pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Estimating the Cheeger constant using machine learning
Authors: Ambar Jain, Shivam Pal, Kashyap Rajeevsarathy
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this paper, we use machine learning to show that the Cheeger constant of a connected regular graph has a predominant linear dependence on the largest two eigenvalues of the graph spectrum. We also show that a trained deep neural network on graphs of smaller sizes can be used as an effective estimator in estimating the Cheeger constant of larger graphs.
Handling Concept Drift for Predictions in Business Process Mining
Authors: Lucas Baier, Josua Reimold, Niklas Kühl
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Predictive services nowadays play an important role across all business sectors. However, deployed machine learning models are challenged by changing data streams over time which is described as concept drift. Prediction quality of models can be largely influenced by this phenomenon. Therefore, concept drift is usually handled by retraining of the model. However, current research lacks a recommendation which data should be selected for the retraining of the machine learning model. Therefore, we systematically analyze different data selection strategies in this work. Subsequently, we instantiate our findings on a use case in process mining which is strongly affected by concept drift. We can show that we can improve accuracy from 0.5400 to 0.7010 with concept drift handling. Furthermore, we depict the effects of the different data selection strategies.
Document Modeling with Graph Attention Networks for Multi-grained Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Bo Zheng, Haoyang Wen, Yaobo Liang, Nan Duan, Wanxiang Che, Daxin Jiang, Ming Zhou, Ting Liu
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Graph Attention, Machine Reading Comprehension, Natural Questions, Reading Comprehension

Natural Questions is a new challenging machine reading comprehension benchmark with two-grained answers, which are a long answer (typically a paragraph) and a short answer (one or more entities inside the long answer). Despite the effectiveness of existing methods on this benchmark, they treat these two sub-tasks individually during training while ignoring their dependencies. To address this issue, we present a novel multi-grained machine reading comprehension framework that focuses on modeling documents at their hierarchical nature, which are different levels of granularity: documents, paragraphs, sentences, and tokens. We utilize graph attention networks to obtain different levels of representations so that they can be learned simultaneously. The long and short answers can be extracted from paragraph-level representation and token-level representation, respectively. In this way, we can model the dependencies between the two-grained answers to provide evidence for each other. We jointly train the two sub-tasks, and our experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms previous systems at both long and short answer criteria.
Bayesian optimal control of GHZ states in Rydberg lattices
Authors: Rick Mukherjee, Harry Xie, Florian Mintert
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00

The ability to prepare non-classical states in a robust manner is essential for quantum sensors beyond the standard quantum limit. We demonstrate that Bayesian optimal control is capable of finding control pulses that drive trapped Rydberg atoms into highly entangled GHZ states. The control sequences have a physically intuitive functionality based on the quasi-integrability of the Ising dynamics. They can be constructed in laboratory experiments resulting in preparation times that scale very favourably with the system size.
HDD-Net: Hybrid Detector Descriptor with Mutual Interactive Learning
Authors: Axel Barroso-Laguna, Yannick Verdie, Benjamin Busam, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Triplet

Local feature extraction remains an active research area due to the advances in fields such as SLAM, 3D reconstructions, or AR applications. The success in these applications relies on the performance of the feature detector and descriptor. While the detector-descriptor interaction of most methods is based on unifying in single network detections and descriptors, we propose a method that treats both extractions independently and focuses on their interaction in the learning process rather than by parameter sharing. We formulate the classical hard-mining triplet loss as a new detector optimisation term to refine candidate positions based on the descriptor map. We propose a dense descriptor that uses a multi-scale approach and a hybrid combination of hand-crafted and learned features to obtain rotation and scale robustness by design. We evaluate our method extensively on different benchmarks and show improvements over the state of the art in terms of image matching on HPatches and 3D reconstruction quality while keeping on par on camera localisation tasks.
Adaptive Mixture Regression Network with Local Counting Map for Crowd Counting
Authors: Xiyang Liu, Jie Yang, Wenrui Ding
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Crowd Counting, regression

The crowd counting task aims at estimating the number of people located in an image or a frame from videos. Existing methods widely adopt density maps as the training targets to optimize the point-to-point loss. While in testing phase, we only focus on the differences between the crowd numbers and the global summation of density maps, which indicate the inconsistency between the training targets and the evaluation criteria. To solve this problem, we introduce a new target, named local counting map (LCM), to obtain more accurate results than density map based approaches. Moreover, we also propose an adaptive mixture regression framework with three modules in a coarse-to-fine manner to further improve the precision of the crowd estimation: scale-aware module (SAM), mixture regression module (MRM) and adaptive soft interval module (ASIM). Specifically, SAM fully utilizes the context and multi-scale information from different convolutional features; MRM and ASIM perform more precise counting regression on local patches of images. Compared with current methods, the proposed method reports better performances on the typical datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/xiyang1012/Local-Crowd-Counting.
Interpreting Neural Ranking Models using Grad-CAM
Authors: Jaekeol Choi, Jungin Choi, Wonjong Rhee
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Interpretable Machine Learning

Recently, applying deep neural networks in IR has become an important and timely topic. For instance, Neural Ranking Models(NRMs) have shown promising performance compared to the traditional ranking models. However, explaining the ranking results has become even more difficult with NRM due to the complex structure of neural networks. On the other hand, a great deal of research is under progress on Interpretable Machine Learning(IML), including Grad-CAM. Grad-CAM is an attribution method and it can visualize the input regions that contribute to the network's output. In this paper, we adopt Grad-CAM for interpreting the ranking results of NRM. By adopting Grad-CAM, we analyze how each query-document term pair contributes to the matching score for a given pair of query and document. The visualization results provide insights on why a certain document is relevant to the given query. Also, the results show that neural ranking model captures the subtle notion of relevance. Our interpretation method and visualization results can be used for snippet generation and user-query intent analysis.
WinoWhy: A Deep Diagnosis of Essential Commonsense Knowledge for Answering Winograd Schema Challenge
Authors: Hongming Zhang, Xinran Zhao, Yangqiu Song
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Winowhy

In this paper, we present the first comprehensive categorization of essential commonsense knowledge for answering the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC). For each of the questions, we invite annotators to first provide reasons for making correct decisions and then categorize them into six major knowledge categories. By doing so, we better understand the limitation of existing methods (i.e., what kind of knowledge cannot be effectively represented or inferred with existing methods) and shed some light on the commonsense knowledge that we need to acquire in the future for better commonsense reasoning. Moreover, to investigate whether current WSC models can understand the commonsense or they simply solve the WSC questions based on the statistical bias of the dataset, we leverage the collected reasons to develop a new task called WinoWhy, which requires models to distinguish plausible reasons from very similar but wrong reasons for all WSC questions. Experimental results prove that even though pre-trained language representation models have achieved promising progress on the original WSC dataset, they are still struggling at WinoWhy. Further experiments show that even though supervised models can achieve better performance, the performance of these models can be sensitive to the dataset distribution. WinoWhy and all codes are available at: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/WinoWhy.
Do not let the history haunt you -- Mitigating Compounding Errors in Conversational Question Answering
Authors: Angrosh Mandya, James O'Neill, Danushka Bollegala, Frans Coenen
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Question Answering

The Conversational Question Answering (CoQA) task involves answering a sequence of inter-related conversational questions about a contextual paragraph. Although existing approaches employ human-written ground-truth answers for answering conversational questions at test time, in a realistic scenario, the CoQA model will not have any access to ground-truth answers for the previous questions, compelling the model to rely upon its own previously predicted answers for answering the subsequent questions. In this paper, we find that compounding errors occur when using previously predicted answers at test time, significantly lowering the performance of CoQA systems. To solve this problem, we propose a sampling strategy that dynamically selects between target answers and model predictions during training, thereby closely simulating the situation at test time. Further, we analyse the severity of this phenomena as a function of the question type, conversation length and domain type.
A Secure Federated Learning Framework for 5G Networks
Authors: Yi Liu, Jialiang Peng, Jiawen Kang, Abdullah M. Iliyasu, Dusit Niyato, Ahmed A. Abd El-Latif
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has been recently proposed as an emerging paradigm to build machine learning models using distributed training datasets that are locally stored and maintained on different devices in 5G networks while providing privacy preservation for participants. In FL, the central aggregator accumulates local updates uploaded by participants to update a global model. However, there are two critical security threats: poisoning and membership inference attacks. These attacks may be carried out by malicious or unreliable participants, resulting in the construction failure of global models or privacy leakage of FL models. Therefore, it is crucial for FL to develop security means of defense. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based secure FL framework to create smart contracts and prevent malicious or unreliable participants from involving in FL. In doing so, the central aggregator recognizes malicious and unreliable participants by automatically executing smart contracts to defend against poisoning attacks. Further, we use local differential privacy techniques to prevent membership inference attacks. Numerical results suggest that the proposed framework can effectively deter poisoning and membership inference attacks, thereby improving the security of FL in 5G networks.
Unpaired Motion Style Transfer from Video to Animation
Authors: Kfir Aberman, Yijia Weng, Dani Lischinski, Daniel Cohen-Or, Baoquan Chen
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Motion Style Transfer, Motion Synthesis, Style Transfer

Transferring the motion style from one animation clip to another, while preserving the motion content of the latter, has been a long-standing problem in character animation. Most existing data-driven approaches are supervised and rely on paired data, where motions with the same content are performed in different styles. In addition, these approaches are limited to transfer of styles that were seen during training. In this paper, we present a novel data-driven framework for motion style transfer, which learns from an unpaired collection of motions with style labels, and enables transferring motion styles not observed during training. Furthermore, our framework is able to extract motion styles directly from videos, bypassing 3D reconstruction, and apply them to the 3D input motion. Our style transfer network encodes motions into two latent codes, for content and for style, each of which plays a different role in the decoding (synthesis) process. While the content code is decoded into the output motion by several temporal convolutional layers, the style code modifies deep features via temporally invariant adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN). Moreover, while the content code is encoded from 3D joint rotations, we learn a common embedding for style from either 3D or 2D joint positions, enabling style extraction from videos. Our results are comparable to the state-of-the-art, despite not requiring paired training data, and outperform other methods when transferring previously unseen styles. To our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate style transfer directly from videos to 3D animations - an ability which enables one to extend the set of style examples far beyond motions captured by MoCap systems.
Evaluating Ensemble Robustness Against Adversarial Attacks
Authors: George Adam, Romain Speciel
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00

Adversarial examples, which are slightly perturbed inputs generated with the aim of fooling a neural network, are known to transfer between models; adversaries which are effective on one model will often fool another. This concept of transferability poses grave security concerns as it leads to the possibility of attacking models in a black box setting, during which the internal parameters of the target model are unknown. In this paper, we seek to analyze and minimize the transferability of adversaries between models within an ensemble. To this end, we introduce a gradient based measure of how effectively an ensemble's constituent models collaborate to reduce the space of adversarial examples targeting the ensemble itself. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this measure can be utilized during training as to increase an ensemble's robustness to adversarial examples.
Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
Authors: Juergen Schmidhuber
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In 2020-2021, we celebrated that many of the basic ideas behind the deep learning revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" or "Miraculous Year" 1990-1991 at TU Munich. Back then, few people were interested, but a quarter century later, neural networks based on these ideas were on over 3 billion devices such as smartphones, and used many billions of times per day, consuming a significant fraction of the world's compute.
Angular Triplet Loss-based Camera Network for ReID
Authors: Yitian Li, Ruini Xue, Mengmeng Zhu, Jing Xu, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification, Retrieval, Triplet

Person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging crosscamera retrieval task to identify pedestrians. Many complex network structures are proposed recently and many of them concentrate on multi-branch features to achieve high performance. However, they are too heavy-weight to deploy in realworld applications. Additionally, pedestrian images are often captured by different surveillance cameras, so the varied lights, perspectives and resolutions result in inevitable multi-camera domain gaps for ReID. To address these issues, this paper proposes ATCN, a simple but effective angular triplet loss-based camera network, which is able to achieve compelling performance with only global features. In ATCN, a novel angular distance is introduced to learn a more discriminative feature representation in the embedding space. Meanwhile, a lightweight camera network is designed to transfer global features to more discriminative features. ATCN is designed to be simple and flexible so it can be easily deployed in practice. The experiment results on various benchmark datasets show that ATCN outperforms many SOTA approaches.
Reassessing Claims of Human Parity and Super-Human Performance in Machine Translation at WMT 2019
Authors: Antonio Toral
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: EAMT 2020 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We reassess the claims of human parity and super-human performance made at the news shared task of WMT 2019 for three translation directions: English-to-German, English-to-Russian and German-to-English. First we identify three potential issues in the human evaluation of that shared task: (i) the limited amount of intersentential context available, (ii) the limited translation proficiency of the evaluators and (iii) the use of a reference translation. We then conduct a modified evaluation taking these issues into account. Our results indicate that all the claims of human parity and super-human performance made at WMT 2019 should be refuted, except the claim of human parity for English-to-German. Based on our findings, we put forward a set of recommendations and open questions for future assessments of human parity in machine translation.
Skeleton-Aware Networks for Deep Motion Retargeting
Authors: Kfir Aberman, Peizhuo Li, Dani Lischinski, Olga Sorkine-Hornung, Daniel Cohen-Or, Baoquan Chen
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: motion retargeting, Motion Synthesis

We introduce a novel deep learning framework for data-driven motion retargeting between skeletons, which may have different structure, yet corresponding to homeomorphic graphs. Importantly, our approach learns how to retarget without requiring any explicit pairing between the motions in the training set. We leverage the fact that different homeomorphic skeletons may be reduced to a common primal skeleton by a sequence of edge merging operations, which we refer to as skeletal pooling. Thus, our main technical contribution is the introduction of novel differentiable convolution, pooling, and unpooling operators. These operators are skeleton-aware, meaning that they explicitly account for the skeleton's hierarchical structure and joint adjacency, and together they serve to transform the original motion into a collection of deep temporal features associated with the joints of the primal skeleton. In other words, our operators form the building blocks of a new deep motion processing framework that embeds the motion into a common latent space, shared by a collection of homeomorphic skeletons. Thus, retargeting can be achieved simply by encoding to, and decoding from this latent space. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our framework for motion retargeting, as well as motion processing in general, compared to existing approaches. Our approach is also quantitatively evaluated on a synthetic dataset that contains pairs of motions applied to different skeletons. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to perform retargeting between skeletons with differently sampled kinematic chains, without any paired examples.
Dynamic Memory Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification
Authors: Ruiying Geng, Binhua Li, Yongbin Li, Jian Sun, Xiaodan Zhu
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Learning, Few-Shot Text Classification, General Classification, Meta-Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

This paper proposes Dynamic Memory Induction Networks (DMIN) for few-shot text classification. The model utilizes dynamic routing to provide more flexibility to memory-based few-shot learning in order to better adapt the support sets, which is a critical capacity of few-shot classification models. Based on that, we further develop induction models with query information, aiming to enhance the generalization ability of meta-learning. The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results on the miniRCV1 and ODIC dataset, improving the best performance (accuracy) by 2~4%. Detailed analysis is further performed to show the effectiveness of each component.
Preference Elicitation in Assumption-Based Argumentation
Authors: Quratul-ain Mahesar, Nir Oren, Wamberto W. Vasconcelos
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00

Various structured argumentation frameworks utilize preferences as part of their standard inference procedure to enable reasoning with preferences. In this paper, we consider an inverse of the standard reasoning problem, seeking to identify what preferences over assumptions could lead to a given set of conclusions being drawn. We ground our work in the Assumption-Based Argumentation (ABA) framework, and present an algorithm which computes and enumerates all possible sets of preferences over the assumptions in the system from which a desired conflict free set of conclusions can be obtained under a given semantic. After describing our algorithm, we establish its soundness, completeness and complexity.
Smooth Exploration for Robotic Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Antonin Raffin, Jens Kober, Freek Stulp
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to learn skills from interactions with the real world. In practice, the unstructured step-based exploration used in Deep RL -- often very successful in simulation -- leads to jerky motion patterns on real robots. Consequences of the resulting shaky behavior are poor exploration, or even damage to the robot. We address these issues by adapting state-dependent exploration (SDE) to current Deep RL algorithms. To enable this adaptation, we propose two extensions to the original SDE, using more general features and re-sampling the noise periodically, which leads to a new exploration method generalized state-dependent exploration (gSDE). We evaluate gSDE both in simulation, on PyBullet continuous control tasks, and directly on three different real robots: a tendon-driven elastic robot, a quadruped and an RC car. The noise sampling interval of gSDE permits to have a compromise between performance and smoothness, which allows training directly on the real robots without loss of performance. The code is available at https://github.com/DLR-RM/stable-baselines3.