pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Daily Forecasting of New Cases for Regional Epidemics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 with Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Yen Ting Lin, Jacob Neumann, Ely Miller, Richard G. Posner, Abhishek Mallela, Cosmin Safta, Jaideep Ray, Gautam Thakur, Supriya Chinthavali, William S. Hlavacek
Date: 2020-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Uncertainty Quantification

To increase situational awareness and support evidence-based policy-making, we formulated two types of mathematical models for COVID-19 transmission within a regional population. One is a fitting function that can be calibrated to reproduce an epidemic curve with two timescales (e.g., fast growth and slow decay). The other is a compartmental model that accounts for quarantine, self-isolation, social distancing, a non-exponentially distributed incubation period, asymptomatic individuals, and mild and severe forms of symptomatic disease. Using Bayesian inference, we have been calibrating our models daily for consistency with new reports of confirmed cases from the 15 most populous metropolitan statistical areas in the United States and quantifying uncertainty in parameter estimates and predictions of future case reports. This online learning approach allows for early identification of new trends despite considerable variability in case reporting. We infer new significant upward trends for five of the metropolitan areas starting between 19-April-2020 and 12-June-2020.
Revisiting multiple pattern matching
Authors: Robert Susik, Szymon Grabowski, Kimmo Fredriksson
Date: 2019-01-01 00:00:00

We consider the classical exact multiple string matching problem. The proposed solution is based on a combination of a few ideas: using q-grams instead of single characters, pattern superimposition, bit-parallelism and alphabet size reduction. We discuss the pros and cons of various alternatives to achieve the possibly best combination of techniques. The main contribution of this paper are different alphabet mapping methods that allow to reduce memory requirements and use larger q-grams. The experimental results show that the presented algorithm is competitive in most practical cases. One of the tests shows also that tailoring our scheme to search over a byte-encoded text results in speedups in comparison to searching over a plain text.
Generalized Lee Bounds
Authors: Vira Semenova
Date: 2020-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Selection bias

Lee (2009) is a common approach to bound the average causal effect in the presence of selection bias, assuming the treatment effect on selection has the same sign for all subjects. This paper generalizes Lee bounds to allow the sign of this effect to be identified by pretreatment covariates, relaxing the standard (unconditional) monotonicity to its conditional analog. Asymptotic theory for generalized Lee bounds is proposed in low-dimensional smooth and high-dimensional sparse designs. The paper also generalizes Lee bounds to accommodate multiple outcomes. Focusing on JobCorps job training program, I first show that unconditional monotonicity is unlikely to hold, and then demonstrate the use of covariates to tighten the bounds.
Temporal Collaborative Filtering with Bayesian Probabilistic Tensor Factorization
Authors: Liang Xiong, Xi Chen, Tzu-Kuo Huang, Jeff Schneider, Jaime G. Carbonell
Date: 2019-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Movie Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Real-world relational data are seldom stationary, yet
traditional collaborative filtering algorithms generally
rely on this assumption. Motivated by our sales prediction problem, we propose a factor-based algorithm that
is able to take time into account. By introducing additional factors for time, we formalize this problem as
a tensor factorization with a special constraint on the
time dimension. Further, we provide a fully Bayesian
treatment to avoid tuning parameters and achieve automatic model complexity control. To learn the model
we develop an efficient sampling procedure that is capable of analyzing large-scale data sets. This new algorithm, called Bayesian Probabilistic Tensor Factorization (BPTF), is evaluated on several real-world problems including sales prediction and movie recommendation. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of
our temporal model.
Multilevel regression with poststratification for the national level Viber/Street poll on the 2020 presidential election in Belarus
Authors: Ales Zahorski
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Pre-election ratings estimation

Independent sociological polls are forbidden in Belarus. Online polls performed without sound scientific rigour do not yield representative results. Yet, both inside and outside Belarus it is of great importance to obtain precise estimates of the ratings of all candidates. These ratings could function as reliable proxies for the election's outcomes. We conduct an independent poll based on the combination of the data collected via Viber and on the streets of Belarus. The Viber and the street data samples consist of almost 45000 and 1150 unique observations respectively. Bayesian regressions with poststratification were build to estimate ratings of the candidates and rates of early voting turnout for the population as a whole and within various focus subgroups. We show that both the officially announced results of the election and early voting rates are highly improbable. With a probability of at least 95%, Sviatlana Tikhanouskaya's rating lies between 75% and 80%, whereas Aliaksandr Lukashenka's rating lies between 13% and 18% and early voting rate predicted by the method ranges from 9% to 13% of those who took part in the election. These results contradict the officially announced outcomes, which are 10.12%, 80.11%, and 49.54% respectively and lie far outside even the 99.9% credible intervals predicted by our model. The only marginal groups of people where the upper bounds of the 99.9% credible intervals of the rating of Lukashenka are above 50% are people older than 60 and uneducated people. For all other marginal subgroups, including rural residents, even the upper bounds of 99.9% credible intervals for Lukashenka are far below 50%. The same is true for the population as a whole. Thus, with a probability of at least 99.9% Lukashenka could not have had enough electoral support to win the 2020 presidential election in Belarus.
High-Resolution Deep Image Matting
Authors: Haichao Yu, Ning Xu, Zilong Huang, Yuqian Zhou, Humphrey Shi
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Matting, Video Editing, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Image matting is a key technique for image and video editing and composition. Conventionally, deep learning approaches take the whole input image and an associated trimap to infer the alpha matte using convolutional neural networks. Such approaches set state-of-the-arts in image matting; however, they may fail in real-world matting applications due to hardware limitations, since real-world input images for matting are mostly of very high resolution. In this paper, we propose HDMatt, a first deep learning based image matting approach for high-resolution inputs. More concretely, HDMatt runs matting in a patch-based crop-and-stitch manner for high-resolution inputs with a novel module design to address the contextual dependency and consistency issues between different patches. Compared with vanilla patch-based inference which computes each patch independently, we explicitly model the cross-patch contextual dependency with a newly-proposed Cross-Patch Contextual module (CPC) guided by the given trimap. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its necessity for high-resolution inputs. Our HDMatt approach also sets new state-of-the-art performance on Adobe Image Matting and AlphaMatting benchmarks and produce impressive visual results on more real-world high-resolution images.
Adaptive Text Recognition through Visual Matching
Authors: Chuhan Zhang, Ankush Gupta, Andrew Zisserman
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Representation Learning

In this work, our objective is to address the problems of generalization and flexibility for text recognition in documents. We introduce a new model that exploits the repetitive nature of characters in languages, and decouples the visual representation learning and linguistic modelling stages. By doing this, we turn text recognition into a shape matching problem, and thereby achieve generalization in appearance and flexibility in classes. We evaluate the new model on both synthetic and real datasets across different alphabets and show that it can handle challenges that traditional architectures are not able to solve without expensive retraining, including: (i) it can generalize to unseen fonts without new exemplars from them; (ii) it can flexibly change the number of classes, simply by changing the exemplars provided; and (iii) it can generalize to new languages and new characters that it has not been trained for by providing a new glyph set. We show significant improvements over state-of-the-art models for all these cases.
GeDi: Generative Discriminator Guided Sequence Generation
Authors: Ben Krause, Akhilesh Deepak Gotmare, Bryan McCann, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Shafiq Joty, Richard Socher, Nazneen Fatema Rajani
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Attribute, Linguistic Acceptability, Word Embeddings

While large-scale language models (LMs) are able to imitate the distribution of natural language well enough to generate realistic text, it is difficult to control which regions of the distribution they generate. This is especially problematic because datasets used for training large LMs usually contain significant toxicity, hate, bias, and negativity. We propose GeDi as an efficient method for using smaller LMs as generative discriminators to guide generation from large LMs to make them safer and more controllable. GeDi guides generation at each step by computing classification probabilities for all possible next tokens via Bayes rule by normalizing over two class-conditional distributions; one conditioned on the desired attribute, or control code, and another conditioned on the undesired attribute, or anti control code. We find that GeDi gives stronger controllability than the state of the art method while also achieving generation speeds more than 30 times faster. Additionally, training GeDi on only four topics allows us to controllably generate new topics zero-shot from just a keyword, unlocking a new capability that previous controllable generation methods do not have. Lastly, we show that GeDi can make GPT-2 (1.5B parameters) significantly less toxic without sacrificing linguistic quality, making it by far the most practical existing method for detoxifying large language models while maintaining a fast generation speed.
Adaptive KL-UCB based Bandit Algorithms for Markovian and i.i.d. Settings
Authors: Arghyadip Roy, Sanjay Shakkottai, R. Srikant
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00

In the regret-based formulation of Multi-armed Bandit (MAB) problems, except in rare instances, much of the literature focuses on arms with i.i.d. rewards. In this paper, we consider the problem of obtaining regret guarantees for MAB problems in which the rewards of each arm form a Markov chain which may not belong to a single parameter exponential family. To achieve a logarithmic regret in such problems is not difficult: a variation of standard Kullback-Leibler Upper Confidence Bound (KL-UCB) does the job. However, the constants obtained from such an analysis are poor for the following reason: i.i.d. rewards are a special case of Markov rewards and it is difficult to design an algorithm that works well independent of whether the underlying model is truly Markovian or i.i.d. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel algorithm that identifies whether the rewards from each arm are truly Markovian or i.i.d. using a total variation distance-based test. Our algorithm then switches from using a standard KL-UCB to a specialized version of KL-UCB when it determines that the arm reward is Markovian, thus resulting in low regrets for both i.i.d. and Markovian settings.
GIA-Net: Global Information Aware Network for Low-light Imaging
Authors: Zibo Meng, Runsheng Xu, Chiu Man Ho
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00

It is extremely challenging to acquire perceptually plausible images under low-light conditions due to low SNR. Most recently, U-Nets have shown promising results for low-light imaging. However, vanilla U-Nets generate images with artifacts such as color inconsistency due to the lack of global color information. In this paper, we propose a global information aware (GIA) module, which is capable of extracting and integrating the global information into the network to improve the performance of low-light imaging. The GIA module can be inserted into a vanilla U-Net with negligible extra learnable parameters or computational cost. Moreover, a GIA-Net is constructed, trained and evaluated on a large scale real-world low-light imaging dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed GIA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of four metrics, including deep metrics that measure perceptual similarities. Extensive ablation studies have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed GIA-Net for low-light imaging by utilizing global information.
VacSIM: Learning Effective Strategies for COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Raghav Awasthi, Keerat Kaur Guliani, Saif Ahmad Khan, Aniket Vashishtha, Mehrab Singh Gill, Arshita Bhatt, Aditya Nagori, Aniket Gupta, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Tavpritesh Sethi
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits, OpenAI Gym, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A COVID-19 vaccine is our best bet for mitigating the ongoing onslaught of the pandemic. However, vaccine is also expected to be a limited resource. An optimal allocation strategy, especially in countries with access inequities and temporal separation of hot-spots, might be an effective way of halting the disease spread. We approach this problem by proposing a novel pipeline VacSIM that dovetails Deep Reinforcement Learning models into a Contextual Bandits approach for optimizing the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine. Whereas the Reinforcement Learning models suggest better actions and rewards, Contextual Bandits allow online modifications that may need to be implemented on a day-to-day basis in the real world scenario. We evaluate this framework against a naive allocation approach of distributing vaccine proportional to the incidence of COVID-19 cases in five different States across India (Assam, Delhi, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Nagaland) and demonstrate up to 9039 potential infections prevented and a significant increase in the efficacy of limiting the spread over a period of 45 days through the VacSIM approach. Our models and the platform are extensible to all states of India and potentially across the globe. We also propose novel evaluation strategies including standard compartmental model-based projections and a causality-preserving evaluation of our model. Since all models carry assumptions that may need to be tested in various contexts, we open source our model VacSIM and contribute a new reinforcement learning environment compatible with OpenAI gym to make it extensible for real-world applications across the globe. (http://vacsim.tavlab.iiitd.edu.in:8000/).
Collaborative Attention Mechanism for Multi-View Action Recognition
Authors: Yue Bai, Zhiqiang Tao, Lichen Wang, Sheng Li, Yu Yin, Yun Fu
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Representation Learning

Multi-view action recognition (MVAR) leverages complementary temporal information from different views to improve the learning performance. Obtaining informative view-specific representation plays an essential role in MVAR. Attention has been widely adopted as an effective strategy for discovering discriminative cues underlying temporal data. However, most existing MVAR methods only utilize attention to extract representation for each view individually, ignoring the potential to dig latent patterns based on mutual-support information in attention space. To this end, we propose a collaborative attention mechanism (CAM) for solving the MVAR problem in this paper. The proposed CAM detects the attention differences among multi-view, and adaptively integrates frame-level information to benefit each other. Specifically, we extend the long short-term memory (LSTM) to a Mutual-Aid RNN (MAR) to achieve the multi-view collaboration process. CAM takes advantages of view-specific attention pattern to guide another view and discover potential information which is hard to be explored by itself. It paves a novel way to leverage attention information and enhances the multi-view representation learning. Extensive experiments on four action datasets illustrate the proposed CAM achieves better results for each view and also boosts multi-view performance.
Analogy-Making as a Core Primitive in the Software Engineering Toolbox
Authors: Matthew Sotoudeh, Aditya V. Thakur
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00

An analogy is an identification of structural similarities and correspondences between two objects. Computational models of analogy making have been studied extensively in the field of cognitive science to better understand high-level human cognition. For instance, Melanie Mitchell and Douglas Hofstadter sought to better understand high-level perception by developing the Copycat algorithm for completing analogies between letter sequences. In this paper, we argue that analogy making should be seen as a core primitive in software engineering. We motivate this argument by showing how complex software engineering problems such as program understanding and source-code transformation learning can be reduced to an instance of the analogy-making problem. We demonstrate this idea using Sifter, a new analogy-making algorithm suitable for software engineering applications that adapts and extends ideas from Copycat. In particular, Sifter reduces analogy-making to searching for a sequence of update rule applications. Sifter uses a novel representation for mathematical structures capable of effectively representing the wide variety of information embedded in software. We conclude by listing major areas of future work for Sifter and analogy-making in software engineering.
Robust Deep Learning Ensemble against Deception
Authors: Wenqi Wei, Ling Liu
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Deep Learning, Denoising, Diversity, Ensemble Learning

Deep neural network (DNN) models are known to be vulnerable to maliciously crafted adversarial examples and to out-of-distribution inputs drawn sufficiently far away from the training data. How to protect a machine learning model against deception of both types of destructive inputs remains an open challenge. This paper presents XEnsemble, a diversity ensemble verification methodology for enhancing the adversarial robustness of DNN models against deception caused by either adversarial examples or out-of-distribution inputs. XEnsemble by design has three unique capabilities. First, XEnsemble builds diverse input denoising verifiers by leveraging different data cleaning techniques. Second, XEnsemble develops a disagreement-diversity ensemble learning methodology for guarding the output of the prediction model against deception. Third, XEnsemble provides a suite of algorithms to combine input verification and output verification to protect the DNN prediction models from both adversarial examples and out of distribution inputs. Evaluated using eleven popular adversarial attacks and two representative out-of-distribution datasets, we show that XEnsemble achieves a high defense success rate against adversarial examples and a high detection success rate against out-of-distribution data inputs, and outperforms existing representative defense methods with respect to robustness and defensibility.
Zero-shot Synthesis with Group-Supervised Learning
Authors: Yunhao Ge, Sami Abu-El-Haija, Gan Xin, Laurent Itti
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

Visual cognition of primates is superior to that of artificial neural networks in its ability to 'envision' a visual object, even a newly-introduced one, in different attributes including pose, position, color, texture, etc. To aid neural networks to envision objects with different attributes, we propose a family of objective functions, expressed on groups of examples, as a novel learning framework that we term Group-Supervised Learning (GSL). GSL allows us to decompose inputs into a disentangled representation with swappable components, that can be recombined to synthesize new samples. For instance, images of red boats & blue cars can be decomposed and recombined to synthesize novel images of red cars. We propose an implementation based on auto-encoder, termed group-supervised zero-shot synthesis network (GZS-Net) trained with our learning framework, that can produce a high-quality red car even if no such example is witnessed during training. We test our model and learning framework on existing benchmarks, in addition to anew dataset that we open-source. We qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that GZS-Net trained with GSL outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Resource Optimization in 5G Radio Access Network Slicing
Authors: Yi Shi, Yalin E. Sagduyu, Tugba Erpek
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The paper presents a reinforcement learning solution to dynamic resource allocation for 5G radio access network slicing. Available communication resources (frequency-time blocks and transmit powers) and computational resources (processor usage) are allocated to stochastic arrivals of network slice requests. Each request arrives with priority (weight), throughput, computational resource, and latency (deadline) requirements, and if feasible, it is served with available communication and computational resources allocated over its requested duration. As each decision of resource allocation makes some of the resources temporarily unavailable for future, the myopic solution that can optimize only the current resource allocation becomes ineffective for network slicing. Therefore, a Q-learning solution is presented to maximize the network utility in terms of the total weight of granted network slicing requests over a time horizon subject to communication and computational constraints. Results show that reinforcement learning provides major improvements in the 5G network utility relative to myopic, random, and first come first served solutions. While reinforcement learning sustains scalable performance as the number of served users increases, it can also be effectively used to assign resources to network slices when 5G needs to share the spectrum with incumbent users that may dynamically occupy some of the frequency-time blocks.