pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Covariate-assisted Sparse Tensor Completion
Authors: Hilda S Ibriga, Will Wei Sun
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00

We aim to provably complete a sparse and highly-missing tensor in the presence of covariate information along tensor modes. Our motivation comes from online advertising where users click-through-rates (CTR) on ads over various devices form a CTR tensor that has about 96% missing entries and has many zeros on non-missing entries, which makes the standalone tensor completion method unsatisfactory. Beside the CTR tensor, additional ad features or user characteristics are often available. In this paper, we propose Covariate-assisted Sparse Tensor Completion (COSTCO) to incorporate covariate information for the recovery of the sparse tensor. The key idea is to jointly extract latent components from both the tensor and the covariate matrix to learn a synthetic representation. Theoretically, we derive the error bound for the recovered tensor components and explicitly quantify the improvements on both the reveal probability condition and the tensor recovery accuracy due to covariates. Finally, we apply COSTCO to an advertisement dataset consisting of a CTR tensor and ad covariate matrix, leading to 23% accuracy improvement over the baseline. An important by-product is that ad latent components from COSTCO reveal interesting ad clusters, which are useful for better ad targeting.
XDO: A Double Oracle Algorithm for Extensive-Form Games
Authors: Stephen Mcaleer, John Lanier, Kevin Wang, Pierre Baldi, Roy Fox
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Form, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Policy Space Response Oracles (PSRO) is a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for two-player zero-sum games that has been empirically shown to find approximate Nash equilibria in large games. Although PSRO is guaranteed to converge to an approximate Nash equilibrium and can handle continuous actions, it may take an exponential number of iterations as the number of information states (infostates) grows. We propose Extensive-Form Double Oracle (XDO), an extensive-form double oracle algorithm for two-player zero-sum games that is guaranteed to converge to an approximate Nash equilibrium linearly in the number of infostates. Unlike PSRO, which mixes best responses at the root of the game, XDO mixes best responses at every infostate. We also introduce Neural XDO (NXDO), where the best response is learned through deep RL. In tabular experiments on Leduc poker, we find that XDO achieves an approximate Nash equilibrium in a number of iterations an order of magnitude smaller than PSRO. Experiments on a modified Leduc poker game and Oshi-Zumo show that tabular XDO achieves a lower exploitability than CFR with the same amount of computation. We also find that NXDO outperforms PSRO and NFSP on a sequential multidimensional continuous-action game. NXDO is the first deep RL method that can find an approximate Nash equilibrium in high-dimensional continuous-action sequential games. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/indylab/nxdo.
Holistic 3D Scene Understanding from a Single Image with Implicit Representation
Authors: Cheng Zhang, Zhaopeng Cui, yinda zhang, Bing Zeng, Marc Pollefeys, Shuaicheng Liu
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, 3D Shape Reconstruction, Graph Neural Network, Monocular 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Room Layout Estimation, Scene Understanding

We present a new pipeline for holistic 3D scene understanding from a single image, which could predict object shapes, object poses, and scene layout. As it is a highly ill-posed problem, existing methods usually suffer from inaccurate estimation of both shapes and layout especially for the cluttered scene due to the heavy occlusion between objects. We propose to utilize the latest deep implicit representation to solve this challenge. We not only propose an image-based local structured implicit network to improve the object shape estimation, but also refine the 3D object pose and scene layout via a novel implicit scene graph neural network that exploits the implicit local object features. A novel physical violation loss is also proposed to avoid incorrect context between objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of object shape, scene layout estimation, and 3D object detection.
SAR-U-Net: squeeze-and-excitation block and atrous spatial pyramid pooling based residual U-Net for automatic liver segmentation in Computed Tomography
Authors: Jinke Wang, Peiqing Lv, Haiying Wang, Changfa Shi
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Liver Segmentation

Background and objective: In this paper, a modified U-Net based framework is presented, which leverages techniques from Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) block, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) and residual learning for accurate and robust liver CT segmentation, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was tested on two public datasets LiTS17 and SLiver07. Methods: A new network architecture called SAR-U-Net was designed. Firstly, the SE block is introduced to adaptively extract image features after each convolution in the U-Net encoder, while suppressing irrelevant regions, and highlighting features of specific segmentation task; Secondly, ASPP was employed to replace the transition layer and the output layer, and acquire multi-scale image information via different receptive fields. Thirdly, to alleviate the degradation problem, the traditional convolution block was replaced with the residual block and thus prompt the network to gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. Results: In the LiTS17 experiment, the mean values of Dice, VOE, RVD, ASD and MSD were 95.71, 9.52, -0.84, 1.54 and 29.14, respectively. Compared with other closely related 2D-based models, the proposed method achieved the highest accuracy. In the experiment of the SLiver07, the mean values of Dice, VOE, RVD, ASD and MSD were 97.31, 5.37, -1.08, 1.85 and 27.45, respectively. Compared with other closely related models, the proposed method achieved the highest segmentation accuracy except for the RVD. Conclusion: The proposed model enables a great improvement on the accuracy compared to 2D-based models, and its robustness in circumvent challenging problems, such as small liver regions, discontinuous liver regions, and fuzzy liver boundaries, is also well demonstrated and validated.
LightMBERT: A Simple Yet Effective Method for Multilingual BERT Distillation
Authors: Xiaoqi Jiao, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Xiao Chen, Linlin Li, Fang Wang, Qun Liu
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, XLM-R

The multilingual pre-trained language models (e.g, mBERT, XLM and XLM-R) have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual natural language understanding tasks. However, these models are computationally intensive and difficult to be deployed on resource-restricted devices. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective distillation method (LightMBERT) for transferring the cross-lingual generalization ability of the multilingual BERT to a small student model. The experiment results empirically demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of LightMBERT, which is significantly better than the baselines and performs comparable to the teacher mBERT.
3D Head-Position Prediction in First-Person View by Considering Head Pose for Human-Robot Eye Contact
Authors: Yuki Tamaru, Yasunori Ozaki, Yuki Okafuji, Junya Nakanishi, Yuichiro Yoshikawa, Jun Baba
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Prediction

For a humanoid robot to make eye contact and initiate communication with a person, it is necessary to estimate the person's head position. However, eye contact becomes difficult due to the mechanical delay of the robot when the person is moving. Owing to these issues, it is important to conduct a head-position prediction to mitigate the effect of the delay in the robot motion. Based on the fact that humans turn their heads before changing direction while walking, we hypothesized that the accuracy of three-dimensional (3D) head-position prediction from a first-person view can be improved by considering the head pose. We compared our method with a conventional Kalman filter-based approach, and found our method to be more accurate. The experiment results show that considering the head pose helps improve the accuracy of 3D head-position prediction.
FairFil: Contrastive Neural Debiasing Method for Pretrained Text Encoders
Authors: Pengyu Cheng, Weituo Hao, Siyang Yuan, Shijing Si, Lawrence Carin
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Fairness, Sentence

Pretrained text encoders, such as BERT, have been applied increasingly in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and have recently demonstrated significant performance gains. However, recent studies have demonstrated the existence of social bias in these pretrained NLP models. Although prior works have made progress on word-level debiasing, improved sentence-level fairness of pretrained encoders still lacks exploration. In this paper, we proposed the first neural debiasing method for a pretrained sentence encoder, which transforms the pretrained encoder outputs into debiased representations via a fair filter (FairFil) network. To learn the FairFil, we introduce a contrastive learning framework that not only minimizes the correlation between filtered embeddings and bias words but also preserves rich semantic information of the original sentences. On real-world datasets, our FairFil effectively reduces the bias degree of pretrained text encoders, while continuously showing desirable performance on downstream tasks. Moreover, our post-hoc method does not require any retraining of the text encoders, further enlarging FairFil's application space.
MediaSum: A Large-scale Media Interview Dataset for Dialogue Summarization
Authors: Chenguang Zhu, Yang Liu, Jie Mei, Michael Zeng
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Transfer Learning

MediaSum, a large-scale media interview dataset consisting of 463.6K transcripts with abstractive summaries. To create this dataset, we collect interview transcripts from NPR and CNN and employ the overview and topic descriptions as summaries. Compared with existing public corpora for dialogue summarization, our dataset is an order of magnitude larger and contains complex multi-party conversations from multiple domains. We conduct statistical analysis to demonstrate the unique positional bias exhibited in the transcripts of televised and radioed interviews. We also show that MediaSum can be used in transfer learning to improve a model's performance on other dialogue summarization tasks.
Distributed Principal Subspace Analysis for Partitioned Big Data: Algorithms, Analysis, and Implementation
Authors: Arpita Gang, Bingqing Xiang, Waheed U. Bajwa
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Principal Subspace Analysis (PSA) -- and its sibling, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) -- is one of the most popular approaches for dimensionality reduction in signal processing and machine learning. But centralized PSA/PCA solutions are fast becoming irrelevant in the modern era of big data, in which the number of samples and/or the dimensionality of samples often exceed the storage and/or computational capabilities of individual machines. This has led to the study of distributed PSA/PCA solutions, in which the data are partitioned across multiple machines and an estimate of the principal subspace is obtained through collaboration among the machines. It is in this vein that this paper revisits the problem of distributed PSA/PCA under the general framework of an arbitrarily connected network of machines that lacks a central server. The main contributions of the paper in this regard are threefold. First, two algorithms are proposed in the paper that can be used for distributed PSA/PCA, with one in the case of data partitioned across samples and the other in the case of data partitioned across (raw) features. Second, in the case of sample-wise partitioned data, the proposed algorithm and a variant of it are analyzed, and their convergence to the true subspace at linear rates is established. Third, extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data are carried out to validate the usefulness of the proposed algorithms. In particular, in the case of sample-wise partitioned data, an MPI-based distributed implementation is carried out to study the interplay between network topology and communications cost as well as to study the effects of straggler machines on the proposed algorithms.
A Vision Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for UAV Obstacle Avoidance
Authors: Jeremy Roghair, Kyungtae Ko, Amir Ehsan Niaraki Asli, Ali Jannesari
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Integration of reinforcement learning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to achieve autonomous flight has been an active research area in recent years. An important part focuses on obstacle detection and avoidance for UAVs navigating through an environment. Exploration in an unseen environment can be tackled with Deep Q-Network (DQN). However, value exploration with uniform sampling of actions may lead to redundant states, where often the environments inherently bear sparse rewards. To resolve this, we present two techniques for improving exploration for UAV obstacle avoidance. The first is a convergence-based approach that uses convergence error to iterate through unexplored actions and temporal threshold to balance exploration and exploitation. The second is a guidance-based approach using a Domain Network which uses a Gaussian mixture distribution to compare previously seen states to a predicted next state in order to select the next action. Performance and evaluation of these approaches were implemented in multiple 3-D simulation environments, with variation in complexity. The proposed approach demonstrates a two-fold improvement in average rewards compared to state of the art.
Self-supervised Text-to-SQL Learning with Header Alignment Training
Authors: Donggyu Kim, Seanie Lee
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Since we can leverage a large amount of unlabeled data without any human supervision to train a model and transfer the knowledge to target tasks, self-supervised learning is a de-facto component for the recent success of deep learning in various fields. However, in many cases, there is a discrepancy between a self-supervised learning objective and a task-specific objective. In order to tackle such discrepancy in Text-to-SQL task, we propose a novel self-supervised learning framework. We utilize the task-specific properties of Text-to-SQL task and the underlying structures of table contents to train the models to learn useful knowledge of the \textit{header-column} alignment task from unlabeled table data. We are able to transfer the knowledge to the supervised Text-to-SQL training with annotated samples, so that the model can leverage the knowledge to better perform the \textit{header-span} alignment task to predict SQL statements. Experimental results show that our self-supervised learning framework significantly improves the performance of the existing strong BERT based models without using large external corpora. In particular, our method is effective for training the model with scarce labeled data. The source code of this work is available in GitHub.
Analyzing the Hidden Activations of Deep Policy Networks: Why Representation Matters
Authors: Trevor A. McInroe, Michael Spurrier, Jennifer Sieber, Stephen Conneely
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We analyze the hidden activations of neural network policies of deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents and show, empirically, that it's possible to know a priori if a state representation will lend itself to fast learning. RL agents in high-dimensional states have two main learning burdens: (1) to learn an action-selection policy and (2) to learn to discern between useful and non-useful information in a given state. By learning a latent representation of these high-dimensional states with an auxiliary model, the latter burden is effectively removed, thereby leading to accelerated training progress. We examine this phenomenon across tasks in the PyBullet Kuka environment, where an agent must learn to control a robotic gripper to pick up an object. Our analysis reveals how neural network policies learn to organize their internal representation of the state space throughout training. The results from this analysis provide three main insights into how deep RL agents learn. First, a well-organized internal representation within the policy network is a prerequisite to learning good action-selection. Second, a poor initial representation can cause an unrecoverable collapse within a policy network. Third, a good initial representation allows an agent's policy network to organize its internal representation even before any training begins.
Interpretable Data-driven Methods for Subgrid-scale Closure in LES for Transcritical LOX/GCH4 Combustion
Authors: Wai Tong Chung, Aashwin Ananda Mishra, Matthias Ihme
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Interpretable Machine Learning

Many practical combustion systems such as those in rockets, gas turbines, and internal combustion engines operate under high pressures that surpass the thermodynamic critical limit of fuel-oxidizer mixtures. These conditions require the consideration of complex fluid behaviors that pose challenges for numerical simulations, casting doubts on the validity of existing subgrid-scale (SGS) models in large-eddy simulations of these systems. While data-driven methods have shown high accuracy as closure models in simulations of turbulent flames, these models are often criticized for lack of physical interpretability, wherein they provide answers but no insight into their underlying rationale. The objective of this study is to assess SGS stress models from conventional physics-driven approaches and an interpretable machine learning algorithm, i.e., the random forest regressor, in a turbulent transcritical non-premixed flame. To this end, direct numerical simulations (DNS) of transcritical liquid-oxygen/gaseous-methane (LOX/GCH4) inert and reacting flows are performed. Using this data, a priori analysis is performed on the Favre-filtered DNS data to examine the accuracy of physics-based and random forest SGS-models under these conditions. SGS stresses calculated with the gradient model show good agreement with the exact terms extracted from filtered DNS. The accuracy of the random-forest regressor decreased when physics-based constraints are applied to the feature set. Results demonstrate that random forests can perform as effectively as algebraic models when modeling subgrid stresses, only when trained on a sufficiently representative database. The employment of random forest feature importance score is shown to provide insight into discovering subgrid-scale stresses through sparse regression.
Improving Context-Based Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Self-Supervised Trajectory Contrastive Learning
Authors: Bernie Wang, Simon Xu, Kurt Keutzer, Yang Gao, Bichen Wu
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Meta Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Self-Supervised Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning typically requires orders of magnitude more samples than single task reinforcement learning methods. This is because meta-training needs to deal with more diverse distributions and train extra components such as context encoders. To address this, we propose a novel self-supervised learning task, which we named Trajectory Contrastive Learning (TCL), to improve meta-training. TCL adopts contrastive learning and trains a context encoder to predict whether two transition windows are sampled from the same trajectory. TCL leverages the natural hierarchical structure of context-based meta-RL and makes minimal assumptions, allowing it to be generally applicable to context-based meta-RL algorithms. It accelerates the training of context encoders and improves meta-training overall. Experiments show that TCL performs better or comparably than a strong meta-RL baseline in most of the environments on both meta-RL MuJoCo (5 of 6) and Meta-World benchmarks (44 out of 50).
Automated liver tissues delineation techniques: A systematic survey on machine learning current trends and future orientations
Authors: Ayman Al-Kababji, Faycal Bensaali, Sarada Prasad Dakua, Yassine Himeur
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning and computer vision techniques have grown rapidly in recent years due to their automation, suitability, and ability to generate astounding results. Hence, in this paper, we survey the key studies that are published between 2014 and 2022, showcasing the different machine learning algorithms researchers have used to segment the liver, hepatic tumors, and hepatic-vasculature structures. We divide the surveyed studies based on the tissue of interest (hepatic-parenchyma, hepatic-tumors, or hepatic-vessels), highlighting the studies that tackle more than one task simultaneously. Additionally, the machine learning algorithms are classified as either supervised or unsupervised, and they are further partitioned if the amount of work that falls under a certain scheme is significant. Moreover, different datasets and challenges found in literature and websites containing masks of the aforementioned tissues are thoroughly discussed, highlighting the organizers' original contributions and those of other researchers. Also, the metrics used excessively in literature are mentioned in our review, stressing their relevance to the task at hand. Finally, critical challenges and future directions are emphasized for innovative researchers to tackle, exposing gaps that need addressing, such as the scarcity of many studies on the vessels' segmentation challenge and why their absence needs to be dealt with sooner than later.
A Local Similarity-Preserving Framework for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction with Neural Networks
Authors: Xiang Wang, Xiaoyong Li, Junxing Zhu, Zichen Xu, Kaijun Ren, Weiming Zhang, Xinwang Liu, Kui Yu
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction, Representation Learning

Real-world data usually have high dimensionality and it is important to mitigate the curse of dimensionality. High-dimensional data are usually in a coherent structure and make the data in relatively small true degrees of freedom. There are global and local dimensionality reduction methods to alleviate the problem. Most of existing methods for local dimensionality reduction obtain an embedding with the eigenvalue or singular value decomposition, where the computational complexities are very high for a large amount of data. Here we propose a novel local nonlinear approach named Vec2vec for general purpose dimensionality reduction, which generalizes recent advancements in embedding representation learning of words to dimensionality reduction of matrices. It obtains the nonlinear embedding using a neural network with only one hidden layer to reduce the computational complexity. To train the neural network, we build the neighborhood similarity graph of a matrix and define the context of data points by exploiting the random walk properties. Experiments demenstrate that Vec2vec is more efficient than several state-of-the-art local dimensionality reduction methods in a large number of high-dimensional data. Extensive experiments of data classification and clustering on eight real datasets show that Vec2vec is better than several classical dimensionality reduction methods in the statistical hypothesis test, and it is competitive with recently developed state-of-the-art UMAP.