pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving RNA Secondary Structure Design using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Alexander Whatley, Zhekun Luo, Xiangru Tang
Date: 2021-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Rising costs in recent years of developing new drugs and treatments have led to extensive research in optimization techniques in biomolecular design. Currently, the most widely used approach in biomolecular design is directed evolution, which is a greedy hill-climbing algorithm that simulates biological evolution. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark of applying reinforcement learning to RNA sequence design, in which the objective function is defined to be the free energy in the sequence's secondary structure. In addition to experimenting with the vanilla implementations of each reinforcement learning algorithm from standard libraries, we analyze variants of each algorithm in which we modify the algorithm's reward function and tune the model's hyperparameters. We show results of the ablation analysis that we do for these algorithms, as well as graphs indicating the algorithm's performance across batches and its ability to search the possible space of RNA sequences. We find that our DQN algorithm performs by far the best in this setting, contrasting with, in which PPO performs the best among all tested algorithms. Our results should be of interest to those in the biomolecular design community and should serve as a baseline for future experiments involving machine learning in molecule design.
Flight Demand Forecasting with Transformers
Authors: Liya Wang, Amy Mykityshyn, Craig Johnson, Jillian Cheng
Date: 2021-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Management, Prediction

Transformers have become the de-facto standard in the natural language processing (NLP) field. They have also gained momentum in computer vision and other domains. Transformers can enable artificial intelligence (AI) models to dynamically focus on certain parts of their input and thus reason more effectively. Inspired by the success of transformers, we adopted this technique to predict strategic flight departure demand in multiple horizons. This work was conducted in support of a MITRE-developed mobile application, Pacer, which displays predicted departure demand to general aviation (GA) flight operators so they can have better situation awareness of the potential for departure delays during busy periods. Field demonstrations involving Pacer's previously designed rule-based prediction method showed that the prediction accuracy of departure demand still has room for improvement. This research strives to improve prediction accuracy from two key aspects: better data sources and robust forecasting algorithms. We leveraged two data sources, Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) and System Wide Information Management (SWIM), as our input. We then trained forecasting models with temporal fusion transformer (TFT) for five different airports. Case studies show that TFTs can perform better than traditional forecasting methods by large margins, and they can result in better prediction across diverse airports and with better interpretability.
Multi-Airport Delay Prediction with Transformers
Authors: Liya Wang, Alex Tien, Jason Chou
Date: 2021-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Prediction, Self-Supervised Learning

Airport performance prediction with a reasonable look-ahead time is a challenging task and has been attempted by various prior research. Traffic, demand, weather, and traffic management actions are all critical inputs to any prediction model. In this paper, a novel approach based on Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) was proposed to predict departure and arrival delays simultaneously for multiple airports at once. This approach can capture complex temporal dynamics of the inputs known at the time of prediction and then forecast selected delay metrics up to four hours into the future. When dealing with weather inputs, a self-supervised learning (SSL) model was developed to encode high-dimensional weather data into a much lower-dimensional representation to make the training of TFT more efficiently and effectively. The initial results show that the TFT-based delay prediction model achieves satisfactory performance measured by smaller prediction errors on a testing dataset. In addition, the interpretability analysis of the model outputs identifies the important input factors for delay prediction. The proposed approach is expected to help air traffic managers or decision makers gain insights about traffic management actions on delay mitigation and once operationalized, provide enough lead time to plan for predicted performance degradation.
Identifying the Leading Factors of Significant Weight Gains Using a New Rule Discovery Method
Authors: Mina Samizadeh, Jessica C Jones-Smith, Bethany Sheridan, Rahmatollah Beheshti
Date: 2021-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Subgroup Discovery

Overweight and obesity remain a major global public health concern and identifying the individualized patterns that increase the risk of future weight gains has a crucial role in preventing obesity and numerous sub-sequent diseases associated with obesity. In this work, we use a rule discovery method to study this problem, by presenting an approach that offers genuine interpretability and concurrently optimizes the accuracy(being correct often) and support (applying to many samples) of the identified patterns. Specifically, we extend an established subgroup-discovery method to generate the desired rules of type X -> Y and show how top features can be extracted from the X side, functioning as the best predictors of Y. In our obesity problem, X refers to the extracted features from very large and multi-site EHR data, and Y indicates significant weight gains. Using our method, we also extensively compare the differences and inequities in patterns across 22 strata determined by the individual's gender, age, race, insurance type, neighborhood type, and income level. Through extensive series of experiments, we show new and complementary findings regarding the predictors of future dangerous weight gains.
Weapon Engagement Zone Maximum Launch Range Estimation Using a Deep Neural Network
Authors: Joao P. A. Dantas, Andre N. Costa, Diego Geraldo, Marcos R. O. A. Maximo, Takashi Yoneyama
Date: 2021-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design

This work investigates the use of a Deep Neural Network (DNN) to perform an estimation of the Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ) maximum launch range. The WEZ allows the pilot to identify an airspace in which the available missile has a more significant probability of successfully engaging a particular target, i.e., a hypothetical area surrounding an aircraft in which an adversary is vulnerable to a shot. We propose an approach to determine the WEZ of a given missile using 50,000 simulated launches in variate conditions. These simulations are used to train a DNN that can predict the WEZ when the aircraft finds itself on different firing conditions, with a coefficient of determination of 0.99. It provides another procedure concerning preceding research since it employs a non-discretized model, i.e., it considers all directions of the WEZ at once, which has not been done previously. Additionally, the proposed method uses an experimental design that allows for fewer simulation runs, providing faster model training.
Improving Peer Assessment with Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Alireza A. Namanloo, Julie Thorpe, Amirali Salehi-Abari
Date: 2021-11-04 00:00:00

Peer assessment systems are emerging in many social and multi-agent settings, such as peer grading in large (online) classes, peer review in conferences, peer art evaluation, etc. However, peer assessments might not be as accurate as expert evaluations, thus rendering these systems unreliable. The reliability of peer assessment systems is influenced by various factors such as assessment ability of peers, their strategic assessment behaviors, and the peer assessment setup (e.g., peer evaluating group work or individual work of others). In this work, we first model peer assessment as multi-relational weighted networks that can express a variety of peer assessment setups, plus capture conflicts of interest and strategic behaviors. Leveraging our peer assessment network model, we introduce a graph convolutional network which can learn assessment patterns and user behaviors to more accurately predict expert evaluations. Our extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach, which outperforms existing peer assessment methods.
Ten Conceptual Dimensions of Context
Authors: Hashai Papneja
Date: 2021-11-04 00:00:00

This paper attempts to synthesize various conceptualizations of the term "context" as found in computing literature. Ten conceptual dimensions of context thus emerge -- location; user, task, and system characteristics; physical, social, organizational, and cultural environments; time-related aspects, and historical information. Together, the ten dimensions of context provide a comprehensive view of the notion of context, and allow for a more systematic examination of the influence of context and contextual information on human-system or human-AI interactions.
Confidence Composition for Monitors of Verification Assumptions
Authors: Ivan Ruchkin, Matthew Cleaveland, Radoslav Ivanov, Pengyuan Lu, Taylor Carpenter, Oleg Sokolsky, Insup Lee
Date: 2021-11-03 00:00:00

Closed-loop verification of cyber-physical systems with neural network controllers offers strong safety guarantees under certain assumptions. It is, however, difficult to determine whether these guarantees apply at run time because verification assumptions may be violated. To predict safety violations in a verified system, we propose a three-step confidence composition (CoCo) framework for monitoring verification assumptions. First, we represent the sufficient condition for verified safety with a propositional logical formula over assumptions. Second, we build calibrated confidence monitors that evaluate the probability that each assumption holds. Third, we obtain the confidence in the verification guarantees by composing the assumption monitors using a composition function suitable for the logical formula. Our CoCo framework provides theoretical bounds on the calibration and conservatism of compositional monitors. Two case studies show that compositional monitors are calibrated better than their constituents and successfully predict safety violations.
IoT to monitor people flow in areas of public interest
Authors: Damiano Perri, Marco Simonetti, Alex Bordini, Simone Cimarelli, Osvaldo Gervasi
Date: 2021-11-03 00:00:00

The unexpected historical period we are living has abruptly pushed us to loosen any sort of interaction between individuals, gradually forcing us to deal with new ways to allow compliance with safety distances; indeed the present situation has demonstrated more than ever how critical it is to be able to properly organize our travel plans, put people in safe conditions, and avoid harmful circumstances. The aim of this research is to set up a system to monitor the flow of people inside public places and facilities of interest (museums, theatres, cinemas, etc.) without collecting personal or sensitive data. Weak monitoring of people flows (i.e. monitoring without personal identification of the monitored subjects) through Internet of Things tools might be a viable solution to minimize lineups and overcrowding. Our study, which began as an experiment in the Umbria region of Italy, aims to be one of several answers to automated planning of people's flows in order to make our land more liveable. We intend to show that the Internet of Things gives almost unlimited tools and possibilities, from developing a basic information process to implementing a true portal which enables business people to connect with interested consumers.
SustainBench: Benchmarks for Monitoring the Sustainable Development Goals with Machine Learning
Authors: Christopher Yeh, Chenlin Meng, Sherrie Wang, Anne Driscoll, Erik Rozi, Patrick Liu, Jihyeon Lee, Marshall Burke, David B. Lobell, Stefano Ermon
Date: 2021-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Progress toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been hindered by a lack of data on key environmental and socioeconomic indicators, which historically have come from ground surveys with sparse temporal and spatial coverage. Recent advances in machine learning have made it possible to utilize abundant, frequently-updated, and globally available data, such as from satellites or social media, to provide insights into progress toward SDGs. Despite promising early results, approaches to using such data for SDG measurement thus far have largely evaluated on different datasets or used inconsistent evaluation metrics, making it hard to understand whether performance is improving and where additional research would be most fruitful. Furthermore, processing satellite and ground survey data requires domain knowledge that many in the machine learning community lack. In this paper, we introduce SustainBench, a collection of 15 benchmark tasks across 7 SDGs, including tasks related to economic development, agriculture, health, education, water and sanitation, climate action, and life on land. Datasets for 11 of the 15 tasks are released publicly for the first time. Our goals for SustainBench are to (1) lower the barriers to entry for the machine learning community to contribute to measuring and achieving the SDGs; (2) provide standard benchmarks for evaluating machine learning models on tasks across a variety of SDGs; and (3) encourage the development of novel machine learning methods where improved model performance facilitates progress towards the SDGs.
OMD: Orthogonal Malware Detection Using Audio, Image, and Static Features
Authors: Lakshmanan Nataraj, Tajuddin Manhar Mohammed, Tejaswi Nanjundaswamy, Satish Chikkagoudar, Shivkumar Chandrasekaran, B. S. Manjunath
Date: 2021-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Detection

With the growing number of malware and cyber attacks, there is a need for "orthogonal" cyber defense approaches, which are complementary to existing methods by detecting unique malware samples that are not predicted by other methods. In this paper, we propose a novel and orthogonal malware detection (OMD) approach to identify malware using a combination of audio descriptors, image similarity descriptors and other static/statistical features. First, we show how audio descriptors are effective in classifying malware families when the malware binaries are represented as audio signals. Then, we show that the predictions made on the audio descriptors are orthogonal to the predictions made on image similarity descriptors and other static features. Further, we develop a framework for error analysis and a metric to quantify how orthogonal a new feature set (or type) is with respect to other feature sets. This allows us to add new features and detection methods to our overall framework. Experimental results on malware datasets show that our approach provides a robust framework for orthogonal malware detection.
Automated pharyngeal phase detection and bolus localization in videofluoroscopic swallowing study: Killing two birds with one stone?
Authors: Andrea Bandini, Sana Smaoui, Catriona M. Steele
Date: 2021-11-08 00:00:00

The videofluoroscopic swallowing study (VFSS) is a gold-standard imaging technique for assessing swallowing, but analysis and rating of VFSS recordings is time consuming and requires specialized training and expertise. Researchers have recently demonstrated that it is possible to automatically detect the pharyngeal phase of swallowing and to localize the bolus in VFSS recordings via computer vision, fostering the development of novel techniques for automatic VFSS analysis. However, training of algorithms to perform these tasks requires large amounts of annotated data that are seldom available. We demonstrate that the challenges of pharyngeal phase detection and bolus localization can be solved together using a single approach. We propose a deep-learning framework that jointly tackles pharyngeal phase detection and bolus localization in a weakly-supervised manner, requiring only the initial and final frames of the pharyngeal phase as ground truth annotations for the training. Our approach stems from the observation that bolus presence in the pharynx is the most prominent visual feature upon which to infer whether individual VFSS frames belong to the pharyngeal phase. We conducted extensive experiments with multiple convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on a dataset of 1245 bolus-level clips from 59 healthy subjects. We demonstrated that the pharyngeal phase can be detected with an F1-score higher than 0.9. Moreover, by processing the class activation maps of the CNNs, we were able to localize the bolus with promising results, obtaining correlations with ground truth trajectories higher than 0.9, without any manual annotations of bolus location used for training purposes. Once validated on a larger sample of participants with swallowing disorders, our framework will pave the way for the development of intelligent tools for VFSS analysis to support clinicians in swallowing assessment.
Information-Theoretic Bias Assessment Of Learned Representations Of Pretrained Face Recognition
Authors: Jiazhi Li, Wael Abd-Almageed
Date: 2021-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Fairness

As equality issues in the use of face recognition have garnered a lot of attention lately, greater efforts have been made to debiased deep learning models to improve fairness to minorities. However, there is still no clear definition nor sufficient analysis for bias assessment metrics. We propose an information-theoretic, independent bias assessment metric to identify degree of bias against protected demographic attributes from learned representations of pretrained facial recognition systems. Our metric differs from other methods that rely on classification accuracy or examine the differences between ground truth and predicted labels of protected attributes predicted using a shallow network. Also, we argue, theoretically and experimentally, that logits-level loss is not adequate to explain bias since predictors based on neural networks will always find correlations. Further, we present a synthetic dataset that mitigates the issue of insufficient samples in certain cohorts. Lastly, we establish a benchmark metric by presenting advantages in clear discrimination and small variation comparing with other metrics, and evaluate the performance of different debiased models with the proposed metric.
Approximate Neural Architecture Search via Operation Distribution Learning
Authors: Xingchen Wan, Binxin Ru, Pedro M. Esperança, Fabio M. Carlucci
Date: 2021-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimisation, Neural Architecture Search

The standard paradigm in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is to search for a fully deterministic architecture with specific operations and connections. In this work, we instead propose to search for the optimal operation distribution, thus providing a stochastic and approximate solution, which can be used to sample architectures of arbitrary length. We propose and show, that given an architectural cell, its performance largely depends on the ratio of used operations, rather than any specific connection pattern in typical search spaces; that is, small changes in the ordering of the operations are often irrelevant. This intuition is orthogonal to any specific search strategy and can be applied to a diverse set of NAS algorithms. Through extensive validation on 4 data-sets and 4 NAS techniques (Bayesian optimisation, differentiable search, local search and random search), we show that the operation distribution (1) holds enough discriminating power to reliably identify a solution and (2) is significantly easier to optimise than traditional encodings, leading to large speed-ups at little to no cost in performance. Indeed, this simple intuition significantly reduces the cost of current approaches and potentially enable NAS to be used in a broader range of applications.
Composition and Style Attributes Guided Image Aesthetic Assessment
Authors: Luigi Celona, Marco Leonardi, Paolo Napoletano, Alessandro Rozza
Date: 2021-11-08 00:00:00

The aesthetic quality of an image is defined as the measure or appreciation of the beauty of an image. Aesthetics is inherently a subjective property but there are certain factors that influence it such as, the semantic content of the image, the attributes describing the artistic aspect, the photographic setup used for the shot, etc. In this paper we propose a method for the automatic prediction of the aesthetics of an image that is based on the analysis of the semantic content, the artistic style and the composition of the image. The proposed network includes: a pre-trained network for semantic features extraction (the Backbone); a Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) network that relies on the Backbone features for the prediction of image attributes (the AttributeNet); a self-adaptive Hypernetwork that exploits the attributes prior encoded into the embedding generated by the AttributeNet to predict the parameters of the target network dedicated to aesthetic estimation (the AestheticNet). Given an image, the proposed multi-network is able to predict: style and composition attributes, and aesthetic score distribution. Results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, while the ablation study gives a better understanding of the proposed network.
S3RP: Self-Supervised Super-Resolution and Prediction for Advection-Diffusion Process
Authors: Chulin Wang, Kyongmin Yeo, Xiao Jin, Andres Codas, Levente J. Klein, Bruce Elmegreen
Date: 2021-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

We present a super-resolution model for an advection-diffusion process with limited information. While most of the super-resolution models assume high-resolution (HR) ground-truth data in the training, in many cases such HR dataset is not readily accessible. Here, we show that a Recurrent Convolutional Network trained with physics-based regularizations is able to reconstruct the HR information without having the HR ground-truth data. Moreover, considering the ill-posed nature of a super-resolution problem, we employ the Recurrent Wasserstein Autoencoder to model the uncertainty.