pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pairwise Supervised Hashing with Bernoulli Variational Auto-Encoder and Self-Control Gradient Estimator
Authors: Siamak Zamani Dadaneh, Shahin Boluki, Mingzhang Yin, Mingyuan Zhou, Xiaoning Qian
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Semantic hashing has become a crucial component of fast similarity search in many large-scale information retrieval systems, in particular, for text data. Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) with binary latent variables as hashing codes provide state-of-the-art performance in terms of precision for document retrieval. We propose a pairwise loss function with discrete latent VAE to reward within-class similarity and between-class dissimilarity for supervised hashing. Instead of solving the optimization relying on existing biased gradient estimators, an unbiased low-variance gradient estimator is adopted to optimize the hashing function by evaluating the non-differentiable loss function over two correlated sets of binary hashing codes to control the variance of gradient estimates. This new semantic hashing framework achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-arts, as demonstrated by our comprehensive experiments.
Transfer Learning via Contextual Invariants for One-to-Many Cross-Domain Recommendation
Authors: Adit Krishnan, Mahashweta Das, Mangesh Bendre, Hao Yang, Hari Sundaram
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems, Transfer Learning

The rapid proliferation of new users and items on the social web has aggravated the gray-sheep user/long-tail item challenge in recommender systems. Historically, cross-domain co-clustering methods have successfully leveraged shared users and items across dense and sparse domains to improve inference quality. However, they rely on shared rating data and cannot scale to multiple sparse target domains (i.e., the one-to-many transfer setting). This, combined with the increasing adoption of neural recommender architectures, motivates us to develop scalable neural layer-transfer approaches for cross-domain learning. Our key intuition is to guide neural collaborative filtering with domain-invariant components shared across the dense and sparse domains, improving the user and item representations learned in the sparse domains. We leverage contextual invariances across domains to develop these shared modules, and demonstrate that with user-item interaction context, we can learn-to-learn informative representation spaces even with sparse interaction data. We show the effectiveness and scalability of our approach on two public datasets and a massive transaction dataset from Visa, a global payments technology company (19% Item Recall, 3x faster vs. training separate models for each domain). Our approach is applicable to both implicit and explicit feedback settings.
Multistream CNN for Robust Acoustic Modeling
Authors: Kyu J. Han, Jing Pan, Venkata Krishna Naveen Tadala, Tao Ma, Dan Povey
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper proposes multistream CNN, a novel neural network architecture for robust acoustic modeling in speech recognition tasks. The proposed architecture processes input speech with diverse temporal resolutions by applying different dilation rates to convolutional neural networks across multiple streams to achieve the robustness. The dilation rates are selected from the multiples of a sub-sampling rate of 3 frames. Each stream stacks TDNN-F layers (a variant of 1D CNN), and output embedding vectors from the streams are concatenated then projected to the final layer. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed multistream CNN architecture by showing consistent improvements against Kaldi's best TDNN-F model across various data sets. Multistream CNN improves the WER of the test-other set in the LibriSpeech corpus by 12% (relative). On custom data from ASAPP's production ASR system for a contact center, it records a relative WER improvement of 11% for customer channel audio to prove its robustness to data in the wild. In terms of real-time factor, multistream CNN outperforms the baseline TDNN-F by 15%, which also suggests its practicality on production systems. When combined with self-attentive SRU LM rescoring, multistream CNN contributes for ASAPP to achieve the best WER of 1.75% on test-clean in LibriSpeech.
ASAPP-ASR: Multistream CNN and Self-Attentive SRU for SOTA Speech Recognition
Authors: Jing Pan, Joshua Shapiro, Jeremy Wohlwend, Kyu J. Han, Tao Lei, Tao Ma
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In this paper we present state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the LibriSpeech corpus with two novel neural network architectures, a multistream CNN for acoustic modeling and a self-attentive simple recurrent unit (SRU) for language modeling. In the hybrid ASR framework, the multistream CNN acoustic model processes an input of speech frames in multiple parallel pipelines where each stream has a unique dilation rate for diversity. Trained with the SpecAugment data augmentation method, it achieves relative word error rate (WER) improvements of 4% on test-clean and 14% on test-other. We further improve the performance via N-best rescoring using a 24-layer self-attentive SRU language model, achieving WERs of 1.75% on test-clean and 4.46% on test-other.
Fluent Response Generation for Conversational Question Answering
Authors: Ashutosh Baheti, Alan Ritter, Kevin Small
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Data Augmentation, Question Answering, Response Generation, STS, Text Generation

Question answering (QA) is an important aspect of open-domain conversational agents, garnering specific research focus in the conversational QA (ConvQA) subtask. One notable limitation of recent ConvQA efforts is the response being answer span extraction from the target corpus, thus ignoring the natural language generation (NLG) aspect of high-quality conversational agents. In this work, we propose a method for situating QA responses within a SEQ2SEQ NLG approach to generate fluent grammatical answer responses while maintaining correctness. From a technical perspective, we use data augmentation to generate training data for an end-to-end system. Specifically, we develop Syntactic Transformations (STs) to produce question-specific candidate answer responses and rank them using a BERT-based classifier (Devlin et al., 2019). Human evaluation on SQuAD 2.0 data (Rajpurkar et al., 2018) demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms baseline CoQA and QuAC models in generating conversational responses. We further show our model's scalability by conducting tests on the CoQA dataset. The code and data are available at https://github.com/abaheti95/QADialogSystem.
Simplified Self-Attention for Transformer-based End-to-End Speech Recognition
Authors: Haoneng Luo, Shiliang Zhang, Ming Lei, Lei Xie
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Transformer models have been introduced into end-to-end speech recognition with state-of-the-art performance on various tasks owing to their superiority in modeling long-term dependencies. However, such improvements are usually obtained through the use of very large neural networks. Transformer models mainly include two submodules - position-wise feedforward layers and self-attention (SAN) layers. In this paper, to reduce the model complexity while maintaining good performance, we propose a simplified self-attention (SSAN) layer which employs FSMN memory block instead of projection layers to form query and key vectors for transformer-based end-to-end speech recognition. We evaluate the SSAN-based and the conventional SAN-based transformers on the public AISHELL-1, internal 1000-hour and 20,000-hour large-scale Mandarin tasks. Results show that our proposed SSAN-based transformer model can achieve over 20% relative reduction in model parameters and 6.7% relative CER reduction on the AISHELL-1 task. With impressively 20% parameter reduction, our model shows no loss of recognition performance on the 20,000-hour large-scale task.
Single Image Super-Resolution via Residual Neuron Attention Networks
Authors: Wenjie Ai, Xiaoguang Tu, Shilei Cheng, Mei Xie
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have achieved impressive performance in Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). To further improve the performance, existing CNN-based methods generally focus on designing deeper architecture of the network. However, we argue blindly increasing network's depth is not the most sensible way. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end Residual Neuron Attention Networks (RNAN) for more efficient and effective SISR. Structurally, our RNAN is a sequential integration of the well-designed Global Context-enhanced Residual Groups (GCRGs), which extracts super-resolved features from coarse to fine. Our GCRG is designed with two novelties. Firstly, the Residual Neuron Attention (RNA) mechanism is proposed in each block of GCRG to reveal the relevance of neurons for better feature representation. Furthermore, the Global Context (GC) block is embedded into RNAN at the end of each GCRG for effectively modeling the global contextual information. Experiments results demonstrate that our RNAN achieves the comparable results with state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality, however, with simplified network architecture.
Symptom extraction from the narratives of personal experiences with COVID-19 on Reddit
Authors: Curtis Murray, Lewis Mitchell, Jonathan Tuke, Mark Mackay
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Social media discussion of COVID-19 provides a rich source of information into how the virus affects people's lives that is qualitatively different from traditional public health datasets. In particular, when individuals self-report their experiences over the course of the virus on social media, it can allow for identification of the emotions each stage of symptoms engenders in the patient. Posts to the Reddit forum r/COVID19Positive contain first-hand accounts from COVID-19 positive patients, giving insight into personal struggles with the virus. These posts often feature a temporal structure indicating the number of days after developing symptoms the text refers to. Using topic modelling and sentiment analysis, we quantify the change in discussion of COVID-19 throughout individuals' experiences for the first 14 days since symptom onset. Discourse on early symptoms such as fever, cough, and sore throat was concentrated towards the beginning of the posts, while language indicating breathing issues peaked around ten days. Some conversation around critical cases was also identified and appeared at a roughly constant rate. We identified two clear clusters of positive and negative emotions associated with the evolution of these symptoms and mapped their relationships. Our results provide a perspective on the patient experience of COVID-19 that complements other medical data streams and can potentially reveal when mental health issues might appear.
CPOT: Channel Pruning via Optimal Transport
Authors: Yucong Shen, Li Shen, Hao-Zhi Huang, Xuan Wang, Wei Liu
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) lead to tremendously growing network parameters, making the deployments of DNNs on platforms with limited resources extremely difficult. Therefore, various pruning methods have been developed to compress the deep network architectures and accelerate the inference process. Most of the existing channel pruning methods discard the less important filters according to well-designed filter ranking criteria. However, due to the limited interpretability of deep learning models, designing an appropriate ranking criterion to distinguish redundant filters is difficult. To address such a challenging issue, we propose a new technique of Channel Pruning via Optimal Transport, dubbed CPOT. Specifically, we locate the Wasserstein barycenter for channels of each layer in the deep models, which is the mean of a set of probability distributions under the optimal transport metric. Then, we prune the redundant information located by Wasserstein barycenters. At last, we empirically demonstrate that, for classification tasks, CPOT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on pruning ResNet-20, ResNet-32, ResNet-56, and ResNet-110. Furthermore, we show that the proposed CPOT technique is good at compressing the StarGAN models by pruning in the more difficult case of image-to-image translation tasks.
MTSS: Learn from Multiple Domain Teachers and Become a Multi-domain Dialogue Expert
Authors: Shuke Peng, Feng Ji, Zehao Lin, Shaobo Cui, Haiqing Chen, Yin Zhang
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00

How to build a high-quality multi-domain dialogue system is a challenging work due to its complicated and entangled dialogue state space among each domain, which seriously limits the quality of dialogue policy, and further affects the generated response. In this paper, we propose a novel method to acquire a satisfying policy and subtly circumvent the knotty dialogue state representation problem in the multi-domain setting. Inspired by real school teaching scenarios, our method is composed of multiple domain-specific teachers and a universal student. Each individual teacher only focuses on one specific domain and learns its corresponding domain knowledge and dialogue policy based on a precisely extracted single domain dialogue state representation. Then, these domain-specific teachers impart their domain knowledge and policies to a universal student model and collectively make this student model a multi-domain dialogue expert. Experiment results show that our method reaches competitive results with SOTAs in both multi-domain and single domain setting.
Unsupposable Test-data Generation for Machine-learned Software
Authors: Naoto Sato, Hironobu Kuruma, Hideto Ogawa
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

As for software development by machine learning, a trained model is evaluated by using part of an existing dataset as test data. However, if data with characteristics that differ from the existing data is input, the model does not always behave as expected. Accordingly, to confirm the behavior of the model more strictly, it is necessary to create data that differs from the existing data and test the model with that different data. The data to be tested includes not only data that developers can suppose (supposable data) but also data they cannot suppose (unsupposable data). To confirm the behavior of the model strictly, it is important to create as much unsupposable data as possible. In this study, therefore, a method called "unsupposable test-data generation" (UTG)---for giving suggestions for unsupposable data to model developers and testers---is proposed. UTG uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) to generate unsupposable data. The unsupposable data is generated by acquiring latent values with low occurrence probability in the prior distribution of the VAE and inputting the acquired latent values into the decoder. If unsupposable data is included in the data generated by the decoder, the developer can recognize new unsupposable features by referring to the data. On the basis of those unsupposable features, the developer will be able to create other unsupposable data with the same features. The proposed UTG was applied to the MNIST dataset and the House Sales Price dataset. The results demonstrate the feasibility of UTG.
Cross-lingual Multispeaker Text-to-Speech under Limited-Data Scenario
Authors: Zexin Cai, Yaogen Yang, Ming Li
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Modeling voices for multiple speakers and multiple languages in one text-to-speech system has been a challenge for a long time. This paper presents an extension on Tacotron2 to achieve bilingual multispeaker speech synthesis when there are limited data for each language. We achieve cross-lingual synthesis, including code-switching cases, between English and Mandarin for monolingual speakers. The two languages share the same phonemic representations for input, while the language attribute and the speaker identity are independently controlled by language tokens and speaker embeddings, respectively. In addition, we investigate the model's performance on the cross-lingual synthesis, with and without a bilingual dataset during training. With the bilingual dataset, not only can the model generate high-fidelity speech for all speakers concerning the language they speak, but also can generate accented, yet fluent and intelligible speech for monolingual speakers regarding non-native language. For example, the Mandarin speaker can speak English fluently. Furthermore, the model trained with bilingual dataset is robust for code-switching text-to-speech, as shown in our results and provided samples.{https://caizexin.github.io/mlms-syn-samples/index.html}.
HF-UNet: Learning Hierarchically Inter-Task Relevance in Multi-Task U-Net for Accurate Prostate Segmentation
Authors: Kelei He, Chunfeng Lian, Bing Zhang, Xin Zhang, Xiaohuan Cao, Dong Nie, Yang Gao, Junfeng Zhang, Dinggang Shen
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of the prostate is a key step in external beam radiation therapy treatments. In this paper, we tackle the challenging task of prostate segmentation in CT images by a two-stage network with 1) the first stage to fast localize, and 2) the second stage to accurately segment the prostate. To precisely segment the prostate in the second stage, we formulate prostate segmentation into a multi-task learning framework, which includes a main task to segment the prostate, and an auxiliary task to delineate the prostate boundary. Here, the second task is applied to provide additional guidance of unclear prostate boundary in CT images. Besides, the conventional multi-task deep networks typically share most of the parameters (i.e., feature representations) across all tasks, which may limit their data fitting ability, as the specificities of different tasks are inevitably ignored. By contrast, we solve them by a hierarchically-fused U-Net structure, namely HF-UNet. The HF-UNet has two complementary branches for two tasks, with the novel proposed attention-based task consistency learning block to communicate at each level between the two decoding branches. Therefore, HF-UNet endows the ability to learn hierarchically the shared representations for different tasks, and preserve the specificities of learned representations for different tasks simultaneously. We did extensive evaluations of the proposed method on a large planning CT image dataset, including images acquired from 339 patients. The experimental results show HF-UNet outperforms the conventional multi-task network architectures and the state-of-the-art methods.
Optimal Distributed Subsampling for Maximum Quasi-Likelihood Estimators with Massive Data
Authors: Jun Yu, HaiYing Wang, Mingyao Ai, Huiming Zhang
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Nonuniform subsampling methods are effective to reduce computational burden and maintain estimation efficiency for massive data. Existing methods mostly focus on subsampling with replacement due to its high computational efficiency. If the data volume is so large that nonuniform subsampling probabilities cannot be calculated all at once, then subsampling with replacement is infeasible to implement. This paper solves this problem using Poisson subsampling. We first derive optimal Poisson subsampling probabilities in the context of quasi-likelihood estimation under the A- and L-optimality criteria. For a practically implementable algorithm with approximated optimal subsampling probabilities, we establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of the resultant estimators. To deal with the situation that the full data are stored in different blocks or at multiple locations, we develop a distributed subsampling framework, in which statistics are computed simultaneously on smaller partitions of the full data. Asymptotic properties of the resultant aggregated estimator are investigated. We illustrate and evaluate the proposed strategies through numerical experiments on simulated and real data sets.
Deep Learning-Based Automated Image Segmentation for Concrete Petrographic Analysis
Authors: Yu Song, Zilong Huang, Chuanyue Shen, Humphrey Shi, David A Lange
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The standard petrography test method for measuring air voids in concrete (ASTM C457) requires a meticulous and long examination of sample phase composition under a stereomicroscope. The high expertise and specialized equipment discourage this test for routine concrete quality control. Though the task can be alleviated with the aid of color-based image segmentation, additional surface color treatment is required. Recently, deep learning algorithms using convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved unprecedented segmentation performance on image testing benchmarks. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of using CNN to conduct concrete segmentation without the use of color treatment. The CNN demonstrated a strong potential to process a wide range of concretes, including those not involved in model training. The experimental results showed that CNN outperforms the color-based segmentation by a considerable margin, and has comparable accuracy to human experts. Furthermore, the segmentation time is reduced to mere seconds.
Text-to-Text Pre-Training for Data-to-Text Tasks
Authors: Mihir Kale, Abhinav Rastogi
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: INLG (ACL) 2020 12
Tasks: Data-to-Text Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation, Transfer Learning

We study the pre-train + fine-tune strategy for data-to-text tasks. Our experiments indicate that text-to-text pre-training in the form of T5, enables simple, end-to-end transformer based models to outperform pipelined neural architectures tailored for data-to-text generation, as well as alternative language model based pre-training techniques such as BERT and GPT-2. Importantly, T5 pre-training leads to better generalization, as evidenced by large improvements on out-of-domain test sets. We hope our work serves as a useful baseline for future research, as transfer learning becomes ever more prevalent for data-to-text tasks.
Gender Slopes: Counterfactual Fairness for Computer Vision Models by Attribute Manipulation
Authors: Jungseock Joo, Kimmo Kärkkäinen
Date: 2020-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, counterfactual, Decoder, Fairness

Automated computer vision systems have been applied in many domains including security, law enforcement, and personal devices, but recent reports suggest that these systems may produce biased results, discriminating against people in certain demographic groups. Diagnosing and understanding the underlying true causes of model biases, however, are challenging tasks because modern computer vision systems rely on complex black-box models whose behaviors are hard to decode. We propose to use an encoder-decoder network developed for image attribute manipulation to synthesize facial images varying in the dimensions of gender and race while keeping other signals intact. We use these synthesized images to measure counterfactual fairness of commercial computer vision classifiers by examining the degree to which these classifiers are affected by gender and racial cues controlled in the images, e.g., feminine faces may elicit higher scores for the concept of nurse and lower scores for STEM-related concepts. We also report the skewed gender representations in an online search service on profession-related keywords, which may explain the origin of the biases encoded in the models.