pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-kernel Passive Stochastic Gradient Algorithms and Transfer Learning
Authors: Vikram Krishnamurthy, George Yin
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

This paper develops a novel passive stochastic gradient algorithm. In passive stochastic approximation, the stochastic gradient algorithm does not have control over the location where noisy gradients of the cost function are evaluated. Classical passive stochastic gradient algorithms use a kernel that approximates a Dirac delta to weigh the gradients based on how far they are evaluated from the desired point. In this paper we construct a multi-kernel passive stochastic gradient algorithm. The algorithm performs substantially better in high dimensional problems and incorporates variance reduction. We analyze the weak convergence of the multi-kernel algorithm and its rate of convergence. In numerical examples, we study the multi-kernel version of the passive least mean squares (LMS) algorithm for transfer learning to compare the performance with the classical passive version.
They are wearing a mask! Identification of Subjects Wearing a Surgical Mask from their Speech by means of x-vectors and Fisher Vectors
Authors: José Vicente Egas-López
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Recognition

Challenges based on Computational Paralinguistics in the INTERSPEECH Conference have always had a good reception among the attendees owing to its competitive academic and research demands. This year, the INTERSPEECH 2020 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge offers three different problems; here, the Mask Sub-Challenge is of specific interest. This challenge involves the classification of speech recorded from subjects while wearing a surgical mask. In this study, to address the above-mentioned problem we employ two different types of feature extraction methods. The x-vectors embeddings, which is the current state-of-the-art approach for Speaker Recognition; and the Fisher Vector (FV), that is a method originally intended for Image Recognition, but here we utilize it to discriminate utterances. These approaches employ distinct frame-level representations: MFCC and PLP. Using Support Vector Machines (SVM) as the classifier, we perform a technical comparison between the performances of the FV encodings and the x-vector embeddings for this particular classification task. We find that the Fisher vector encodings provide better representations of the utterances than the x-vectors do for this specific dataset. Moreover, we show that a fusion of our best configurations outperforms all the baseline scores of the Mask Sub-Challenge.
A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild
Authors: K R Prajwal, Rudrabha Mukhopadhyay, Vinay Namboodiri, C. V. Jawahar
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: All, MORPH, Talking Face Generation, Talking Head Generation, Unconstrained Lip-synchronization

In this work, we investigate the problem of lip-syncing a talking face video of an arbitrary identity to match a target speech segment. Current works excel at producing accurate lip movements on a static image or videos of specific people seen during the training phase. However, they fail to accurately morph the lip movements of arbitrary identities in dynamic, unconstrained talking face videos, resulting in significant parts of the video being out-of-sync with the new audio. We identify key reasons pertaining to this and hence resolve them by learning from a powerful lip-sync discriminator. Next, we propose new, rigorous evaluation benchmarks and metrics to accurately measure lip synchronization in unconstrained videos. Extensive quantitative evaluations on our challenging benchmarks show that the lip-sync accuracy of the videos generated by our Wav2Lip model is almost as good as real synced videos. We provide a demo video clearly showing the substantial impact of our Wav2Lip model and evaluation benchmarks on our website: \url{cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/a-lip-sync-expert-is-all-you-need-for-speech-to-lip-generation-in-the-wild}. The code and models are released at this GitHub repository: \url{github.com/Rudrabha/Wav2Lip}. You can also try out the interactive demo at this link: \url{bhaasha.iiit.ac.in/lipsync}.
Tree Structure-Aware Graph Representation Learning via Integrated Hierarchical Aggregation and Relational Metric Learning
Authors: Ziyue Qiao, Pengyang Wang, Yanjie Fu, Yi Du, Pengfei Wang, Yuanchun Zhou
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, Metric Learning, Representation Learning

While Graph Neural Network (GNN) has shown superiority in learning node representations of homogeneous graphs, leveraging GNN on heterogeneous graphs remains a challenging problem. The dominating reason is that GNN learns node representations by aggregating neighbors' information regardless of node types. Some work is proposed to alleviate such issue by exploiting relations or meta-path to sample neighbors with distinct categories, then use attention mechanism to learn different importance for different categories. However, one limitation is that the learned representations for different types of nodes should own different feature spaces, while all the above work still project node representations into one feature space. Moreover, after exploring massive heterogeneous graphs, we identify a fact that multiple nodes with the same type always connect to a node with another type, which reveals the many-to-one schema, a.k.a. the hierarchical tree structure. But all the above work cannot preserve such tree structure, since the exact multi-hop path correlation from neighbors to the target node would be erased through aggregation. Therefore, to overcome the limitations of the literature, we propose T-GNN, a tree structure-aware graph neural network model for graph representation learning. Specifically, the proposed T-GNN consists of two modules: (1) the integrated hierarchical aggregation module and (2) the relational metric learning module. The integrated hierarchical aggregation module aims to preserve the tree structure by combining GNN with Gated Recurrent Unit to integrate the hierarchical and sequential neighborhood information on the tree structure to node representations. The relational metric learning module aims to preserve the heterogeneity by embedding each type of nodes into a type-specific space with distinct distribution based on similarity metrics.
Discriminative Residual Analysis for Image Set Classification with Posture and Age Variations
Authors: Chuan-Xian Ren, You-Wei Luo, Xiao-Lin Xu, Dao-Qing Dai, Hong Yan
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Retrieval, Video Retrieval

Image set recognition has been widely applied in many practical problems like real-time video retrieval and image caption tasks. Due to its superior performance, it has grown into a significant topic in recent years. However, images with complicated variations, e.g., postures and human ages, are difficult to address, as these variations are continuous and gradual with respect to image appearance. Consequently, the crucial point of image set recognition is to mine the intrinsic connection or structural information from the image batches with variations. In this work, a Discriminant Residual Analysis (DRA) method is proposed to improve the classification performance by discovering discriminant features in related and unrelated groups. Specifically, DRA attempts to obtain a powerful projection which casts the residual representations into a discriminant subspace. Such a projection subspace is expected to magnify the useful information of the input space as much as possible, then the relation between the training set and the test set described by the given metric or distance will be more precise in the discriminant subspace. We also propose a nonfeasance strategy by defining another approach to construct the unrelated groups, which help to reduce furthermore the cost of sampling errors. Two regularization approaches are used to deal with the probable small sample size problem. Extensive experiments are conducted on benchmark databases, and the results show superiority and efficiency of the new methods.
Visible Feature Guidance for Crowd Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Zhida Huang, Kaiyu Yue, Jiangfan Deng, Feng Zhou
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Pedestrian Detection

Heavy occlusion and dense gathering in crowd scene make pedestrian detection become a challenging problem, because it's difficult to guess a precise full bounding box according to the invisible human part. To crack this nut, we propose a mechanism called Visible Feature Guidance (VFG) for both training and inference. During training, we adopt visible feature to regress the simultaneous outputs of visible bounding box and full bounding box. Then we perform NMS only on visible bounding boxes to achieve the best fitting full box in inference. This manner can alleviate the incapable influence brought by NMS in crowd scene and make full bounding box more precisely. Furthermore, in order to ease feature association in the post application process, such as pedestrian tracking, we apply Hungarian algorithm to associate parts for a human instance. Our proposed method can stably bring about 2~3% improvements in mAP and AP50 for both two-stage and one-stage detector. It's also more effective for MR-2 especially with the stricter IoU. Experiments on Crowdhuman, Cityperson, Caltech and KITTI datasets show that visible feature guidance can help detector achieve promisingly better performances. Moreover, parts association produces a strong benchmark on Crowdhuman for the vision community.
Unsupervised Multi-view Clustering by Squeezing Hybrid Knowledge from Cross View and Each View
Authors: Junpeng Tan, Yukai Shi, Zhijing Yang, Caizhen Wen, Liang Lin
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Multi-view clustering methods have been a focus in recent years because of their superiority in clustering performance. However, typical traditional multi-view clustering algorithms still have shortcomings in some aspects, such as removal of redundant information, utilization of various views and fusion of multi-view features. In view of these problems, this paper proposes a new multi-view clustering method, low-rank subspace multi-view clustering based on adaptive graph regularization. We construct two new data matrix decomposition models into a unified optimization model. In this framework, we address the significance of the common knowledge shared by the cross view and the unique knowledge of each view by presenting new low-rank and sparse constraints on the sparse subspace matrix. To ensure that we achieve effective sparse representation and clustering performance on the original data matrix, adaptive graph regularization and unsupervised clustering constraints are also incorporated in the proposed model to preserve the internal structural features of the data. Finally, the proposed method is compared with several state-of-the-art algorithms. Experimental results for five widely used multi-view benchmarks show that our proposed algorithm surpasses other state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin.
Leveraging Organizational Resources to Adapt Models to New Data Modalities
Authors: Sahaana Suri, Raghuveer Chanda, Neslihan Bulut, Pradyumna Narayana, Yemao Zeng, Peter Bailis, Sugato Basu, Girija Narlikar, Christopher Re, Abishek Sethi
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00

As applications in large organizations evolve, the machine learning (ML) models that power them must adapt the same predictive tasks to newly arising data modalities (e.g., a new video content launch in a social media application requires existing text or image models to extend to video). To solve this problem, organizations typically create ML pipelines from scratch. However, this fails to utilize the domain expertise and data they have cultivated from developing tasks for existing modalities. We demonstrate how organizational resources, in the form of aggregate statistics, knowledge bases, and existing services that operate over related tasks, enable teams to construct a common feature space that connects new and existing data modalities. This allows teams to apply methods for training data curation (e.g., weak supervision and label propagation) and model training (e.g., forms of multi-modal learning) across these different data modalities. We study how this use of organizational resources composes at production scale in over 5 classification tasks at Google, and demonstrate how it reduces the time needed to develop models for new modalities from months to weeks to days.
Spending Money Wisely: Online Electronic Coupon Allocation based on Real-Time User Intent Detection
Authors: Liangwei Li, Liucheng Sun, Chenwei Weng, Chengfu Huo, Weijun Ren
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Intent Detection, Multiple-choice

Online electronic coupon (e-coupon) is becoming a primary tool for e-commerce platforms to attract users to place orders. E-coupons are the digital equivalent of traditional paper coupons which provide customers with discounts or gifts. One of the fundamental problems related is how to deliver e-coupons with minimal cost while users' willingness to place an order is maximized. We call this problem the coupon allocation problem. This is a non-trivial problem since the number of regular users on a mature e-platform often reaches hundreds of millions and the types of e-coupons to be allocated are often multiple. The policy space is extremely large and the online allocation has to satisfy a budget constraint. Besides, one can never observe the responses of one user under different policies which increases the uncertainty of the policy making process. Previous work fails to deal with these challenges. In this paper, we decompose the coupon allocation task into two subtasks: the user intent detection task and the allocation task. Accordingly, we propose a two-stage solution: at the first stage (detection stage), we put forward a novel Instantaneous Intent Detection Network (IIDN) which takes the user-coupon features as input and predicts user real-time intents; at the second stage (allocation stage), we model the allocation problem as a Multiple-Choice Knapsack Problem (MCKP) and provide a computational efficient allocation method using the intents predicted at the detection stage. We conduct extensive online and offline experiments and the results show the superiority of our proposed framework, which has brought great profits to the platform and continues to function online.
Emerging App Issue Identification via Online Joint Sentiment-Topic Tracing
Authors: Cuiyun Gao, Jichuan Zeng, Zhiyuan Wen, David Lo, Xin Xia, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Millions of mobile apps are available in app stores, such as Apple's App Store and Google Play. For a mobile app, it would be increasingly challenging to stand out from the enormous competitors and become prevalent among users. Good user experience and well-designed functionalities are the keys to a successful app. To achieve this, popular apps usually schedule their updates frequently. If we can capture the critical app issues faced by users in a timely and accurate manner, developers can make timely updates, and good user experience can be ensured. There exist prior studies on analyzing reviews for detecting emerging app issues. These studies are usually based on topic modeling or clustering techniques. However, the short-length characteristics and sentiment of user reviews have not been considered. In this paper, we propose a novel emerging issue detection approach named MERIT to take into consideration the two aforementioned characteristics. Specifically, we propose an Adaptive Online Biterm Sentiment-Topic (AOBST) model for jointly modeling topics and corresponding sentiments that takes into consideration app versions. Based on the AOBST model, we infer the topics negatively reflected in user reviews for one app version, and automatically interpret the meaning of the topics with most relevant phrases and sentences. Experiments on popular apps from Google Play and Apple's App Store demonstrate the effectiveness of MERIT in identifying emerging app issues, improving the state-of-the-art method by 22.3% in terms of F1-score. In terms of efficiency, MERIT can return results within acceptable time.
An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web
Authors: Timothy R. Tangherlini, Shadi Shahsavari, Behnam Shahbazi, Ehsan Ebrahimzadeh, Vwani Roychowdhury
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Although a great deal of attention has been paid to how conspiracy theories circulate on social media and their factual counterpart conspiracies, there has been little computational work done on describing their narrative structures. We present an automated pipeline for the discovery and description of the generative narrative frameworks of conspiracy theories on social media, and actual conspiracies reported in the news media. We base this work on two separate repositories of posts and news articles describing the well-known conspiracy theory Pizzagate from 2016, and the New Jersey conspiracy Bridgegate from 2013. We formulate a graphical generative machine learning model where nodes represent actors/actants, and multi-edges and self-loops among nodes capture context-specific relationships. Posts and news items are viewed as samples of subgraphs of the hidden narrative network. The problem of reconstructing the underlying structure is posed as a latent model estimation problem. We automatically extract and aggregate the actants and their relationships from the posts and articles. We capture context specific actants and interactant relationships by developing a system of supernodes and subnodes. We use these to construct a network, which constitutes the underlying narrative framework. We show how the Pizzagate framework relies on the conspiracy theorists' interpretation of "hidden knowledge" to link otherwise unlinked domains of human interaction, and hypothesize that this multi-domain focus is an important feature of conspiracy theories. While Pizzagate relies on the alignment of multiple domains, Bridgegate remains firmly rooted in the single domain of New Jersey politics. We hypothesize that the narrative framework of a conspiracy theory might stabilize quickly in contrast to the narrative framework of an actual one, which may develop more slowly as revelations come to light.
Matching Guided Distillation
Authors: Kaiyu Yue, Jiangfan Deng, Feng Zhou
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8

Feature distillation is an effective way to improve the performance for a smaller student model, which has fewer parameters and lower computation cost compared to the larger teacher model. Unfortunately, there is a common obstacle - the gap in semantic feature structure between the intermediate features of teacher and student. The classic scheme prefers to transform intermediate features by adding the adaptation module, such as naive convolutional, attention-based or more complicated one. However, this introduces two problems: a) The adaptation module brings more parameters into training. b) The adaptation module with random initialization or special transformation isn't friendly for distilling a pre-trained student. In this paper, we present Matching Guided Distillation (MGD) as an efficient and parameter-free manner to solve these problems. The key idea of MGD is to pose matching the teacher channels with students' as an assignment problem. We compare three solutions of the assignment problem to reduce channels from teacher features with partial distillation loss. The overall training takes a coordinate-descent approach between two optimization objects - assignments update and parameters update. Since MGD only contains normalization or pooling operations with negligible computation cost, it is flexible to plug into network with other distillation methods.
DSP: A Differential Spatial Prediction Scheme for Comprehensive real industrial datasets
Authors: Jun-Jie Zhang, Cong Zhang, Neal N. Xiong
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Prediction, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Inverse Distance Weighted models (IDW) have been widely used for predicting and modeling multidimensional space in multimodal industrial processes. However, the more complex the structure of multidimensional space, the lower the performance of IDW models, and real industrial datasets tend to have more complex spatial structure. To solve this problem, a new framework for spatial prediction and modeling based on deep reinforcement learning network is proposed. In the proposed framework, the internal relationship between state and action is enhanced by reusing the state values in the Q network, and the convergence rate and stability of the deep reinforcement learning network are improved. The improved deep reinforcement learning network is then used to search for and learn the hyperparameters of each sample point in the inverse distance weighted model. These hyperparameters can reflect the spatial structure of the current industrial dataset to some extent. Then a spatial distribution of hyperparameters is constructed based on the learned hyperparameters. Each interpolation point obtains corresponding hyperparameters from the hyperparametric spatial distribution and brings them into the classical IDW models for prediction, thus achieving differential spatial prediction and modeling. The simulation results show that the proposed framework is suitable for real industrial datasets with complex spatial structure characteristics and is more accurate than current IDW models in spatial prediction.
Quantum Language Model with Entanglement Embedding for Question Answering
Authors: Yi-Wei Chen, Yu Pan, Daoyi Dong
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

Quantum Language Models (QLMs) in which words are modelled as quantum superposition of sememes have demonstrated a high level of model transparency and good post-hoc interpretability. Nevertheless, in the current literature word sequences are basically modelled as a classical mixture of word states, which cannot fully exploit the potential of a quantum probabilistic description. A full quantum model is yet to be developed to explicitly capture the non-classical correlations within the word sequences. We propose a neural network model with a novel Entanglement Embedding (EE) module, whose function is to transform the word sequences into entangled pure states of many-body quantum systems. Strong quantum entanglement, which is the central concept of quantum information and an indication of parallelized correlations among the words, is observed within the word sequences. Numerical experiments show that the proposed QLM with EE (QLM-EE) achieves superior performance compared with the classical deep neural network models and other QLMs on Question Answering (QA) datasets. In addition, the post-hoc interpretability of the model can be improved by quantizing the degree of entanglement among the words.