pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Polynomial Approximation of Discounted Moments
Authors: Chenyu Zhao, Misha van Beek, Peter Spreij, Makhtar Ba
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00

We introduce an approximation strategy for the discounted moments of a stochastic process that can, for a large class of problems, approximate the true moments. These moments appear in pricing formulas of financial products such as bonds and credit derivatives. The approximation relies on high-order power series expansion of the infinitesimal generator, and draws parallels with the theory of polynomial processes. We demonstrate applications to bond pricing and credit derivatives. In the special cases that allow for an analytical solution the approximation error decreases to around 10 to 100 times machine precision for higher orders. When no analytical solution exists we tie out the approximation with Monte Carlo simulations.
Utility Indifference Pricing with High Risk Aversion and Small Linear Price Impact
Authors: Yan Dolinsky, Shir Moshe
Date: 2021-10-31 00:00:00

We consider the Bachelier model with linear price impact. Exponential utility indifference prices are studied for vanilla European options and we compute their non-trivial scaling limit for a vanishing price impact which is inversely proportional to the risk aversion. Moreover, we find explicitly a family of portfolios which are asymptotically optimal.
Interpretive Blindness
Authors: Nicholas Asher, Julie Hunter
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00

We model here an epistemic bias we call \textit{interpretive blindness} (IB). IB is a special problem for learning from testimony, in which one acquires information only from text or conversation. We show that IB follows from a co-dependence between background beliefs and interpretation in a Bayesian setting and the nature of contemporary testimony. We argue that a particular characteristic contemporary testimony, \textit{argumentative completeness}, can preclude learning in hierarchical Bayesian settings, even in the presence of constraints that are designed to promote good epistemic practices.
DetectorNet: Transformer-enhanced Spatial Temporal Graph Neural Network for Traffic Prediction
Authors: He Li, Shiyu Zhang, Xuejiao Li, Liangcai Su, Hongjie Huang, Duo Jin, Linghao Chen, Jianbing Huang, Jaesoo Yoo
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Traffic Prediction

Detectors with high coverage have direct and far-reaching benefits for road users in route planning and avoiding traffic congestion, but utilizing these data presents unique challenges including: the dynamic temporal correlation, and the dynamic spatial correlation caused by changes in road conditions. Although the existing work considers the significance of modeling with spatial-temporal correlation, what it has learned is still a static road network structure, which cannot reflect the dynamic changes of roads, and eventually loses much valuable potential information. To address these challenges, we propose DetectorNet enhanced by Transformer. Differs from previous studies, our model contains a Multi-view Temporal Attention module and a Dynamic Attention module, which focus on the long-distance and short-distance temporal correlation, and dynamic spatial correlation by dynamically updating the learned knowledge respectively, so as to make accurate prediction. In addition, the experimental results on two public datasets and the comparison results of four ablation experiments proves that the performance of DetectorNet is better than the eleven advanced baselines.
An Uncertainty-Informed Framework for Trustworthy Fault Diagnosis in Safety-Critical Applications
Authors: Taotao Zhou, Enrique Lopez Droguett, Ali Mosleh, Felix T. S. Chan
Date: 2021-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fault Diagnosis, Management

There has been a growing interest in deep learning-based prognostic and health management (PHM) for building end-to-end maintenance decision support systems, especially due to the rapid development of autonomous systems. However, the low trustworthiness of PHM hinders its applications in safety-critical assets when handling data from an unknown distribution that differs from the training dataset, referred to as the out-of-distribution (OOD) dataset. To bridge this gap, we propose an uncertainty-informed framework to diagnose faults and meanwhile detect the OOD dataset, enabling the capability of learning unknowns and achieving trustworthy fault diagnosis. Particularly, we develop a probabilistic Bayesian convolutional neural network (CNN) to quantify both epistemic and aleatory uncertainties in fault diagnosis. The fault diagnosis model flags the OOD dataset with large predictive uncertainty for expert intervention and is confident in providing predictions for the data within tolerable uncertainty. This results in trustworthy fault diagnosis and reduces the risk of erroneous decision-making, thus potentially avoiding undesirable consequences. The proposed framework is demonstrated by the fault diagnosis of bearings with three OOD datasets attributed to random number generation, an unknown fault mode, and four common sensor faults, respectively. The results show that the proposed framework is of particular advantage in tackling unknowns and enhancing the trustworthiness of fault diagnosis in safety-critical applications.
Artificial Intelligence in the Low-Level Realm -- A Survey
Authors: Vahid Mohammadi Safarzadeh, Hamed Ghasr Loghmani
Date: 2021-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Survey

Resource-aware machine learning has been a trending topic in recent years, focusing on making ML computational aspects more exploitable by the edge devices in the Internet of Things. This paper attempts to review a conceptually and practically related area concentrated on efforts and challenges for applying ML in the operating systems' main tasks in a low-resource environment. Artificial Intelligence has been integrated into the operating system with applications such as voice or image recognition. However, this integration is only in user space. Here, we seek methods and efforts that exploit AI approaches, specifically machine learning, in the OSes' primary responsibilities. We provide the improvements that ML can bring to OS to make them more trustworthy. In other words, the main question to be answered is how AI has played/can play a role directly in improving the traditional OS kernel main tasks. Also, the challenges and limitations in the way of this combination are provided.
Click-Based Student Performance Prediction: A Clustering Guided Meta-Learning Approach
Authors: Yun-Wei Chu, Elizabeth Tenorio, Laura Cruz, Kerrie Douglas, Andrew S. Lan, Christopher G. Brinton
Date: 2021-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Meta-Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We study the problem of predicting student knowledge acquisition in online courses from clickstream behavior. Motivated by the proliferation of eLearning lecture delivery, we specifically focus on student in-video activity in lectures videos, which consist of content and in-video quizzes. Our methodology for predicting in-video quiz performance is based on three key ideas we develop. First, we model students' clicking behavior via time-series learning architectures operating on raw event data, rather than defining hand-crafted features as in existing approaches that may lose important information embedded within the click sequences. Second, we develop a self-supervised clickstream pre-training to learn informative representations of clickstream events that can initialize the prediction model effectively. Third, we propose a clustering guided meta-learning-based training that optimizes the prediction model to exploit clusters of frequent patterns in student clickstream sequences. Through experiments on three real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our method obtains substantial improvements over two baseline models in predicting students' in-video quiz performance. Further, we validate the importance of the pre-training and meta-learning components of our framework through ablation studies. Finally, we show how our methodology reveals insights on video-watching behavior associated with knowledge acquisition for useful learning analytics.
Multi-stage malaria parasite recognition by deep learning
Authors: Sen Li, Zeyu Du, Xiangjie Meng, Yang Zhang
Date: 2021-06-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: GigaScience 2021 6
Tasks: Deep Learning

Motivation
Malaria, a mosquito-borne infectious disease affecting humans and other animals, is widespread in tropical and subtropical regions. Microscopy is the most common method for diagnosing the malaria parasite from stained blood smear samples. However, this technique is time consuming and must be performed by a well-trained professional, yet it remains prone to errors. Distinguishing the multiple growth stages of parasites remains an especially challenging task.
Results

In this article, we develop a novel deep learning approach for the recognition of malaria parasites of various stages in blood smear images using a deep transfer graph convolutional network (DTGCN). To our knowledge, this is the first application of graph convolutional network (GCN) on multi-stage malaria parasite recognition in such images. The proposed DTGCN model is based on unsupervised learning by transferring knowledge learnt from source images that contain the discriminative morphology characteristics of multi-stage malaria parasites. This transferred information guarantees the effectiveness of the target parasite recognition. This approach first learns the identical representations from the source to establish topological correlations between source class groups and the unlabelled target samples. At this stage, the GCN is implemented to extract graph feature representations for multi-stage malaria parasite recognition. The proposed method showed higher accuracy and effectiveness in publicly available microscopic images of multi-stage malaria parasites compared to a wide range of state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, this method is also evaluated on a large-scale dataset of unseen malaria parasites and the Babesia dataset.
Availability

Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/senli2018/DTGCN_2021 under a MIT license.
Ask me in your own words: paraphrasing for multitask question answering
Authors: G. Thomas Hudson​, Noura Al Moubayed
Date: 2021-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: PeerJ Computer Science 2021 10
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Paraphrase Generation, Question Answering, Sentence

Multitask learning has led to significant advances in Natural Language Processing, including the decaNLP benchmark where question answering is used to frame 10 natural language understanding tasks in a single model. In this work we show how models trained to solve decaNLP fail with simple paraphrasing of the question. We contribute a crowd-sourced corpus of paraphrased questions (PQ-decaNLP), annotated with paraphrase phenomena. This enables analysis of how transformations such as swapping the class labels and changing the sentence modality lead to a large performance degradation. Training both MQAN and the newer T5 model using PQ-decaNLP improves their robustness and for some tasks improves the performance on the original questions, demonstrating the benefits of a model which is more robust to paraphrasing. Additionally, we explore how paraphrasing knowledge is transferred between tasks, with the aim of exploiting the multitask property to improve the robustness of the models. We explore the addition of paraphrase detection and paraphrase generation tasks, and find that while both models are able to learn these new tasks, knowledge about paraphrasing does not transfer to other decaNLP tasks.
Hap10: reconstructing accurate and long polyploid haplotypes using linked reads
Authors: Sina Majidian, Mohammad Hossein Kahaei, Dick de Ridder
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: BMC Bioinformatics 2020 6

Background: Haplotype information is essential for many genetic and genomic analyses, including genotype-phenotype associations in human, animals and plants. Haplotype assembly is a method for reconstructing haplotypes from DNA sequencing reads. By the advent of new sequencing technologies, new algorithms are needed to ensure long and accurate haplotypes. While a few linked-read haplotype assembly algorithms are available for diploid genomes, to the best of our knowledge, no algorithms have yet been proposed for polyploids specifically exploiting linked reads.
Results: The first haplotyping algorithm designed for linked reads generated from a polyploid genome is presented, built on a typical short-read haplotyping method, SDhaP. Using the input aligned reads and called variants, the haplotype-relevant information is extracted. Next, reads with the same barcodes are combined to produce molecule-specific fragments. Then, these fragments are clustered into strongly connected components which are then used as input of a haplotype assembly core in order to estimate accurate and long haplotypes.
Conclusions: Hap10 is a novel algorithm for haplotype assembly of polyploid genomes using linked reads. The performance of the algorithms is evaluated in a number of simulation scenarios and its applicability is demonstrated on a real dataset of sweet potato.
PhaseME: Automatic rapid assessment of phasing quality and phasing improvement.
Authors: Sina Majidian, Fritz J Sedlazeck
Date: 2020-07-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: GigaScience 2020 7

Background: The detection of which mutations are occurring on the same DNA molecule is essential to predict their consequences. This can be achieved by phasing the genomic variations. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art haplotype phasing is currently a black box in which the accuracy and quality of the reconstructed haplotypes are hard to assess.
Findings: Here we present PhaseME, a versatile method to provide insights into and improvement of sample phasing results based on linkage data. We showcase the performance and the importance of PhaseME by comparing phasing information obtained from Pacific Biosciences including both continuous long reads and high-quality consensus reads, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, 10x Genomics, and Illumina sequencing technologies. We found that 10x Genomics and Oxford Nanopore phasing can be significantly improved while retaining a high N50 and completeness of phase blocks. PhaseME generates reports and summary plots to provide insights into phasing performance and correctness. We observed unique phasing issues for each of the sequencing technologies, highlighting the necessity of quality assessments. PhaseME is able to decrease the Hamming error rate significantly by 22.4% on average across all 5 technologies. Additionally, a significant improvement is obtained in the reduction of long switch errors. Especially for high-quality consensus reads, the improvement is 54.6% in return for only a 5% decrease in phase block N50 length.
Conclusions: PhaseME is a universal method to assess the phasing quality and accuracy and improves the quality of phasing using linkage information. The package is freely available at https://github.com/smajidian/phaseme.
Top1 Solution of QQ Browser 2021 Ai Algorithm Competition Track 1 : Multimodal Video Similarity
Authors: Zhuoran Ma, Majing Lou, Xuan Ouyang
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, TAG, Video Similarity

In this paper, we describe the solution to the QQ Browser 2021 Ai Algorithm Competition (AIAC) Track 1. We use the multi-modal transformer model for the video embedding extraction. In the pretrain phase, we train the model with three tasks, (1) Video Tag Classification (VTC), (2) Mask Language Modeling (MLM) and (3) Mask Frame Modeling (MFM). In the finetune phase, we train the model with video similarity based on rank normalized human labels. Our full pipeline, after ensembling several models, scores 0.852 on the leaderboard, which we achieved the 1st place in the competition. The source codes have been released at Github.
LogAvgExp Provides a Principled and Performant Global Pooling Operator
Authors: Scott C. Lowe, Thomas Trappenberg, Sageev Oore
Date: 2021-11-02 00:00:00

We seek to improve the pooling operation in neural networks, by applying a more theoretically justified operator. We demonstrate that LogSumExp provides a natural OR operator for logits. When one corrects for the number of elements inside the pooling operator, this becomes $\text{LogAvgExp} := \log(\text{mean}(\exp(x)))$. By introducing a single temperature parameter, LogAvgExp smoothly transitions from the max of its operands to the mean (found at the limiting cases $t \to 0^+$ and $t \to +\infty$). We experimentally tested LogAvgExp, both with and without a learnable temperature parameter, in a variety of deep neural network architectures for computer vision.
Instructive artificial intelligence (AI) for human training, assistance, and explainability
Authors: Nicholas Kantack, Nina Cohen, Nathan Bos, Corey Lowman, James Everett, Timothy Endres
Date: 2021-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

We propose a novel approach to explainable AI (XAI) based on the concept of "instruction" from neural networks. In this case study, we demonstrate how a superhuman neural network might instruct human trainees as an alternative to traditional approaches to XAI. Specifically, an AI examines human actions and calculates variations on the human strategy that lead to better performance. Experiments with a JHU/APL-developed AI player for the cooperative card game Hanabi suggest this technique makes unique contributions to explainability while improving human performance. One area of focus for Instructive AI is in the significant discrepancies that can arise between a human's actual strategy and the strategy they profess to use. This inaccurate self-assessment presents a barrier for XAI, since explanations of an AI's strategy may not be properly understood or implemented by human recipients. We have developed and are testing a novel, Instructive AI approach that estimates human strategy by observing human actions. With neural networks, this allows a direct calculation of the changes in weights needed to improve the human strategy to better emulate a more successful AI. Subjected to constraints (e.g. sparsity) these weight changes can be interpreted as recommended changes to human strategy (e.g. "value A more, and value B less"). Instruction from AI such as this functions both to help humans perform better at tasks, but also to better understand, anticipate, and correct the actions of an AI. Results will be presented on AI instruction's ability to improve human decision-making and human-AI teaming in Hanabi.
Predicting the Location of Bicycle-sharing Stations using OpenStreetMap Data
Authors: Kamil Raczycki
Date: 2021-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Transfer Learning

Planning the layout of bicycle-sharing stations is a complex process, especially in cities where bicycle sharing systems are just being implemented. Urban planners often have to make a lot of estimates based on both publicly available data and privately provided data from the administration and then use the Location-Allocation model popular in the field. Many municipalities in smaller cities may have difficulty hiring specialists to carry out such planning. This thesis proposes a new solution to streamline and facilitate the process of such planning by using spatial embedding methods. Based only on publicly available data from OpenStreetMap, and station layouts from 34 cities in Europe, a method has been developed to divide cities into micro-regions using the Uber H3 discrete global grid system and to indicate regions where it is worth placing a station based on existing systems in different cities using transfer learning. The result of the work is a mechanism to support planners in their decision making when planning a station layout with a choice of reference cities.
Meta-Learning the Search Distribution of Black-Box Random Search Based Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Maksym Yatsura, Jan Hendrik Metzen, Matthias Hein
Date: 2021-11-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Adversarial attacks based on randomized search schemes have obtained state-of-the-art results in black-box robustness evaluation recently. However, as we demonstrate in this work, their efficiency in different query budget regimes depends on manual design and heuristic tuning of the underlying proposal distributions. We study how this issue can be addressed by adapting the proposal distribution online based on the information obtained during the attack. We consider Square Attack, which is a state-of-the-art score-based black-box attack, and demonstrate how its performance can be improved by a learned controller that adjusts the parameters of the proposal distribution online during the attack. We train the controller using gradient-based end-to-end training on a CIFAR10 model with white box access. We demonstrate that plugging the learned controller into the attack consistently improves its black-box robustness estimate in different query regimes by up to 20% for a wide range of different models with black-box access. We further show that the learned adaptation principle transfers well to the other data distributions such as CIFAR100 or ImageNet and to the targeted attack setting.
Assessing Effectiveness of Using Internal Signals for Check-Worthy Claim Identification in Unlabeled Data for Automated Fact-Checking
Authors: Archita Pathak, Rohini K. Srihari
Date: 2021-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Fact Checking, Retrieval, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence

While recent work on automated fact-checking has focused mainly on verifying and explaining claims, for which the list of claims is readily available, identifying check-worthy claim sentences from a text remains challenging. Current claim identification models rely on manual annotations for each sentence in the text, which is an expensive task and challenging to conduct on a frequent basis across multiple domains. This paper explores methodology to identify check-worthy claim sentences from fake news articles, irrespective of domain, without explicit sentence-level annotations. We leverage two internal supervisory signals - headline and the abstractive summary - to rank the sentences based on semantic similarity. We hypothesize that this ranking directly correlates to the check-worthiness of the sentences. To assess the effectiveness of this hypothesis, we build pipelines that leverage the ranking of sentences based on either the headline or the abstractive summary. The top-ranked sentences are used for the downstream fact-checking tasks of evidence retrieval and the article's veracity prediction by the pipeline. Our findings suggest that the top 3 ranked sentences contain enough information for evidence-based fact-checking of a fake news article. We also show that while the headline has more gisting similarity with how a fact-checking website writes a claim, the summary-based pipeline is the most promising for an end-to-end fact-checking system.