pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Disentangled Self-Attentive Neural Networks for Click-Through Rate Prediction
Authors: Yichen Xu, Yanqiao Zhu, Feng Yu, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu
Date: 2021-01-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Computational Efficiency, Feature Importance, Prediction

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, whose aim is to predict the probability of whether a user will click on an item, is an essential task for many online applications. Due to the nature of data sparsity and high dimensionality of CTR prediction, a key to making effective prediction is to model high-order feature interaction. An efficient way to do this is to perform inner product of feature embeddings with self-attentive neural networks. To better model complex feature interaction, in this paper we propose a novel DisentanglEd Self-atTentIve NEtwork (DESTINE) framework for CTR prediction that explicitly decouples the computation of unary feature importance from pairwise interaction. Specifically, the unary term models the general importance of one feature on all other features, whereas the pairwise interaction term contributes to learning the pure impact for each feature pair. We conduct extensive experiments using two real-world benchmark datasets. The results show that DESTINE not only maintains computational efficiency but achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.
Learning Augmented Index Policy for Optimal Service Placement at the Network Edge
Authors: Guojun Xiong, Rahul Singh, Jian Li
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning

We consider the problem of service placement at the network edge, in which a decision maker has to choose between $N$ services to host at the edge to satisfy the demands of customers. Our goal is to design adaptive algorithms to minimize the average service delivery latency for customers. We pose the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the system state is given by describing, for each service, the number of customers that are currently waiting at the edge to obtain the service. However, solving this $N$-services MDP is computationally expensive due to the curse of dimensionality. To overcome this challenge, we show that the optimal policy for a single-service MDP has an appealing threshold structure, and derive explicitly the Whittle indices for each service as a function of the number of requests from customers based on the theory of Whittle index policy. Since request arrival and service delivery rates are usually unknown and possibly time-varying, we then develop efficient learning augmented algorithms that fully utilize the structure of optimal policies with a low learning regret. The first of these is UCB-Whittle, and relies upon the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty. The second algorithm, Q-learning-Whittle, utilizes Q-learning iterations for each service by using a two time scale stochastic approximation. We characterize the non-asymptotic performance of UCB-Whittle by analyzing its learning regret, and also analyze the convergence properties of Q-learning-Whittle. Simulation results show that the proposed policies yield excellent empirical performance.
The Logic for a Mildly Context-Sensitive Fragment of the Lambek-Grishin Calculus
Authors: Hiroyoshi Komatsu
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00

While context-free grammars are characterized by a simple proof-theoretic grammatical formalism namely categorial grammar and its logic the Lambek calculus, no such characterizations were known for tree-adjoining grammars, and even for any mildly context-sensitive languages classes in the last forty years despite some efforts. We settle this problem in this paper. On the basis of the existing fragment of the Lambek-Grishin calculus which captures tree-adjoining languages, we present a logic called HLG: a proof-theoretic characterization of tree-adjoining languages based on the Lambek-Grishin calculus restricted to Hyperedge-replacement grammar with rank two studied by Moot. HLG is defined in display calculus with cut-admissibility. Several new techniques are introduced for the proofs, such as purely structural connectives, usefulness, and a graph-theoretic argument on proof nets for HLG.
Bandwidth Allocation for Multiple Federated Learning Services in Wireless Edge Networks
Authors: Jie Xu, Heqiang Wang, Lixing Chen
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Federated Learning

This paper studies a federated learning (FL) system, where \textit{multiple} FL services co-exist in a wireless network and share common wireless resources. It fills the void of wireless resource allocation for multiple simultaneous FL services in the existing literature. Our method designs a two-level resource allocation framework comprising \emph{intra-service} resource allocation and \emph{inter-service} resource allocation. The intra-service resource allocation problem aims to minimize the length of FL rounds by optimizing the bandwidth allocation among the clients of each FL service. Based on this, an inter-service resource allocation problem is further considered, which distributes bandwidth resources among multiple simultaneous FL services. We consider both cooperative and selfish providers of the FL services. For cooperative FL service providers, we design a distributed bandwidth allocation algorithm to optimize the overall performance of multiple FL services, meanwhile cater to the fairness among FL services and the privacy of clients. For selfish FL service providers, a new auction scheme is designed with the FL service owners as the bidders and the network provider as the auctioneer. The designed auction scheme strikes a balance between the overall FL performance and fairness. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform other benchmarks under various network conditions.
Transfer Learning and Augmentation for Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Harsh Kohli
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Transfer Learning, Word Sense Disambiguation

Many downstream NLP tasks have shown significant improvement through continual pre-training, transfer learning and multi-task learning. State-of-the-art approaches in Word Sense Disambiguation today benefit from some of these approaches in conjunction with information sources such as semantic relationships and gloss definitions contained within WordNet. Our work builds upon these systems and uses data augmentation along with extensive pre-training on various different NLP tasks and datasets. Our transfer learning and augmentation pipeline achieves state-of-the-art single model performance in WSD and is at par with the best ensemble results.
Occupancy Detection in Room Using Sensor Data
Authors: Mohammadhossein Toutiaee
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

With the advent of Internet of Thing (IoT), and ubiquitous data collected every moment by either portable (smart phone) or fixed (sensor) devices, it is important to gain insights and meaningful information from the sensor data in context-aware computing environments. Many researches have been implemented by scientists in different fields, to analyze such data for the purpose of security, energy efficiency, building reliability and smart environments. One study, that many researchers are interested in, is to utilize Machine Learning techniques for occupancy detection where the aforementioned sensors gather information about the environment. This paper provides a solution to detect occupancy using sensor data by using and testing several variables. Additionally we show the analysis performed over the gathered data using Machine Learning and pattern recognition mechanisms is possible to determine the occupancy of indoor environments. Seven famous algorithms in Machine Learning, namely as Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting Machine, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Kernelized SVM and K-Nearest Neighbors are tested and compared in this study.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): An Engineering Perspective
Authors: F. Hussain, R. Hussain, E. Hossain
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), object-detection, Object Detection

The remarkable advancements in Deep Learning (DL) algorithms have fueled enthusiasm for using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in almost every domain; however, the opaqueness of these algorithms put a question mark on their applications in safety-critical systems. In this regard, the `explainability' dimension is not only essential to both explain the inner workings of black-box algorithms, but it also adds accountability and transparency dimensions that are of prime importance for regulators, consumers, and service providers. eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is the set of techniques and methods to convert the so-called black-box AI algorithms to white-box algorithms, where the results achieved by these algorithms and the variables, parameters, and steps taken by the algorithm to reach the obtained results, are transparent and explainable. To complement the existing literature on XAI, in this paper, we take an `engineering' approach to illustrate the concepts of XAI. We discuss the stakeholders in XAI and describe the mathematical contours of XAI from engineering perspective. Then we take the autonomous car as a use-case and discuss the applications of XAI for its different components such as object detection, perception, control, action decision, and so on. This work is an exploratory study to identify new avenues of research in the field of XAI.
Neurocognitive Informatics Manifesto
Authors: Włodzisław Duch
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Position

Informatics studies all aspects of the structure of natural and artificial information systems. Theoretical and abstract approaches to information have made great advances, but human information processing is still unmatched in many areas, including information management, representation and understanding. Neurocognitive informatics is a new, emerging field that should help to improve the matching of artificial and natural systems, and inspire better computational algorithms to solve problems that are still beyond the reach of machines. In this position paper examples of neurocognitive inspirations and promising directions in this area are given.
The Gaussian Neural Process
Authors: Wessel P. Bruinsma, James Requeima, Andrew Y. K. Foong, Jonathan Gordon, Richard E. Turner
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: pproximateinference AABI Symposium 2021 1
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Translation

Neural Processes (NPs; Garnelo et al., 2018a,b) are a rich class of models for meta-learning that map data sets directly to predictive stochastic processes. We provide a rigorous analysis of the standard maximum-likelihood objective used to train conditional NPs. Moreover, we propose a new member to the Neural Process family called the Gaussian Neural Process (GNP), which models predictive correlations, incorporates translation equivariance, provides universal approximation guarantees, and demonstrates encouraging performance.
Combining Neural Network Models for Blood Cell Classification
Authors: Indraneel Ghosh, Siddhant Kundu
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

The objective of the study is to evaluate the efficiency of a multi layer neural network models built by combining Recurrent Neural Network(RNN) and Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) for solving the problem of classifying different types of White Blood Cells. This can have applications in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry for automating the analysis of blood tests and other processes requiring identifying the nature of blood cells in a given image sample. It can also be used in the diagnosis of various blood-related diseases in patients.
Target Detection and Segmentation in Circular-Scan Synthetic-Aperture-Sonar Images using Semi-Supervised Convolutional Encoder-Decoders
Authors: Isaac J. Sledge, Matthew S. Emigh, Jonathan L. King, Denton L. Woods, J. Tory Cobb, Jose C. Principe
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation

We propose a framework for saliency-based, multi-target detection and segmentation of circular-scan, synthetic-aperture-sonar (CSAS) imagery. Our framework relies on a multi-branch, convolutional encoder-decoder network (MB-CEDN). The encoder portion of the MB-CEDN extracts visual contrast features from CSAS images. These features are fed into dual decoders that perform pixel-level segmentation to mask targets. Each decoder provides different perspectives as to what constitutes a salient target. These opinions are aggregated and cascaded into a deep-parsing network to refine the segmentation. We evaluate our framework using real-world CSAS imagery consisting of five broad target classes. We compare against existing approaches from the computer-vision literature. We show that our framework outperforms supervised, deep-saliency networks designed for natural imagery. It greatly outperforms unsupervised saliency approaches developed for natural imagery. This illustrates that natural-image-based models may need to be altered to be effective for this imaging-sonar modality.
Provably Approximated ICP
Authors: Ibrahim Jubran, Alaa Maalouf, Ron Kimmel, Dan Feldman
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00

The goal of the \emph{alignment problem} is to align a (given) point cloud $P = \{p_1,\cdots,p_n\}$ to another (observed) point cloud $Q = \{q_1,\cdots,q_n\}$. That is, to compute a rotation matrix $R \in \mathbb{R}^{3 \times 3}$ and a translation vector $t \in \mathbb{R}^{3}$ that minimize the sum of paired distances $\sum_{i=1}^n D(Rp_i-t,q_i)$ for some distance function $D$. A harder version is the \emph{registration problem}, where the correspondence is unknown, and the minimum is also over all possible correspondence functions from $P$ to $Q$. Heuristics such as the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm and its variants were suggested for these problems, but none yield a provable non-trivial approximation for the global optimum. We prove that there \emph{always} exists a "witness" set of $3$ pairs in $P \times Q$ that, via novel alignment algorithm, defines a constant factor approximation (in the worst case) to this global optimum. We then provide algorithms that recover this witness set and yield the first provable constant factor approximation for the: (i) alignment problem in $O(n)$ expected time, and (ii) registration problem in polynomial time. Such small witness sets exist for many variants including points in $d$-dimensional space, outlier-resistant cost functions, and different correspondence types. Extensive experimental results on real and synthetic datasets show that our approximation constants are, in practice, close to $1$, and up to x$10$ times smaller than state-of-the-art algorithms.
Towards Long-term Fairness in Recommendation
Authors: Yingqiang Ge, Shuchang Liu, Ruoyuan Gao, Yikun Xian, Yunqi Li, Xiangyu Zhao, Changhua Pei, Fei Sun, Junfeng Ge, Wenwu Ou, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Recommendation Systems

As Recommender Systems (RS) influence more and more people in their daily life, the issue of fairness in recommendation is becoming more and more important. Most of the prior approaches to fairness-aware recommendation have been situated in a static or one-shot setting, where the protected groups of items are fixed, and the model provides a one-time fairness solution based on fairness-constrained optimization. This fails to consider the dynamic nature of the recommender systems, where attributes such as item popularity may change over time due to the recommendation policy and user engagement. For example, products that were once popular may become no longer popular, and vice versa. As a result, the system that aims to maintain long-term fairness on the item exposure in different popularity groups must accommodate this change in a timely fashion. Novel to this work, we explore the problem of long-term fairness in recommendation and accomplish the problem through dynamic fairness learning. We focus on the fairness of exposure of items in different groups, while the division of the groups is based on item popularity, which dynamically changes over time in the recommendation process. We tackle this problem by proposing a fairness-constrained reinforcement learning algorithm for recommendation, which models the recommendation problem as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), so that the model can dynamically adjust its recommendation policy to make sure the fairness requirement is always satisfied when the environment changes. Experiments on several real-world datasets verify our framework's superiority in terms of recommendation performance, short-term fairness, and long-term fairness.
Accuracy and Architecture Studies of Residual Neural Network solving Ordinary Differential Equations
Authors: Changxin Qiu, Aaron Bendickson, Joshua Kalyanapu, Jue Yan
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00

In this paper we consider utilizing a residual neural network (ResNet) to solve ordinary differential equations. Stochastic gradient descent method is applied to obtain the optimal parameter set of weights and biases of the network. We apply forward Euler, Runge-Kutta2 and Runge-Kutta4 finite difference methods to generate three sets of targets training the ResNet and carry out the target study. The well trained ResNet behaves just as its counterpart of the corresponding one-step finite difference method. In particular, we carry out (1) the architecture study in terms of number of hidden layers and neurons per layer to find the optimal ResNet structure; (2) the target study to verify the ResNet solver behaves as accurate as its finite difference method counterpart; (3) solution trajectory simulation. Even the ResNet solver looks like and is implemented in a way similar to forward Euler scheme, its accuracy can be as high as any one step method. A sequence of numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of the ResNet solver.
Curvature-based Feature Selection with Application in Classifying Electronic Health Records
Authors: Zheming Zuo, Jie Li, Han Xu, Noura Al Moubayed
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Breast Cancer Detection, Breast Tissue Identification, Cervical cancer biopsy identification, Diabetic Retinopathy Detection, Dimensionality Reduction, feature selection

Disruptive technologies provides unparalleled opportunities to contribute to the identifications of many aspects in pervasive healthcare, from the adoption of the Internet of Things through to Machine Learning (ML) techniques. As a powerful tool, ML has been widely applied in patient-centric healthcare solutions. To further improve the quality of patient care, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are commonly adopted in healthcare facilities for analysis. It is a crucial task to apply AI and ML to analyse those EHRs for prediction and diagnostics due to their highly unstructured, unbalanced, incomplete, and high-dimensional nature. Dimensionality reduction is a common data preprocessing technique to cope with high-dimensional EHR data, which aims to reduce the number of features of EHR representation while improving the performance of the subsequent data analysis, e.g. classification. In this work, an efficient filter-based feature selection method, namely Curvature-based Feature Selection (CFS), is presented. The proposed CFS applied the concept of Menger Curvature to rank the weights of all features in the given data set. The performance of the proposed CFS has been evaluated in four well-known EHR data sets, including Cervical Cancer Risk Factors (CCRFDS), Breast Cancer Coimbra (BCCDS), Breast Tissue (BTDS), and Diabetic Retinopathy Debrecen (DRDDS). The experimental results show that the proposed CFS achieved state-of-the-art performance on the above data sets against conventional PCA and other most recent approaches. The source code of the proposed approach is publicly available at https://github.com/zhemingzuo/CFS.
Stabilized Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation
Authors: Tristan Cazenave, Jean-Baptiste Sevestre, Matthieu Toulemont
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00

Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation (NRPA) is a Monte Carlo search algorithm for single player games. In this paper we propose to modify NRPA in order to improve the stability of the algorithm. Experiments show it improves the algorithm for different application domains: SameGame, Traveling Salesman with Time Windows and Expression Discovery.
Learning from Satisfying Assignments Using Risk Minimization
Authors: Manjish Pal. Subham Pokhriyal
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

In this paper we consider the problem of Learning from Satisfying Assignments introduced by \cite{1} of finding a distribution that is a close approximation to the uniform distribution over the satisfying assignments of a low complexity Boolean function $f$. In a later work \cite{2} consider the same problem but with the knowledge of some continuous distribution $D$ and the objective being to estimate $D_f$, which is $D$ restricted to the satisfying assignments of an unknown Boolean function $f$. We consider these problems from the point of view of parameter estimation techniques in statistical machine learning and prove similar results that are based on standard optimization algorithms for Risk Minimization.
Summaformers @ LaySumm 20, LongSumm 20
Authors: Sayar Ghosh Roy, Nikhil Pinnaparaju, Risubh Jain, Manish Gupta, Vasudeva Varma
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Feature Engineering, Text Summarization

Automatic text summarization has been widely studied as an important task in natural language processing. Traditionally, various feature engineering and machine learning based systems have been proposed for extractive as well as abstractive text summarization. Recently, deep learning based, specifically Transformer-based systems have been immensely popular. Summarization is a cognitively challenging task - extracting summary worthy sentences is laborious, and expressing semantics in brief when doing abstractive summarization is complicated. In this paper, we specifically look at the problem of summarizing scientific research papers from multiple domains. We differentiate between two types of summaries, namely, (a) LaySumm: A very short summary that captures the essence of the research paper in layman terms restricting overtly specific technical jargon and (b) LongSumm: A much longer detailed summary aimed at providing specific insights into various ideas touched upon in the paper. While leveraging latest Transformer-based models, our systems are simple, intuitive and based on how specific paper sections contribute to human summaries of the two types described above. Evaluations against gold standard summaries using ROUGE metrics prove the effectiveness of our approach. On blind test corpora, our system ranks first and third for the LongSumm and LaySumm tasks respectively.
PowerEvaluationBALD: Efficient Evaluation-Oriented Deep (Bayesian) Active Learning with Stochastic Acquisition Functions
Authors: Andreas Kirsch, Yarin Gal
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

We develop BatchEvaluationBALD, a new acquisition function for deep Bayesian active learning, as an expansion of BatchBALD that takes into account an evaluation set of unlabeled data, for example, the pool set. We also develop a variant for the non-Bayesian setting, which we call Evaluation Information Gain. To reduce computational requirements and allow these methods to scale to larger acquisition batch sizes, we introduce stochastic acquisition functions that use importance sampling of tempered acquisition scores. We call this method PowerEvaluationBALD. We show in a few initial experiments that PowerEvaluationBALD works on par with BatchEvaluationBALD, which outperforms BatchBALD on Repeated MNIST (MNISTx2), while massively reducing the computational requirements compared to BatchBALD or BatchEvaluationBALD.