pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Representing Pure Nash Equilibria in Argumentation
Authors: Bruno Yun, Srdjan Vesic, Nir Oren
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00

In this paper we describe an argumentation-based representation of normal form games, and demonstrate how argumentation can be used to compute pure strategy Nash equilibria. Our approach builds on Modgil's Extended Argumentation Frameworks. We demonstrate its correctness, prove several theoretical properties it satisfies, and outline how it can be used to explain why certain strategies are Nash equilibria to a non-expert human user.
Gradient boosting machine with partially randomized decision trees
Authors: Andrei V. Konstantinov, Lev V. Utkin
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, regression

The gradient boosting machine is a powerful ensemble-based machine learning method for solving regression problems. However, one of the difficulties of its using is a possible discontinuity of the regression function, which arises when regions of training data are not densely covered by training points. In order to overcome this difficulty and to reduce the computational complexity of the gradient boosting machine, we propose to apply the partially randomized trees which can be regarded as a special case of the extremely randomized trees applied to the gradient boosting. The gradient boosting machine with the partially randomized trees is illustrated by means of many numerical examples using synthetic and real data.
Disentangling User Interest and Conformity for Recommendation with Causal Embedding
Authors: Yu Zheng, Chen Gao, Xiang Li, Xiangnan He, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

Recommendation models are usually trained on observational interaction data. However, observational interaction data could result from users' conformity towards popular items, which entangles users' real interest. Existing methods tracks this problem as eliminating popularity bias, e.g., by re-weighting training samples or leveraging a small fraction of unbiased data. However, the variety of user conformity is ignored by these approaches, and different causes of an interaction are bundled together as unified representations, hence robustness and interpretability are not guaranteed when underlying causes are changing. In this paper, we present DICE, a general framework that learns representations where interest and conformity are structurally disentangled, and various backbone recommendation models could be smoothly integrated. We assign users and items with separate embeddings for interest and conformity, and make each embedding capture only one cause by training with cause-specific data which is obtained according to the colliding effect of causal inference. Our proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with remarkable improvements on two real-world datasets on top of various backbone models. We further demonstrate that the learned embeddings successfully capture the desired causes, and show that DICE guarantees the robustness and interpretability of recommendation.
Fair clustering via equitable group representations
Authors: Mohsen Abbasi, Aditya Bhaskara, Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fairness

What does it mean for a clustering to be fair? One popular approach seeks to ensure that each cluster contains groups in (roughly) the same proportion in which they exist in the population. The normative principle at play is balance: any cluster might act as a representative of the data, and thus should reflect its diversity. But clustering also captures a different form of representativeness. A core principle in most clustering problems is that a cluster center should be representative of the cluster it represents, by being "close" to the points associated with it. This is so that we can effectively replace the points by their cluster centers without significant loss in fidelity, and indeed is a common "use case" for clustering. For such a clustering to be fair, the centers should "represent" different groups equally well. We call such a clustering a group-representative clustering. In this paper, we study the structure and computation of group-representative clusterings. We show that this notion naturally parallels the development of fairness notions in classification, with direct analogs of ideas like demographic parity and equal opportunity. We demonstrate how these notions are distinct from and cannot be captured by balance-based notions of fairness. We present approximation algorithms for group representative $k$-median clustering and couple this with an empirical evaluation on various real-world data sets.
Towards an Adversarially Robust Normalization Approach
Authors: Muhammad Awais, Fahad Shamshad, Sung-Ho Bae
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00

Batch Normalization (BatchNorm) is effective for improving the performance and accelerating the training of deep neural networks. However, it has also shown to be a cause of adversarial vulnerability, i.e., networks without it are more robust to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we investigate how BatchNorm causes this vulnerability and proposed new normalization that is robust to adversarial attacks. We first observe that adversarial images tend to shift the distribution of BatchNorm input, and this shift makes train-time estimated population statistics inaccurate. We hypothesize that these inaccurate statistics make models with BatchNorm more vulnerable to adversarial attacks. We prove our hypothesis by replacing train-time estimated statistics with statistics calculated from the inference-time batch. We found that the adversarial vulnerability of BatchNorm disappears if we use these statistics. However, without estimated batch statistics, we can not use BatchNorm in the practice if large batches of input are not available. To mitigate this, we propose Robust Normalization (RobustNorm); an adversarially robust version of BatchNorm. We experimentally show that models trained with RobustNorm perform better in adversarial settings while retaining all the benefits of BatchNorm. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/awaisrauf/RobustNorm}.
Statistical and Algorithmic Insights for Semi-supervised Learning with Self-training
Authors: Samet Oymak, Talha Cihad Gulcu
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Self-training is a classical approach in semi-supervised learning which is successfully applied to a variety of machine learning problems. Self-training algorithm generates pseudo-labels for the unlabeled examples and progressively refines these pseudo-labels which hopefully coincides with the actual labels. This work provides theoretical insights into self-training algorithm with a focus on linear classifiers. We first investigate Gaussian mixture models and provide a sharp non-asymptotic finite-sample characterization of the self-training iterations. Our analysis reveals the provable benefits of rejecting samples with low confidence and demonstrates that self-training iterations gracefully improve the model accuracy even if they do get stuck in sub-optimal fixed points. We then demonstrate that regularization and class margin (i.e. separation) is provably important for the success and lack of regularization may prevent self-training from identifying the core features in the data. Finally, we discuss statistical aspects of empirical risk minimization with self-training for general distributions. We show how a purely unsupervised notion of generalization based on self-training based clustering can be formalized based on cluster margin. We then establish a connection between self-training based semi-supervision and the more general problem of learning with heterogenous data and weak supervision.
Adversarial Attacks for Multi-view Deep Models
Authors: Xuli Sun, Shiliang Sun
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Recent work has highlighted the vulnerability of many deep machine learning models to adversarial examples. It attracts increasing attention to adversarial attacks, which can be used to evaluate the security and robustness of models before they are deployed. However, to our best knowledge, there is no specific research on the adversarial attacks for multi-view deep models. This paper proposes two multi-view attack strategies, two-stage attack (TSA) and end-to-end attack (ETEA). With the mild assumption that the single-view model on which the target multi-view model is based is known, we first propose the TSA strategy. The main idea of TSA is to attack the multi-view model with adversarial examples generated by attacking the associated single-view model, by which state-of-the-art single-view attack methods are directly extended to the multi-view scenario. Then we further propose the ETEA strategy when the multi-view model is provided publicly. The ETEA is applied to accomplish direct attacks on the target multi-view model, where we develop three effective multi-view attack methods. Finally, based on the fact that adversarial examples generalize well among different models, this paper takes the adversarial attack on the multi-view convolutional neural network as an example to validate that the effectiveness of the proposed multi-view attacks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our multi-view attack strategies are capable of attacking the multi-view deep models, and we additionally find that multi-view models are more robust than single-view models.
Monash University, UEA, UCR Time Series Extrinsic Regression Archive
Authors: Chang Wei Tan, Christoph Bergmeir, Francois Petitjean, Geoffrey I. Webb
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Missing Values, regression, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification, Time Series Forecasting, Time Series Regression

Time series research has gathered lots of interests in the last decade, especially for Time Series Classification (TSC) and Time Series Forecasting (TSF). Research in TSC has greatly benefited from the University of California Riverside and University of East Anglia (UCR/UEA) Time Series Archives. On the other hand, the advancement in Time Series Forecasting relies on time series forecasting competitions such as the Makridakis competitions, NN3 and NN5 Neural Network competitions, and a few Kaggle competitions. Each year, thousands of papers proposing new algorithms for TSC and TSF have utilized these benchmarking archives. These algorithms are designed for these specific problems, but may not be useful for tasks such as predicting the heart rate of a person using photoplethysmogram (PPG) and accelerometer data. We refer to this problem as Time Series Extrinsic Regression (TSER), where we are interested in a more general methodology of predicting a single continuous value, from univariate or multivariate time series. This prediction can be from the same time series or not directly related to the predictor time series and does not necessarily need to be a future value or depend heavily on recent values. To the best of our knowledge, research into TSER has received much less attention in the time series research community and there are no models developed for general time series extrinsic regression problems. Most models are developed for a specific problem. Therefore, we aim to motivate and support the research into TSER by introducing the first TSER benchmarking archive. This archive contains 19 datasets from different domains, with varying number of dimensions, unequal length dimensions, and missing values. In this paper, we introduce the datasets in this archive and did an initial benchmark on existing models.
Cross-denoising Network against Corrupted Labels in Medical Image Segmentation with Domain Shift
Authors: Qinming Zhang, Luyan Liu, Kai Ma, Cheng Zhuo, Yefeng Zheng
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have contributed many breakthroughs in segmentation tasks, especially in the field of medical imaging. However, \textit{domain shift} and \textit{corrupted annotations}, which are two common problems in medical imaging, dramatically degrade the performance of DCNNs in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel robust cross-denoising framework using two peer networks to address domain shift and corrupted label problems with a peer-review strategy. Specifically, each network performs as a mentor, mutually supervised to learn from reliable samples selected by the peer network to combat with corrupted labels. In addition, a noise-tolerant loss is proposed to encourage the network to capture the key location and filter the discrepancy under various noise-contaminant labels. To further reduce the accumulated error, we introduce a class-imbalanced cross learning using most confident predictions at the class-level. Experimental results on REFUGE and Drishti-GS datasets for optic disc (OD) and optic cup (OC) segmentation demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach to the state-of-the-art methods.
NROWAN-DQN: A Stable Noisy Network with Noise Reduction and Online Weight Adjustment for Exploration
Authors: Shuai Han, Wenbo Zhou, Jing Liu, Shuai Lü
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning has been applied more and more widely nowadays, especially in various complex control tasks. Effective exploration for noisy networks is one of the most important issues in deep reinforcement learning. Noisy networks tend to produce stable outputs for agents. However, this tendency is not always enough to find a stable policy for an agent, which decreases efficiency and stability during the learning process. Based on NoisyNets, this paper proposes an algorithm called NROWAN-DQN, i.e., Noise Reduction and Online Weight Adjustment NoisyNet-DQN. Firstly, we develop a novel noise reduction method for NoisyNet-DQN to make the agent perform stable actions. Secondly, we design an online weight adjustment strategy for noise reduction, which improves stable performance and gets higher scores for the agent. Finally, we evaluate this algorithm in four standard domains and analyze properties of hyper-parameters. Our results show that NROWAN-DQN outperforms prior algorithms in all these domains. In addition, NROWAN-DQN also shows better stability. The variance of the NROWAN-DQN score is significantly reduced, especially in some action-sensitive environments. This means that in some environments where high stability is required, NROWAN-DQN will be more appropriate than NoisyNets-DQN.
No one-hidden-layer neural network can represent multivariable functions
Authors: Masayo Inoue, Mana Futamura, Hirokazu Ninomiya
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00

In a function approximation with a neural network, an input dataset is mapped to an output index by optimizing the parameters of each hidden-layer unit. For a unary function, we present constraints on the parameters and its second derivative by constructing a continuum version of a one-hidden-layer neural network with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function. The network is accurately implemented because the constraints decrease the degrees of freedom of the parameters. We also explain the existence of a smooth binary function that cannot be precisely represented by any such neural network.
Optimization and Generalization of Regularization-Based Continual Learning: a Loss Approximation Viewpoint
Authors: Dong Yin, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Ang Li, Nir Levine, Alex Mott
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Neural networks have achieved remarkable success in many cognitive tasks. However, when they are trained sequentially on multiple tasks without access to old data, their performance on early tasks tend to drop significantly. This problem is often referred to as catastrophic forgetting, a key challenge in continual learning of neural networks. The regularization-based approach is one of the primary classes of methods to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we provide a novel viewpoint of regularization-based continual learning by formulating it as a second-order Taylor approximation of the loss function of each task. This viewpoint leads to a unified framework that can be instantiated to derive many existing algorithms such as Elastic Weight Consolidation and Kronecker factored Laplace approximation. Based on this viewpoint, we study the optimization aspects (i.e., convergence) as well as generalization properties (i.e., finite-sample guarantees) of regularization-based continual learning. Our theoretical results indicate the importance of accurate approximation of the Hessian matrix. The experimental results on several benchmarks provide empirical validation of our theoretical findings.
Sentiment Frames for Attitude Extraction in Russian
Authors: Natalia Loukachevitch, Nicolay Rusnachenko
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00

Texts can convey several types of inter-related information concerning opinions and attitudes. Such information includes the author's attitude towards mentioned entities, attitudes of the entities towards each other, positive and negative effects on the entities in the described situations. In this paper, we described the lexicon RuSentiFrames for Russian, where predicate words and expressions are collected and linked to so-called sentiment frames conveying several types of presupposed information on attitudes and effects. We applied the created frames in the task of extracting attitudes from a large news collection.
A Deep Learning Framework for Hybrid Beamforming Without Instantaneous CSI Feedback
Authors: Ahmet M. Elbir
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Hybrid beamformer design plays very crucial role in the next generation millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems. Previous works assume the perfect channel state information (CSI) which results heavy feedback overhead. To lower complexity, channel statistics can be utilized such that only infrequent update of the channel information is needed. To reduce the complexity and provide robustness, in this work, we propose a deep learning (DL) framework to deal with both hybrid beamforming and channel estimation. For this purpose, we introduce three deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures. We assume that the base station (BS) has the channel statistics only and feeds the channel covariance matrix into a CNN to obtain the hybrid precoders. At the receiver, two CNNs are employed. The first one is used for channel estimation purposes and the another is employed to design the hybrid combiners. The proposed DL framework does not require the instantaneous feedback of the CSI at the BS. We have shown that the proposed approach has higher spectral efficiency with comparison to the conventional techniques. The trained CNN structures do not need to be re-trained due to the changes in the propagation environment such as the deviations in the number of received paths and the fluctuations in the received path angles up to 4 degrees. Also, the proposed DL framework exhibits at least 10 times lower computational complexity as compared to the conventional optimization-based approaches.
Feature Interaction Interpretability: A Case for Explaining Ad-Recommendation Systems via Neural Interaction Detection
Authors: Michael Tsang, Dehua Cheng, Hanpeng Liu, Xue Feng, Eric Zhou, Yan Liu
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Recommendation Systems

Recommendation is a prevalent application of machine learning that affects many users; therefore, it is important for recommender models to be accurate and interpretable. In this work, we propose a method to both interpret and augment the predictions of black-box recommender systems. In particular, we propose to interpret feature interactions from a source recommender model and explicitly encode these interactions in a target recommender model, where both source and target models are black-boxes. By not assuming the structure of the recommender system, our approach can be used in general settings. In our experiments, we focus on a prominent use of machine learning recommendation: ad-click prediction. We found that our interaction interpretations are both informative and predictive, e.g., significantly outperforming existing recommender models. What's more, the same approach to interpret interactions can provide new insights into domains even beyond recommendation, such as text and image classification.
How does this interaction affect me? Interpretable attribution for feature interactions
Authors: Michael Tsang, Sirisha Rambhatla, Yan Liu
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Machine learning transparency calls for interpretable explanations of how inputs relate to predictions. Feature attribution is a way to analyze the impact of features on predictions. Feature interactions are the contextual dependence between features that jointly impact predictions. There are a number of methods that extract feature interactions in prediction models; however, the methods that assign attributions to interactions are either uninterpretable, model-specific, or non-axiomatic. We propose an interaction attribution and detection framework called Archipelago which addresses these problems and is also scalable in real-world settings. Our experiments on standard annotation labels indicate our approach provides significantly more interpretable explanations than comparable methods, which is important for analyzing the impact of interactions on predictions. We also provide accompanying visualizations of our approach that give new insights into deep neural networks.
A Qualitative Evaluation of Language Models on Automatic Question-Answering for COVID-19
Authors: David Oniani, Yanshan Wang
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Sentence, Transfer Learning

COVID-19 has resulted in an ongoing pandemic and as of 12 June 2020, has caused more than 7.4 million cases and over 418,000 deaths. The highly dynamic and rapidly evolving situation with COVID-19 has made it difficult to access accurate, on-demand information regarding the disease. Online communities, forums, and social media provide potential venues to search for relevant questions and answers, or post questions and seek answers from other members. However, due to the nature of such sites, there are always a limited number of relevant questions and responses to search from, and posted questions are rarely answered immediately. With the advancements in the field of natural language processing, particularly in the domain of language models, it has become possible to design chatbots that can automatically answer consumer questions. However, such models are rarely applied and evaluated in the healthcare domain, to meet the information needs with accurate and up-to-date healthcare data. In this paper, we propose to apply a language model for automatically answering questions related to COVID-19 and qualitatively evaluate the generated responses. We utilized the GPT-2 language model and applied transfer learning to retrain it on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) corpus. In order to improve the quality of the generated responses, we applied 4 different approaches, namely tf-idf, BERT, BioBERT, and USE to filter and retain relevant sentences in the responses. In the performance evaluation step, we asked two medical experts to rate the responses. We found that BERT and BioBERT, on average, outperform both tf-idf and USE in relevance-based sentence filtering tasks. Additionally, based on the chatbot, we created a user-friendly interactive web application to be hosted online.