pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Accounting for Human Learning when Inferring Human Preferences
Authors: Harry Giles, Lawrence Chan
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a common technique for inferring human preferences from data. Standard IRL techniques tend to assume that the human demonstrator is stationary, that is that their policy $\pi$ doesn't change over time. In practice, humans interacting with a novel environment or performing well on a novel task will change their demonstrations as they learn more about the environment or task. We investigate the consequences of relaxing this assumption of stationarity, in particular by modelling the human as learning. Surprisingly, we find in some small examples that this can lead to better inference than if the human was stationary. That is, by observing a demonstrator who is themselves learning, a machine can infer more than by observing a demonstrator who is noisily rational. In addition, we find evidence that misspecification can lead to poor inference, suggesting that modelling human learning is important, especially when the human is facing an unfamiliar environment.
WaDeNet: Wavelet Decomposition based CNN for Speech Processing
Authors: Prithvi Suresh, Abhijith Ragav
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Modelling, Emotion Recognition

Existing speech processing systems consist of different modules, individually optimized for a specific task such as acoustic modelling or feature extraction. In addition to not assuring optimality of the system, the disjoint nature of current speech processing systems make them unsuitable for ubiquitous health applications. We propose WaDeNet, an end-to-end model for mobile speech processing. In order to incorporate spectral features, WaDeNet embeds wavelet decomposition of the speech signal within the architecture. This allows WaDeNet to learn from spectral features in an end-to-end manner, thus alleviating the need for feature extraction and successive modules that are currently present in speech processing systems. WaDeNet outperforms the current state of the art in datasets that involve speech for mobile health applications such as non-invasive emotion recognition. WaDeNet achieves an average increase in accuracy of 6.36% when compared to the existing state of the art models. Additionally, WaDeNet is considerably lighter than a simple CNNs with a similar architecture.
Deep Time Delay Neural Network for Speech Enhancement with Full Data Learning
Authors: Cunhang Fan, Bin Liu, JianHua Tao, Jiangyan Yi, Zhengqi Wen, Leichao Song
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown significant improvements in recent years for speech enhancement. However, the model complexity and inference time cost of RNNs are much higher than deep feed-forward neural networks (DNNs). Therefore, these limit the applications of speech enhancement. This paper proposes a deep time delay neural network (TDNN) for speech enhancement with full data learning. The TDNN has excellent potential for capturing long range temporal contexts, which utilizes a modular and incremental design. Besides, the TDNN preserves the feed-forward structure so that its inference cost is comparable to standard DNN. To make full use of the training data, we propose a full data learning method for speech enhancement. More specifically, we not only use the noisy-to-clean (input-to-target) to train the enhanced model, but also the clean-to-clean and noise-to-silence data. Therefore, all of the training data can be used to train the enhanced model. Our experiments are conducted on TIMIT dataset. Experimental results show that our proposed method could achieve a better performance than DNN and comparable even better performance than BLSTM. Meanwhile, compared with the BLSTM, the proposed method drastically reduce the inference time.
Deep Neural Networks and Neuro-Fuzzy Networks for Intellectual Analysis of Economic Systems
Authors: Alexey Averkin, Sergey Yarushev
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

In tis paper we consider approaches for time series forecasting based on deep neural networks and neuro-fuzzy nets. Also, we make short review of researches in forecasting based on various models of ANFIS models. Deep Learning has proven to be an effective method for making highly accurate predictions from complex data sources. Also, we propose our models of DL and Neuro-Fuzzy Networks for this task. Finally, we show possibility of using these models for data science tasks. This paper presents also an overview of approaches for incorporating rule-based methodology into deep learning neural networks.
Strict Enforcement of Conservation Laws and Invertibility in CNN-Based Super Resolution for Scientific Datasets
Authors: Andrew Geiss, Joseph C. Hardin
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recently, deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have revolutionized image super-resolution (SR), dramatically outperforming past methods for enhancing image resolution. They could be a boon for the many scientific fields that involve image or gridded datasets: satellite remote sensing, radar meteorology, medical imaging, numerical modeling etc. Unfortunately, while SR-CNNs produce visually compelling outputs, they may break physical conservation laws when applied to scientific datasets. Here, a method for ``Downsampling Enforcement" in SR-CNNs is proposed. A differentiable operator is derived that, when applied as the final transfer function of a CNN, ensures the high resolution outputs exactly reproduce the low resolution inputs under 2D-average downsampling while improving performance of the SR schemes. The method is demonstrated across seven modern CNN-based SR schemes on several benchmark image datasets, and applications to weather radar, satellite imager, and climate model data are also shown. The approach improves training time and performance while ensuring physical consistency between the super-resolved and low resolution data.
Recognizing More Emotions with Less Data Using Self-supervised Transfer Learning
Authors: Jonathan Boigne, Biman Liyanage, Ted Östrem
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition, Transfer Learning

We propose a novel transfer learning method for speech emotion recognition allowing us to obtain promising results when only few training data is available. With as low as 125 examples per emotion class, we were able to reach a higher accuracy than a strong baseline trained on 8 times more data. Our method leverages knowledge contained in pre-trained speech representations extracted from models trained on a more general self-supervised task which doesn't require human annotations, such as the wav2vec model. We provide detailed insights on the benefits of our approach by varying the training data size, which can help labeling teams to work more efficiently. We compare performance with other popular methods on the IEMOCAP dataset, a well-benchmarked dataset among the Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) research community. Furthermore, we demonstrate that results can be greatly improved by combining acoustic and linguistic knowledge from transfer learning. We align acoustic pre-trained representations with semantic representations from the BERT model through an attention-based recurrent neural network. Performance improves significantly when combining both modalities and scales with the amount of data. When trained on the full IEMOCAP dataset, we reach a new state-of-the-art of 73.9% unweighted accuracy (UA).
Toward Scalable and Unified Example-based Explanation and Outlier Detection
Authors: Penny Chong, Ngai-Man Cheung, Yuval Elovici, Alexander Binder
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Outlier Detection

When neural networks are employed for high-stakes decision-making, it is desirable that they provide explanations for their prediction in order for us to understand the features that have contributed to the decision. At the same time, it is important to flag potential outliers for in-depth verification by domain experts. In this work we propose to unify two differing aspects of explainability with outlier detection. We argue for a broader adoption of prototype-based student networks capable of providing an example-based explanation for their prediction and at the same time identify regions of similarity between the predicted sample and the examples. The examples are real prototypical cases sampled from the training set via our novel iterative prototype replacement algorithm. Furthermore, we propose to use the prototype similarity scores for identifying outliers. We compare performances in terms of the classification, explanation quality, and outlier detection of our proposed network with other baselines. We show that our prototype-based networks beyond similarity kernels deliver meaningful explanations and promising outlier detection results without compromising classification accuracy.
Intentonomy: a Dataset and Study towards Human Intent Understanding
Authors: Menglin Jia, Zuxuan Wu, Austin Reiter, Claire Cardie, Serge Belongie, Ser-Nam Lim
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

An image is worth a thousand words, conveying information that goes beyond the physical visual content therein. In this paper, we study the intent behind social media images with an aim to analyze how visual information can help the recognition of human intent. Towards this goal, we introduce an intent dataset, Intentonomy, comprising 14K images covering a wide range of everyday scenes. These images are manually annotated with 28 intent categories that are derived from a social psychology taxonomy. We then systematically study whether, and to what extent, commonly used visual information, i.e., object and context, contribute to human motive understanding. Based on our findings, we conduct further study to quantify the effect of attending to object and context classes as well as textual information in the form of hashtags when training an intent classifier. Our results quantitatively and qualitatively shed light on how visual and textual information can produce observable effects when predicting intent.
TERMCast: Temporal Relation Modeling for Effective Urban Flow Forecasting
Authors: Hao Xue, Flora D Salim
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Relation, Relation Prediction

Urban flow forecasting is a challenging task, given the inherent periodic characteristics of urban flow patterns. To capture the periodicity, existing urban flow prediction approaches are often designed with closeness, period, and trend components extracted from the urban flow sequence. However, these three components are often considered separately in the prediction model. These components have not been fully explored together and simultaneously incorporated in urban flow forecasting models. We introduce a novel urban flow forecasting architecture, TERMCast. A Transformer based long-term relation prediction module is explicitly designed to discover the periodicity and enable the three components to be jointly modeled This module predicts the periodic relation which is then used to yield the predicted urban flow tensor. To measure the consistency of the predicted periodic relation vector and the relation vector inferred from the predicted urban flow tensor, we propose a consistency module. A consistency loss is introduced in the training process to further improve the prediction performance. Through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, we demonstrate that TERMCast outperforms multiple state-of-the-art methods. The effectiveness of each module in TERMCast has also been investigated.
End-to-End Chinese Landscape Painting Creation Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Alice Xue
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Chinese Landscape Painting Generation, Translation

Current GAN-based art generation methods produce unoriginal artwork due to their dependence on conditional input. Here, we propose Sketch-And-Paint GAN (SAPGAN), the first model which generates Chinese landscape paintings from end to end, without conditional input. SAPGAN is composed of two GANs: SketchGAN for generation of edge maps, and PaintGAN for subsequent edge-to-painting translation. Our model is trained on a new dataset of traditional Chinese landscape paintings never before used for generative research. A 242-person Visual Turing Test study reveals that SAPGAN paintings are mistaken as human artwork with 55% frequency, significantly outperforming paintings from baseline GANs. Our work lays a groundwork for truly machine-original art generation.
NIT COVID-19 at WNUT-2020 Task 2: Deep Learning Model RoBERTa for Identify Informative COVID-19 English Tweets
Authors: Jagadeesh M S, Alphonse P J A
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Task 2

This paper presents the model submitted by the NIT_COVID-19 team for identified informative COVID-19 English tweets at WNUT-2020 Task2. This shared task addresses the problem of automatically identifying whether an English tweet related to informative (novel coronavirus) or not. These informative tweets provide information about recovered, confirmed, suspected, and death cases as well as the location or travel history of the cases. The proposed approach includes pre-processing techniques and pre-trained RoBERTa with suitable hyperparameters for English coronavirus tweet classification. The performance achieved by the proposed model for shared task WNUT 2020 Task2 is 89.14% in the F1-score metric.
Identifying Properties of Real-World Optimisation Problems through a Questionnaire
Authors: Koen van der Blom, Timo M. Deist, Vanessa Volz, Mariapia Marchi, Yusuke Nojima, Boris Naujoks, Akira Oyama, Tea Tušar
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00

Optimisation algorithms are commonly compared on benchmarks to get insight into performance differences. However, it is not clear how closely benchmarks match the properties of real-world problems because these properties are largely unknown. This work investigates the properties of real-world problems through a questionnaire to enable the design of future benchmark problems that more closely resemble those found in the real world. The results, while not representative as they are based on only 45 responses, indicate that many problems possess at least one of the following properties: they are constrained, deterministic, have only continuous variables, require substantial computation times for both the objectives and the constraints, or allow a limited number of evaluations. Properties like known optimal solutions and analytical gradients are rarely available, limiting the options in guiding the optimisation process. These are all important aspects to consider when designing realistic benchmark problems. At the same time, the design of realistic benchmarks is difficult, because objective functions are often reported to be black-box and many problem properties are unknown. To further improve the understanding of real-world problems, readers working on a real-world optimisation problem are encouraged to fill out the questionnaire: https://tinyurl.com/opt-survey
E-commerce Query-based Generation based on User Review
Authors: Yiren Liu, Kuan-Ying Lee
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

With the increasing number of merchandise on e-commerce platforms, users tend to refer to reviews of other shoppers to decide which product they should buy. However, with so many reviews of a product, users often have to spend lots of time browsing through reviews talking about product attributes they do not care about. We want to establish a system that can automatically summarize and answer user's product specific questions. In this study, we propose a novel seq2seq based text generation model to generate answers to user's question based on reviews posted by previous users. Given a user question and/or target sentiment polarity, we extract aspects of interest and generate an answer that summarizes previous relevant user reviews. Specifically, our model performs attention between input reviews and target aspects during encoding and is conditioned on both review rating and input context during decoding. We also incorporate a pre-trained auxiliary rating classifier to improve model performance and accelerate convergence during training. Experiments using real-world e-commerce dataset show that our model achieves improvement in performance compared to previously introduced models.
An ensemble-based approach by fine-tuning the deep transfer learning models to classify pneumonia from chest X-ray images
Authors: Sagar Kora Venu
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Pneumonia Detection, Respiratory Failure, Transfer Learning

Pneumonia is caused by viruses, bacteria, or fungi that infect the lungs, which, if not diagnosed, can be fatal and lead to respiratory failure. More than 250,000 individuals in the United States, mainly adults, are diagnosed with pneumonia each year, and 50,000 die from the disease. Chest Radiography (X-ray) is widely used by radiologists to detect pneumonia. It is not uncommon to overlook pneumonia detection for a well-trained radiologist, which triggers the need for improvement in the diagnosis's accuracy. In this work, we propose using transfer learning, which can reduce the neural network's training time and minimize the generalization error. We trained, fine-tuned the state-of-the-art deep learning models such as InceptionResNet, MobileNetV2, Xception, DenseNet201, and ResNet152V2 to classify pneumonia accurately. Later, we created a weighted average ensemble of these models and achieved a test accuracy of 98.46%, precision of 98.38%, recall of 99.53%, and f1 score of 98.96%. These performance metrics of accuracy, precision, and f1 score are at their highest levels ever reported in the literature, which can be considered a benchmark for the accurate pneumonia classification.
Differentially Private Synthetic Data: Applied Evaluations and Enhancements
Authors: Lucas Rosenblatt, Xiaoyan Liu, Samira Pouyanfar, Eduardo de Leon, Anuj Desai, Joshua Allen
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning practitioners frequently seek to leverage the most informative available data, without violating the data owner's privacy, when building predictive models. Differentially private data synthesis protects personal details from exposure, and allows for the training of differentially private machine learning models on privately generated datasets. But how can we effectively assess the efficacy of differentially private synthetic data? In this paper, we survey four differentially private generative adversarial networks for data synthesis. We evaluate each of them at scale on five standard tabular datasets, and in two applied industry scenarios. We benchmark with novel metrics from recent literature and other standard machine learning tools. Our results suggest some synthesizers are more applicable for different privacy budgets, and we further demonstrate complicating domain-based tradeoffs in selecting an approach. We offer experimental learning on applied machine learning scenarios with private internal data to researchers and practioners alike. In addition, we propose QUAIL, an ensemble-based modeling approach to generating synthetic data. We examine QUAIL's tradeoffs, and note circumstances in which it outperforms baseline differentially private supervised learning models under the same budget constraint.
Spoken Language Interaction with Robots: Research Issues and Recommendations, Report from the NSF Future Directions Workshop
Authors: Matthew Marge, Carol Espy-Wilson, Nigel Ward
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00

With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language interaction capabilities is still very limited. The National Science Foundation accordingly convened a workshop, bringing together speech, language, and robotics researchers to discuss what needs to be done. The result is this report, in which we identify key scientific and engineering advances needed. Our recommendations broadly relate to eight general themes. First, meeting human needs requires addressing new challenges in speech technology and user experience design. Second, this requires better models of the social and interactive aspects of language use. Third, for robustness, robots need higher-bandwidth communication with users and better handling of uncertainty, including simultaneous consideration of multiple hypotheses and goals. Fourth, more powerful adaptation methods are needed, to enable robots to communicate in new environments, for new tasks, and with diverse user populations, without extensive re-engineering or the collection of massive training data. Fifth, since robots are embodied, speech should function together with other communication modalities, such as gaze, gesture, posture, and motion. Sixth, since robots operate in complex environments, speech components need access to rich yet efficient representations of what the robot knows about objects, locations, noise sources, the user, and other humans. Seventh, since robots operate in real time, their speech and language processing components must also. Eighth, in addition to more research, we need more work on infrastructure and resources, including shareable software modules and internal interfaces, inexpensive hardware, baseline systems, and diverse corpora.
A Unified Framework for Compressive Video Recovery from Coded Exposure Techniques
Authors: Prasan Shedligeri, Anupama S, Kaushik Mitra
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00

Several coded exposure techniques have been proposed for acquiring high frame rate videos at low bandwidth. Most recently, a Coded-2-Bucket camera has been proposed that can acquire two compressed measurements in a single exposure, unlike previously proposed coded exposure techniques, which can acquire only a single measurement. Although two measurements are better than one for an effective video recovery, we are yet unaware of the clear advantage of two measurements, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Here, we propose a unified learning-based framework to make such a qualitative and quantitative comparison between those which capture only a single coded image (Flutter Shutter, Pixel-wise coded exposure) and those that capture two measurements per exposure (C2B). Our learning-based framework consists of a shift-variant convolutional layer followed by a fully convolutional deep neural network. Our proposed unified framework achieves the state of the art reconstructions in all three sensing techniques. Further analysis shows that when most scene points are static, the C2B sensor has a significant advantage over acquiring a single pixel-wise coded measurement. However, when most scene points undergo motion, the C2B sensor has only a marginal benefit over the single pixel-wise coded exposure measurement.