pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Accelerated, Scalable and Reproducible AI-driven Gravitational Wave Detection
Authors: E. A. Huerta, Asad Khan, Xiaobo Huang, Minyang Tian, Maksim Levental, Ryan Chard, Wei Wei, Maeve Heflin, Daniel S. Katz, Volodymyr Kindratenko, Dawei Mu, Ben Blaiszik, Ian Foster
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Computing, Gravitational Wave Detection

The development of reusable artificial intelligence (AI) models for wider use and rigorous validation by the community promises to unlock new opportunities in multi-messenger astrophysics. Here we develop a workflow that connects the Data and Learning Hub for Science, a repository for publishing AI models, with the Hardware Accelerated Learning (HAL) cluster, using funcX as a universal distributed computing service. Using this workflow, an ensemble of four openly available AI models can be run on HAL to process an entire month's worth (August 2017) of advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory data in just seven minutes, identifying all four all four binary black hole mergers previously identified in this dataset and reporting no misclassifications. This approach combines advances in AI, distributed computing, and scientific data infrastructure to open new pathways to conduct reproducible, accelerated, data-driven discovery.
Intrusion detection in computer systems by using artificial neural networks with Deep Learning approaches
Authors: Sergio Hidalgo-Espinoza, Kevin Chamorro-Cupueran, Oscar Chang-Tortolero
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection

Intrusion detection into computer networks has become one of the most important issues in cybersecurity. Attackers keep on researching and coding to discover new vulnerabilities to penetrate information security system. In consequence computer systems must be daily upgraded using up-to-date techniques to keep hackers at bay. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of an intrusion detection system based on Deep Learning architectures. As a first step, a shallow network is trained with labelled log-in [into a computer network] data taken from the Dataset CICIDS2017. The internal behaviour of this network is carefully tracked and tuned by using plotting and exploring codes until it reaches a functional peak in intrusion prediction accuracy. As a second step, an autoencoder, trained with big unlabelled data, is used as a middle processor which feeds compressed information and abstract representation to the original shallow network. It is proven that the resultant deep architecture has a better performance than any version of the shallow network alone. The resultant functional code scripts, written in MATLAB, represent a re-trainable system which has been proved using real data, producing good precision and fast response.
Graph integration of structured, semistructured and unstructured data for data journalism
Authors: Angelos-Christos Anadiotis, Oana Balalau, Catarina Conceicao, Helena Galhardas, Mhd Yamen Haddad, Ioana Manolescu, Tayeb Merabti, Jingmao You
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00

Digital data is a gold mine for modern journalism. However, datasets which interest journalists are extremely heterogeneous, ranging from highly structured (relational databases), semi-structured (JSON, XML, HTML), graphs (e.g., RDF), and text. Journalists (and other classes of users lacking advanced IT expertise, such as most non-governmental-organizations, or small public administrations) need to be able to make sense of such heterogeneous corpora, even if they lack the ability to define and deploy custom extract-transform-load workflows, especially for dynamically varying sets of data sources. We describe a complete approach for integrating dynamic sets of heterogeneous datasets along the lines described above: the challenges we faced to make such graphs useful, allow their integration to scale, and the solutions we proposed for these problems. Our approach is implemented within the ConnectionLens system; we validate it through a set of experiments.
ColorShapeLinks: A board game AI competition for educators and students
Authors: Nuno Fachada
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00

ColorShapeLinks is an AI board game competition framework specially designed for students and educators in videogame development, with openness and accessibility in mind. The competition is based on an arbitrarily-sized version of the Simplexity board game, the motto of which, "simple to learn, complex to master", is curiously also applicable to AI agents. ColorShapeLinks offers graphical and text-based frontends and a completely open and documented development framework built using industry standard tools and following software engineering best practices. ColorShapeLinks is not only a competition, but both a game and a framework which educators and students can extend and use to host their own competitions. It has been successfully used for running internal competitions in AI classes, as well as for hosting an international AI competition at the IEEE Conference on Games.
A Systematic Mapping Study in AIOps
Authors: Paolo Notaro, Jorge Cardoso, Michael Gerndt
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

IT systems of today are becoming larger and more complex, rendering their human supervision more difficult. Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) has been proposed to tackle modern IT administration challenges thanks to AI and Big Data. However, past AIOps contributions are scattered, unorganized and missing a common terminology convention, which renders their discovery and comparison impractical. In this work, we conduct an in-depth mapping study to collect and organize the numerous scattered contributions to AIOps in a unique reference index. We create an AIOps taxonomy to build a foundation for future contributions and allow an efficient comparison of AIOps papers treating similar problems. We investigate temporal trends and classify AIOps contributions based on the choice of algorithms, data sources and the target components. Our results show a recent and growing interest towards AIOps, specifically to those contributions treating failure-related tasks (62%), such as anomaly detection and root cause analysis.
Developing Future Human-Centered Smart Cities: Critical Analysis of Smart City Security, Interpretability, and Ethical Challenges
Authors: Kashif Ahmad, Majdi Maabreh, Mohamed Ghaly, Khalil Khan, Junaid Qadir, Ala Al-Fuqaha
Date: 2020-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

As the globally increasing population drives rapid urbanisation in various parts of the world, there is a great need to deliberate on the future of the cities worth living. In particular, as modern smart cities embrace more and more data-driven artificial intelligence services, it is worth remembering that technology can facilitate prosperity, wellbeing, urban livability, or social justice, but only when it has the right analog complements (such as well-thought out policies, mature institutions, responsible governance); and the ultimate objective of these smart cities is to facilitate and enhance human welfare and social flourishing. Researchers have shown that various technological business models and features can in fact contribute to social problems such as extremism, polarization, misinformation, and Internet addiction. In the light of these observations, addressing the philosophical and ethical questions involved in ensuring the security, safety, and interpretability of such AI algorithms that will form the technological bedrock of future cities assumes paramount importance. Globally there are calls for technology to be made more humane and human-centered. In this paper, we analyze and explore key challenges including security, robustness, interpretability, and ethical (data and algorithmic) challenges to a successful deployment of AI in human-centric applications, with a particular emphasis on the convergence of these concepts/challenges. We provide a detailed review of existing literature on these key challenges and analyze how one of these challenges may lead to others or help in solving other challenges. The paper also advises on the current limitations, pitfalls, and future directions of research in these domains, and how it can fill the current gaps and lead to better solutions. We believe such rigorous analysis will provide a baseline for future research in the domain.
An Improved Simulation Model for Pedestrian Crowd Evacuation
Authors: Danial A. Muhammed, Tarik A. Rashid, Abeer Alsadoon, Nebojsa Bacanin, Polla Fattah, Mokhtar Mohammadi, Indradip Banerjee
Date: 2020-12-04 00:00:00

This paper works on one of the most recent pedestrian crowd evacuation models, i.e., "a simulation model for pedestrian crowd evacuation based on various AI techniques", developed in late 2019. This study adds a new feature to the developed model by proposing a new method and integrating it with the model. This method enables the developed model to find a more appropriate evacuation area design, among others regarding safety due to selecting the best exit door location among many suggested locations. This method is completely dependent on the selected model's output, i.e., the evacuation time for each individual within the evacuation process. The new method finds an average of the evacuees' evacuation times of each exit door location; then, based on the average evacuation time, it decides which exit door location would be the best exit door to be used for evacuation by the evacuees. To validate the method, various designs for the evacuation area with various written scenarios were used. The results showed that the model with this new method could predict a proper exit door location among many suggested locations. Lastly, from the results of this research using the integration of this newly proposed method, a new capability for the selected model in terms of safety allowed the right decision in selecting the finest design for the evacuation area among other designs.
Resolving Implicit Coordination in Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Deep Q-Networks & Game Theory
Authors: Griffin Adams, Sarguna Janani Padmanabhan, Shivang Shekhar
Date: 2020-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, OpenAI Gym, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We address two major challenges of implicit coordination in multi-agent deep reinforcement learning: non-stationarity and exponential growth of state-action space, by combining Deep-Q Networks for policy learning with Nash equilibrium for action selection. Q-values proxy as payoffs in Nash settings, and mutual best responses define joint action selection. Coordination is implicit because multiple/no Nash equilibria are resolved deterministically. We demonstrate that knowledge of game type leads to an assumption of mirrored best responses and faster convergence than Nash-Q. Specifically, the Friend-or-Foe algorithm demonstrates signs of convergence to a Set Controller which jointly chooses actions for two agents. This encouraging given the highly unstable nature of decentralized coordination over joint actions. Inspired by the dueling network architecture, which decouples the Q-function into state and advantage streams, as well as residual networks, we learn both a single and joint agent representation, and merge them via element-wise addition. This simplifies coordination by recasting it is as learning a residual function. We also draw high level comparative insights on key MADRL and game theoretic variables: competitive vs. cooperative, asynchronous vs. parallel learning, greedy versus socially optimal Nash equilibria tie breaking, and strategies for the no Nash equilibrium case. We evaluate on 3 custom environments written in Python using OpenAI Gym: a Predator Prey environment, an alternating Warehouse environment, and a Synchronization environment. Each environment requires successively more coordination to achieve positive rewards.
Incremental discriminative color object tracking
Authors: Alireza Asvadi, Hami Mahdavinataj, Mohammadreza Karami, Yasser Baleghi
Date: 2013-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking

This paper presents an object tracking algorithm based on discriminative 3D joint RGB histograms of the object and surrounding background. Mean-shift algorithm on the object confident map is used for localization. An incremental color learning scheme with a forgetting factor is utilized to account for appearance variation of the object. Evaluated against three state of the art methods, experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking algorithm where the object undergoes variation in illumination and color. Implemented in MATLAB, the proposed tracker runs at 25.7 frames per second.
Transfer Learning Through Weighted Loss Function and Group Normalization for Vessel Segmentation from Retinal Images
Authors: Abdullah Sarhan, Jon Rokne, Reda Alhajj, Andrew Crichton
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation, Transfer Learning

The vascular structure of blood vessels is important in diagnosing retinal conditions such as glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Accurate segmentation of these vessels can help in detecting retinal objects such as the optic disc and optic cup and hence determine if there are damages to these areas. Moreover, the structure of the vessels can help in diagnosing glaucoma. The rapid development of digital imaging and computer-vision techniques has increased the potential for developing approaches for segmenting retinal vessels. In this paper, we propose an approach for segmenting retinal vessels that uses deep learning along with transfer learning. We adapted the U-Net structure to use a customized InceptionV3 as the encoder and used multiple skip connections to form the decoder. Moreover, we used a weighted loss function to handle the issue of class imbalance in retinal images. Furthermore, we contributed a new dataset to this field. We tested our approach on six publicly available datasets and a newly created dataset. We achieved an average accuracy of 95.60% and a Dice coefficient of 80.98%. The results obtained from comprehensive experiments demonstrate the robustness of our approach to the segmentation of blood vessels in retinal images obtained from different sources. Our approach results in greater segmentation accuracy than other approaches.
MASKER: Masked Keyword Regularization for Reliable Text Classification
Authors: Seung Jun Moon, Sangwoo Mo, Kimin Lee, Jaeho Lee, Jinwoo Shin
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Domain Generalization, General Classification, Natural Language Inference, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

Pre-trained language models have achieved state-of-the-art accuracies on various text classification tasks, e.g., sentiment analysis, natural language inference, and semantic textual similarity. However, the reliability of the fine-tuned text classifiers is an often underlooked performance criterion. For instance, one may desire a model that can detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples (drawn far from training distribution) or be robust against domain shifts. We claim that one central obstacle to the reliability is the over-reliance of the model on a limited number of keywords, instead of looking at the whole context. In particular, we find that (a) OOD samples often contain in-distribution keywords, while (b) cross-domain samples may not always contain keywords; over-relying on the keywords can be problematic for both cases. In light of this observation, we propose a simple yet effective fine-tuning method, coined masked keyword regularization (MASKER), that facilitates context-based prediction. MASKER regularizes the model to reconstruct the keywords from the rest of the words and make low-confidence predictions without enough context. When applied to various pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT), we demonstrate that MASKER improves OOD detection and cross-domain generalization without degrading classification accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/alinlab/MASKER.
RainNet: A Large-Scale Imagery Dataset and Benchmark for Spatial Precipitation Downscaling
Authors: Xuanhong Chen, Kairui Feng, Naiyuan Liu, Bingbing Ni, Yifan Lu, Zhengyan Tong, Ziang Liu
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00

AI-for-science approaches have been applied to solve scientific problems (e.g., nuclear fusion, ecology, genomics, meteorology) and have achieved highly promising results. Spatial precipitation downscaling is one of the most important meteorological problem and urgently requires the participation of AI. However, the lack of a well-organized and annotated large-scale dataset hinders the training and verification of more effective and advancing deep-learning models for precipitation downscaling. To alleviate these obstacles, we present the first large-scale spatial precipitation downscaling dataset named RainNet, which contains more than $62,400$ pairs of high-quality low/high-resolution precipitation maps for over $17$ years, ready to help the evolution of deep learning models in precipitation downscaling. Specifically, the precipitation maps carefully collected in RainNet cover various meteorological phenomena (e.g., hurricane, squall), which is of great help to improve the model generalization ability. In addition, the map pairs in RainNet are organized in the form of image sequences ($720$ maps per month or 1 map/hour), showing complex physical properties, e.g., temporal misalignment, temporal sparse, and fluid properties. Furthermore, two deep-learning-oriented metrics are specifically introduced to evaluate or verify the comprehensive performance of the trained model (e.g., prediction maps reconstruction accuracy). To illustrate the applications of RainNet, 14 state-of-the-art models, including deep models and traditional approaches, are evaluated. To fully explore potential downscaling solutions, we propose an implicit physical estimation benchmark framework to learn the above characteristics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the value of RainNet in training and evaluating downscaling models. Our dataset is available at https://neuralchen.github.io/RainNet/.
Balancing Geometry and Density: Path Distances on High-Dimensional Data
Authors: Anna Little, Daniel Mckenzie, James Murphy
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

New geometric and computational analyses of power-weighted shortest-path distances (PWSPDs) are presented. By illuminating the way these metrics balance density and geometry in the underlying data, we clarify their key parameters and discuss how they may be chosen in practice. Comparisons are made with related data-driven metrics, which illustrate the broader role of density in kernel-based unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning. Computationally, we relate PWSPDs on complete weighted graphs to their analogues on weighted nearest neighbor graphs, providing high probability guarantees on their equivalence that are near-optimal. Connections with percolation theory are developed to establish estimates on the bias and variance of PWSPDs in the finite sample setting. The theoretical results are bolstered by illustrative experiments, demonstrating the versatility of PWSPDs for a wide range of data settings. Throughout the paper, our results require only that the underlying data is sampled from a low-dimensional manifold, and depend crucially on the intrinsic dimension of this manifold, rather than its ambient dimension.
Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization
Authors: Hila Chefer, Shir Gur, Lior Wolf
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Self-attention techniques, and specifically Transformers, are dominating the field of text processing and are becoming increasingly popular in computer vision classification tasks. In order to visualize the parts of the image that led to a certain classification, existing methods either rely on the obtained attention maps or employ heuristic propagation along the attention graph. In this work, we propose a novel way to compute relevancy for Transformer networks. The method assigns local relevance based on the Deep Taylor Decomposition principle and then propagates these relevancy scores through the layers. This propagation involves attention layers and skip connections, which challenge existing methods. Our solution is based on a specific formulation that is shown to maintain the total relevancy across layers. We benchmark our method on very recent visual Transformer networks, as well as on a text classification problem, and demonstrate a clear advantage over the existing explainability methods.
Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Counting and Sampling Markov Equivalent DAGs
Authors: Marcel Wienöbst, Max Bannach, Maciej Liśkiewicz
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00

Counting and uniform sampling of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from a Markov equivalence class are fundamental tasks in graphical causal analysis. In this paper, we show that these tasks can be performed in polynomial time, solving a long-standing open problem in this area. Our algorithms are effective and easily implementable. Experimental results show that the algorithms significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.
MIX : a Multi-task Learning Approach to Solve Open-Domain Question Answering
Authors: Sofian Chaybouti, Achraf Saghe, Aymen Shabou
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Multi-Task Learning, Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering

In this paper, we introduce MIX : a multi-task deep learning approach to solve Open-Domain Question Answering. First, we design our system as a multi-stage pipeline made of 3 building blocks : a BM25-based Retriever, to reduce the search space; RoBERTa based Scorer and Extractor, to rank retrieved paragraphs and extract relevant spans of text respectively. Eventually, we further improve computational efficiency of our system to deal with the scalability challenge : thanks to multi-task learning, we parallelize the close tasks solved by the Scorer and the Extractor. Our system is on par with state-of-the-art performances on the squad-open benchmark while being simpler conceptually.
DenseHMM: Learning Hidden Markov Models by Learning Dense Representations
Authors: Joachim Sicking, Maximilian Pintz, Maram Akila, Tim Wirtz
Date: 2020-12-17 00:00:00

We propose DenseHMM - a modification of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) that allows to learn dense representations of both the hidden states and the observables. Compared to the standard HMM, transition probabilities are not atomic but composed of these representations via kernelization. Our approach enables constraint-free and gradient-based optimization. We propose two optimization schemes that make use of this: a modification of the Baum-Welch algorithm and a direct co-occurrence optimization. The latter one is highly scalable and comes empirically without loss of performance compared to standard HMMs. We show that the non-linearity of the kernelization is crucial for the expressiveness of the representations. The properties of the DenseHMM like learned co-occurrences and log-likelihoods are studied empirically on synthetic and biomedical datasets.