pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MatRec: Matrix Factorization for Highly Skewed Dataset
Authors: Hao Wang, Bing Ruan
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank, Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems is one of the most successful AI technologies applied in the internet cooperations. Popular internet products such as TikTok, Amazon, and YouTube have all integrated recommender systems as their core product feature. Although recommender systems have received great success, it is well known for highly skewed datasets, engineers and researchers need to adjust their methods to tackle the specific problem to yield good results. Inability to deal with highly skewed dataset usually generates hard computational problems for big data clusters and unsatisfactory results for customers. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm solving the problem in the framework of matrix factorization. We model the data skewness factors in the theoretic modeling of the approach with easy to interpret and easy to implement formulas. We prove in experiments our method generates comparably favorite results with popular recommender system algorithms such as Learning to Rank , Alternating Least Squares and Deep Matrix Factorization.
Positional Artefacts Propagate Through Masked Language Model Embeddings
Authors: Ziyang Luo, Artur Kulmizev, Xiaoxi Mao
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Word Embeddings, Word Sense Disambiguation

In this work, we demonstrate that the contextualized word vectors derived from pretrained masked language model-based encoders share a common, perhaps undesirable pattern across layers. Namely, we find cases of persistent outlier neurons within BERT and RoBERTa's hidden state vectors that consistently bear the smallest or largest values in said vectors. In an attempt to investigate the source of this information, we introduce a neuron-level analysis method, which reveals that the outliers are closely related to information captured by positional embeddings. We also pre-train the RoBERTa-base models from scratch and find that the outliers disappear without using positional embeddings. These outliers, we find, are the major cause of anisotropy of encoders' raw vector spaces, and clipping them leads to increased similarity across vectors. We demonstrate this in practice by showing that clipped vectors can more accurately distinguish word senses, as well as lead to better sentence embeddings when mean pooling. In three supervised tasks, we find that clipping does not affect the performance.
Dual regularized Laplacian spectral clustering methods on community detection
Authors: Huan Qing, Jingli Wang
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection, Stochastic Block Model

Spectral clustering methods are widely used for detecting clusters in networks for community detection, while a small change on the graph Laplacian matrix could bring a dramatic improvement. In this paper, we propose a dual regularized graph Laplacian matrix and then employ it to three classical spectral clustering approaches under the degree-corrected stochastic block model. If the number of communities is known as $K$, we consider more than $K$ leading eigenvectors and weight them by their corresponding eigenvalues in the spectral clustering procedure to improve the performance. Three improved spectral clustering methods are dual regularized spectral clustering (DRSC) method, dual regularized spectral clustering on Ratios-of-eigenvectors (DRSCORE) method, and dual regularized symmetrized Laplacian inverse matrix (DRSLIM) method. Theoretical analysis of DRSC and DRSLIM show that under mild conditions DRSC and DRSLIM yield stable consistent community detection, moreover, DRSCORE returns perfect clustering under the ideal case. We compare the performances of DRSC, DRSCORE and DRSLIM with several spectral methods by substantial simulated networks and eight real-world networks.
Reinforced Deep Markov Models With Applications in Automatic Trading
Authors: Tadeu A. Ferreira
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning

Inspired by the developments in deep generative models, we propose a model-based RL approach, coined Reinforced Deep Markov Model (RDMM), designed to integrate desirable properties of a reinforcement learning algorithm acting as an automatic trading system. The network architecture allows for the possibility that market dynamics are partially visible and are potentially modified by the agent's actions. The RDMM filters incomplete and noisy data, to create better-behaved input data for RL planning. The policy search optimisation also properly accounts for state uncertainty. Due to the complexity of the RKDF model architecture, we performed ablation studies to understand the contributions of individual components of the approach better. To test the financial performance of the RDMM we implement policies using variants of Q-Learning, DynaQ-ARIMA and DynaQ-LSTM algorithms. The experiments show that the RDMM is data-efficient and provides financial gains compared to the benchmarks in the optimal execution problem. The performance improvement becomes more pronounced when price dynamics are more complex, and this has been demonstrated using real data sets from the limit order book of Facebook, Intel, Vodafone and Microsoft.
EDEN: Multimodal Synthetic Dataset of Enclosed GarDEN Scenes
Authors: Hoang-An Le, Thomas Mensink, Partha Das, Sezer Karaoglu, Theo Gevers
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal large-scale datasets for outdoor scenes are mostly designed for urban driving problems. The scenes are highly structured and semantically different from scenarios seen in nature-centered scenes such as gardens or parks. To promote machine learning methods for nature-oriented applications, such as agriculture and gardening, we propose the multimodal synthetic dataset for Enclosed garDEN scenes (EDEN). The dataset features more than 300K images captured from more than 100 garden models. Each image is annotated with various low/high-level vision modalities, including semantic segmentation, depth, surface normals, intrinsic colors, and optical flow. Experimental results on the state-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation and monocular depth prediction, two important tasks in computer vision, show positive impact of pre-training deep networks on our dataset for unstructured natural scenes. The dataset and related materials will be available at https://lhoangan.github.io/eden.
Characterizing Transactional Databases for Frequent Itemset Mining
Authors: Christian Lezcano, Marta Arias
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

This paper presents a study of the characteristics of transactional databases used in frequent itemset mining. Such characterizations have typically been used to benchmark and understand the data mining algorithms working on these databases. The aim of our study is to give a picture of how diverse and representative these benchmarking databases are, both in general but also in the context of particular empirical studies found in the literature. Our proposed list of metrics contains many of the existing metrics found in the literature, as well as new ones. Our study shows that our list of metrics is able to capture much of the datasets' inner complexity and thus provides a good basis for the characterization of transactional datasets. Finally, we provide a set of representative datasets based on our characterization that may be used as a benchmark safely.
Community Detection by Principal Components Clustering Methods
Authors: Huan Qing, Jingli Wang
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection

Based on the classical Degree Corrected Stochastic Blockmodel (DCSBM) model for network community detection problem, we propose two novel approaches: principal component clustering (PCC) and normalized principal component clustering (NPCC). Without any parameters to be estimated, the PCC method is simple to be implemented. Under mild conditions, we show that PCC yields consistent community detection. NPCC is designed based on the combination of the PCC and the RSC method (Qin & Rohe 2013). Population analysis for NPCC shows that NPCC returns perfect clustering for the ideal case under DCSBM. PCC and NPCC is illustrated through synthetic and real-world datasets. Numerical results show that NPCC provides a significant improvement compare with PCC and RSC. Moreover, NPCC inherits nice properties of PCC and RSC such that NPCC is insensitive to the number of eigenvectors to be clustered and the choosing of the tuning parameter. When dealing with two weak signal networks Simmons and Caltech, by considering one more eigenvectors for clustering, we provide two refinements PCC+ and NPCC+ of PCC and NPCC, respectively. Both two refinements algorithms provide improvement performances compared with their original algorithms. Especially, NPCC+ provides satisfactory performances on Simmons and Caltech, with error rates of 121/1137 and 96/590, respectively.
Low-Resource Adaptation of Neural NLP Models
Authors: Farhad Nooralahzadeh
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Transfer Learning

Real-world applications of natural language processing (NLP) are challenging. NLP models rely heavily on supervised machine learning and require large amounts of annotated data. These resources are often based on language data available in large quantities, such as English newswire. However, in real-world applications of NLP, the textual resources vary across several dimensions, such as language, dialect, topic, and genre. It is challenging to find annotated data of sufficient amount and quality. The objective of this thesis is to investigate methods for dealing with such low-resource scenarios in information extraction and natural language understanding. To this end, we study distant supervision and sequential transfer learning in various low-resource settings. We develop and adapt neural NLP models to explore a number of research questions concerning NLP tasks with minimal or no training data.
Characterizations of non-normalized discrete probability distributions and their application in statistics
Authors: Steffen Betsch, Bruno Ebner, Franz Nestmann
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

From the distributional characterizations that lie at the heart of Stein's method we derive explicit formulae for the mass functions of discrete probability laws that identify those distributions. These identities are applied to develop tools for the solution of statistical problems. Our characterizations, and hence the applications built on them, do not require any knowledge about normalization constants of the probability laws. To demonstrate that our statistical methods are sound, we provide comparative simulation studies for the testing of fit to the Poisson distribution and for parameter estimation of the negative binomial family when both parameters are unknown. We also consider the problem of parameter estimation for discrete exponential-polynomial models which generally are non-normalized.
SuperDeConFuse: A Supervised Deep Convolutional Transform based Fusion Framework for Financial Trading Systems
Authors: Pooja Gupta, Angshul Majumdar, Emilie Chouzenoux, Giovanni Chierchia
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

This work proposes a supervised multi-channel time-series learning framework for financial stock trading. Although many deep learning models have recently been proposed in this domain, most of them treat the stock trading time-series data as 2-D image data, whereas its true nature is 1-D time-series data. Since the stock trading systems are multi-channel data, many existing techniques treating them as 1-D time-series data are not suggestive of any technique to effectively fusion the information carried by the multiple channels. To contribute towards both of these shortcomings, we propose an end-to-end supervised learning framework inspired by the previously established (unsupervised) convolution transform learning framework. Our approach consists of processing the data channels through separate 1-D convolution layers, then fusing the outputs with a series of fully-connected layers, and finally applying a softmax classification layer. The peculiarity of our framework - SuperDeConFuse (SDCF), is that we remove the nonlinear activation located between the multi-channel convolution layers and the fully-connected layers, as well as the one located between the latter and the output layer. We compensate for this removal by introducing a suitable regularization on the aforementioned layer outputs and filters during the training phase. Specifically, we apply a logarithm determinant regularization on the layer filters to break symmetry and force diversity in the learnt transforms, whereas we enforce the non-negativity constraint on the layer outputs to mitigate the issue of dead neurons. This results in the effective learning of a richer set of features and filters with respect to a standard convolutional neural network. Numerical experiments confirm that the proposed model yields considerably better results than state-of-the-art deep learning techniques for real-world problem of stock trading.
An Empirical Study of Visual Features for DNN based Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement in Multi-talker Environments
Authors: Shrishti Saha Shetu, Soumitro Chakrabarty, Emanuël A. P. Habets
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Speech Enhancement

Audio-visual speech enhancement (AVSE) methods use both audio and visual features for the task of speech enhancement and the use of visual features has been shown to be particularly effective in multi-speaker scenarios. In the majority of deep neural network (DNN) based AVSE methods, the audio and visual data are first processed separately using different sub-networks, and then the learned features are fused to utilize the information from both modalities. There have been various studies on suitable audio input features and network architectures, however, to the best of our knowledge, there is no published study that has investigated which visual features are best suited for this specific task. In this work, we perform an empirical study of the most commonly used visual features for DNN based AVSE, the pre-processing requirements for each of these features, and investigate their influence on the performance. Our study shows that despite the overall better performance of embedding-based features, their computationally intensive pre-processing make their use difficult in low resource systems. For such systems, optical flow or raw pixels-based features might be better suited.
MAGNeto: An Efficient Deep Learning Method for the Extractive Tags Summarization Problem
Authors: Hieu Trong Phung, Anh Tuan Vu, Tung Dinh Nguyen, Lam Thanh Do, Giang Nam Ngo, Trung Thanh Tran, Ngoc C. Lê
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Extractive Tags Summarization, Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Pre-training

In this work, we study a new image annotation task named Extractive Tags Summarization (ETS). The goal is to extract important tags from the context lying in an image and its corresponding tags. We adjust some state-of-the-art deep learning models to utilize both visual and textual information. Our proposed solution consists of different widely used blocks like convolutional and self-attention layers, together with a novel idea of combining auxiliary loss functions and the gating mechanism to glue and elevate these fundamental components and form a unified architecture. Besides, we introduce a loss function that aims to reduce the imbalance of the training data and a simple but effective data augmentation technique dedicated to alleviates the effect of outliers on the final results. Last but not least, we explore an unsupervised pre-training strategy to further boost the performance of the model by making use of the abundant amount of available unlabeled data. Our model shows the good results as 90% $F_\text{1}$ score on the public NUS-WIDE benchmark, and 50% $F_\text{1}$ score on a noisy large-scale real-world private dataset. Source code for reproducing the experiments is publicly available at: https://github.com/pixta-dev/labteam
Forecasting asylum-related migration flows with machine learning and data at scale
Authors: Marcello Carammia, Stefano Maria Iacus, Teddy Wilkin
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The effects of the so-called "refugee crisis" of 2015-16 continue to dominate the political agenda in Europe. Migration flows were sudden and unexpected, leaving governments unprepared and exposing significant shortcomings in the field of migration forecasting. Migration is a complex system typified by episodic variation, underpinned by causal factors that are interacting, highly context dependent and short-lived. Correspondingly, migration monitoring relies on scattered data, while approaches to forecasting focus on specific migration flows and often have inconsistent results that are difficult to generalise at the regional or global levels. Here we show that adaptive machine learning algorithms that integrate official statistics and non-traditional data sources at scale can effectively forecast asylum-related migration flows. We focus on asylum applications lodged in countries of the European Union (EU) by nationals of all countries of origin worldwide; the same approach can be applied in any context provided adequate migration or asylum data are available. We exploit three tiers of data - geolocated events and internet searches in countries of origin, detections of irregular crossings at the EU border, and asylum recognition rates in countries of destination - to effectively forecast individual asylum-migration flows up to four weeks ahead with high accuracy. Uniquely, our approach a) monitors potential drivers of migration in countries of origin to detect changes early onset; b) models individual country-to-country migration flows separately and on moving time windows; c) estimates the effects of individual drivers, including lagged effects; d) provides forecasts of asylum applications up to four weeks ahead; e) assesses how patterns of drivers shift over time to describe the functioning and change of migration systems.
BayGo: Joint Bayesian Learning and Information-Aware Graph Optimization
Authors: Tamara Alshammari, Sumudu Samarakoon, Anis Elgabli, Mehdi Bennis
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00

This article deals with the problem of distributed machine learning, in which agents update their models based on their local datasets, and aggregate the updated models collaboratively and in a fully decentralized manner. In this paper, we tackle the problem of information heterogeneity arising in multi-agent networks where the placement of informative agents plays a crucial role in the learning dynamics. Specifically, we propose BayGo, a novel fully decentralized joint Bayesian learning and graph optimization framework with proven fast convergence over a sparse graph. Under our framework, agents are able to learn and communicate with the most informative agent to their own learning. Unlike prior works, our framework assumes no prior knowledge of the data distribution across agents nor does it assume any knowledge of the true parameter of the system. The proposed alternating minimization based framework ensures global connectivity in a fully decentralized way while minimizing the number of communication links. We theoretically show that by optimizing the proposed objective function, the estimation error of the posterior probability distribution decreases exponentially at each iteration. Via extensive simulations, we show that our framework achieves faster convergence and higher accuracy compared to fully-connected and star topology graphs.
DeConFuse : A Deep Convolutional Transform based Unsupervised Fusion Framework
Authors: Pooja Gupta, Jyoti Maggu, Angshul Majumdar, Emilie Chouzenoux, Giovanni Chierchia
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00

This work proposes an unsupervised fusion framework based on deep convolutional transform learning. The great learning ability of convolutional filters for data analysis is well acknowledged. The success of convolutive features owes to convolutional neural network (CNN). However, CNN cannot perform learning tasks in an unsupervised fashion. In a recent work, we show that such shortcoming can be addressed by adopting a convolutional transform learning (CTL) approach, where convolutional filters are learnt in an unsupervised fashion. The present paper aims at (i) proposing a deep version of CTL; (ii) proposing an unsupervised fusion formulation taking advantage of the proposed deep CTL representation; (iii) developing a mathematically sounded optimization strategy for performing the learning task. We apply the proposed technique, named DeConFuse, on the problem of stock forecasting and trading. Comparison with state-of-the-art methods (based on CNN and long short-term memory network) shows the superiority of our method for performing a reliable feature extraction.
Sparsely constrained neural networks for model discovery of PDEs
Authors: Gert-Jan Both, Gijs Vermarien, Remy Kusters
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Discovery, regression

Sparse regression on a library of candidate features has developed as the prime method to discover the partial differential equation underlying a spatio-temporal data-set. These features consist of higher order derivatives, limiting model discovery to densely sampled data-sets with low noise. Neural network-based approaches circumvent this limit by constructing a surrogate model of the data, but have to date ignored advances in sparse regression algorithms. In this paper we present a modular framework that dynamically determines the sparsity pattern of a deep-learning based surrogate using any sparse regression technique. Using our new approach, we introduce a new constraint on the neural network and show how a different network architecture and sparsity estimator improve model discovery accuracy and convergence on several benchmark examples. Our framework is available at \url{https://github.com/PhIMaL/DeePyMoD}
Geometric Deep Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic DAG Scheduling
Authors: Nathan Grinsztajn, Olivier Beaumont, Emmanuel Jeannot, Philippe Preux
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

In practice, it is quite common to face combinatorial optimization problems which contain uncertainty along with non-determinism and dynamicity. These three properties call for appropriate algorithms; reinforcement learning (RL) is dealing with them in a very natural way. Today, despite some efforts, most real-life combinatorial optimization problems remain out of the reach of reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning approach to solve a realistic scheduling problem, and apply it to an algorithm commonly executed in the high performance computing community, the Cholesky factorization. On the contrary to static scheduling, where tasks are assigned to processors in a predetermined ordering before the beginning of the parallel execution, our method is dynamic: task allocations and their execution ordering are decided at runtime, based on the system state and unexpected events, which allows much more flexibility. To do so, our algorithm uses graph neural networks in combination with an actor-critic algorithm (A2C) to build an adaptive representation of the problem on the fly. We show that this approach is competitive with state-of-the-art heuristics used in high-performance computing runtime systems. Moreover, our algorithm does not require an explicit model of the environment, but we demonstrate that extra knowledge can easily be incorporated and improves performance. We also exhibit key properties provided by this RL approach, and study its transfer abilities to other instances.