pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On the Equivalence of Decoupled Graph Convolution Network and Label Propagation
Authors: Hande Dong, Jiawei Chen, Fuli Feng, Xiangnan He, Shuxian Bi, Zhaolin Ding, Peng Cui
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification, Pseudo Label, Representation Learning

The original design of Graph Convolution Network (GCN) couples feature transformation and neighborhood aggregation for node representation learning. Recently, some work shows that coupling is inferior to decoupling, which supports deep graph propagation better and has become the latest paradigm of GCN (e.g., APPNP and SGCN). Despite effectiveness, the working mechanisms of the decoupled GCN are not well understood. In this paper, we explore the decoupled GCN for semi-supervised node classification from a novel and fundamental perspective -- label propagation. We conduct thorough theoretical analyses, proving that the decoupled GCN is essentially the same as the two-step label propagation: first, propagating the known labels along the graph to generate pseudo-labels for the unlabeled nodes, and second, training normal neural network classifiers on the augmented pseudo-labeled data. More interestingly, we reveal the effectiveness of decoupled GCN: going beyond the conventional label propagation, it could automatically assign structure- and model- aware weights to the pseudo-label data. This explains why the decoupled GCN is relatively robust to the structure noise and over-smoothing, but sensitive to the label noise and model initialization. Based on this insight, we propose a new label propagation method named Propagation then Training Adaptively (PTA), which overcomes the flaws of the decoupled GCN with a dynamic and adaptive weighting strategy. Our PTA is simple yet more effective and robust than decoupled GCN. We empirically validate our findings on four benchmark datasets, demonstrating the advantages of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/DongHande/PT_propagation_then_training.
UNER: Universal Named-Entity RecognitionFramework
Authors: Diego Alves, Tin Kuculo, Gabriel Amaral, Gaurish Thakkar, Marko Tadic
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

We introduce the Universal Named-Entity Recognition (UNER)framework, a 4-level classification hierarchy, and the methodology that isbeing adopted to create the first multilingual UNER corpus: the SETimesparallel corpus annotated for named-entities. First, the English SETimescorpus will be annotated using existing tools and knowledge bases. Afterevaluating the resulting annotations through crowdsourcing campaigns,they will be propagated automatically to other languages within the SE-Times corpora. Finally, as an extrinsic evaluation, the UNER multilin-gual dataset will be used to train and test available NER tools. As part offuture research directions, we aim to increase the number of languages inthe UNER corpus and to investigate possible ways of integrating UNERwith available knowledge graphs to improve named-entity recognition.
Unsupervised Cross-lingual Adaptation for Sequence Tagging and Beyond
Authors: Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Wenxuan Zhang, Zheng Li, Wai Lam
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Translation

Cross-lingual adaptation with multilingual pre-trained language models (mPTLMs) mainly consists of two lines of works: zero-shot approach and translation-based approach, which have been studied extensively on the sequence-level tasks. We further verify the efficacy of these cross-lingual adaptation approaches by evaluating their performances on more fine-grained sequence tagging tasks. After re-examining their strengths and drawbacks, we propose a novel framework to consolidate the zero-shot approach and the translation-based approach for better adaptation performance. Instead of simply augmenting the source data with the machine-translated data, we tailor-make a warm-up mechanism to quickly update the mPTLMs with the gradients estimated on a few translated data. Then, the adaptation approach is applied to the refined parameters and the cross-lingual transfer is performed in a warm-start way. The experimental results on nine target languages demonstrate that our method is beneficial to the cross-lingual adaptation of various sequence tagging tasks.
Pretraining and Fine-Tuning Strategies for Sentiment Analysis of Latvian Tweets
Authors: Gaurish Thakkar, Marcis Pinnis
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

In this paper, we present various pre-training strategies that aid in im-proving the accuracy of the sentiment classification task. We, at first, pre-trainlanguage representation models using these strategies and then fine-tune them onthe downstream task. Experimental results on a time-balanced tweet evaluation setshow the improvement over the previous technique. We achieve 76% accuracy forsentiment analysis on Latvian tweets, which is a substantial improvement over pre-vious work
RSKDD-Net: Random Sample-based Keypoint Detector and Descriptor
Authors: Fan Lu, Guang Chen, Yinlong Liu, Zhongnan Qu, Alois Knoll
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration, Saliency Prediction

Keypoint detector and descriptor are two main components of point cloud registration. Previous learning-based keypoint detectors rely on saliency estimation for each point or farthest point sample (FPS) for candidate points selection, which are inefficient and not applicable in large scale scenes. This paper proposes Random Sample-based Keypoint Detector and Descriptor Network (RSKDD-Net) for large scale point cloud registration. The key idea is using random sampling to efficiently select candidate points and using a learning-based method to jointly generate keypoints and descriptors. To tackle the information loss of random sampling, we exploit a novel random dilation cluster strategy to enlarge the receptive field of each sampled point and an attention mechanism to aggregate the positions and features of neighbor points. Furthermore, we propose a matching loss to train the descriptor in a weakly supervised manner. Extensive experiments on two large scale outdoor LiDAR datasets show that the proposed RSKDD-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance with more than 15 times faster than existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/RSKDD-Net.
Efficient grouping for keypoint detection
Authors: Alexey Sidnev, Ekaterina Krasikova, Maxim Kazakov
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection, Pose Estimation

The success of deep neural networks in the traditional keypoint detection task encourages researchers to solve new problems and collect more complex datasets. The size of the DeepFashion2 dataset poses a new challenge on the keypoint detection task, as it comprises 13 clothing categories that span a wide range of keypoints (294 in total). The direct prediction of all keypoints leads to huge memory consumption, slow training, and a slow inference time. This paper studies the keypoint grouping approach and how it affects the performance of the CenterNet architecture. We propose a simple and efficient automatic grouping technique with a powerful post-processing method and apply it to the DeepFashion2 fashion landmark task and the MS COCO pose estimation task. This reduces memory consumption and processing time during inference by up to 19% and 30% respectively, and during the training stage by 28% and 26% respectively, without compromising accuracy.
Segmentation of the cortical plate in fetal brain MRI with a topological loss
Authors: Priscille de Dumast, Hamza Kebiri, Chirine Atat, Vincent Dunet, Mériam Koob, Meritxell Bach Cuadra
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The fetal cortical plate undergoes drastic morphological changes throughout early in utero development that can be observed using magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. An accurate MR image segmentation, and more importantly a topologically correct delineation of the cortical gray matter, is a key baseline to perform further quantitative analysis of brain development. In this paper, we propose for the first time the integration of a topological constraint, as an additional loss function, to enhance the morphological consistency of a deep learning-based segmentation of the fetal cortical plate. We quantitatively evaluate our method on 18 fetal brain atlases ranging from 21 to 38 weeks of gestation, showing the significant benefits of our method through all gestational ages as compared to a baseline method. Furthermore, qualitative evaluation by three different experts on 130 randomly selected slices from 26 clinical MRIs evidences the out-performance of our method independently of the MR reconstruction quality.
EventKG+Click: A Dataset of Language-specific Event-centric User Interaction Traces
Authors: Sara Abdollahi, Simon Gottschalk, Elena Demidova
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00

An increasing need to analyse event-centric cross-lingual information calls for innovative user interaction models that assist users in crossing the language barrier. However, datasets that reflect user interaction traces in cross-lingual settings required to train and evaluate the user interaction models are mostly missing. In this paper, we present the EventKG+Click dataset that aims to facilitate the creation and evaluation of such interaction models. EventKG+Click builds upon the event-centric EventKG knowledge graph and language-specific information on user interactions with events, entities, and their relations derived from the Wikipedia clickstream.
Spherical Harmonics for Shape-Constrained 3D Cell Segmentation
Authors: Dennis Eschweiler, Malte Rethwisch, Simon Koppers, Johannes Stegmaier
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Segmentation, Segmentation

Recent microscopy imaging techniques allow to precisely analyze cell morphology in 3D image data. To process the vast amount of image data generated by current digitized imaging techniques, automated approaches are demanded more than ever. Segmentation approaches used for morphological analyses, however, are often prone to produce unnaturally shaped predictions, which in conclusion could lead to inaccurate experimental outcomes. In order to minimize further manual interaction, shape priors help to constrain the predictions to the set of natural variations. In this paper, we show how spherical harmonics can be used as an alternative way to inherently constrain the predictions of neural networks for the segmentation of cells in 3D microscopy image data. Benefits and limitations of the spherical harmonic representation are analyzed and final results are compared to other state-of-the-art approaches on two different data sets.
Learning to Dispatch for Job Shop Scheduling via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Cong Zhang, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang, Puay Siew Tan, Chi Xu
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Graph Neural Network, Job Shop Scheduling, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

Priority dispatching rule (PDR) is widely used for solving real-world Job-shop scheduling problem (JSSP). However, the design of effective PDRs is a tedious task, requiring a myriad of specialized knowledge and often delivering limited performance. In this paper, we propose to automatically learn PDRs via an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning agent. We exploit the disjunctive graph representation of JSSP, and propose a Graph Neural Network based scheme to embed the states encountered during solving. The resulting policy network is size-agnostic, effectively enabling generalization on large-scale instances. Experiments show that the agent can learn high-quality PDRs from scratch with elementary raw features, and demonstrates strong performance against the best existing PDRs. The learned policies also perform well on much larger instances that are unseen in training.
Regret in Online Recommendation Systems
Authors: Kaito Ariu, Narae Ryu, Se-Young Yun, Alexandre Proutière
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of recommendation systems in an online setting, where items are sequentially recommended to users over time. In each round, a user, randomly picked from a population of $m$ users, requests a recommendation. The decision-maker observes the user and selects an item from a catalogue of $n$ items. Importantly, an item cannot be recommended twice to the same user. The probabilities that a user likes each item are unknown. The performance of the recommendation algorithm is captured through its regret, considering as a reference an Oracle algorithm aware of these probabilities. We investigate various structural assumptions on these probabilities: we derive for each structure regret lower bounds, and devise algorithms achieving these limits. Interestingly, our analysis reveals the relative weights of the different components of regret: the component due to the constraint of not presenting the same item twice to the same user, that due to learning the chances users like items, and finally that arising when learning the underlying structure.
Rescuing neural spike train models from bad MLE
Authors: Diego M. Arribas, Yuan Zhao, Il Memming Park
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

The standard approach to fitting an autoregressive spike train model is to maximize the likelihood for one-step prediction. This maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) often leads to models that perform poorly when generating samples recursively for more than one time step. Moreover, the generated spike trains can fail to capture important features of the data and even show diverging firing rates. To alleviate this, we propose to directly minimize the divergence between neural recorded and model generated spike trains using spike train kernels. We develop a method that stochastically optimizes the maximum mean discrepancy induced by the kernel. Experiments performed on both real and synthetic neural data validate the proposed approach, showing that it leads to well-behaving models. Using different combinations of spike train kernels, we show that we can control the trade-off between different features which is critical for dealing with model-mismatch.
Online Algorithm for Unsupervised Sequential Selection with Contextual Information
Authors: Arun Verma, Manjesh K. Hanawal, Csaba Szepesvári, Venkatesh Saligrama
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

In this paper, we study Contextual Unsupervised Sequential Selection (USS), a new variant of the stochastic contextual bandits problem where the loss of an arm cannot be inferred from the observed feedback. In our setup, arms are associated with fixed costs and are ordered, forming a cascade. In each round, a context is presented, and the learner selects the arms sequentially till some depth. The total cost incurred by stopping at an arm is the sum of fixed costs of arms selected and the stochastic loss associated with the arm. The learner's goal is to learn a decision rule that maps contexts to arms with the goal of minimizing the total expected loss. The problem is challenging as we are faced with an unsupervised setting as the total loss cannot be estimated. Clearly, learning is feasible only if the optimal arm can be inferred (explicitly or implicitly) from the problem structure. We observe that learning is still possible when the problem instance satisfies the so-called 'Contextual Weak Dominance' (CWD) property. Under CWD, we propose an algorithm for the contextual USS problem and demonstrate that it has sub-linear regret. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets validate our algorithm.
Fusion of Dual Spatial Information for Hyperspectral Image Classification
Authors: Puhong Duan, Pedram Ghamisi, Xudong Kang, Behnood Rasti, Shutao Li, Richard Gloaguen
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

The inclusion of spatial information into spectral classifiers for fine-resolution hyperspectral imagery has led to significant improvements in terms of classification performance. The task of spectral-spatial hyperspectral image classification has remained challenging because of high intraclass spectrum variability and low interclass spectral variability. This fact has made the extraction of spatial information highly active. In this work, a novel hyperspectral image classification framework using the fusion of dual spatial information is proposed, in which the dual spatial information is built by both exploiting pre-processing feature extraction and post-processing spatial optimization. In the feature extraction stage, an adaptive texture smoothing method is proposed to construct the structural profile (SP), which makes it possible to precisely extract discriminative features from hyperspectral images. The SP extraction method is used here for the first time in the remote sensing community. Then, the extracted SP is fed into a spectral classifier. In the spatial optimization stage, a pixel-level classifier is used to obtain the class probability followed by an extended random walker-based spatial optimization technique. Finally, a decision fusion rule is utilized to fuse the class probabilities obtained by the two different stages. Experiments performed on three data sets from different scenes illustrate that the proposed method can outperform other state-of-the-art classification techniques. In addition, the proposed feature extraction method, i.e., SP, can effectively improve the discrimination between different land covers.
Tele-operative Robotic Lung Ultrasound Scanning Platform for Triage of COVID-19 Patients
Authors: Ryosuke Tsumura, John W. Hardin, Keshav Bimbraw, Olushola S. Odusanya, Yihao Zheng, Jeffrey C. Hill, Beatrice Hoffmann, Winston Soboyejo, Haichong K. Zhang
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00

Novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has become a pandemic of epic proportions and a global response to prepare health systems worldwide is of utmost importance. In addition to its cost-effectiveness in a resources-limited setting, lung ultrasound (LUS) has emerged as a rapid noninvasive imaging tool for the diagnosis of COVID-19 infected patients. Concerns surrounding LUS include the disparity of infected patients and healthcare providers, relatively small number of physicians and sonographers capable of performing LUS, and most importantly, the requirement for substantial physical contact between the patient and operator, increasing the risk of transmission. Mitigation of the spread of the virus is of paramount importance. A 2-dimensional (2D) tele-operative robotic platform capable of performing LUS in for COVID-19 infected patients may be of significant benefit. The authors address the aforementioned issues surrounding the use of LUS in the application of COVID- 19 infected patients. In addition, first time application, feasibility and safety were validated in three healthy subjects, along with 2D image optimization and comparison for overall accuracy. Preliminary results demonstrate that the proposed platform allows for successful acquisition and application of LUS in humans.
Towards human-agent knowledge fusion (HAKF) in support of distributed coalition teams
Authors: Dave Braines, Federico Cerutti, Marc Roig Vilamala, Mani Srivastava, Lance Kaplan Alun Preece, Gavin Pearson
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00

Future coalition operations can be substantially augmented through agile teaming between human and machine agents, but in a coalition context these agents may be unfamiliar to the human users and expected to operate in a broad set of scenarios rather than being narrowly defined for particular purposes. In such a setting it is essential that the human agents can rapidly build trust in the machine agents through appropriate transparency of their behaviour, e.g., through explanations. The human agents are also able to bring their local knowledge to the team, observing the situation unfolding and deciding which key information should be communicated to the machine agents to enable them to better account for the particular environment. In this paper we describe the initial steps towards this human-agent knowledge fusion (HAKF) environment through a recap of the key requirements, and an explanation of how these can be fulfilled for an example situation. We show how HAKF has the potential to bring value to both human and machine agents working as part of a distributed coalition team in a complex event processing setting with uncertain sources.
NLNDE at CANTEMIST: Neural Sequence Labeling and Parsing Approaches for Clinical Concept Extraction
Authors: Lukas Lange, Xiang Dai, Heike Adel, Jannik Strötgen
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Clinical Concept Extraction

The recognition and normalization of clinical information, such as tumor morphology mentions, is an important, but complex process consisting of multiple subtasks. In this paper, we describe our system for the CANTEMIST shared task, which is able to extract, normalize and rank ICD codes from Spanish electronic health records using neural sequence labeling and parsing approaches with context-aware embeddings. Our best system achieves 85.3 F1, 76.7 F1, and 77.0 MAP for the three tasks, respectively.
BARThez: a Skilled Pretrained French Sequence-to-Sequence Model
Authors: Moussa Kamal Eddine, Antoine J. -P. Tixier, Michalis Vazirgiannis
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: FLUE, Natural Language Understanding, OrangeSum, Self-Supervised Learning, Text Summarization, Transfer Learning

Inductive transfer learning has taken the entire NLP field by storm, with models such as BERT and BART setting new state of the art on countless NLU tasks. However, most of the available models and research have been conducted for English. In this work, we introduce BARThez, the first large-scale pretrained seq2seq model for French. Being based on BART, BARThez is particularly well-suited for generative tasks. We evaluate BARThez on five discriminative tasks from the FLUE benchmark and two generative tasks from a novel summarization dataset, OrangeSum, that we created for this research. We show BARThez to be very competitive with state-of-the-art BERT-based French language models such as CamemBERT and FlauBERT. We also continue the pretraining of a multilingual BART on BARThez' corpus, and show our resulting model, mBARThez, to significantly boost BARThez' generative performance. Code, data and models are publicly available.
Learning Implicit Functions for Topology-Varying Dense 3D Shape Correspondence
Authors: Feng Liu, Xiaoming Liu
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Semantic correspondence

The goal of this paper is to learn dense 3D shape correspondence for topology-varying objects in an unsupervised manner. Conventional implicit functions estimate the occupancy of a 3D point given a shape latent code. Instead, our novel implicit function produces a part embedding vector for each 3D point, which is assumed to be similar to its densely corresponded point in another 3D shape of the same object category. Furthermore, we implement dense correspondence through an inverse function mapping from the part embedding to a corresponded 3D point. Both functions are jointly learned with several effective loss functions to realize our assumption, together with the encoder generating the shape latent code. During inference, if a user selects an arbitrary point on the source shape, our algorithm can automatically generate a confidence score indicating whether there is a correspondence on the target shape, as well as the corresponding semantic point if there is one. Such a mechanism inherently benefits man-made objects with different part constitutions. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through unsupervised 3D semantic correspondence and shape segmentation.