pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On the Challenges of Evaluating Compositional Explanations in Multi-Hop Inference: Relevance, Completeness, and Expert Ratings
Authors: Peter Jansen, Kelly Smith, Dan Moreno, Huitzilin Ortiz
Date: 2021-09-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: valid

Building compositional explanations requires models to combine two or more facts that, together, describe why the answer to a question is correct. Typically, these "multi-hop" explanations are evaluated relative to one (or a small number of) gold explanations. In this work, we show these evaluations substantially underestimate model performance, both in terms of the relevance of included facts, as well as the completeness of model-generated explanations, because models regularly discover and produce valid explanations that are different than gold explanations. To address this, we construct a large corpus of 126k domain-expert (science teacher) relevance ratings that augment a corpus of explanations to standardized science exam questions, discovering 80k additional relevant facts not rated as gold. We build three strong models based on different methodologies (generation, ranking, and schemas), and empirically show that while expert-augmented ratings provide better estimates of explanation quality, both original (gold) and expert-augmented automatic evaluations still substantially underestimate performance by up to 36% when compared with full manual expert judgements, with different models being disproportionately affected. This poses a significant methodological challenge to accurately evaluating explanations produced by compositional reasoning models.
CyGIL: A Cyber Gym for Training Autonomous Agents over Emulated Network Systems
Authors: Li Li, Raed Fayad, Adrian Taylor
Date: 2021-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Given the success of reinforcement learning (RL) in various domains, it is promising to explore the application of its methods to the development of intelligent and autonomous cyber agents. Enabling this development requires a representative RL training environment. To that end, this work presents CyGIL: an experimental testbed of an emulated RL training environment for network cyber operations. CyGIL uses a stateless environment architecture and incorporates the MITRE ATT&CK framework to establish a high fidelity training environment, while presenting a sufficiently abstracted interface to enable RL training. Its comprehensive action space and flexible game design allow the agent training to focus on particular advanced persistent threat (APT) profiles, and to incorporate a broad range of potential threats and vulnerabilities. By striking a balance between fidelity and simplicity, it aims to leverage state of the art RL algorithms for application to real-world cyber defence.
Effective and interpretable dispatching rules for dynamic job shops via guided empirical learning
Authors: Cristiane Ferreira, Gonçalo Figueira, Pedro Amorim
Date: 2021-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

The emergence of Industry 4.0 is making production systems more flexible and also more dynamic. In these settings, schedules often need to be adapted in real-time by dispatching rules. Although substantial progress was made until the '90s, the performance of these rules is still rather limited. The machine learning literature is developing a variety of methods to improve them, but the resulting rules are difficult to interpret and do not generalise well for a wide range of settings. This paper is the first major attempt at combining machine learning with domain problem reasoning for scheduling. The idea consists of using the insights obtained with the latter to guide the empirical search of the former. Our hypothesis is that this guided empirical learning process should result in dispatching rules that are effective and interpretable and which generalise well to different instance classes. We test our approach in the classical dynamic job shop scheduling problem minimising tardiness, which is one of the most well-studied scheduling problems. Nonetheless, results suggest that our approach was able to find new state-of-the-art rules, which significantly outperform the existing literature in the vast majority of settings, from loose to tight due dates and from low utilisation conditions to congested shops. Overall, the average improvement is 19%. Moreover, the rules are compact, interpretable, and generalise well to extreme, unseen scenarios.
Melatect: A Machine Learning Model Approach For Identifying Malignant Melanoma in Skin Growths
Authors: Vidushi Meel, Asritha Bodepudi
Date: 2021-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML

Malignant melanoma is a common skin cancer that is mostly curable before metastasis -when growths spawn in organs away from the original site. Melanoma is the most dangerous type of skin cancer if left untreated due to the high risk of metastasis. This paper presents Melatect, a machine learning (ML) model embedded in an iOS app that identifies potential malignant melanoma. Melatect accurately classifies lesions as malignant or benign over 96.6% of the time with no apparent bias or overfitting. Using the Melatect app, users have the ability to take pictures of skin lesions (moles) and subsequently receive a mole classification. The Melatect app provides a convenient way to get free advice on lesions and track these lesions over time. A recursive computer image analysis algorithm and modified MLOps pipeline was developed to create a model that performs at a higher accuracy than existing models. Our training dataset included 18,400 images of benign and malignant lesions, including 18,000 from the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) archive, as well as 400 images gathered from local dermatologists; these images were augmented using DeepAugment, an AutoML tool, to 54,054 images.
Have a break from making decisions, have a MARS: The Multi-valued Action Reasoning System
Authors: Cosmin Badea
Date: 2021-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The Multi-valued Action Reasoning System (MARS) is an automated value-based ethical decision-making model for artificial agents (AI). Given a set of available actions and an underlying moral paradigm, by employing MARS one can identify the ethically preferred action. It can be used to implement and model different ethical theories, different moral paradigms, as well as combinations of such, in the context of automated practical reasoning and normative decision analysis. It can also be used to model moral dilemmas and discover the moral paradigms that result in the desired outcomes therein. In this paper, we give a condensed description of MARS, explain its uses, and comparatively place it in the existing literature.
Conjectures, Tests and Proofs: An Overview of Theory Exploration
Authors: Moa Johansson, Nicholas Smallbone
Date: 2021-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Theorem Proving, Mathematical Reasoning

A key component of mathematical reasoning is the ability to formulate interesting conjectures about a problem domain at hand. In this paper, we give a brief overview of a theory exploration system called QuickSpec, which is able to automatically discover interesting conjectures about a given set of functions. QuickSpec works by interleaving term generation with random testing to form candidate conjectures. This is made tractable by starting from small sizes and ensuring that only terms that are irreducible with respect to already discovered conjectures are considered. QuickSpec has been successfully applied to generate lemmas for automated inductive theorem proving as well as to generate specifications of functional programs. We give an overview of typical use-cases of QuickSpec, as well as demonstrating how to easily connect it to a theorem prover of the user's choice.
Predicting Process Name from Network Data
Authors: Justin Allen, David Knapp, Kristine Monteith
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification

The ability to identify applications based on the network data they generate could be a valuable tool for cyber defense. We report on a machine learning technique capable of using netflow-like features to predict the application that generated the traffic. In our experiments, we used ground-truth labels obtained from host-based sensors deployed in a large enterprise environment; we applied random forests and multilayer perceptrons to the tasks of browser vs. non-browser identification, browser fingerprinting, and process name prediction. For each of these tasks, we demonstrate how machine learning models can achieve high classification accuracy using only netflow-like features as the basis for classification.
Panoptic SegFormer: Delving Deeper into Panoptic Segmentation with Transformers
Authors: Zhiqi Li, Wenhai Wang, Enze Xie, Zhiding Yu, Anima Anandkumar, Jose M. Alvarez, Ping Luo, Tong Lu
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Decoder, Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation

Panoptic segmentation involves a combination of joint semantic segmentation and instance segmentation, where image contents are divided into two types: things and stuff. We present Panoptic SegFormer, a general framework for panoptic segmentation with transformers. It contains three innovative components: an efficient deeply-supervised mask decoder, a query decoupling strategy, and an improved post-processing method. We also use Deformable DETR to efficiently process multi-scale features, which is a fast and efficient version of DETR. Specifically, we supervise the attention modules in the mask decoder in a layer-wise manner. This deep supervision strategy lets the attention modules quickly focus on meaningful semantic regions. It improves performance and reduces the number of required training epochs by half compared to Deformable DETR. Our query decoupling strategy decouples the responsibilities of the query set and avoids mutual interference between things and stuff. In addition, our post-processing strategy improves performance without additional costs by jointly considering classification and segmentation qualities to resolve conflicting mask overlaps. Our approach increases the accuracy 6.2\% PQ over the baseline DETR model. Panoptic SegFormer achieves state-of-the-art results on COCO test-dev with 56.2\% PQ. It also shows stronger zero-shot robustness over existing methods. The code is released at \url{https://github.com/zhiqi-li/Panoptic-SegFormer}.
Scaled ReLU Matters for Training Vision Transformers
Authors: Pichao Wang, Xue Wang, Hao Luo, Jingkai Zhou, Zhipeng Zhou, Fan Wang, Hao Li, Rong Jin
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Vision transformers (ViTs) have been an alternative design paradigm to convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, the training of ViTs is much harder than CNNs, as it is sensitive to the training parameters, such as learning rate, optimizer and warmup epoch. The reasons for training difficulty are empirically analysed in ~\cite{xiao2021early}, and the authors conjecture that the issue lies with the \textit{patchify-stem} of ViT models and propose that early convolutions help transformers see better. In this paper, we further investigate this problem and extend the above conclusion: only early convolutions do not help for stable training, but the scaled ReLU operation in the \textit{convolutional stem} (\textit{conv-stem}) matters. We verify, both theoretically and empirically, that scaled ReLU in \textit{conv-stem} not only improves training stabilization, but also increases the diversity of patch tokens, thus boosting peak performance with a large margin via adding few parameters and flops. In addition, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that previous ViTs are far from being well trained, further showing that ViTs have great potential to be a better substitute of CNNs.
Digitize-PID: Automatic Digitization of Piping and Instrumentation Diagrams
Authors: Shubham Paliwal, Arushi Jain, Monika Sharma, Lovekesh Vig
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Line Detection, Management

Digitization of scanned Piping and Instrumentation diagrams(P&ID), widely used in manufacturing or mechanical industries such as oil and gas over several decades, has become a critical bottleneck in dynamic inventory management and creation of smart P&IDs that are compatible with the latest CAD tools. Historically, P&ID sheets have been manually generated at the design stage, before being scanned and stored as PDFs. Current digitization initiatives involve manual processing and are consequently very time consuming, labour intensive and error-prone.Thanks to advances in image processing, machine and deep learning techniques there are emerging works on P&ID digitization. However, existing solutions face several challenges owing to the variation in the scale, size and noise in the P&IDs, sheer complexity and crowdedness within drawings, domain knowledge required to interpret the drawings. This motivates our current solution called Digitize-PID which comprises of an end-to-end pipeline for detection of core components from P&IDs like pipes, symbols and textual information, followed by their association with each other and eventually, the validation and correction of output data based on inherent domain knowledge. A novel and efficient kernel-based line detection and a two-step method for detection of complex symbols based on a fine-grained deep recognition technique is presented in the paper. In addition, we have created an annotated synthetic dataset, Dataset-P&ID, of 500 P&IDs by incorporating different types of noise and complex symbols which is made available for public use (currently there exists no public P&ID dataset). We evaluate our proposed method on this synthetic dataset and a real-world anonymized private dataset of 12 P&ID sheets. Results show that Digitize-PID outperforms the existing state-of-the-art for P&ID digitization.
Adaptive Few-Shot Learning PoC Ultrasound COVID-19 Diagnostic System
Authors: Michael Karnes, Shehan Perera, Srikar Adhikari, Alper Yilmaz
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Diagnostic, Few-Shot Learning

This paper presents a novel ultrasound imaging point-of-care (PoC) COVID-19 diagnostic system. The adaptive visual diagnostics utilize few-shot learning (FSL) to generate encoded disease state models that are stored and classified using a dictionary of knowns. The novel vocabulary based feature processing of the pipeline adapts the knowledge of a pretrained deep neural network to compress the ultrasound images into discrimative descriptions. The computational efficiency of the FSL approach enables high diagnostic deep learning performance in PoC settings, where training data is limited and the annotation process is not strictly controlled. The algorithm performance is evaluated on the open source COVID-19 POCUS Dataset to validate the system's ability to distinguish COVID-19, pneumonia, and healthy disease states. The results of the empirical analyses demonstrate the appropriate efficiency and accuracy for scalable PoC use. The code for this work will be made publicly available on GitHub upon acceptance.
FIDNet: LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation with Fully Interpolation Decoding
Authors: Yiming Zhao, Lin Bai, Xinming Huang
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, Robust 3D Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Projecting the point cloud on the 2D spherical range image transforms the LiDAR semantic segmentation to a 2D segmentation task on the range image. However, the LiDAR range image is still naturally different from the regular 2D RGB image; for example, each position on the range image encodes the unique geometry information. In this paper, we propose a new projection-based LiDAR semantic segmentation pipeline that consists of a novel network structure and an efficient post-processing step. In our network structure, we design a FID (fully interpolation decoding) module that directly upsamples the multi-resolution feature maps using bilinear interpolation. Inspired by the 3D distance interpolation used in PointNet++, we argue this FID module is a 2D version distance interpolation on $(\theta, \phi)$ space. As a parameter-free decoding module, the FID largely reduces the model complexity by maintaining good performance. Besides the network structure, we empirically find that our model predictions have clear boundaries between different semantic classes. This makes us rethink whether the widely used K-nearest-neighbor post-processing is still necessary for our pipeline. Then, we realize the many-to-one mapping causes the blurring effect that some points are mapped into the same pixel and share the same label. Therefore, we propose to process those occluded points by assigning the nearest predicted label to them. This NLA (nearest label assignment) post-processing step shows a better performance than KNN with faster inference speed in the ablation study. On the SemanticKITTI dataset, our pipeline achieves the best performance among all projection-based methods with $64 \times 2048$ resolution and all point-wise solutions. With a ResNet-34 as the backbone, both the training and testing of our model can be finished on a single RTX 2080 Ti with 11G memory. The code is released.
Egocentric View Hand Action Recognition by Leveraging Hand Surface and Hand Grasp Type
Authors: Sangpil Kim, Jihyun Bae, Hyunggun Chi, Sunghee Hong, Byoung Soo Koh, Karthik Ramani
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Object, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

We introduce a multi-stage framework that uses mean curvature on a hand surface and focuses on learning interaction between hand and object by analyzing hand grasp type for hand action recognition in egocentric videos. The proposed method does not require 3D information of objects including 6D object poses which are difficult to annotate for learning an object's behavior while it interacts with hands. Instead, the framework synthesizes the mean curvature of the hand mesh model to encode the hand surface geometry in 3D space. Additionally, our method learns the hand grasp type which is highly correlated with the hand action. From our experiment, we notice that using hand grasp type and mean curvature of hand increases the performance of the hand action recognition.
Axial multi-layer perceptron architecture for automatic segmentation of choroid plexus in multiple sclerosis
Authors: Marius Schmidt-Mengin, Vito A. G. Ricigliano, Benedetta Bodini, Emanuele Morena, Annalisa Colombi, Mariem Hamzaoui, Arya Yazdan Panah, Bruno Stankoff, Olivier Colliot
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00

Choroid plexuses (CP) are structures of the ventricles of the brain which produce most of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Several postmortem and in vivo studies have pointed towards their role in the inflammatory process in multiple sclerosis (MS). Automatic segmentation of CP from MRI thus has high value for studying their characteristics in large cohorts of patients. To the best of our knowledge, the only freely available tool for CP segmentation is FreeSurfer but its accuracy for this specific structure is poor. In this paper, we propose to automatically segment CP from non-contrast enhanced T1-weighted MRI. To that end, we introduce a new model called "Axial-MLP" based on an assembly of Axial multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs). This is inspired by recent works which showed that the self-attention layers of Transformers can be replaced with MLPs. This approach is systematically compared with a standard 3D U-Net, nnU-Net, Freesurfer and FastSurfer. For our experiments, we make use of a dataset of 141 subjects (44 controls and 97 patients with MS). We show that all the tested deep learning (DL) methods outperform FreeSurfer (Dice around 0.7 for DL vs 0.33 for FreeSurfer). Axial-MLP is competitive with U-Nets even though it is slightly less accurate. The conclusions of our paper are two-fold: 1) the studied deep learning methods could be useful tools to study CP in large cohorts of MS patients; 2)~Axial-MLP is a potentially viable alternative to convolutional neural networks for such tasks, although it could benefit from further improvements.
Disentangling Alzheimer's disease neurodegeneration from typical brain aging using machine learning
Authors: Gyujoon Hwang, Ahmed Abdulkadir, Guray Erus, Mohamad Habes, Raymond Pomponio, Haochang Shou, Jimit Doshi, Elizabeth Mamourian, Tanweer Rashid, Murat Bilgel, Yong Fan, Aristeidis Sotiras, Dhivya Srinivasan, John C. Morris, Daniel Marcus, Marilyn S. Albert, Nick R. Bryan, Susan M. Resnick, Ilya M. Nasrallah, Christos Davatzikos, David A. Wolk
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Neuroimaging biomarkers that distinguish between typical brain aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD) are valuable for determining how much each contributes to cognitive decline. Machine learning models can derive multi-variate brain change patterns related to the two processes, including the SPARE-AD (Spatial Patterns of Atrophy for Recognition of Alzheimer's Disease) and SPARE-BA (of Brain Aging) investigated herein. However, substantial overlap between brain regions affected in the two processes confounds measuring them independently. We present a methodology toward disentangling the two. T1-weighted MRI images of 4,054 participants (48-95 years) with AD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or cognitively normal (CN) diagnoses from the iSTAGING (Imaging-based coordinate SysTem for AGIng and NeurodeGenerative diseases) consortium were analyzed. First, a subset of AD patients and CN adults were selected based purely on clinical diagnoses to train SPARE-BA1 (regression of age using CN individuals) and SPARE-AD1 (classification of CN versus AD). Second, analogous groups were selected based on clinical and molecular markers to train SPARE-BA2 and SPARE-AD2: amyloid-positive (A+) AD continuum group (consisting of A+AD, A+MCI, and A+ and tau-positive CN individuals) and amyloid-negative (A-) CN group. Finally, the combined group of the AD continuum and A-/CN individuals was used to train SPARE-BA3, with the intention to estimate brain age regardless of AD-related brain changes. Disentangled SPARE models derived brain patterns that were more specific to the two types of the brain changes. Correlation between the SPARE-BA and SPARE-AD was significantly reduced. Correlation of disentangled SPARE-AD was non-inferior to the molecular measurements and to the number of APOE4 alleles, but was less to AD-related psychometric test scores, suggesting contribution of advanced brain aging to these scores.
Unsupervised clothing change adaptive person ReID
Authors: Ziyue Zhang, Shuai Jiang, Congzhentao Huang, Richard Yida Xu
Date: 2021-09-08 00:00:00

Clothing changes and lack of data labels are both crucial challenges in person ReID. For the former challenge, people may occur multiple times at different locations wearing different clothing. However, most of the current person ReID research works focus on the benchmarks in which a person's clothing is kept the same all the time. For the last challenge, some researchers try to make model learn information from a labeled dataset as a source to an unlabeled dataset. Whereas purely unsupervised training is less used. In this paper, we aim to solve both problems at the same time. We design a novel unsupervised model, Sync-Person-Cloud ReID, to solve the unsupervised clothing change person ReID problem. We developer a purely unsupervised clothing change person ReID pipeline with person sync augmentation operation and same person feature restriction. The person sync augmentation is to supply additional same person resources. These same person's resources can be used as part supervised input by same person feature restriction. The extensive experiments on clothing change ReID datasets show the out-performance of our methods.