pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Fairness-Accuracy Pareto Front
Authors: Susan Wei, Marc Niethammer
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

Algorithmic fairness seeks to identify and correct sources of bias in machine learning algorithms. Confoundingly, ensuring fairness often comes at the cost of accuracy. We provide formal tools in this work for reconciling this fundamental tension in algorithm fairness. Specifically, we put to use the concept of Pareto optimality from multi-objective optimization and seek the fairness-accuracy Pareto front of a neural network classifier. We demonstrate that many existing algorithmic fairness methods are performing the so-called linear scalarization scheme which has severe limitations in recovering Pareto optimal solutions. We instead apply the Chebyshev scalarization scheme which is provably superior theoretically and no more computationally burdensome at recovering Pareto optimal solutions compared to the linear scheme.
Deep Variational Network Toward Blind Image Restoration
Authors: Zongsheng Yue, Hongwei Yong, Qian Zhao, Lei Zhang, Deyu Meng, Kwan-Yee K. Wong
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Deblocking, Image Denoising, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution, Variational Inference

Blind image restoration (IR) is a common yet challenging problem in computer vision. Classical model-based methods and recent deep learning (DL)-based methods represent two different methodologies for this problem, each with their own merits and drawbacks. In this paper, we propose a novel blind image restoration method, aiming to integrate both the advantages of them. Specifically, we construct a general Bayesian generative model for the blind IR, which explicitly depicts the degradation process. In this proposed model, a pixel-wise non-i.i.d. Gaussian distribution is employed to fit the image noise. It is with more flexibility than the simple i.i.d. Gaussian or Laplacian distributions as adopted in most of conventional methods, so as to handle more complicated noise types contained in the image degradation. To solve the model, we design a variational inference algorithm where all the expected posteriori distributions are parameterized as deep neural networks to increase their model capability. Notably, such an inference algorithm induces a unified framework to jointly deal with the tasks of degradation estimation and image restoration. Further, the degradation information estimated in the former task is utilized to guide the latter IR process. Experiments on two typical blind IR tasks, namely image denoising and super-resolution, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance over current state-of-the-arts.
Multiple Classification with Split Learning
Authors: Jongwon Kim, Sungho Shin, Yeonguk Yu, Junseok Lee, Kyoobin Lee
Date: 2020-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Learning, General Classification, Privacy Preserving

Privacy issues were raised in the process of training deep learning in medical, mobility, and other fields. To solve this problem, we present privacy-preserving distributed deep learning method that allow clients to learn a variety of data without direct exposure. We divided a single deep learning architecture into a common extractor, a cloud model and a local classifier for the distributed learning. First, the common extractor, which is used by local clients, extracts secure features from the input data. The secure features also take the role that the cloud model can employ various task and diverse types of data. The feature contain the most important information that helps to proceed various task. Second, the cloud model including most parts of the whole training model gets the embedded features from the massive local clients, and performs most of deep learning operations which takes severe computing cost. After the operations in cloud model finished, outputs of the cloud model send back to local clients. Finally, the local classifier determined classification results and delivers the results to local clients. When clients train models, our model does not directly expose sensitive information to exterior network. During the test, the average performance improvement was 2.63% over the existing local training model. However, in a distributed environment, there is a possibility of inversion attack due to exposed features. For this reason, we experimented with the common extractor to prevent data restoration. The quality of restoration of the original image was tested by adjusting the depth of the common extractor. As a result, we found that the deeper the common extractor, the restoration score decreased to 89.74.
Smart Weather Forecasting Using Machine Learning:A Case Study in Tennessee
Authors: A H M Jakaria, Md Mosharaf Hossain, Mohammad Ashiqur Rahman
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Weather Forecasting

Traditionally, weather predictions are performed with the help of large complex models of physics, which utilize different atmospheric conditions over a long period of time. These conditions are often unstable because of perturbations of the weather system, causing the models to provide inaccurate forecasts. The models are generally run on hundreds of nodes in a large High Performance Computing (HPC) environment which consumes a large amount of energy. In this paper, we present a weather prediction technique that utilizes historical data from multiple weather stations to train simple machine learning models, which can provide usable forecasts about certain weather conditions for the near future within a very short period of time. The models can be run on much less resource intensive environments. The evaluation results show that the accuracy of the models is good enough to be used alongside the current state-of-the-art techniques. Furthermore, we show that it is beneficial to leverage the weather station data from multiple neighboring areas over the data of only the area for which weather forecasting is being performed.
Neighbourhood-Insensitive Point Cloud Normal Estimation Network
Authors: Zirui Wang, Victor Adrian Prisacariu
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00

We introduce a novel self-attention-based normal estimation network that is able to focus softly on relevant points and adjust the softness by learning a temperature parameter, making it able to work naturally and effectively within a large neighbourhood range. As a result, our model outperforms all existing normal estimation algorithms by a large margin, achieving 94.1% accuracy in comparison with the previous state of the art of 91.2%, with a 25x smaller model and 12x faster inference time. We also use point-to-plane Iterative Closest Point (ICP) as an application case to show that our normal estimations lead to faster convergence than normal estimations from other methods, without manually fine-tuning neighbourhood range parameters. Code available at https://code.active.vision.
Data Science for Motion and Time Analysis with Modern Motion Sensor Data
Authors: Chiwoo Park, Sang Do Noh, Anuj Srivastava
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

The motion-and-time analysis has been a popular research topic in operations research, especially for analyzing work performances in manufacturing and service operations. It is regaining attention as continuous improvement tools for lean manufacturing and smart factory. This paper develops a framework for data-driven analysis of work motions and studies their correlations to work speeds or execution rates, using data collected from modern motion sensors. The past analyses largely relied on manual steps involving time-consuming stop-watching and video-taping, followed by manual data analysis. While modern sensing devices have automated the collection of motion data, the motion analytics that transform the new data into knowledge are largely underdeveloped. Unsolved technical questions include: How the motion and time information can be extracted from the motion sensor data, how work motions and execution rates are statistically modeled and compared, and what are the statistical correlations of motions to the rates? In this paper, we develop a novel mathematical framework for motion and time analysis with motion sensor data, by defining new mathematical representation spaces of human motions and execution rates and by developing statistical tools on these new spaces. This methodological research is demonstrated using five use cases applied to manufacturing motion data.
Learning Target Domain Specific Classifier for Partial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Chuan-Xian Ren, PengFei Ge, Peiyi Yang, Shuicheng Yan
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Partial Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation~(UDA) aims at reducing the distribution discrepancy when transferring knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Previous UDA methods assume that the source and target domains share an identical label space, which is unrealistic in practice since the label information of the target domain is agnostic. This paper focuses on a more realistic UDA scenario, i.e. partial domain adaptation (PDA), where the target label space is subsumed to the source label space. In the PDA scenario, the source outliers that are absent in the target domain may be wrongly matched to the target domain (technically named negative transfer), leading to performance degradation of UDA methods. This paper proposes a novel Target Domain Specific Classifier Learning-based Domain Adaptation (TSCDA) method. TSCDA presents a soft-weighed maximum mean discrepancy criterion to partially align feature distributions and alleviate negative transfer. Also, it learns a target-specific classifier for the target domain with pseudo-labels and multiple auxiliary classifiers, to further address classifier shift. A module named Peers Assisted Learning is used to minimize the prediction difference between multiple target-specific classifiers, which makes the classifiers more discriminant for the target domain. Extensive experiments conducted on three PDA benchmark datasets show that TSCDA outperforms other state-of-the-art methods with a large margin, e.g. $4\%$ and $5.6\%$ averagely on Office-31 and Office-Home, respectively.
Collaborative Filtering under Model Uncertainty
Authors: Robin M. Schmidt, Moritz Hahn
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, model, Recommendation Systems

In their work, Dean, Rich, and Recht create a model to research recourse and availability of items in a recommender system. We used the definition of predictive multiplicity by Marx, Pin Calmon, and Ustun to examine different variations of this model, using different values for two model parameters. Pairwise comparison of their models show, that most of these models produce very similar results in terms of discrepancy and ambiguity for the availability and only in some cases the availability sets differ significantly.
Counterfactual Explanations for Machine Learning on Multivariate Time Series Data
Authors: Emre Ates, Burak Aksar, Vitus J. Leung, Ayse K. Coskun
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, counterfactual, Management, Scheduling, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Applying machine learning (ML) on multivariate time series data has growing popularity in many application domains, including in computer system management. For example, recent high performance computing (HPC) research proposes a variety of ML frameworks that use system telemetry data in the form of multivariate time series so as to detect performance variations, perform intelligent scheduling or node allocation, and improve system security. Common barriers for adoption for these ML frameworks include the lack of user trust and the difficulty of debugging. These barriers need to be overcome to enable the widespread adoption of ML frameworks in production systems. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a novel explainability technique for providing counterfactual explanations for supervised ML frameworks that use multivariate time series data. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art explainability methods on several different ML frameworks and data sets in metrics such as faithfulness and robustness. The paper also demonstrates how the proposed method can be used to debug ML frameworks and gain a better understanding of HPC system telemetry data.
Model Generalization in Deep Learning Applications for Land Cover Mapping
Authors: Lucas Hu, Caleb Robinson, Bistra Dilkina
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Learning

Recent work has shown that deep learning models can be used to classify land-use data from geospatial satellite imagery. We show that when these deep learning models are trained on data from specific continents/seasons, there is a high degree of variability in model performance on out-of-sample continents/seasons. This suggests that just because a model accurately predicts land-use classes in one continent or season does not mean that the model will accurately predict land-use classes in a different continent or season. We then use clustering techniques on satellite imagery from different continents to visualize the differences in landscapes that make geospatial generalization particularly difficult, and summarize our takeaways for future satellite imagery-related applications.
Continuous Authentication of Wearable Device Users from Heart Rate, Gait, and Breathing Data
Authors: William Cheung, Sudip Vhaduri
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

The security of private information is becoming the bedrock of an increasingly digitized society. While the users are flooded with passwords and PINs, these gold-standard explicit authentications are becoming less popular and valuable. Recent biometric-based authentication methods, such as facial or finger recognition, are getting popular due to their higher accuracy. However, these hard-biometric-based systems require dedicated devices with powerful sensors and authentication models, which are often limited to most of the market wearables. Still, market wearables are collecting various private information of a user and are becoming an integral part of life: accessing cars, bank accounts, etc. Therefore, time demands a burden-free implicit authentication mechanism for wearables using the less-informative soft-biometric data that are easily obtainable from modern market wearables. In this work, we present a context-dependent soft-biometric-based authentication system for wearables devices using heart rate, gait, and breathing audio signals. From our detailed analysis using the "leave-one-out" validation, we find that a lighter $k$-Nearest Neighbor ($k$-NN) model with $k = 2$ can obtain an average accuracy of $0.93 \pm 0.06$, $F_1$ score $0.93 \pm 0.03$, and {\em false positive rate} (FPR) below $0.08$ at 50\% level of confidence, which shows the promise of this work.
Image Colorization: A Survey and Dataset
Authors: Saeed Anwar, Muhammad Tahir, Chongyi Li, Ajmal Mian, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Abdul Wahab Muzaffar
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Colorization, Image Colorization, Survey

Image colorization estimates RGB colors for grayscale images or video frames to improve their aesthetic and perceptual quality. Over the last decade, deep learning techniques for image colorization have significantly progressed, necessitating a systematic survey and benchmarking of these techniques. This article presents a comprehensive survey of recent state-of-the-art deep learning-based image colorization techniques, describing their fundamental block architectures, inputs, optimizers, loss functions, training protocols, training data, etc. It categorizes the existing colorization techniques into seven classes and discusses important factors governing their performance, such as benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics. We highlight the limitations of existing datasets and introduce a new dataset specific to colorization. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation of existing image colorization methods using both existing datasets and our proposed one. Finally, we discuss the limitations of existing methods and recommend possible solutions and future research directions for this rapidly evolving topic of deep image colorization. The dataset and codes for evaluation are publicly available at https://github.com/saeed-anwar/ColorSurvey.
Variable selection for Gaussian process regression through a sparse projection
Authors: Chiwoo Park, David J. Borth, Nicholas S. Wilson, Chad N. Hunter
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation, regression, Variable Selection

This paper presents a new variable selection approach integrated with Gaussian process (GP) regression. We consider a sparse projection of input variables and a general stationary covariance model that depends on the Euclidean distance between the projected features. The sparse projection matrix is considered as an unknown parameter. We propose a forward stagewise approach with embedded gradient descent steps to co-optimize the parameter with other covariance parameters based on the maximization of a non-convex marginal likelihood function with a concave sparsity penalty, and some convergence properties of the algorithm are provided. The proposed model covers a broader class of stationary covariance functions than the existing automatic relevance determination approaches, and the solution approach is more computationally feasible than the existing MCMC sampling procedures for the automatic relevance parameter estimation with a sparsity prior. The approach is evaluated for a large number of simulated scenarios. The choice of tuning parameters and the accuracy of the parameter estimation are evaluated with the simulation study. In the comparison to some chosen benchmark approaches, the proposed approach has provided a better accuracy in the variable selection. It is applied to an important problem of identifying environmental factors that affect an atmospheric corrosion of metal alloys.
Channel-Directed Gradients for Optimization of Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Dong Lao, Peihao Zhu, Peter Wonka, Ganesh Sundaramoorthi
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

We introduce optimization methods for convolutional neural networks that can be used to improve existing gradient-based optimization in terms of generalization error. The method requires only simple processing of existing stochastic gradients, can be used in conjunction with any optimizer, and has only a linear overhead (in the number of parameters) compared to computation of the stochastic gradient. The method works by computing the gradient of the loss function with respect to output-channel directed re-weighted L2 or Sobolev metrics, which has the effect of smoothing components of the gradient across a certain direction of the parameter tensor. We show that defining the gradients along the output channel direction leads to a performance boost, while other directions can be detrimental. We present the continuum theory of such gradients, its discretization, and application to deep networks. Experiments on benchmark datasets, several networks and baseline optimizers show that optimizers can be improved in generalization error by simply computing the stochastic gradient with respect to output-channel directed metrics.
Contextualized moral inference
Authors: Jing Yi Xie, Graeme Hirst, Yang Xu
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

Developing moral awareness in intelligent systems has shifted from a topic of philosophical inquiry to a critical and practical issue in artificial intelligence over the past decades. However, automated inference of everyday moral situations remains an under-explored problem. We present a text-based approach that predicts people's intuitive judgment of moral vignettes. Our methodology builds on recent work in contextualized language models and textual inference of moral sentiment. We show that a contextualized representation offers a substantial advantage over alternative representations based on word embeddings and emotion sentiment in inferring human moral judgment, evaluated and reflected in three independent datasets from moral psychology. We discuss the promise and limitations of our approach toward automated textual moral reasoning.
Residual Network Based Direct Synthesis of EM Structures: A Study on One-to-One Transformers
Authors: David Munzer, Siawpeng Er, Minshuo Chen, Yan Li, Naga S. Mannem, Tuo Zhao, Hua Wang
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We propose using machine learning models for the direct synthesis of on-chip electromagnetic (EM) passive structures to enable rapid or even automated designs and optimizations of RF/mm-Wave circuits. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the direct synthesis of a 1:1 transformer on a 45nm SOI process using our proposed neural network model. Using pre-existing transformer s-parameter files and their geometric design training samples, the model predicts target geometric designs.
Evaluating Nonlinear Decision Trees for Binary Classification Tasks with Other Existing Methods
Authors: Yashesh Dhebar, Sparsh Gupta, Kalyanmoy Deb
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification

Classification of datasets into two or more distinct classes is an important machine learning task. Many methods are able to classify binary classification tasks with a very high accuracy on test data, but cannot provide any easily interpretable explanation for users to have a deeper understanding of reasons for the split of data into two classes. In this paper, we highlight and evaluate a recently proposed nonlinear decision tree approach with a number of commonly used classification methods on a number of datasets involving a few to a large number of features. The study reveals key issues such as effect of classification on the method's parameter values, complexity of the classifier versus achieved accuracy, and interpretability of resulting classifiers.
Breaking the Communities: Characterizing community changing users using text mining and graph machine learning on Twitter
Authors: Federico Albanese, Leandro Lombardi, Esteban Feuerstein, Pablo Balenzuela
Date: 2020-08-24 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Feature Importance

Even though the Internet and social media have increased the amount of news and information people can consume, most users are only exposed to content that reinforces their positions and isolates them from other ideological communities. This environment has real consequences with great impact on our lives like severe political polarization, easy spread of fake news, political extremism, hate groups and the lack of enriching debates, among others. Therefore, encouraging conversations between different groups of users and breaking the closed community is of importance for healthy societies. In this paper, we characterize and study users who break their community on Twitter using natural language processing techniques and graph machine learning algorithms. In particular, we collected 9 million Twitter messages from 1.5 million users and constructed the retweet networks. We identified their communities and topics of discussion associated to them. With this data, we present a machine learning framework for social media users classification which detects "community breakers", i.e. users that swing from their closed community to another one. A feature importance analysis in three Twitter polarized political datasets showed that these users have low values of PageRank, suggesting that changes are driven because their messages have no response in their communities. This methodology also allowed us to identify their specific topics of interest, providing a fully characterization of this kind of users.