pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Insta-VAX: A Multimodal Benchmark for Anti-Vaccine and Misinformation Posts Detection on Social Media
Authors: Mingyang Zhou, Mahasweta Chakraborti, Sijia Qian, Zhou Yu, Jingwen Zhang
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

Sharing of anti-vaccine posts on social media, including misinformation posts, has been shown to create confusion and reduce the publics confidence in vaccines, leading to vaccine hesitancy and resistance. Recent years have witnessed the fast rise of such anti-vaccine posts in a variety of linguistic and visual forms in online networks, posing a great challenge for effective content moderation and tracking. Extending previous work on leveraging textual information to understand vaccine information, this paper presents Insta-VAX, a new multi-modal dataset consisting of a sample of 64,957 Instagram posts related to human vaccines. We applied a crowdsourced annotation procedure verified by two trained expert judges to this dataset. We then bench-marked several state-of-the-art NLP and computer vision classifiers to detect whether the posts show anti-vaccine attitude and whether they contain misinformation. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the multimodal models can classify the posts more accurately than the uni-modal models, but still need improvement especially on visual context understanding and external knowledge cooperation. The dataset and classifiers contribute to monitoring and tracking of vaccine discussions for social scientific and public health efforts in combating the problem of vaccine misinformation.
Interference Suppression Using Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Open Challenges
Authors: Taiwo Oyedare, Vijay K Shah, Daniel J Jakubisin, Jeff H Reed
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In light of the finite nature of the wireless spectrum and the increasing demand for spectrum use arising from recent technological breakthroughs in wireless communication, the problem of interference continues to persist. Despite recent advancements in resolving interference issues, interference still presents a difficult challenge to effective usage of the spectrum. This is partly due to the rise in the use of license-free and managed shared bands for Wi-Fi, long term evolution (LTE) unlicensed (LTE-U), LTE licensed assisted access (LAA), 5G NR, and other opportunistic spectrum access solutions. As a result of this, the need for efficient spectrum usage schemes that are robust against interference has never been more important. In the past, most solutions to interference have addressed the problem by using avoidance techniques as well as non-AI mitigation approaches (for example, adaptive filters). The key downside to non-AI techniques is the need for domain expertise in the extraction or exploitation of signal features such as cyclostationarity, bandwidth and modulation of the interfering signals. More recently, researchers have successfully explored AI/ML enabled physical (PHY) layer techniques, especially deep learning which reduces or compensates for the interfering signal instead of simply avoiding it. The underlying idea of ML based approaches is to learn the interference or the interference characteristics from the data, thereby sidelining the need for domain expertise in suppressing the interference. In this paper, we review a wide range of techniques that have used deep learning to suppress interference. We provide comparison and guidelines for many different types of deep learning techniques in interference suppression. In addition, we highlight challenges and potential future research directions for the successful adoption of deep learning in interference suppression.
Progressive Graph Convolution Network for EEG Emotion Recognition
Authors: Yijin Zhou, Fu Li, Yang Li, Youshuo Ji, Guangming Shi, Wenming Zheng, Lijian Zhang, Yuanfang Chen, Rui Cheng
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, EEG Emotion Recognition, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Emotion Recognition

Studies in the area of neuroscience have revealed the relationship between emotional patterns and brain functional regions, demonstrating that dynamic relationships between different brain regions are an essential factor affecting emotion recognition determined through electroencephalography (EEG). Moreover, in EEG emotion recognition, we can observe that clearer boundaries exist between coarse-grained emotions than those between fine-grained emotions, based on the same EEG data; this indicates the concurrence of large coarse- and small fine-grained emotion variations. Thus, the progressive classification process from coarse- to fine-grained categories may be helpful for EEG emotion recognition. Consequently, in this study, we propose a progressive graph convolution network (PGCN) for capturing this inherent characteristic in EEG emotional signals and progressively learning the discriminative EEG features. To fit different EEG patterns, we constructed a dual-graph module to characterize the intrinsic relationship between different EEG channels, containing the dynamic functional connections and static spatial proximity information of brain regions from neuroscience research. Moreover, motivated by the observation of the relationship between coarse- and fine-grained emotions, we adopt a dual-head module that enables the PGCN to progressively learn more discriminative EEG features, from coarse-grained (easy) to fine-grained categories (difficult), referring to the hierarchical characteristic of emotion. To verify the performance of our model, extensive experiments were conducted on two public datasets: SEED-IV and multi-modal physiological emotion database (MPED).
Characterizing and addressing the issue of oversmoothing in neural autoregressive sequence modeling
Authors: Ilia Kulikov, Maksim Eremeev, Kyunghyun Cho
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Neural autoregressive sequence models smear the probability among many possible sequences including degenerate ones, such as empty or repetitive sequences. In this work, we tackle one specific case where the model assigns a high probability to unreasonably short sequences. We define the oversmoothing rate to quantify this issue. After confirming the high degree of oversmoothing in neural machine translation, we propose to explicitly minimize the oversmoothing rate during training. We conduct a set of experiments to study the effect of the proposed regularization on both model distribution and decoding performance. We use a neural machine translation task as the testbed and consider three different datasets of varying size. Our experiments reveal three major findings. First, we can control the oversmoothing rate of the model by tuning the strength of the regularization. Second, by enhancing the oversmoothing loss contribution, the probability and the rank of <eos> token decrease heavily at positions where it is not supposed to be. Third, the proposed regularization impacts the outcome of beam search especially when a large beam is used. The degradation of translation quality (measured in BLEU) with a large beam significantly lessens with lower oversmoothing rate, but the degradation compared to smaller beam sizes remains to exist. From these observations, we conclude that the high degree of oversmoothing is the main reason behind the degenerate case of overly probable short sequences in a neural autoregressive model.
Predicting Students’ Difficulties From a Piece of Code
Authors: Marco Moresi, Marcos J. Gomez, and Luciana Benotti
Date: 2021-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON LEARNING TECHNOLOGIES 2021 6

Based on hundreds of thousands of hours of data
about how students learn in massive open online courses,
educational machine learning promises to help students who are
learning to code. However, in most classrooms, students and
assignments do not have enough historical data for feeding these
data hungry algorithms. Previous work on predicting dropout is
data hungry and, moreover, requires the code to be syntactically
correct. As we deal with beginners’ code in a text-based language
our models are trained on noisy student text; almost 40% of the
code in our datasets contains parsing errors. In this article, we
compare two machine learning models that predict whether
students need help regardless of whether their code compiles or
not. That is, we compare two methods for automatically
predicting whether students will be able to solve a programming
exercise on their own. The first model is a heavily featureengineered
approach that implements pedagogical theories of the
relation between student interaction patterns and the probability
of dropout; it requires a rich history of student interaction. The
second method is based on a short program (that may contain
errors) written by a student, together with a few hundred
attempts by their classmates on the same exercise. This second
method uses natural language processing techniques; it is based
on the intuition that beginners’ code may be closer to a natural
language than to a formal one. It is inspired by previous work on
predicting people’s fluency when learning a second natural
language.
Categories of Emotion names in Web retrieved texts
Authors: Sergey Petrov, Jose F. Fontanari, Leonid I. Perlovsky
Date: 2012-03-11 00:00:00

The categorization of emotion names, i.e., the grouping of emotion words that have similar emotional connotations together, is a key tool of Social Psychology used to explore people's knowledge about emotions. Without exception, the studies following that research line were based on the gauging of the perceived similarity between emotion names by the participants of the experiments. Here we propose and examine a new approach to study the categories of emotion names - the similarities between target emotion names are obtained by comparing the contexts in which they appear in texts retrieved from the World Wide Web. This comparison does not account for any explicit semantic information; it simply counts the number of common words or lexical items used in the contexts. This procedure allows us to write the entries of the similarity matrix as dot products in a linear vector space of contexts. The properties of this matrix were then explored using Multidimensional Scaling Analysis and Hierarchical Clustering. Our main findings, namely, the underlying dimension of the emotion space and the categories of emotion names, were consistent with those based on people's judgments of emotion names similarities.
Improving Automatic Emotion Recognition from speech using Rhythm and Temporal feature
Authors: Mayank Bhargava, Tim Polzehl
Date: 2013-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Rhythm

This paper is devoted to improve automatic emotion recognition from speech by incorporating rhythm and temporal features. Research on automatic emotion recognition so far has mostly been based on applying features like MFCCs, pitch and energy or intensity. The idea focuses on borrowing rhythm features from linguistic and phonetic analysis and applying them to the speech signal on the basis of acoustic knowledge only. In addition to this we exploit a set of temporal and loudness features. A segmentation unit is employed in starting to separate the voiced/unvoiced and silence parts and features are explored on different segments. Thereafter different classifiers are used for classification. After selecting the top features using an IGR filter we are able to achieve a recognition rate of 80.60 % on the Berlin Emotion Database for the speaker dependent framework.
PeopleSansPeople: A Synthetic Data Generator for Human-Centric Computer Vision
Authors: Salehe Erfanian Ebadi, You-Cyuan Jhang, Alex Zook, Saurav Dhakad, Adam Crespi, Pete Parisi, Steven Borkman, Jonathan Hogins, Sujoy Ganguly
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, Pose Estimation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

In recent years, person detection and human pose estimation have made great strides, helped by large-scale labeled datasets. However, these datasets had no guarantees or analysis of human activities, poses, or context diversity. Additionally, privacy, legal, safety, and ethical concerns may limit the ability to collect more human data. An emerging alternative to real-world data that alleviates some of these issues is synthetic data. However, creation of synthetic data generators is incredibly challenging and prevents researchers from exploring their usefulness. Therefore, we release a human-centric synthetic data generator PeopleSansPeople which contains simulation-ready 3D human assets, a parameterized lighting and camera system, and generates 2D and 3D bounding box, instance and semantic segmentation, and COCO pose labels. Using PeopleSansPeople, we performed benchmark synthetic data training using a Detectron2 Keypoint R-CNN variant [1]. We found that pre-training a network using synthetic data and fine-tuning on various sizes of real-world data resulted in a keypoint AP increase of $+38.03$ ($44.43 \pm 0.17$ vs. $6.40$) for few-shot transfer (limited subsets of COCO-person train [2]), and an increase of $+1.47$ ($63.47 \pm 0.19$ vs. $62.00$) for abundant real data regimes, outperforming models trained with the same real data alone. We also found that our models outperformed those pre-trained with ImageNet with a keypoint AP increase of $+22.53$ ($44.43 \pm 0.17$ vs. $21.90$) for few-shot transfer and $+1.07$ ($63.47 \pm 0.19$ vs. $62.40$) for abundant real data regimes. This freely-available data generator should enable a wide range of research into the emerging field of simulation to real transfer learning in the critical area of human-centric computer vision.
Split Moves for Monte-Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Jakub Kowalski, Maksymilian Mika, Wojciech Pawlik, Jakub Sutowicz, Marek Szykuła, Mark H. M. Winands
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Board Games

In many games, moves consist of several decisions made by the player. These decisions can be viewed as separate moves, which is already a common practice in multi-action games for efficiency reasons. Such division of a player move into a sequence of simpler / lower level moves is called \emph{splitting}. So far, split moves have been applied only in forementioned straightforward cases, and furthermore, there was almost no study revealing its impact on agents' playing strength. Taking the knowledge-free perspective, we aim to answer how to effectively use split moves within Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and what is the practical impact of split design on agents' strength. This paper proposes a generalization of MCTS that works with arbitrarily split moves. We design several variations of the algorithm and try to measure the impact of split moves separately on efficiency, quality of MCTS, simulations, and action-based heuristics. The tests are carried out on a set of board games and performed using the Regular Boardgames General Game Playing formalism, where split strategies of different granularity can be automatically derived based on an abstract description of the game. The results give an overview of the behavior of agents using split design in different ways. We conclude that split design can be greatly beneficial for single- as well as multi-action games.
AGMI: Attention-Guided Multi-omics Integration for Drug Response Prediction with Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Ruiwei Feng, Yufeng Xie, Minshan Lai, Danny Z. Chen, Ji Cao, Jian Wu
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Response Prediction

Accurate drug response prediction (DRP) is a crucial yet challenging task in precision medicine. This paper presents a novel Attention-Guided Multi-omics Integration (AGMI) approach for DRP, which first constructs a Multi-edge Graph (MeG) for each cell line, and then aggregates multi-omics features to predict drug response using a novel structure, called Graph edge-aware Network (GeNet). For the first time, our AGMI approach explores gene constraint based multi-omics integration for DRP with the whole-genome using GNNs. Empirical experiments on the CCLE and GDSC datasets show that our AGMI largely outperforms state-of-the-art DRP methods by 8.3%--34.2% on four metrics. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/yivan-WYYGDSG/AGMI.
CPPE-5: Medical Personal Protective Equipment Dataset
Authors: Rishit Dagli, Ali Mustufa Shaikh
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Detection

We present a new challenging dataset, CPPE - 5 (Medical Personal Protective Equipment), with the goal to allow the study of subordinate categorization of medical personal protective equipments, which is not possible with other popular data sets that focus on broad-level categories (such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, Microsoft COCO, OpenImages, etc). To make it easy for models trained on this dataset to be used in practical scenarios in complex scenes, our dataset mainly contains images that show complex scenes with several objects in each scene in their natural context. The image collection for this dataset focuses on: obtaining as many non-iconic images as possible and making sure all the images are real-life images, unlike other existing datasets in this area. Our dataset includes 5 object categories (coveralls, face shields, gloves, masks, and goggles), and each image is annotated with a set of bounding boxes and positive labels. We present a detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison to other popular broad category datasets as well as datasets focusing on personal protective equipments, we also find that at present there exist no such publicly available datasets. Finally, we also analyze performance and compare model complexities on baseline and state-of-the-art models for bounding box results. Our code, data, and trained models are available at https://git.io/cppe5-dataset.
Dynamics-aware Adversarial Attack of 3D Sparse Convolution Network
Authors: An Tao, Yueqi Duan, He Wang, Ziyi Wu, Pengliang Ji, Haowen Sun, Jie zhou, Jiwen Lu
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Classification, 3D Semantic Segmentation, Adversarial Attack, Computational Efficiency

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics-aware adversarial attack problem in deep neural networks. Most existing adversarial attack algorithms are designed under a basic assumption -- the network architecture is fixed throughout the attack process. However, this assumption does not hold for many recently proposed networks, e.g. 3D sparse convolution network, which contains input-dependent execution to improve computational efficiency. It results in a serious issue of lagged gradient, making the learned attack at the current step ineffective due to the architecture changes afterward. To address this issue, we propose a Leaded Gradient Method (LGM) and show the significant effects of the lagged gradient. More specifically, we re-formulate the gradients to be aware of the potential dynamic changes of network architectures, so that the learned attack better "leads" the next step than the dynamics-unaware methods when network architecture changes dynamically. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our LGM achieves impressive performance on semantic segmentation and classification. Compared with the dynamic-unaware methods, LGM achieves about 20% lower mIoU averagely on the ScanNet and S3DIS datasets. LGM also outperforms the recent point cloud attacks.
Fast characterization of inducible regions of atrial fibrillation models with multi-fidelity Gaussian process classification
Authors: Lia Gander, Simone Pezzuto, Ali Gharaviri, Rolf Krause, Paris Perdikaris, Francisco Sahli Costabal
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00

Computational models of atrial fibrillation have successfully been used to predict optimal ablation sites. A critical step to assess the effect of an ablation pattern is to pace the model from different, potentially random, locations to determine whether arrhythmias can be induced in the atria. In this work, we propose to use multi-fidelity Gaussian process classification on Riemannian manifolds to efficiently determine the regions in the atria where arrhythmias are inducible. We build a probabilistic classifier that operates directly on the atrial surface. We take advantage of lower resolution models to explore the atrial surface and combine seamlessly with high-resolution models to identify regions of inducibility. When trained with 40 samples, our multi-fidelity classifier shows a balanced accuracy that is 10% higher than a nearest neighbor classifier used as a baseline atrial fibrillation model, and 9% higher in presence of atrial fibrillation with ablations. We hope that this new technique will allow faster and more precise clinical applications of computational models for atrial fibrillation.
An Online Data-Driven Emergency-Response Method for Autonomous Agents in Unforeseen Situations
Authors: Glenn Maguire, Nicholas Ketz, Praveen Pilly, Jean-Baptiste Mouret
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Reinforcement learning agents perform well when presented with inputs within the distribution of those encountered during training. However, they are unable to respond effectively when faced with novel, out-of-distribution events, until they have undergone additional training. This paper presents an online, data-driven, emergency-response method that aims to provide autonomous agents the ability to react to unexpected situations that are very different from those it has been trained or designed to address. In such situations, learned policies cannot be expected to perform appropriately since the observations obtained in these novel situations would fall outside the distribution of inputs that the agent has been optimized to handle. The proposed approach devises a customized response to the unforeseen situation sequentially, by selecting actions that minimize the rate of increase of the reconstruction error from a variational auto-encoder. This optimization is achieved online in a data-efficient manner (on the order of 30 data-points) using a modified Bayesian optimization procedure. We demonstrate the potential of this approach in a simulated 3D car driving scenario, in which the agent devises a response in under 2 seconds to avoid collisions with objects it has not seen during training.
Deep Learning for Spatiotemporal Modeling of Urbanization
Authors: Tang Li, Jing Gao, Xi Peng
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning

Urbanization has a strong impact on the health and wellbeing of populations across the world. Predictive spatial modeling of urbanization therefore can be a useful tool for effective public health planning. Many spatial urbanization models have been developed using classic machine learning and numerical modeling techniques. However, deep learning with its proven capacity to capture complex spatiotemporal phenomena has not been applied to urbanization modeling. Here we explore the capacity of deep spatial learning for the predictive modeling of urbanization. We treat numerical geospatial data as images with pixels and channels, and enrich the dataset by augmentation, in order to leverage the high capacity of deep learning. Our resulting model can generate end-to-end multi-variable urbanization predictions, and outperforms a state-of-the-art classic machine learning urbanization model in preliminary comparisons.