pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Open-Source Dataset on Dietary Behaviors and DASH Eating Plan Optimization Constraints
Authors: Farzin Ahmadi, Fardin Ganjkhanloo, Kimia Ghobadi
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Nutrition

Linear constrained optimization techniques have been applied to many real-world settings. In recent years, inferring the unknown parameters and functions inside an optimization model has also gained traction. This inference is often based on existing observations and/or known parameters. Consequently, such models require reliable, easily accessed, and easily interpreted examples to be evaluated. To facilitate research in such directions, we provide a modified dataset based on dietary behaviors of different groups of people, their demographics, and pre-existing conditions, among other factors. This data is gathered from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and complemented with the nutritional data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). We additionally provide tailored datasets for hypertension and pre-diabetic patients as groups of interest who may benefit from targetted diets such as the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) eating plan. The data is compiled and curated in such a way that it is suitable as input to linear optimization models. We hope that this data and its supplementary, open-accessed materials can accelerate and simplify interpretations and research on linear optimization and constrained inference models. The complete dataset can be found in the following repository: https://github.com/CSSEHealthcare/InverseLearning
AMPA-Net: Optimization-Inspired Attention Neural Network for Deep Compressed Sensing
Authors: Nanyu Li, Charles C. Zhou
Date: 2020-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Compressive Sensing

Compressed sensing (CS) is a challenging problem in image processing due to reconstructing an almost complete image from a limited measurement. To achieve fast and accurate CS reconstruction, we synthesize the advantages of two well-known methods (neural network and optimization algorithm) to propose a novel optimization inspired neural network which dubbed AMP-Net. AMP-Net realizes the fusion of the Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm and neural network. All of its parameters are learned automatically. Furthermore, we propose an AMPA-Net which uses three attention networks to improve the representation ability of AMP-Net. Finally, We demonstrate the effectiveness of AMP-Net and AMPA-Net on four standard CS reconstruction benchmark data sets. Our code is available on https://github.com/puallee/AMPA-Net.
Natural Language Rationales with Full-Stack Visual Reasoning: From Pixels to Semantic Frames to Commonsense Graphs
Authors: Ana Marasović, Chandra Bhagavatula, Jae Sung Park, Ronan Le Bras, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Inference, Object Recognition, Question Answering, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Reasoning

Natural language rationales could provide intuitive, higher-level explanations that are easily understandable by humans, complementing the more broadly studied lower-level explanations based on gradients or attention weights. We present the first study focused on generating natural language rationales across several complex visual reasoning tasks: visual commonsense reasoning, visual-textual entailment, and visual question answering. The key challenge of accurate rationalization is comprehensive image understanding at all levels: not just their explicit content at the pixel level, but their contextual contents at the semantic and pragmatic levels. We present Rationale^VT Transformer, an integrated model that learns to generate free-text rationales by combining pretrained language models with object recognition, grounded visual semantic frames, and visual commonsense graphs. Our experiments show that the base pretrained language model benefits from visual adaptation and that free-text rationalization is a promising research direction to complement model interpretability for complex visual-textual reasoning tasks.
Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection via Normalizing Flows with Implicit Latent Features
Authors: MyeongAh Cho, Taeoh Kim, Woo Jin Kim, Suhwan Cho, Sangyoun Lee
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decoder, Density Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Video Anomaly Detection

In contemporary society, surveillance anomaly detection, i.e., spotting anomalous events such as crimes or accidents in surveillance videos, is a critical task. As anomalies occur rarely, most training data consists of unlabeled videos without anomalous events, which makes the task challenging. Most existing methods use an autoencoder (AE) to learn to reconstruct normal videos; they then detect anomalies based on their failure to reconstruct the appearance of abnormal scenes. However, because anomalies are distinguished by appearance as well as motion, many previous approaches have explicitly separated appearance and motion information-for example, using a pre-trained optical flow model. This explicit separation restricts reciprocal representation capabilities between two types of information. In contrast, we propose an implicit two-path AE (ITAE), a structure in which two encoders implicitly model appearance and motion features, along with a single decoder that combines them to learn normal video patterns. For the complex distribution of normal scenes, we suggest normal density estimation of ITAE features through normalizing flow (NF)-based generative models to learn the tractable likelihoods and identify anomalies using out of distribution detection. NF models intensify ITAE performance by learning normality through implicitly learned features. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of ITAE and its feature distribution modeling on six benchmarks, including databases that contain various anomalies in real-world scenarios.
Context-Guided BERT for Targeted Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Zhengxuan Wu, Desmond C. Ong
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) and Targeted ASBA (TABSA) allow finer-grained inferences about sentiment to be drawn from the same text, depending on context. For example, a given text can have different targets (e.g., neighborhoods) and different aspects (e.g., price or safety), with different sentiment associated with each target-aspect pair. In this paper, we investigate whether adding context to self-attention models improves performance on (T)ABSA. We propose two variants of Context-Guided BERT (CG-BERT) that learn to distribute attention under different contexts. We first adapt a context-aware Transformer to produce a CG-BERT that uses context-guided softmax-attention. Next, we propose an improved Quasi-Attention CG-BERT model that learns a compositional attention that supports subtractive attention. We train both models with pretrained BERT on two (T)ABSA datasets: SentiHood and SemEval-2014 (Task 4). Both models achieve new state-of-the-art results with our QACG-BERT model having the best performance. Furthermore, we provide analyses of the impact of context in the our proposed models. Our work provides more evidence for the utility of adding context-dependencies to pretrained self-attention-based language models for context-based natural language tasks.
Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction using Enhanced Table Filling by Contextualized Representations
Authors: Youmi Ma, Tatsuya Hiraoka, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: Journal of Natural Language Processing 2022 3
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation, Relation Extraction

In this study, a novel method for extracting named entities and relations from unstructured text based on the table representation is presented. By using contextualized word embeddings, the proposed method computes representations for entity mentions and long-range dependencies without complicated hand-crafted features or neural-network architectures. We also adapt a tensor dot-product to predict relation labels all at once without resorting to history-based predictions or search strategies. These advances significantly simplify the model and algorithm for the extraction of named entities and relations. Despite its simplicity, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the CoNLL04 and ACE05 English datasets. We also confirm that the proposed method achieves a comparable performance with the state-of-the-art NER models on the ACE05 datasets when multiple sentences are provided for context aggregation.
Reinforcement Learning Based Temporal Logic Control with Maximum Probabilistic Satisfaction
Authors: Mingyu Cai, Shaoping Xiao, Baoluo Li, Zhiliang Li, Zhen Kan
Date: 2020-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to synthesize a control policy that maximizes the satisfaction probability of linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications. Due to the consideration of environment and motion uncertainties, we model the robot motion as a probabilistic labeled Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities and unknown probabilistic label functions. The LTL task specification is converted to a limit deterministic generalized B\"uchi automaton (LDGBA) with several accepting sets to maintain dense rewards during learning. The novelty of applying LDGBA is to construct an embedded LDGBA (E-LDGBA) by designing a synchronous tracking-frontier function, which enables the record of non-visited accepting sets without increasing dimensional and computational complexity. With appropriate dependent reward and discount functions, rigorous analysis shows that any method that optimizes the expected discount return of the RL-based approach is guaranteed to find the optimal policy that maximizes the satisfaction probability of the LTL specifications. A model-free RL-based motion planning strategy is developed to generate the optimal policy in this paper. The effectiveness of the RL-based control synthesis is demonstrated via simulation and experimental results.
GTOPX Space Mission Benchmarks
Authors: Martin Schlueter, Mehdi Neshat, Mohamed Wahib, Masaharu Munetomo, Markus Wagner
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00

This contribution introduces the GTOPX space mission benchmark collection, which is an extension of GTOP database published by the European Space Agency (ESA). GTOPX consists of ten individual benchmark instances representing real-world interplanetary space trajectory design problems. In regard to the original GTOP collection, GTOPX includes three new problem instances featuring mixed-integer and multi-objective properties. GTOPX enables a simplified user handling, unified benchmark function call and some minor bug corrections to the original GTOP implementation. Furthermore, GTOPX is linked from it's original C++ source code to Python and Matlab based on dynamic link libraries, assuring computationally fast and accurate reproduction of the benchmark results in all three programming languages. Space mission trajectory design problems as those represented in GTOPX are known to be highly non-linear and difficult to solve. The GTOPX collection, therefore, aims particularly at researchers wishing to put advanced (meta)heuristic and hybrid optimization algorithms to the test. The goal of this paper is to provide researchers with a manual and reference to the newly available GTOPX benchmark software.
RNNs can generate bounded hierarchical languages with optimal memory
Authors: John Hewitt, Michael Hahn, Surya Ganguli, Percy Liang, Christopher D. Manning
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11

Recurrent neural networks empirically generate natural language with high syntactic fidelity. However, their success is not well-understood theoretically. We provide theoretical insight into this success, proving in a finite-precision setting that RNNs can efficiently generate bounded hierarchical languages that reflect the scaffolding of natural language syntax. We introduce Dyck-($k$,$m$), the language of well-nested brackets (of $k$ types) and $m$-bounded nesting depth, reflecting the bounded memory needs and long-distance dependencies of natural language syntax. The best known results use $O(k^{\frac{m}{2}})$ memory (hidden units) to generate these languages. We prove that an RNN with $O(m \log k)$ hidden units suffices, an exponential reduction in memory, by an explicit construction. Finally, we show that no algorithm, even with unbounded computation, can suffice with $o(m \log k)$ hidden units.
Holistic Combination of Structural and Textual Code Information for Context based API Recommendation
Authors: Chi Chen, Xin Peng, Zhenchang Xing, Jun Sun, Xin Wang, Yifan Zhao, Wenyun Zhao
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00

Context based API recommendation is an important way to help developers find the needed APIs effectively and efficiently. For effective API recommendation, we need not only a joint view of both structural and textual code information, but also a holistic view of correlated API usage in control and data flow graph as a whole. Unfortunately, existing API recommendation methods exploit structural or textual code information separately. In this work, we propose a novel API recommendation approach called APIRec-CST (API Recommendation by Combining Structural and Textual code information). APIRec-CST is a deep learning model that combines the API usage with the text information in the source code based on an API Context Graph Network and a Code Token Network that simultaneously learn structural and textual features for API recommendation. We apply APIRec-CST to train a model for JDK library based on 1,914 open-source Java projects and evaluate the accuracy and MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) of API recommendation with another 6 open-source projects. The results show that our approach achieves respectively a top-1, top-5, top-10 accuracy and MRR of 60.3%, 81.5%, 87.7% and 69.4%, and significantly outperforms an existing graph-based statistical approach and a tree-based deep learning approach for API recommendation. A further analysis shows that textual code information makes sense and improves the accuracy and MRR. We also conduct a user study in which two groups of students are asked to finish 6 programming tasks with or without our APIRec-CST plugin. The results show that APIRec-CST can help the students to finish the tasks faster and more accurately and the feedback on the usability is overwhelmingly positive.
Optimal Dispatch in Emergency Service System via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Cheng Hua, Tauhid Zaman
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In the United States, medical responses by fire departments over the last four decades increased by 367%. This had made it critical to decision makers in emergency response departments that existing resources are efficiently used. In this paper, we model the ambulance dispatch problem as an average-cost Markov decision process and present a policy iteration approach to find an optimal dispatch policy. We then propose an alternative formulation using post-decision states that is shown to be mathematically equivalent to the original model, but with a much smaller state space. We present a temporal difference learning approach to the dispatch problem based on the post-decision states. In our numerical experiments, we show that our obtained temporal-difference policy outperforms the benchmark myopic policy. Our findings suggest that emergency response departments can improve their performance with minimal to no cost.
A Human Eye-based Text Color Scheme Generation Method for Image Synthesis
Authors: Shao Wei Wang, Guan Jie Huang, Xiang Yu Luo
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

Synthetic data used for scene text detection and recognition tasks have proven effective. However, there are still two problems: First, the color schemes used for text coloring in the existing methods are relatively fixed color key-value pairs learned from real datasets. The dirty data in real datasets may cause the problem that the colors of text and background are too similar to be distinguished from each other. Second, the generated texts are uniformly limited to the same depth of a picture, while there are special cases in the real world that text may appear across depths. To address these problems, in this paper we design a novel method to generate color schemes, which are consistent with the characteristics of human eyes to observe things. The advantages of our method are as follows: (1) overcomes the color confusion problem between text and background caused by dirty data; (2) the texts generated are allowed to appear in most locations of any image, even across depths; (3) avoids analyzing the depth of background, such that the performance of our method exceeds the state-of-the-art methods; (4) the speed of generating images is fast, nearly one picture generated per three milliseconds. The effectiveness of our method is verified on several public datasets.
Designing Emergency Response Pipelines : Lessons and Challenges
Authors: Ayan Mukhopadhyay, Geoffrey Pettet, Mykel Kochenderfer, Abhishek Dubey
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Emergency response to incidents such as accidents, crimes, and fires is a major problem faced by communities. Emergency response management comprises of several stages and sub-problems like forecasting, resource allocation, and dispatch. The design of principled approaches to tackle each problem is necessary to create efficient emergency response management (ERM) pipelines. Over the last six years, we have worked with several first responder organizations to design ERM pipelines. In this paper, we highlight some of the challenges that we have identified and lessons that we have learned through our experience in this domain. Such challenges are particularly relevant for practitioners and researchers, and are important considerations even in the design of response strategies to mitigate disasters like floods and earthquakes.
Multi-Task Learning for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Sho Takase, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization, Machine Translation, Multi-Task Learning, Sentence, Translation

We present a multi-task learning framework for cross-lingual abstractive summarization to augment training data. Recent studies constructed pseudo cross-lingual abstractive summarization data to train their neural encoder-decoders. Meanwhile, we introduce existing genuine data such as translation pairs and monolingual abstractive summarization data into training. Our proposed method, Transum, attaches a special token to the beginning of the input sentence to indicate the target task. The special token enables us to incorporate the genuine data into the training data easily. The experimental results show that Transum achieves better performance than the model trained with only pseudo cross-lingual summarization data. In addition, we achieve the top ROUGE score on Chinese-English and Arabic-English abstractive summarization. Moreover, Transum also has a positive effect on machine translation. Experimental results indicate that Transum improves the performance from the strong baseline, Transformer, in Chinese-English, Arabic-English, and English-Japanese translation datasets.
Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Jun Fu, Wei Zhou, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Traffic Prediction

In traffic forecasting, graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which model traffic flows as spatio-temporal graphs, have achieved remarkable performance. However, existing GCN-based methods heuristically define the graph structure as the physical topology of the road network, ignoring potential dependence of the graph structure over traffic data. And the defined graph structure is deterministic, which lacks investigation of uncertainty. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Network (BSTGCN) for traffic prediction. The graph structure in our network is learned from the physical topology of the road network and traffic data in an end-to-end manner, which discovers a more accurate description of the relationship among traffic flows. Moreover, a parametric generative model is proposed to represent the graph structure, which enhances the generalization capability of GCNs. We verify the effectiveness of our method on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that BSTGCN attains superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.
MedDG: An Entity-Centric Medical Consultation Dataset for Entity-Aware Medical Dialogue Generation
Authors: Wenge Liu, Jianheng Tang, Yi Cheng, Wenjie Li, Yefeng Zheng, Xiaodan Liang
Date: 2020-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Response Generation, Retrieval

Developing conversational agents to interact with patients and provide primary clinical advice has attracted increasing attention due to its huge application potential, especially in the time of COVID-19 Pandemic. However, the training of end-to-end neural-based medical dialogue system is restricted by an insufficient quantity of medical dialogue corpus. In this work, we make the first attempt to build and release a large-scale high-quality Medical Dialogue dataset related to 12 types of common Gastrointestinal diseases named MedDG, with more than 17K conversations collected from the online health consultation community. Five different categories of entities, including diseases, symptoms, attributes, tests, and medicines, are annotated in each conversation of MedDG as additional labels. To push forward the future research on building expert-sensitive medical dialogue system, we proposes two kinds of medical dialogue tasks based on MedDG dataset. One is the next entity prediction and the other is the doctor response generation. To acquire a clear comprehension on these two medical dialogue tasks, we implement several state-of-the-art benchmarks, as well as design two dialogue models with a further consideration on the predicted entities. Experimental results show that the pre-train language models and other baselines struggle on both tasks with poor performance in our dataset, and the response quality can be enhanced with the help of auxiliary entity information. From human evaluation, the simple retrieval model outperforms several state-of-the-art generative models, indicating that there still remains a large room for improvement on generating medically meaningful responses.