pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Preliminary Study for Literary Rhyme Generation based on Neuronal Representation, Semantics and Shallow Parsing
Authors: Luis-Gil Moreno-Jiménez, Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno, Roseli S. Wedemann
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00

In recent years, researchers in the area of Computational Creativity have studied the human creative process proposing different approaches to reproduce it with a formal procedure. In this paper, we introduce a model for the generation of literary rhymes in Spanish, combining structures of language and neural network models %(\textit{Word2vec}).%, into a structure for semantic assimilation. The results obtained with a manual evaluation of the texts generated by our algorithm are encouraging.
CABACE: Injecting Character Sequence Information and Domain Knowledge for Enhanced Acronym and Long-Form Extraction
Authors: Nithish Kannen, Divyanshu Sheth, Abhranil Chandra, Shubhraneel Pal
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Language Modelling, Zero-shot Generalization

Acronyms and long-forms are commonly found in research documents, more so in documents from scientific and legal domains. Many acronyms used in such documents are domain-specific and are very rarely found in normal text corpora. Owing to this, transformer-based NLP models often detect OOV (Out of Vocabulary) for acronym tokens, especially for non-English languages, and their performance suffers while linking acronyms to their long forms during extraction. Moreover, pretrained transformer models like BERT are not specialized to handle scientific and legal documents. With these points being the overarching motivation behind this work, we propose a novel framework CABACE: Character-Aware BERT for ACronym Extraction, which takes into account character sequences in text and is adapted to scientific and legal domains by masked language modelling. We further use an objective with an augmented loss function, adding the max loss and mask loss terms to the standard cross-entropy loss for training CABACE. We further leverage pseudo labelling and adversarial data generation to improve the generalizability of the framework. Experimental results prove the superiority of the proposed framework in comparison to various baselines. Additionally, we show that the proposed framework is better suited than baseline models for zero-shot generalization to non-English languages, thus reinforcing the effectiveness of our approach. Our team BacKGProp secured the highest scores on the French dataset, second-highest on Danish and Vietnamese, and third-highest in the English-Legal dataset on the global leaderboard for the acronym extraction (AE) shared task at SDU AAAI-22.
Edge Robotics: Edge-Computing-Accelerated Multi-Robot Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Authors: Peng Huang, Liekang Zeng, Xu Chen, Ke Luo, Zhi Zhou, Shuai Yu
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

With the wide penetration of smart robots in multifarious fields, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technique in robotics has attracted growing attention in the community. Yet collaborating SLAM over multiple robots still remains challenging due to performance contradiction between the intensive graphics computation of SLAM and the limited computing capability of robots. While traditional solutions resort to the powerful cloud servers acting as an external computation provider, we show by real-world measurements that the significant communication overhead in data offloading prevents its practicability to real deployment. To tackle these challenges, this paper promotes the emerging edge computing paradigm into multi-robot SLAM and proposes RecSLAM, a multi-robot laser SLAM system that focuses on accelerating map construction process under the robot-edge-cloud architecture. In contrast to conventional multi-robot SLAM that generates graphic maps on robots and completely merges them on the cloud, RecSLAM develops a hierarchical map fusion technique that directs robots' raw data to edge servers for real-time fusion and then sends to the cloud for global merging. To optimize the overall pipeline, an efficient multi-robot SLAM collaborative processing framework is introduced to adaptively optimize robot-to-edge offloading tailored to heterogeneous edge resource conditions, meanwhile ensuring the workload balancing among the edge servers. Extensive evaluations show RecSLAM can achieve up to 39% processing latency reduction over the state-of-the-art. Besides, a proof-of-concept prototype is developed and deployed in real scenes to demonstrate its effectiveness.
NeuronFair: Interpretable White-Box Fairness Testing through Biased Neuron Identification
Authors: Haibin Zheng, Zhiqing Chen, Tianyu Du, Xuhong Zhang, Yao Cheng, Shouling Ji, Jingyi Wang, Yue Yu, Jinyin Chen
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated their outperformance in various domains. However, it raises a social concern whether DNNs can produce reliable and fair decisions especially when they are applied to sensitive domains involving valuable resource allocation, such as education, loan, and employment. It is crucial to conduct fairness testing before DNNs are reliably deployed to such sensitive domains, i.e., generating as many instances as possible to uncover fairness violations. However, the existing testing methods are still limited from three aspects: interpretability, performance, and generalizability. To overcome the challenges, we propose NeuronFair, a new DNN fairness testing framework that differs from previous work in several key aspects: (1) interpretable - it quantitatively interprets DNNs' fairness violations for the biased decision; (2) effective - it uses the interpretation results to guide the generation of more diverse instances in less time; (3) generic - it can handle both structured and unstructured data. Extensive evaluations across 7 datasets and the corresponding DNNs demonstrate NeuronFair's superior performance. For instance, on structured datasets, it generates much more instances (~x5.84) and saves more time (with an average speedup of 534.56%) compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, the instances of NeuronFair can also be leveraged to improve the fairness of the biased DNNs, which helps build more fair and trustworthy deep learning systems.
Textless Speech Emotion Conversion using Decomposed & Discrete Representations
Authors: Felix Kreuk, Adam Polyak, Jade Copet, Eugene Kharitonov, Tu-Anh Nguyen, Morgane Rivière, Wei-Ning Hsu, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Emmanuel Dupoux, Yossi Adi
Date: 2021-11-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: arXiv 2021 11

Speech emotion conversion is the task of modifying the perceived emotion of a speech utterance while preserving the lexical content and speaker identity. In this study, we cast the problem of emotion conversion as a spoken language translation task. We decompose speech into discrete and disentangled learned representations, consisting of content units, F0, speaker, and emotion. First, we modify the speech content by translating the content units to a target emotion, and then predict the prosodic features based on these units. Finally, the speech waveform is generated by feeding the predicted representations into a neural vocoder. Such a paradigm allows us to go beyond spectral and parametric changes of the signal, and model non-verbal vocalizations, such as laughter insertion, yawning removal, etc. We demonstrate objectively and subjectively that the proposed method is superior to the baselines in terms of perceived emotion and audio quality. We rigorously evaluate all components of such a complex system and conclude with an extensive model analysis and ablation study to better emphasize the architectural choices, strengths and weaknesses of the proposed method.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Pharmacovigilance: What Features Are Important When Predicting Adverse Outcomes?
Authors: Isaac Ronald Ward, Ling Wang, Juan lu, Mohammed Bennamoun, Girish Dwivedi, Frank M Sanfilippo
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Feature Importance, Pharmacovigilance

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has been identified as a viable method for determining the importance of features when making predictions using Machine Learning (ML) models. In this study, we created models that take an individual's health information (e.g. their drug history and comorbidities) as inputs, and predict the probability that the individual will have an Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) adverse outcome. Using XAI, we quantified the contribution that specific drugs had on these ACS predictions, thus creating an XAI-based technique for pharmacovigilance monitoring, using ACS as an example of the adverse outcome to detect. Individuals aged over 65 who were supplied Musculo-skeletal system (anatomical therapeutic chemical (ATC) class M) or Cardiovascular system (ATC class C) drugs between 1993 and 2009 were identified, and their drug histories, comorbidities, and other key features were extracted from linked Western Australian datasets. Multiple ML models were trained to predict if these individuals would have an ACS related adverse outcome (i.e., death or hospitalisation with a discharge diagnosis of ACS), and a variety of ML and XAI techniques were used to calculate which features -- specifically which drugs -- led to these predictions. The drug dispensing features for rofecoxib and celecoxib were found to have a greater than zero contribution to ACS related adverse outcome predictions (on average), and it was found that ACS related adverse outcomes can be predicted with 72% accuracy. Furthermore, the XAI libraries LIME and SHAP were found to successfully identify both important and unimportant features, with SHAP slightly outperforming LIME. ML models trained on linked administrative health datasets in tandem with XAI algorithms can successfully quantify feature importance, and with further development, could potentially be used as pharmacovigilance monitoring techniques.
Practical Fixed-Parameter Algorithms for Defending Active Directory Style Attack Graphs
Authors: Mingyu Guo, Jialiang Li, Aneta Neumann, Frank Neumann, Hung Nguyen
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Tree Decomposition

Active Directory is the default security management system for Windows domain networks. We study the shortest path edge interdiction problem for defending Active Directory style attack graphs. The problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game between one defender and one attacker. The attack graph contains one destination node and multiple entry nodes. The attacker's entry node is chosen by nature. The defender chooses to block a set of edges limited by his budget. The attacker then picks the shortest unblocked attack path. The defender aims to maximize the expected shortest path length for the attacker, where the expectation is taken over entry nodes. We observe that practical Active Directory attack graphs have small maximum attack path lengths and are structurally close to trees. We first show that even if the maximum attack path length is a constant, the problem is still $W[1]$-hard with respect to the defender's budget. Having a small maximum attack path length and a small budget is not enough to design fixed-parameter algorithms. If we further assume that the number of entry nodes is small, then we derive a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm. We then propose two other fixed-parameter algorithms by exploiting the tree-like features. One is based on tree decomposition and requires a small tree width. The other assumes a small number of splitting nodes (nodes with multiple out-going edges). Finally, the last algorithm is converted into a graph convolutional neural network based heuristic, which scales to larger graphs with more splitting nodes.
Cyberattack Detection in Large-Scale Smart Grids using Chebyshev Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Osman Boyaci, Mohammad Rasoul Narimani, Katherine Davis, Erchin Serpedin
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00

As a highly complex and integrated cyber-physical system, modern power grids are exposed to cyberattacks. False data injection attacks (FDIAs), specifically, represent a major class of cyber threats to smart grids by targeting the measurement data's integrity. Although various solutions have been proposed to detect those cyberattacks, the vast majority of the works have ignored the inherent graph structure of the power grid measurements and validated their detectors only for small test systems with less than a few hundred buses. To better exploit the spatial correlations of smart grid measurements, this paper proposes a deep learning model for cyberattack detection in large-scale AC power grids using Chebyshev Graph Convolutional Networks (CGCN). By reducing the complexity of spectral graph filters and making them localized, CGCN provides a fast and efficient convolution operation to model the graph structural smart grid data. We numerically verify that the proposed CGCN based detector surpasses the state-of-the-art model by 7.86 in detection rate and 9.67 in false alarm rate for a large-scale power grid with 2848 buses. It is notable that the proposed approach detects cyberattacks under 4 milliseconds for a 2848-bus system, which makes it a good candidate for real-time detection of cyberattacks in large systems.
On the Unreasonable Efficiency of State Space Clustering in Personalization Tasks
Authors: Anton Dereventsov, Ranga Raju Vatsavai, Clayton Webster
Date: 2021-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this effort we consider a reinforcement learning (RL) technique for solving personalization tasks with complex reward signals. In particular, our approach is based on state space clustering with the use of a simplistic $k$-means algorithm as well as conventional choices of the network architectures and optimization algorithms. Numerical examples demonstrate the efficiency of different RL procedures and are used to illustrate that this technique accelerates the agent's ability to learn and does not restrict the agent's performance.
Does MAML Only Work via Feature Re-use? A Data Centric Perspective
Authors: Brando Miranda, Yu-Xiong Wang, Sanmi Koyejo
Date: 2021-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning

Recent work has suggested that a good embedding is all we need to solve many few-shot learning benchmarks. Furthermore, other work has strongly suggested that Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) also works via this same method - by learning a good embedding. These observations highlight our lack of understanding of what meta-learning algorithms are doing and when they work. In this work, we provide empirical results that shed some light on how meta-learned MAML representations function. In particular, we identify three interesting properties: 1) In contrast to previous work, we show that it is possible to define a family of synthetic benchmarks that result in a low degree of feature re-use - suggesting that current few-shot learning benchmarks might not have the properties needed for the success of meta-learning algorithms; 2) meta-overfitting occurs when the number of classes (or concepts) are finite, and this issue disappears once the task has an unbounded number of concepts (e.g., online learning); 3) more adaptation at meta-test time with MAML does not necessarily result in a significant representation change or even an improvement in meta-test performance - even when training on our proposed synthetic benchmarks. Finally, we suggest that to understand meta-learning algorithms better, we must go beyond tracking only absolute performance and, in addition, formally quantify the degree of meta-learning and track both metrics together. Reporting results in future work this way will help us identify the sources of meta-overfitting more accurately and help us design more flexible meta-learning algorithms that learn beyond fixed feature re-use. Finally, we conjecture the core challenge of re-thinking meta-learning is in the design of few-shot learning data sets and benchmarks - rather than in the algorithms, as suggested by previous work.
SGML: A Symmetric Graph Metric Learning Framework for Efficient Hyperspectral Image Classification
Authors: Yunsong Li, Bobo Xi, Jiaojiao Li, Rui Song, Yuchao Xiao, Jocelyn Chanussot.
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing 2021 12
Tasks: Attribute, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Metric Learning

Recently, the semi-supervised graph convolutional network (SSGCN) has been verified effective for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, constrained by the limited training data and spectral uncertainty, the classification performance is remained to be further improved. Moreover, attribute to the massive data, the SSGCN with complex computation is generally too time- and resource-consuming to be applicable in real-time needs. To conquer these issues, we propose an efficient symmetric graph metric learning (SGML) framework by incorporating metric learning into the SSGCN paradigm. Specifically, we first conduct multilevel pixel-to-superpixel projection (P-SP) on the HSI to investigate the multiscale spatial information, where the suitable superpixel numbers are adaptively determined. Then, to extract more expressive representations, we design a new structure denoted as GSvolution, comprising the graph convolution (G-Conv) and a novel self-channel-enhanced convolution (S-Conv), to propagate the labeled and unlabeled graph node information and simultaneously enhance the critical intranode channel features. Finally, the superpixel node features are reprojected to the pixel level (SP-P) so that the distilled multistream features can be integrated to obtain the final decision. Noticeably, this ingenious symmetric mechanism (P-SP and SP-P) can alleviate the spectral variability and facilitate the framework to be an efficient model. Furthermore, in the metric learning module, we propose an innovative metric loss function to enhance the discrimination of the embedding features, i.e., interclass far apart and intraclass close. In the experiments, we demonstrate that the classification capacity of the proposed SGML can surpass the comparators on three benchmark data sets.
The Curse of Zero Task Diversity: On the Failure of Transfer Learning to Outperform MAML and their Empirical Equivalence
Authors: Brando Miranda, Yu-Xiong Wang, Sanmi Koyejo
Date: 2021-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning, Transfer Learning

Recently, it has been observed that a transfer learning solution might be all we need to solve many few-shot learning benchmarks -- thus raising important questions about when and how meta-learning algorithms should be deployed. In this paper, we seek to clarify these questions by proposing a novel metric -- the diversity coefficient -- to measure the diversity of tasks in a few-shot learning benchmark. We hypothesize that the diversity coefficient of the few-shot learning benchmark is predictive of whether meta-learning solutions will succeed or not. Using the diversity coefficient, we show that the MiniImagenet benchmark has zero diversity. This novel insight contextualizes claims that transfer learning solutions are better than meta-learned solutions. Specifically, we empirically find that a diversity coefficient of zero correlates with a high similarity between transfer learning and Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) learned solutions in terms of meta-accuracy (at meta-test time). Therefore, we conjecture meta-learned solutions have the same meta-test performance as transfer learning when the diversity coefficient is zero. Our work provides the first test of whether diversity correlates with meta-learning success.
A deep reinforcement learning model for predictive maintenance planning of road assets: Integrating LCA and LCCA
Authors: Moein Latifi, Fateme Golivand Darvishvand, Omid Khandel, Mobin Latifi Nowsoud
Date: 2021-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Asset Management, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Road maintenance planning is an integral part of road asset management. One of the main challenges in Maintenance and Rehabilitation (M&R) practices is to determine maintenance type and timing. This research proposes a framework using Reinforcement Learning (RL) based on the Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) database to determine the type and timing of M&R practices. A predictive DNN model is first developed in the proposed algorithm, which serves as the Environment for the RL algorithm. For the Policy estimation of the RL model, both DQN and PPO models are developed. However, PPO has been selected in the end due to better convergence and higher sample efficiency. Indicators used in this study are International Roughness Index (IRI) and Rutting Depth (RD). Initially, we considered Cracking Metric (CM) as the third indicator, but it was then excluded due to the much fewer data compared to other indicators, which resulted in lower accuracy of the results. Furthermore, in cost-effectiveness calculation (reward), we considered both the economic and environmental impacts of M&R treatments. Costs and environmental impacts have been evaluated with paLATE 2.0 software. Our method is tested on a hypothetical case study of a six-lane highway with 23 kilometers length located in Texas, which has a warm and wet climate. The results propose a 20-year M&R plan in which road condition remains in an excellent condition range. Because the early state of the road is at a good level of service, there is no need for heavy maintenance practices in the first years. Later, after heavy M&R actions, there are several 1-2 years of no need for treatments. All of these show that the proposed plan has a logical result. Decision-makers and transportation agencies can use this scheme to conduct better maintenance practices that can prevent budget waste and, at the same time, minimize the environmental impacts.
A Survey on Interpretable Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Claire Glanois, Paul Weng, Matthieu Zimmer, Dong Li, Tianpei Yang, Jianye Hao, Wulong Liu
Date: 2021-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making, Survey

Although deep reinforcement learning has become a promising machine learning approach for sequential decision-making problems, it is still not mature enough for high-stake domains such as autonomous driving or medical applications. In such contexts, a learned policy needs for instance to be interpretable, so that it can be inspected before any deployment (e.g., for safety and verifiability reasons). This survey provides an overview of various approaches to achieve higher interpretability in reinforcement learning (RL). To that aim, we distinguish interpretability (as a property of a model) and explainability (as a post-hoc operation, with the intervention of a proxy) and discuss them in the context of RL with an emphasis on the former notion. In particular, we argue that interpretable RL may embrace different facets: interpretable inputs, interpretable (transition/reward) models, and interpretable decision-making. Based on this scheme, we summarize and analyze recent work related to interpretable RL with an emphasis on papers published in the past 10 years. We also discuss briefly some related research areas and point to some potential promising research directions.