pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluating Prediction-Time Batch Normalization for Robustness under Covariate Shift
Authors: Zachary Nado, Shreyas Padhy, D. Sculley, Alexander D'Amour, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jasper Snoek
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Covariate shift has been shown to sharply degrade both predictive accuracy and the calibration of uncertainty estimates for deep learning models. This is worrying, because covariate shift is prevalent in a wide range of real world deployment settings. However, in this paper, we note that frequently there exists the potential to access small unlabeled batches of the shifted data just before prediction time. This interesting observation enables a simple but surprisingly effective method which we call prediction-time batch normalization, which significantly improves model accuracy and calibration under covariate shift. Using this one line code change, we achieve state-of-the-art on recent covariate shift benchmarks and an mCE of 60.28\% on the challenging ImageNet-C dataset; to our knowledge, this is the best result for any model that does not incorporate additional data augmentation or modification of the training pipeline. We show that prediction-time batch normalization provides complementary benefits to existing state-of-the-art approaches for improving robustness (e.g. deep ensembles) and combining the two further improves performance. Our findings are supported by detailed measurements of the effect of this strategy on model behavior across rigorous ablations on various dataset modalities. However, the method has mixed results when used alongside pre-training, and does not seem to perform as well under more natural types of dataset shift, and is therefore worthy of additional study. We include links to the data in our figures to improve reproducibility, including a Python notebooks that can be run to easily modify our analysis at https://colab.research.google.com/drive/11N0wDZnMQQuLrRwRoumDCrhSaIhkqjof.
Attention Mesh: High-fidelity Face Mesh Prediction in Real-time
Authors: Ivan Grishchenko, Artsiom Ablavatski, Yury Kartynnik, Karthik Raveendran, Matthias Grundmann
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We present Attention Mesh, a lightweight architecture for 3D face mesh prediction that uses attention to semantically meaningful regions. Our neural network is designed for real-time on-device inference and runs at over 50 FPS on a Pixel 2 phone. Our solution enables applications like AR makeup, eye tracking and AR puppeteering that rely on highly accurate landmarks for eye and lips regions. Our main contribution is a unified network architecture that achieves the same accuracy on facial landmarks as a multi-stage cascaded approach, while being 30 percent faster.
Keep Your AI-es on the Road: Tackling Distracted Driver Detection with Convolutional Neural Networks and Targeted Data Augmentation
Authors: Nikka Mofid, Jasmine Bayrooti, Shreya Ravi
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Segmentation

According to the World Health Organization, distracted driving is one of the leading cause of motor accidents and deaths in the world. In our study, we tackle the problem of distracted driving by aiming to build a robust multi-class classifier to detect and identify different forms of driver inattention using the State Farm Distracted Driving Dataset. We utilize combinations of pretrained image classification models, classical data augmentation, OpenCV based image preprocessing and skin segmentation augmentation approaches. Our best performing model combines several augmentation techniques, including skin segmentation, facial blurring, and classical augmentation techniques. This model achieves an approximately 15% increase in F1 score over the baseline, thus showing the promise in these techniques in enhancing the power of neural networks for the task of distracted driver detection.
Melanoma Diagnosis with Spatio-Temporal Feature Learning on Sequential Dermoscopic Images
Authors: Zhen Yu, Jennifer Nguyen, Xiaojun Chang, John Kelly, Catriona Mclean, Lei Zhang, Victoria Mar, ZongYuan Ge
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Melanoma Diagnosis

Existing studies for automated melanoma diagnosis are based on single-time point images of lesions. However, melanocytic lesions de facto are progressively evolving and, moreover, benign lesions can progress into malignant melanoma. Ignoring cross-time morphological changes of lesions thus may lead to misdiagnosis in borderline cases. Based on the fact that dermatologists diagnose ambiguous skin lesions by evaluating the dermoscopic changes over time via follow-up examination, in this study, we propose an automated framework for melanoma diagnosis using sequential dermoscopic images. To capture the spatio-temporal characterization of dermoscopic evolution, we construct our model in a two-stream network architecture which capable of simultaneously learning appearance representations of individual lesions while performing temporal reasoning on both raw pixels difference and abstract features difference. We collect 184 cases of serial dermoscopic image data, which consists of histologically confirmed 92 benign lesions and 92 melanoma lesions, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our model achieved AUC of 74.34%, which is ~8% higher than that of only using single images and ~6% higher than the widely used sequence learning model based on LSTM.
Bayesian Optimization with Missing Inputs
Authors: Phuc Luong, Dang Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Santu Rana, Svetha Venkatesh
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Missing Values

Bayesian optimization (BO) is an efficient method for optimizing expensive black-box functions. In real-world applications, BO often faces a major problem of missing values in inputs. The missing inputs can happen in two cases. First, the historical data for training BO often contain missing values. Second, when performing the function evaluation (e.g. computing alloy strength in a heat treatment process), errors may occur (e.g. a thermostat stops working) leading to an erroneous situation where the function is computed at a random unknown value instead of the suggested value. To deal with this problem, a common approach just simply skips data points where missing values happen. Clearly, this naive method cannot utilize data efficiently and often leads to poor performance. In this paper, we propose a novel BO method to handle missing inputs. We first find a probability distribution of each missing value so that we can impute the missing value by drawing a sample from its distribution. We then develop a new acquisition function based on the well-known Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) acquisition function, which considers the uncertainty of imputed values when suggesting the next point for function evaluation. We conduct comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world applications to show the usefulness of our method.
Independent Innovation Analysis for Nonlinear Vector Autoregressive Process
Authors: Hiroshi Morioka, Hermanni Hälvä, Aapo Hyvärinen
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The nonlinear vector autoregressive (NVAR) model provides an appealing framework to analyze multivariate time series obtained from a nonlinear dynamical system. However, the innovation (or error), which plays a key role by driving the dynamics, is almost always assumed to be additive. Additivity greatly limits the generality of the model, hindering analysis of general NVAR processes which have nonlinear interactions between the innovations. Here, we propose a new general framework called independent innovation analysis (IIA), which estimates the innovations from completely general NVAR. We assume mutual independence of the innovations as well as their modulation by an auxiliary variable (which is often taken as the time index and simply interpreted as nonstationarity). We show that IIA guarantees the identifiability of the innovations with arbitrary nonlinearities, up to a permutation and component-wise invertible nonlinearities. We also propose three estimation frameworks depending on the type of the auxiliary variable. We thus provide the first rigorous identifiability result for general NVAR, as well as very general tools for learning such models.
Open Problem: Model Selection for Contextual Bandits
Authors: Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Haipeng Luo
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model Selection, Multi-Armed Bandits

In statistical learning, algorithms for model selection allow the learner to adapt to the complexity of the best hypothesis class in a sequence. We ask whether similar guarantees are possible for contextual bandit learning.
The cyclic job-shop scheduling problem: The new subclass of the job-shop problem and applying the Simulated annealing to solve it
Authors: Pavel Matrenin, Vadim Manusov
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

In the paper, the new approach to the scheduling problem are described. The approach deals with the problem of planning the cyclic production and proposes to consider such scheduling problem as the cyclic job-shop problem of the order k, where k is the number of reiterations. It was found out that planning of only one iteration of the loop is less effective than planning of the entire cycle. To the experimental research, a number of test instances of the job-shop scheduling problem by Operation Research Library were used. The Simulated Annealing was applied to solve the instances. The experiments proved that the approach proposed allows increasing the efficiency of cyclic scheduling significantly.
FedFMC: Sequential Efficient Federated Learning on Non-iid Data
Authors: Kavya Kopparapu, Eric Lin
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

As a mechanism for devices to update a global model without sharing data, federated learning bridges the tension between the need for data and respect for privacy. However, classic FL methods like Federated Averaging struggle with non-iid data, a prevalent situation in the real world. Previous solutions are sub-optimal as they either employ a small shared global subset of data or greater number of models with increased communication costs. We propose FedFMC (Fork-Merge-Consolidate), a method that dynamically forks devices into updating different global models then merges and consolidates separate models into one. We first show the soundness of FedFMC on simple datasets, then run several experiments comparing against baseline approaches. These experiments show that FedFMC substantially improves upon earlier approaches to non-iid data in the federated learning context without using a globally shared subset of data nor increase communication costs.
Particle Swarm Optimization with Velocity Restriction and Evolutionary Parameters Selection for Scheduling Problem
Authors: Pavel Matrenin, Viktor Sekaev
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

The article presents a study of the Particle Swarm optimization method for scheduling problem. To improve the method's performance a restriction of particles' velocity and an evolutionary meta-optimization were realized. The approach proposed uses the Genetic algorithms for selection of the parameters of Particle Swarm optimization. Experiments were carried out on test tasks of the job-shop scheduling problem. This research proves the applicability of the approach and shows the importance of tuning the behavioral parameters of the swarm intelligence methods to achieve a high performance.
Convolutional Gaussian Embeddings for Personalized Recommendation with Uncertainty
Authors: Junyang Jiang, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao, Chenlu Shen
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Most of existing embedding based recommendation models use embeddings (vectors) corresponding to a single fixed point in low-dimensional space, to represent users and items. Such embeddings fail to precisely represent the users/items with uncertainty often observed in recommender systems. Addressing this problem, we propose a unified deep recommendation framework employing Gaussian embeddings, which are proven adaptive to uncertain preferences exhibited by some users, resulting in better user representations and recommendation performance. Furthermore, our framework adopts Monte-Carlo sampling and convolutional neural networks to compute the correlation between the objective user and the candidate item, based on which precise recommendations are achieved. Our extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets not only justify that our proposed Gaussian embeddings capture the uncertainty of users very well, but also demonstrate its superior performance over the state-of-the-art recommendation models.
Pervasive Lying Posture Tracking
Authors: Paratoo Alinia, Ali Samadani, Mladen Milosevic, Hassan Ghasemzadeh, Saman Parvaneh
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

There exist significant gaps in research about how to design efficient in-bed lying posture tracking systems. These gaps can be articulated through several research questions as follows. First, can we design a single-sensor, pervasive, and inexpensive system that can accurately detect lying postures? Second, what computational models are most effective in the accurate detection of lying postures? Finally, what physical configuration of the sensor system is most effective for lying posture tracking? To answer these important research questions, in this article, we propose a comprehensive approach to design a sensor system that uses a single accelerometer along with machine learning algorithms for in-bed lying posture classification. We design two categories of machine learning algorithms based on deep learning and traditional classification with handcrafted features to detect lying postures. We also investigate what wearing sites are most effective in accurate detection of lying postures. We extensively evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms on nine different body locations and four human lying postures using two datasets. Our results show that a system with a single accelerometer can be used with either deep learning or traditional classifiers to accurately detect lying postures. The best models in our approach achieve an F-Score that ranges from 95.2% to 97.8% with 0.03 to 0.05 coefficient of variation. The results also identify the thighs and chest as the most salient body sites for lying posture tracking. Our findings in this article suggest that because accelerometers are ubiquitous and inexpensive sensors, they can be a viable source of information for pervasive monitoring of in-bed postures.
Joint Speaker Counting, Speech Recognition, and Speaker Identification for Overlapped Speech of Any Number of Speakers
Authors: Naoyuki Kanda, Yashesh Gaur, Xiaofei Wang, Zhong Meng, Zhuo Chen, Tianyan Zhou, Takuya Yoshioka
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, Speaker Identification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We propose an end-to-end speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition model that unifies speaker counting, speech recognition, and speaker identification on monaural overlapped speech. Our model is built on serialized output training (SOT) with attention-based encoder-decoder, a recently proposed method for recognizing overlapped speech comprising an arbitrary number of speakers. We extend SOT by introducing a speaker inventory as an auxiliary input to produce speaker labels as well as multi-speaker transcriptions. All model parameters are optimized by speaker-attributed maximum mutual information criterion, which represents a joint probability for overlapped speech recognition and speaker identification. Experiments on LibriSpeech corpus show that our proposed method achieves significantly better speaker-attributed word error rate than the baseline that separately performs overlapped speech recognition and speaker identification.
On the role of data in PAC-Bayes bounds
Authors: Gintare Karolina Dziugaite, Kyle Hsu, Waseem Gharbieh, Gabriel Arpino, Daniel M. Roy
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00

The dominant term in PAC-Bayes bounds is often the Kullback--Leibler divergence between the posterior and prior. For so-called linear PAC-Bayes risk bounds based on the empirical risk of a fixed posterior kernel, it is possible to minimize the expected value of the bound by choosing the prior to be the expected posterior, which we call the oracle prior on the account that it is distribution dependent. In this work, we show that the bound based on the oracle prior can be suboptimal: In some cases, a stronger bound is obtained by using a data-dependent oracle prior, i.e., a conditional expectation of the posterior, given a subset of the training data that is then excluded from the empirical risk term. While using data to learn a prior is a known heuristic, its essential role in optimal bounds is new. In fact, we show that using data can mean the difference between vacuous and nonvacuous bounds. We apply this new principle in the setting of nonconvex learning, simulating data-dependent oracle priors on MNIST and Fashion MNIST with and without held-out data, and demonstrating new nonvacuous bounds in both cases.
Gradient Descent in RKHS with Importance Labeling
Authors: Tomoya Murata, Taiji Suzuki
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00

Labeling cost is often expensive and is a fundamental limitation of supervised learning. In this paper, we study importance labeling problem, in which we are given many unlabeled data and select a limited number of data to be labeled from the unlabeled data, and then a learning algorithm is executed on the selected one. We propose a new importance labeling scheme that can effectively select an informative subset of unlabeled data in least squares regression in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS). We analyze the generalization error of gradient descent combined with our labeling scheme and show that the proposed algorithm achieves the optimal rate of convergence in much wider settings and especially gives much better generalization ability in a small label noise setting than the usual uniform sampling scheme. Numerical experiments verify our theoretical findings.
Neural Program Synthesis with a Differentiable Fixer
Authors: Matej Balog, Rishabh Singh, Petros Maniatis, Charles Sutton
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Program Synthesis

We present a new program synthesis approach that combines an encoder-decoder based synthesis architecture with a differentiable program fixer. Our approach is inspired from the fact that human developers seldom get their program correct on the first attempt, and perform iterative testing-based program fixing to get to the desired program functionality. Similarly, our approach first learns a distribution over programs conditioned on an encoding of a set of input-output examples, and then iteratively performs fix operations using the differentiable fixer. The fixer takes as input the original examples and the current program's outputs on example inputs, and generates a new distribution over the programs with the goal of reducing the discrepancies between the current program outputs and the desired example outputs. We train our architecture end-to-end on the RobustFill domain, and show that the addition of the fixer module leads to a significant improvement on synthesis accuracy compared to using beam search.
Hyperparameter Analysis for Image Captioning
Authors: Amish Patel, Aravind Varier
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Sensitivity

In this paper, we perform a thorough sensitivity analysis on state-of-the-art image captioning approaches using two different architectures: CNN+LSTM and CNN+Transformer. Experiments were carried out using the Flickr8k dataset. The biggest takeaway from the experiments is that fine-tuning the CNN encoder outperforms the baseline and all other experiments carried out for both architectures.
Meta Learning in the Continuous Time Limit
Authors: Ruitu Xu, Lin Chen, Amin Karbasi
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

In this paper, we establish the ordinary differential equation (ODE) that underlies the training dynamics of Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML). Our continuous-time limit view of the process eliminates the influence of the manually chosen step size of gradient descent and includes the existing gradient descent training algorithm as a special case that results from a specific discretization. We show that the MAML ODE enjoys a linear convergence rate to an approximate stationary point of the MAML loss function for strongly convex task losses, even when the corresponding MAML loss is non-convex. Moreover, through the analysis of the MAML ODE, we propose a new BI-MAML training algorithm that significantly reduces the computational burden associated with existing MAML training methods. To complement our theoretical findings, we perform empirical experiments to showcase the superiority of our proposed methods with respect to the existing work.
On the effect of normalization layers on Differentially Private training of deep Neural networks
Authors: Ali Davody, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Thomas Kleinbauer, Dietrich Klakow
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) is a variation of stochastic gradient descent based on the Differential Privacy (DP) paradigm, which can mitigate privacy threats that arise from the presence of sensitive information in training data. However, one major drawback of training deep neural networks with DPSGD is a reduction in the models accuracy. In this paper, we study the effect of normalization layers on the performance of DPSGD. We demonstrate that normalization layers significantly impact the utility of deep neural networks with noisy parameters and should be considered essential ingredients of training with DPSGD. In particular, we propose a novel method for integrating batch normalization with DPSGD without incurring an additional privacy loss. With our approach, we are able to train deeper networks and achieve a better utility-privacy trade-off.
Probabilistic Fair Clustering
Authors: Seyed A. Esmaeili, Brian Brubach, Leonidas Tsepenekas, John P. Dickerson
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Clustering, valid

In clustering problems, a central decision-maker is given a complete metric graph over vertices and must provide a clustering of vertices that minimizes some objective function. In fair clustering problems, vertices are endowed with a color (e.g., membership in a group), and the features of a valid clustering might also include the representation of colors in that clustering. Prior work in fair clustering assumes complete knowledge of group membership. In this paper, we generalize prior work by assuming imperfect knowledge of group membership through probabilistic assignments. We present clustering algorithms in this more general setting with approximation ratio guarantees. We also address the problem of "metric membership", where different groups have a notion of order and distance. Experiments are conducted using our proposed algorithms as well as baselines to validate our approach and also surface nuanced concerns when group membership is not known deterministically.