pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Imperceptible Query-limited Adversarial Attacks with Perceptual Feature Fidelity Loss
Authors: Pengrui Quan, Ruiming Guo, Mani Srivastava
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Recently, there has been a large amount of work towards fooling deep-learning-based classifiers, particularly for images, via adversarial inputs that are visually similar to the benign examples. However, researchers usually use Lp-norm minimization as a proxy for imperceptibility, which oversimplifies the diversity and richness of real-world images and human visual perception. In this work, we propose a novel perceptual metric utilizing the well-established connection between the low-level image feature fidelity and human visual sensitivity, where we call it Perceptual Feature Fidelity Loss. We show that our metric can robustly reflect and describe the imperceptibility of the generated adversarial images validated in various conditions. Moreover, we demonstrate that this metric is highly flexible, which can be conveniently integrated into different existing optimization frameworks to guide the noise distribution for better imperceptibility. The metric is particularly useful in the challenging black-box attack with limited queries, where the imperceptibility is hard to achieve due to the non-trivial perturbation power.
Mixup Regularized Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Text Classification
Authors: Yuan Wu, Diana Inkpen, Ahmed El-Roby
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Using the shared-private paradigm and adversarial training has significantly improved the performances of multi-domain text classification (MDTC) models. However, there are two issues for the existing methods. First, instances from the multiple domains are not sufficient for domain-invariant feature extraction. Second, aligning on the marginal distributions may lead to fatal mismatching. In this paper, we propose a mixup regularized adversarial network (MRAN) to address these two issues. More specifically, the domain and category mixup regularizations are introduced to enrich the intrinsic features in the shared latent space and enforce consistent predictions in-between training instances such that the learned features can be more domain-invariant and discriminative. We conduct experiments on two benchmarks: The Amazon review dataset and the FDU-MTL dataset. Our approach on these two datasets yields average accuracies of 87.64\% and 89.0\% respectively, outperforming all relevant baselines.
The impact of prior knowledge on causal structure learning
Authors: Anthony C. Constantinou, Zhigao Guo, Neville K. Kitson
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00

Causal Bayesian networks have become a powerful technology for reasoning under uncertainty in areas that require transparency and explainability, by relying on causal assumptions that enable us to simulate hypothetical interventions. The graphical structure of such models can be estimated by structure learning algorithms, domain knowledge, or a combination of both. Various knowledge approaches have been proposed in the literature that enable us to specify prior knowledge that constrains or guides these algorithms. This paper introduces some novel, and also describes some existing, knowledge-based approaches that enable us to combine structure learning with knowledge obtained from heterogeneous sources. We investigate the impact of these approaches on structure learning across different algorithms, case studies and settings that we might encounter in practice. Each approach is assessed in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, including graphical accuracy, model fitting, complexity, and runtime; making this the first paper that provides a comparative evaluation of a wide range of knowledge approaches for structure learning. Because the value of knowledge depends on what data are available, we illustrate the results both with limited and big data. While the overall results show that knowledge becomes less important with big data due to higher learning accuracy rendering knowledge less important, some of the knowledge approaches are found to be more important with big data. Amongst the main conclusions is the observation that reduced search space obtained from knowledge does not always imply reduced computational complexity, perhaps because the relationships implied by the data and knowledge are in tension.
Learning elliptic partial differential equations with randomized linear algebra
Authors: Nicolas Boullé, Alex Townsend
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00

Given input-output pairs of an elliptic partial differential equation (PDE) in three dimensions, we derive the first theoretically-rigorous scheme for learning the associated Green's function $G$. By exploiting the hierarchical low-rank structure of $G$, we show that one can construct an approximant to $G$ that converges almost surely and achieves a relative error of $\mathcal{O}(\Gamma_\epsilon^{-1/2}\log^3(1/\epsilon)\epsilon)$ using at most $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-6}\log^4(1/\epsilon))$ input-output training pairs with high probability, for any $0<\epsilon<1$. The quantity $0<\Gamma_\epsilon\leq 1$ characterizes the quality of the training dataset. Along the way, we extend the randomized singular value decomposition algorithm for learning matrices to Hilbert--Schmidt operators and characterize the quality of covariance kernels for PDE learning.
Urban Change Detection by Fully Convolutional Siamese Concatenate Network with Attention
Authors: Farnoosh Heidary, Mehran Yazdi, Maryam Dehghani, Peyman Setoodeh
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Management

Change detection (CD) is an important problem in remote sensing, especially in disaster time for urban management. Most existing traditional methods for change detection are categorized based on pixel or objects. Object-based models are preferred to pixel-based methods for handling very high-resolution remote sensing (VHR RS) images. Such methods can benefit from the ongoing research on deep learning. In this paper, a fully automatic change-detection algorithm on VHR RS images is proposed that deploys Fully Convolutional Siamese Concatenate networks (FC-Siam-Conc). The proposed method uses preprocessing and an attention gate layer to improve accuracy. Gaussian attention (GA) as a soft visual attention mechanism is used for preprocessing. GA helps the network to handle feature maps like biological visual systems. Since the GA parameters cannot be adjusted during network training, an attention gate layer is introduced to play the role of GA with parameters that can be tuned among other network parameters. Experimental results obtained on Onera Satellite Change Detection (OSCD) and RIVER-CD datasets confirm the superiority of the proposed architecture over the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Fine-tuning Handwriting Recognition systems with Temporal Dropout
Authors: Edgard Chammas, Chafic Mokbel
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwriting Recognition

This paper introduces a novel method to fine-tune handwriting recognition systems based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks are good at modeling long sequences but they tend to overfit over time. To improve the system's ability to model sequences, we propose to drop information at random positions in the sequence. We call our approach Temporal Dropout (TD). We apply TD at the image level as well to internal network representation. We show that TD improves the results on two different datasets. Our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art on Rodrigo dataset.
Classification of Shoulder X-Ray Images with Deep Learning Ensemble Models
Authors: Fatih Uysal, Fırat Hardalaç, Ozan Peker, Tolga Tolunay, Nil Tokgöz
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Ensemble Learning, General Classification, Image Classification, Transfer Learning

Fractures occur in the shoulder area, which has a wider range of motion than other joints in the body, for various reasons. To diagnose these fractures, data gathered from Xradiation (X-ray), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), or computed tomography (CT) are used. This study aims to help physicians by classifying shoulder images taken from X-ray devices as fracture / non-fracture with artificial intelligence. For this purpose, the performances of 26 deep learning-based pretrained models in the detection of shoulder fractures were evaluated on the musculoskeletal radiographs (MURA) dataset, and two ensemble learning models (EL1 and EL2) were developed. The pretrained models used are ResNet, ResNeXt, DenseNet, VGG, Inception, MobileNet, and their spinal fully connected (Spinal FC) versions. In the EL1 and EL2 models developed using pretrained models with the best performance, test accuracy was 0.8455,0.8472, Cohens kappa was 0.6907, 0.6942 and the area that was related with fracture class under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) was 0.8862,0.8695. As a result of 28 different classifications in total, the highest test accuracy and Cohens kappa values were obtained in the EL2 model, and the highest AUC value was obtained in the EL1 model.
Boosting the Predictive Accurary of Singer Identification Using Discrete Wavelet Transform For Feature Extraction
Authors: Victoire Djimna Noyum, Younous Perieukeu Mofenjou, Cyrille Feudjio, Alkan Göktug, Ernest Fokoué
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Singer Identification

Facing the diversity and growth of the musical field nowadays, the search for precise songs becomes more and more complex. The identity of the singer facilitates this search. In this project, we focus on the problem of identifying the singer by using different methods for feature extraction. Particularly, we introduce the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for this purpose. To the best of our knowledge, DWT has never been used this way before in the context of singer identification. This process consists of three crucial parts. First, the vocal signal is separated from the background music by using the Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA). Second, features from the obtained vocal signal are extracted. Here, the goal is to study the performance of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in comparison to the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) which is the most used technique in audio signals. Finally, we proceed with the identification of the singer where two methods have experimented: the Support Vector Machine (SVM), and the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). We conclude that, for a dataset of 4 singers and 200 songs, the best identification system consists of the DWT (db4) feature extraction introduced in this work combined with a linear support vector machine for identification resulting in a mean accuracy of 83.96%.
Quantifying the Global Support Network for Non-State Armed Groups (NAGs)
Authors: Weiran Cai, Belgin San-Akca, Jordan Snyder, Grayson Gordon, Zeev Maoz, Raissa M. D'Souza
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00

Human history has been shaped by armed conflicts. Rather than large-scale interstate wars, low-intensity attacks have been more prevalent in the post-World War era. These attacks are often carried out by non-state armed groups (NAGs), which are supported by host states (HSs). We analyze the global bipartite network of NAG-HS support and its evolution over the period of 1945-2010. We find striking parallels to ecological networks such as mutualistic and parasitic forms of support, and a nested and modular network architecture. The nestedness emerges from preferential behaviors: highly connected players are more likely to both gain and lose connections. Long-persisting major modules are identified, reflecting both regional and trans-regional interests, which show significant turnover in their membership, contrary to the transitory ones. Revealing this architecture further enables the identification of actor's roles and provide insights for effective intervention strategies.
Impulse data models for the inverse problem of electrocardiography
Authors: Tommy Peng, Avinash Malik, Laura R. Bear, Mark L. Trew
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Analysis

The proposed method re-frames traditional inverse problems of electrocardiography into regression problems, constraining the solution space by decomposing signals with multidimensional Gaussian impulse basis functions. Impulse HSPs were generated with single Gaussian basis functions at discrete heart surface locations and projected to corresponding BSPs using a volume conductor torso model. Both BSP (inputs) and HSP (outputs) were mapped to regular 2D surface meshes and used to train a neural network. Predictive capabilities of the network were tested with unseen synthetic and experimental data. A dense full connected single hidden layer neural network was trained to map body surface impulses to heart surface Gaussian basis functions for reconstructing HSP. Synthetic pulses moving across the heart surface were predicted from the neural network with root mean squared error of $9.1\pm1.4$%. Predicted signals were robust to noise up to 20 dB and errors due to displacement and rotation of the heart within the torso were bounded and predictable. A shift of the heart 40 mm toward the spine resulted in a 4\% increase in signal feature localization error. The set of training impulse function data could be reduced and prediction error remained bounded. Recorded HSPs from in-vitro pig hearts were reliably decomposed using space-time Gaussian basis functions. Predicted HSPs for left-ventricular pacing had a mean absolute error of $10.4\pm11.4$ ms. Other pacing scenarios were analyzed with similar success. Conclusion: Impulses from Gaussian basis functions are potentially an effective and robust way to train simple neural network data models for reconstructing HSPs from decomposed BSPs. The HSPs predicted by the neural network can be used to generate activation maps that non-invasively identify features of cardiac electrical dysfunction and can guide subsequent treatment options.
A Secure Learning Control Strategy via Dynamic Camouflaging for Unknown Dynamical Systems under Attacks
Authors: Sayak Mukherjee, Veronica Adetola
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper presents a secure reinforcement learning (RL) based control method for unknown linear time-invariant cyber-physical systems (CPSs) that are subjected to compositional attacks such as eavesdropping and covert attack. We consider the attack scenario where the attacker learns about the dynamic model during the exploration phase of the learning conducted by the designer to learn a linear quadratic regulator (LQR), and thereafter, use such information to conduct a covert attack on the dynamic system, which we refer to as doubly learning-based control and attack (DLCA) framework. We propose a dynamic camouflaging based attack-resilient reinforcement learning (ARRL) algorithm which can learn the desired optimal controller for the dynamic system, and at the same time, can inject sufficient misinformation in the estimation of system dynamics by the attacker. The algorithm is accompanied by theoretical guarantees and extensive numerical experiments on a consensus multi-agent system and on a benchmark power grid model.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Temporal Logic Specifications
Authors: Lewis Hammond, Alessandro Abate, Julian Gutierrez, Michael Wooldridge
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we study the problem of learning to satisfy temporal logic specifications with a group of agents in an unknown environment, which may exhibit probabilistic behaviour. From a learning perspective these specifications provide a rich formal language with which to capture tasks or objectives, while from a logic and automated verification perspective the introduction of learning capabilities allows for practical applications in large, stochastic, unknown environments. The existing work in this area is, however, limited. Of the frameworks that consider full linear temporal logic or have correctness guarantees, all methods thus far consider only the case of a single temporal logic specification and a single agent. In order to overcome this limitation, we develop the first multi-agent reinforcement learning technique for temporal logic specifications, which is also novel in its ability to handle multiple specifications. We provide correctness and convergence guarantees for our main algorithm - ALMANAC (Automaton/Logic Multi-Agent Natural Actor-Critic) - even when using function approximation. Alongside our theoretical results, we further demonstrate the applicability of our technique via a set of preliminary experiments.
Few-shot Learning for CT Scan based COVID-19 Diagnosis
Authors: Yifan Jiang, Han Chen, David K. Han, Hanseok Ko
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), COVID-19 Diagnosis, Diagnostic, Domain Adaptation, Few-Shot Learning

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern infecting more than 40 million people across 188 countries and territories. Chest computed tomography (CT) imaging technique benefits from its high diagnostic accuracy and robustness, it has become an indispensable way for COVID-19 mass testing. Recently, deep learning approaches have become an effective tool for automatic screening of medical images, and it is also being considered for COVID-19 diagnosis. However, the high infection risk involved with COVID-19 leads to relative sparseness of collected labeled data limiting the performance of such methodologies. Moreover, accurately labeling CT images require expertise of radiologists making the process expensive and time-consuming. In order to tackle the above issues, we propose a supervised domain adaption based COVID-19 CT diagnostic method which can perform effectively when only a small samples of labeled CT scans are available. To compensate for the sparseness of labeled data, the proposed method utilizes a large amount of synthetic COVID-19 CT images and adjusts the networks from the source domain (synthetic data) to the target domain (real data) with a cross-domain training mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on few-shot COVID-19 CT imaging based diagnostic tasks.
Neural Network architectures to classify emotions in Indian Classical Music
Authors: Uddalok Sarkar, Sayan Nag, Medha Basu, Archi Banerjee, Shankha Sanyal, Ranjan Sengupta, Dipak Ghosh
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Music Emotion Recognition

Music is often considered as the language of emotions. It has long been known to elicit emotions in human being and thus categorizing music based on the type of emotions they induce in human being is a very intriguing topic of research. When the task comes to classify emotions elicited by Indian Classical Music (ICM), it becomes much more challenging because of the inherent ambiguity associated with ICM. The fact that a single musical performance can evoke a variety of emotional response in the audience is implicit to the nature of ICM renditions. With the rapid advancements in the field of Deep Learning, this Music Emotion Recognition (MER) task is becoming more and more relevant and robust, hence can be applied to one of the most challenging test case i.e. classifying emotions elicited from ICM. In this paper we present a new dataset called JUMusEmoDB which presently has 400 audio clips (30 seconds each) where 200 clips correspond to happy emotions and the remaining 200 clips correspond to sad emotion. For supervised classification purposes, we have used 4 existing deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architectures (resnet18, mobilenet v2.0, squeezenet v1.0 and vgg16) on corresponding music spectrograms of the 2000 sub-clips (where every clip was segmented into 5 sub-clips of about 5 seconds each) which contain both time as well as frequency domain information. The initial results are quite inspiring, and we look forward to setting the baseline values for the dataset using this architecture. This type of CNN based classification algorithm using a rich corpus of Indian Classical Music is unique even in the global perspective and can be replicated in other modalities of music also. This dataset is still under development and we plan to include more data containing other emotional features as well. We plan to make the dataset publicly available soon.
Densely Connected Recurrent Residual (Dense R2UNet) Convolutional Neural Network for Segmentation of Lung CT Images
Authors: Kaushik Dutta
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep Learning networks have established themselves as providing state of art performance for semantic segmentation. These techniques are widely applied specifically to medical detection, segmentation and classification. The advent of the U-Net based architecture has become particularly popular for this application. In this paper we present the Dense Recurrent Residual Convolutional Neural Network(Dense R2U CNN) which is a synthesis of Recurrent CNN, Residual Network and Dense Convolutional Network based on the U-Net model architecture. The residual unit helps training deeper network, while the dense recurrent layers enhances feature propagation needed for segmentation. The proposed model tested on the benchmark Lung Lesion dataset showed better performance on segmentation tasks than its equivalent models.
Generalized non-stationary bandits
Authors: Anne Gael Manegueu, Alexandra Carpentier, Yi Yu
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00

In this paper, we study a non-stationary stochastic bandit problem, which generalizes the switching bandit problem. On top of the switching bandit problem (\textbf{Case a}), we are interested in three concrete examples: (\textbf{b}) the means of the arms are local polynomials, (\textbf{c}) the means of the arms are locally smooth, and (\textbf{d}) the gaps of the arms have a bounded number of inflexion points and where the highest arm mean cannot vary too much in a short range. These three settings are very different, but have in common the following: (i) the number of similarly-sized level sets of the logarithm of the gaps can be controlled, and (ii) the highest mean has a limited number of abrupt changes, and otherwise has limited variations. We propose a single algorithm in this general setting, that in particular solves in an efficient and unified way the four problems (a)-(d) mentioned.