pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DiffWave: A Versatile Diffusion Model for Audio Synthesis
Authors: Zhifeng Kong, Wei Ping, Jiaji Huang, Kexin Zhao, Bryan Catanzaro
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Audio Synthesis, Diversity, model, Speech Synthesis

In this work, we propose DiffWave, a versatile diffusion probabilistic model for conditional and unconditional waveform generation. The model is non-autoregressive, and converts the white noise signal into structured waveform through a Markov chain with a constant number of steps at synthesis. It is efficiently trained by optimizing a variant of variational bound on the data likelihood. DiffWave produces high-fidelity audios in different waveform generation tasks, including neural vocoding conditioned on mel spectrogram, class-conditional generation, and unconditional generation. We demonstrate that DiffWave matches a strong WaveNet vocoder in terms of speech quality (MOS: 4.44 versus 4.43), while synthesizing orders of magnitude faster. In particular, it significantly outperforms autoregressive and GAN-based waveform models in the challenging unconditional generation task in terms of audio quality and sample diversity from various automatic and human evaluations.
Target Conditioning for One-to-Many Generation
Authors: Marie-Anne Lachaux, Armand Joulin, Guillaume Lample
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models often lack diversity in their generated translations, even when paired with search algorithm, like beam search. A challenge is that the diversity in translations are caused by the variability in the target language, and cannot be inferred from the source sentence alone. In this paper, we propose to explicitly model this one-to-many mapping by conditioning the decoder of a NMT model on a latent variable that represents the domain of target sentences. The domain is a discrete variable generated by a target encoder that is jointly trained with the NMT model. The predicted domain of target sentences are given as input to the decoder during training. At inference, we can generate diverse translations by decoding with different domains. Unlike our strongest baseline (Shen et al., 2019), our method can scale to any number of domains without affecting the performance or the training time. We assess the quality and diversity of translations generated by our model with several metrics, on three different datasets.
Demand Prediction Using Machine Learning Methods and Stacked Generalization
Authors: Resul Tugay, Sule Gunduz Oguducu
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Ensemble Learning

Supply and demand are two fundamental concepts of sellers and customers. Predicting demand accurately is critical for organizations in order to be able to make plans. In this paper, we propose a new approach for demand prediction on an e-commerce web site. The proposed model differs from earlier models in several ways. The business model used in the e-commerce web site, for which the model is implemented, includes many sellers that sell the same product at the same time at different prices where the company operates a market place model. The demand prediction for such a model should consider the price of the same product sold by competing sellers along the features of these sellers. In this study we first applied different regression algorithms for specific set of products of one department of a company that is one of the most popular online e-commerce companies in Turkey. Then we used stacked generalization or also known as stacking ensemble learning to predict demand. Finally, all the approaches are evaluated on a real world data set obtained from the e-commerce company. The experimental results show that some of the machine learning methods do produce almost as good results as the stacked generalization method.
A Deep Hybrid Model for Recommendation Systems
Authors: Muhammet cakir, sule gunduz oguducu, resul tugay
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Deep Learning, model, Recommendation Systems

Recommendation has been a long-standing problem in many areas ranging from e-commerce to social websites. Most current studies focus only on traditional approaches such as content-based or collaborative filtering while there are relatively fewer studies in hybrid recommender systems. Due to the latest advances of deep learning achieved in different fields including computer vision and natural language processing, deep learning has also gained much attention in Recommendation Systems. There are several studies that utilize ID embeddings of users and items to implement collaborative filtering with deep neural networks. However, such studies do not take advantage of other categorical or continuous features of inputs. In this paper, we propose a new deep neural network architecture which consists of not only ID embeddings but also auxiliary information such as features of job postings and candidates for job recommendation system which is a reciprocal recommendation system. Experimental results on the dataset from a job-site show that the proposed method improves recommendation results over deep learning models utilizing ID embeddings.
Multitask Pointer Network for Multi-Representational Parsing
Authors: Daniel Fernández-González, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

We propose a transition-based approach that, by training a single model, can efficiently parse any input sentence with both constituent and dependency trees, supporting both continuous/projective and discontinuous/non-projective syntactic structures. To that end, we develop a Pointer Network architecture with two separate task-specific decoders and a common encoder, and follow a multitask learning strategy to jointly train them. The resulting quadratic system, not only becomes the first parser that can jointly produce both unrestricted constituent and dependency trees from a single model, but also proves that both syntactic formalisms can benefit from each other during training, achieving state-of-the-art accuracies in several widely-used benchmarks such as the continuous English and Chinese Penn Treebanks, as well as the discontinuous German NEGRA and TIGER datasets.
Improving Automated COVID-19 Grading with Convolutional Neural Networks in Computed Tomography Scans: An Ablation Study
Authors: Coen de Vente, Luuk H. Boulogne, Kiran Vaidhya Venkadesh, Cheryl Sital, Nikolas Lessmann, Colin Jacobs, Clara I. Sánchez, Bram van Ginneken
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Transfer Learning

Amidst the ongoing pandemic, several studies have shown that COVID-19 classification and grading using computed tomography (CT) images can be automated with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Many of these studies focused on reporting initial results of algorithms that were assembled from commonly used components. The choice of these components was often pragmatic rather than systematic. For instance, several studies used 2D CNNs even though these might not be optimal for handling 3D CT volumes. This paper identifies a variety of components that increase the performance of CNN-based algorithms for COVID-19 grading from CT images. We investigated the effectiveness of using a 3D CNN instead of a 2D CNN, of using transfer learning to initialize the network, of providing automatically computed lesion maps as additional network input, and of predicting a continuous instead of a categorical output. A 3D CNN with these components achieved an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.934 on our test set of 105 CT scans and an AUC of 0.923 on a publicly available set of 742 CT scans, a substantial improvement in comparison with a previously published 2D CNN. An ablation study demonstrated that in addition to using a 3D CNN instead of a 2D CNN transfer learning contributed the most and continuous output contributed the least to improving the model performance.
Conditional Automated Channel Pruning for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Yixin Liu, Yong Guo, Zichang Liu, Haohua Liu, Jingjie Zhang, Zejun Chen, Jing Liu, Jian Chen
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression

Model compression aims to reduce the redundancy of deep networks to obtain compact models. Recently, channel pruning has become one of the predominant compression methods to deploy deep models on resource-constrained devices. Most channel pruning methods often use a fixed compression rate for all the layers of the model, which, however, may not be optimal. To address this issue, given a target compression rate for the whole model, one can search for the optimal compression rate for each layer. Nevertheless, these methods perform channel pruning for a specific target compression rate. When we consider multiple compression rates, they have to repeat the channel pruning process multiple times, which is very inefficient yet unnecessary. To address this issue, we propose a Conditional Automated Channel Pruning(CACP) method to obtain the compressed models with different compression rates through single channel pruning process. To this end, we develop a conditional model that takes an arbitrary compression rate as input and outputs the corresponding compressed model. In the experiments, the resultant models with different compression rates consistently outperform the models compressed by existing methods with a channel pruning process for each target compression rate.
Machine Guides, Human Supervises: Interactive Learning with Global Explanations
Authors: Teodora Popordanoska, Mohit Kumar, Stefano Teso
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00

We introduce explanatory guided learning (XGL), a novel interactive learning strategy in which a machine guides a human supervisor toward selecting informative examples for a classifier. The guidance is provided by means of global explanations, which summarize the classifier's behavior on different regions of the instance space and expose its flaws. Compared to other explanatory interactive learning strategies, which are machine-initiated and rely on local explanations, XGL is designed to be robust against cases in which the explanations supplied by the machine oversell the classifier's quality. Moreover, XGL leverages global explanations to open up the black-box of human-initiated interaction, enabling supervisors to select informative examples that challenge the learned model. By drawing a link to interactive machine teaching, we show theoretically that global explanations are a viable approach for guiding supervisors. Our simulations show that explanatory guided learning avoids overselling the model's quality and performs comparably or better than machine- and human-initiated interactive learning strategies in terms of model quality.
A Survey on Machine Learning Applied to Dynamic Physical Systems
Authors: Sagar Verma
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fault Detection, Survey

This survey is on recent advancements in the intersection of physical modeling and machine learning. We focus on the modeling of nonlinear systems which are closer to electric motors. Survey on motor control and fault detection in operation of electric motors has been done.
MFIF-GAN: A New Generative Adversarial Network for Multi-Focus Image Fusion
Authors: Yicheng Wang, Shuang Xu, Junmin Liu, Zixiang Zhao, Chun-Xia Zhang, Jiangshe Zhang
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Enhancement, Multi Focus Image Fusion

Multi-Focus Image Fusion (MFIF) is a promising image enhancement technique to obtain all-in-focus images meeting visual needs and it is a precondition of other computer vision tasks. One of the research trends of MFIF is to avoid the defocus spread effect (DSE) around the focus/defocus boundary (FDB). In this paper,we propose a network termed MFIF-GAN to attenuate the DSE by generating focus maps in which the foreground region are correctly larger than the corresponding objects. The Squeeze and Excitation Residual module is employed in the network. By combining the prior knowledge of training condition, this network is trained on a synthetic dataset based on an {\alpha}-matte model. In addition, the reconstruction and gradient regularization terms are combined in the loss functions to enhance the boundary details and improve the quality of fused images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the MFIF-GAN outperforms several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in visual perception, quantitative analysis as well as efficiency. Moreover, the edge diffusion and contraction module is firstly proposed to verify that focus maps generated by our method are accurate at the pixel level.
When Healthcare Meets Off-the-Shelf WiFi: A Non-Wearable and Low-Costs Approach for In-Home Monitoring
Authors: Lingchao Guo, Zhaoming Lu, Shuang Zhou, Xiangming Wen, Zhihong He
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00

As elderly population grows, social and health care begin to face validation challenges, in-home monitoring is becoming a focus for professionals in the field. Governments urgently need to improve the quality of healthcare services at lower costs while ensuring the comfort and independence of the elderly. This work presents an in-home monitoring approach based on off-the-shelf WiFi, which is low-costs, non-wearable and makes all-round daily healthcare information available to caregivers. The proposed approach can capture fine-grained human pose figures even through a wall and track detailed respiration status simultaneously by off-the-shelf WiFi devices. Based on them, behavioral data, physiological data and the derived information (e.g., abnormal events and underlying diseases), of the elderly could be seen by caregivers directly. We design a series of signal processing methods and a neural network to capture human pose figures and extract respiration status curves from WiFi Channel State Information (CSI). Extensive experiments are conducted and according to the results, off-the-shelf WiFi devices are capable of capturing fine-grained human pose figures, similar to cameras, even through a wall and track accurate respiration status, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of our approach for in-home monitoring.
Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation
Authors: Qintong Li, Piji Li, Zhaochun Ren, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation

Lack of external knowledge makes empathetic dialogue systems difficult to perceive implicit emotions and learn emotional interactions from limited dialogue history. To address the above problems, we propose to leverage external knowledge, including commonsense knowledge and emotional lexical knowledge, to explicitly understand and express emotions in empathetic dialogue generation. We first enrich the dialogue history by jointly interacting with external knowledge and construct an emotional context graph. Then we learn emotional context representations from the knowledge-enriched emotional context graph and distill emotional signals, which are the prerequisites to predicate emotions expressed in responses. Finally, to generate the empathetic response, we propose an emotional cross-attention mechanism to learn the emotional dependencies from the emotional context graph. Extensive experiments conducted on a benchmark dataset verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. In addition, we find the performance of our method can be further improved by integrating with a pre-trained model that works orthogonally.
Deep Reinforcement Learning Methods for Structure-Guided Processing Path Optimization
Authors: Johannes Dornheim, Lukas Morand, Samuel Zeitvogel, Tarek Iraki, Norbert Link, Dirk Helm
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A major goal of materials design is to find material structures with desired properties and in a second step to find a processing path to reach one of these structures. In this paper, we propose and investigate a deep reinforcement learning approach for the optimization of processing paths. The goal is to find optimal processing paths in the material structure space that lead to target-structures, which have been identified beforehand to result in desired material properties. There exists a target set containing one or multiple different structures. Our proposed methods can find an optimal path from a start structure to a single target structure, or optimize the processing paths to one of the equivalent target-structures in the set. In the latter case, the algorithm learns during processing to simultaneously identify the best reachable target structure and the optimal path to it. The proposed methods belong to the family of model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms. They are guided by structure representations as features of the process state and by a reward signal, which is formulated based on a distance function in the structure space. Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms learn through trial and error while interacting with the process. Thereby, they are not restricted to information from a priori sampled processing data and are able to adapt to the specific process. The optimization itself is model-free and does not require any prior knowledge about the process itself. We instantiate and evaluate the proposed methods by optimizing paths of a generic metal forming process. We show the ability of both methods to find processing paths leading close to target structures and the ability of the extended method to identify target-structures that can be reached effectively and efficiently and to focus on these targets for sample efficient processing path optimization.
The High-Quality Wide Multi-Channel Attack (HQ-WMCA) database
Authors: Zohreh Mostaani, Anjith George, Guillaume Heusch, David Geissbuhler, Sebastien Marcel
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The High-Quality Wide Multi-Channel Attack database (HQ-WMCA) database extends the previous Wide Multi-Channel Attack database(WMCA), with more channels including color, depth, thermal, infrared (spectra), and short-wave infrared (spectra), and also a wide variety of attacks.
Exploiting Submodular Value Functions For Scaling Up Active Perception
Authors: Yash Satsangi, Shimon Whiteson, Frans A. Oliehoek, Matthijs T. J. Spaan
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00

In active perception tasks, an agent aims to select sensory actions that reduce its uncertainty about one or more hidden variables. While partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a natural model for such problems, reward functions that directly penalize uncertainty in the agent's belief can remove the piecewise-linear and convex property of the value function required by most POMDP planners. Furthermore, as the number of sensors available to the agent grows, the computational cost of POMDP planning grows exponentially with it, making POMDP planning infeasible with traditional methods. In this article, we address a twofold challenge of modeling and planning for active perception tasks. We show the mathematical equivalence of $\rho$POMDP and POMDP-IR, two frameworks for modeling active perception tasks, that restore the PWLC property of the value function. To efficiently plan for active perception tasks, we identify and exploit the independence properties of POMDP-IR to reduce the computational cost of solving POMDP-IR (and $\rho$POMDP). We propose greedy point-based value iteration (PBVI), a new POMDP planning method that uses greedy maximization to greatly improve scalability in the action space of an active perception POMDP. Furthermore, we show that, under certain conditions, including submodularity, the value function computed using greedy PBVI is guaranteed to have bounded error with respect to the optimal value function. We establish the conditions under which the value function of an active perception POMDP is guaranteed to be submodular. Finally, we present a detailed empirical analysis on a dataset collected from a multi-camera tracking system employed in a shopping mall. Our method achieves similar performance to existing methods but at a fraction of the computational cost leading to better scalability for solving active perception tasks.
Batch Coherence-Driven Network for Part-aware Person Re-Identification
Authors: Kan Wang, Pengfei Wang, Changxing Ding, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2020-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

Existing part-aware person re-identification methods typically employ two separate steps: namely, body part detection and part-level feature extraction. However, part detection introduces an additional computational cost and is inherently challenging for low-quality images. Accordingly, in this work, we propose a simple framework named Batch Coherence-Driven Network (BCD-Net) that bypasses body part detection during both the training and testing phases while still learning semantically aligned part features. Our key observation is that the statistics in a batch of images are stable, and therefore that batch-level constraints are robust. First, we introduce a batch coherence-guided channel attention (BCCA) module that highlights the relevant channels for each respective part from the output of a deep backbone model. We investigate channelpart correspondence using a batch of training images, then impose a novel batch-level supervision signal that helps BCCA to identify part-relevant channels. Second, the mean position of a body part is robust and consequently coherent between batches throughout the training process. Accordingly, we introduce a pair of regularization terms based on the semantic consistency between batches. The first term regularizes the high responses of BCD-Net for each part on one batch in order to constrain it within a predefined area, while the second encourages the aggregate of BCD-Nets responses for all parts covering the entire human body. The above constraints guide BCD-Net to learn diverse, complementary, and semantically aligned part-level features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that BCDNet consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on four large-scale ReID benchmarks.