Machine Learning and Image Recognition, in particular for visual analysis of user interfaces (UIs). A popular way for obtaining human-labeled training data is Crowdsourcing, typically using the quality control methods ground truth and majority consensus, which necessitate redundancy in the outcome. In our paper we propose a non-redundant method for prediction of crowdworkers' output quality in web UI labeling tasks, based on homogeneity of distributions assessed with two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Using a dataset of about 500 screenshots with over 74,000 UI elements located and classified by 11 trusted labelers and 298 Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdworkers, we demonstrate the advantage of our approach over the baseline model based on mean Time-on-Task. Exploring different dataset partitions, we show that with the trusted set size of 17-27% UIs our "distributional ground truth" model can achieve R2s of over 0.8 and help to obviate the ancillary work effort and expenses.