pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient implementations of echo state network cross-validation
Authors: Mantas Lukoševičius, Arnas Uselis
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: One-Shot Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Background/introduction: Cross-Validation (CV) is still uncommon in time series modeling. Echo State Networks (ESNs), as a prime example of Reservoir Computing (RC) models, are known for their fast and precise one-shot learning, that often benefit from good hyper-parameter tuning. This makes them ideal to change the status quo. Methods: We discuss CV of time series for predicting a concrete time interval of interest, suggest several schemes for cross-validating ESNs and introduce an efficient algorithm for implementing them. This algorithm is presented as two levels of optimizations of doing $k$-fold CV. Training an RC model typically consists of two stages: (i) running the reservoir with the data and (ii) computing the optimal readouts. The first level of our optimization addresses the most computationally expensive part (i) and makes it remain constant irrespective of $k$. It dramatically reduces reservoir computations in any type of RC system and is enough if $k$ is small. The second level of optimization also makes the (ii) part remain constant irrespective of large $k$, as long as the dimension of the output is low. We discuss when the proposed validation schemes for ESNs could be beneficial, three options for producing the final model and empirically investigate them on six different real-world datasets, as well as do empirical computation time experiments. We provide the code in an online repository. Results: Proposed CV schemes give better and more stable test performance in all the six different real-world datasets, three task types. Empirical run times confirm our complexity analysis. Conclusions: In most situations $k$-fold CV of ESNs and many other RC models can be done for virtually the same time and space complexity as a simple single-split validation. This enables CV to become a standard practice in RC.
End-to-end deep metamodeling to calibrate and optimize energy loads
Authors: Max Cohen, Maurice Charbit, Sylvain Le Corff, Marius Preda, Gilles Nozière
Date: 2020-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

In this paper, we propose a new end-to-end methodology to optimize the energy performance and the comfort, air quality and hygiene of large buildings. A metamodel based on a Transformer network is introduced and trained using a dataset sampled with a simulation program. Then, a few physical parameters and the building management system settings of this metamodel are calibrated using the CMA-ES optimization algorithm and real data obtained from sensors. Finally, the optimal settings to minimize the energy loads while maintaining a target thermal comfort and air quality are obtained using a multi-objective optimization procedure. The numerical experiments illustrate how this metamodel ensures a significant gain in energy efficiency while being computationally much more appealing than models requiring a huge number of physical parameters to be estimated.
Dataflow Aware Mapping of Convolutional Neural Networks Onto Many-Core Platforms With Network-on-Chip Interconnect
Authors: Andreas Bytyn, René Ahlsdorf, Rainer Leupers, Gerd Ascheid
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00

Machine intelligence, especially using convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has become a large area of research over the past years. Increasingly sophisticated hardware accelerators are proposed that exploit e.g. the sparsity in computations and make use of reduced precision arithmetic to scale down the energy consumption. However, future platforms require more than just energy efficiency: Scalability is becoming an increasingly important factor. The required effort for physical implementation grows with the size of the accelerator making it more difficult to meet target constraints. Using many-core platforms consisting of several homogeneous cores can alleviate the aforementioned limitations with regard to physical implementation at the expense of an increased dataflow mapping effort. While the dataflow in CNNs is deterministic and can therefore be optimized offline, the problem of finding a suitable scheme that minimizes both runtime and off-chip memory accesses is a challenging task which becomes even more complex if an interconnect system is involved. This work presents an automated mapping strategy starting at the single-core level with different optimization targets for minimal runtime and minimal off-chip memory accesses. The strategy is then extended towards a suitable many-core mapping scheme and evaluated using a scalable system-level simulation with a network-on-chip interconnect. Design space exploration is performed by mapping the well-known CNNs AlexNet and VGG-16 to platforms of different core counts and computational power per core in order to investigate the trade-offs. Our mapping strategy and system setup is scaled starting from the single core level up to 128 cores, thereby showing the limits of the selected approach.
Computer Vision with Deep Learning for Plant Phenotyping in Agriculture: A Survey
Authors: Akshay L Chandra, Sai Vikas Desai, Wei Guo, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Plant Phenotyping

In light of growing challenges in agriculture with ever growing food demand across the world, efficient crop management techniques are necessary to increase crop yield. Precision agriculture techniques allow the stakeholders to make effective and customized crop management decisions based on data gathered from monitoring crop environments. Plant phenotyping techniques play a major role in accurate crop monitoring. Advancements in deep learning have made previously difficult phenotyping tasks possible. This survey aims to introduce the reader to the state of the art research in deep plant phenotyping.
Generalization of Agent Behavior through Explicit Representation of Context
Authors: Cem C. Tutum, Suhaib Abdulquddos, Risto Miikkulainen
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

In order to deploy autonomous agents in digital interactive environments, they must be able to act robustly in unseen situations. The standard machine learning approach is to include as much variation as possible into training these agents. The agents can then interpolate within their training, but they cannot extrapolate much beyond it. This paper proposes a principled approach where a context module is coevolved with a skill module in the game. The context module recognizes the temporal variation in the game and modulates the outputs of the skill module so that the action decisions can be made robustly even in previously unseen situations. The approach is evaluated in the Flappy Bird and LunarLander video games, as well as in the CARLA autonomous driving simulation. The Context+Skill approach leads to significantly more robust behavior in environments that require extrapolation beyond training. Such a principled generalization ability is essential in deploying autonomous agents in real-world tasks, and can serve as a foundation for continual adaptation as well.
Deep Learning feature selection to unhide demographic recommender systems factors
Authors: Jesús Bobadilla, Ángel González-Prieto, Fernando Ortega, Raúl Lara-Cabrera
Date: 2020-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Deep Learning, Fairness, feature selection, General Classification, Recommendation Systems

Extracting demographic features from hidden factors is an innovative concept that provides multiple and relevant applications. The matrix factorization model generates factors which do not incorporate semantic knowledge. This paper provides a deep learning-based method: DeepUnHide, able to extract demographic information from the users and items factors in collaborative filtering recommender systems. The core of the proposed method is the gradient-based localization used in the image processing literature to highlight the representative areas of each classification class. Validation experiments make use of two public datasets and current baselines. Results show the superiority of DeepUnHide to make feature selection and demographic classification, compared to the state of art of feature selection methods. Relevant and direct applications include recommendations explanation, fairness in collaborative filtering and recommendation to groups of users.
OGAN: Disrupting Deepfakes with an Adversarial Attack that Survives Training
Authors: Eran Segalis, Eran Galili
Date: 2020-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Bilevel Optimization, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

Recent advances in autoencoders and generative models have given rise to effective video forgery methods, used for generating so-called "deepfakes". Mitigation research is mostly focused on post-factum deepfake detection and not on prevention. We complement these efforts by introducing a novel class of adversarial attacks---training-resistant attacks---which can disrupt face-swapping autoencoders whether or not its adversarial images have been included in the training set of said autoencoders. We propose the Oscillating GAN (OGAN) attack, a novel attack optimized to be training-resistant, which introduces spatial-temporal distortions to the output of face-swapping autoencoders. To implement OGAN, we construct a bilevel optimization problem, where we train a generator and a face-swapping model instance against each other. Specifically, we pair each input image with a target distortion, and feed them into a generator that produces an adversarial image. This image will exhibit the distortion when a face-swapping autoencoder is applied to it. We solve the optimization problem by training the generator and the face-swapping model simultaneously using an iterative process of alternating optimization. Next, we analyze the previously published Distorting Attack and show it is training-resistant, though it is outperformed by our suggested OGAN. Finally, we validate both attacks using a popular implementation of FaceSwap, and show that they transfer across different target models and target faces, including faces the adversarial attacks were not trained on. More broadly, these results demonstrate the existence of training-resistant adversarial attacks, potentially applicable to a wide range of domains.
Quick Lists: Enriched Playlist Embeddings for Future Playlist Recommendation
Authors: Brett Vintch
Date: 2020-06-17 00:00:00

Recommending playlists to users in the context of a digital music service is a difficult task because a playlist is often more than the mere sum of its parts. We present a novel method for generating playlist embeddings that are invariant to playlist length and sensitive to local and global track ordering. The embeddings also capture information about playlist sequencing, and are enriched with side information about the playlist user. We show that these embeddings are useful for generating next-best playlist recommendations, and that side information can be used for the cold start problem.
Human-Expert-Level Brain Tumor Detection Using Deep Learning with Data Distillation and Augmentation
Authors: Diyuan Lu, Nenad Polomac, Iskra Gacheva, Elke Hattingen, Jochen Triesch
Date: 2020-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis

The application of Deep Learning (DL) for medical diagnosis is often hampered by two problems. First, the amount of training data may be scarce, as it is limited by the number of patients who have acquired the condition to be diagnosed. Second, the training data may be corrupted by various types of noise. Here, we study the problem of brain tumor detection from magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) data, where both types of problems are prominent. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new method for training a deep neural network that distills particularly representative training examples and augments the training data by mixing these samples from one class with those from the same and other classes to create additional training samples. We demonstrate that this technique substantially improves performance, allowing our method to reach human-expert-level accuracy with just a few thousand training examples. Interestingly, the network learns to rely on features of the data that are usually ignored by human experts, suggesting new directions for future research.
The MCC-F1 curve: a performance evaluation technique for binary classification
Authors: Chang Cao, Davide Chicco, Michael M. Hoffman
Date: 2020-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, General Classification

Many fields use the ROC curve and the PR curve as standard evaluations of binary classification methods. Analysis of ROC and PR, however, often gives misleading and inflated performance evaluations, especially with an imbalanced ground truth. Here, we demonstrate the problems with ROC and PR analysis through simulations, and propose the MCC-F1 curve to address these drawbacks. The MCC-F1 curve combines two informative single-threshold metrics, MCC and the F1 score. The MCC-F1 curve more clearly differentiates good and bad classifiers, even with imbalanced ground truths. We also introduce the MCC-F1 metric, which provides a single value that integrates many aspects of classifier performance across the whole range of classification thresholds. Finally, we provide an R package that plots MCC-F1 curves and calculates related metrics.
Efficient Hyperparameter Optimization in Deep Learning Using a Variable Length Genetic Algorithm
Authors: Xueli Xiao, Ming Yan, Sunitha Basodi, Chunyan Ji, Yi Pan
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Hyperparameter Optimization

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have gained great success in many artificial intelligence tasks. However, finding a good set of hyperparameters for a CNN remains a challenging task. It usually takes an expert with deep knowledge, and trials and errors. Genetic algorithms have been used in hyperparameter optimizations. However, traditional genetic algorithms with fixed-length chromosomes may not be a good fit for optimizing deep learning hyperparameters, because deep learning models have variable number of hyperparameters depending on the model depth. As the depth increases, the number of hyperparameters grows exponentially, and searching becomes exponentially harder. It is important to have an efficient algorithm that can find a good model in reasonable time. In this article, we propose to use a variable length genetic algorithm (GA) to systematically and automatically tune the hyperparameters of a CNN to improve its performance. Experimental results show that our algorithm can find good CNN hyperparameters efficiently. It is clear from our experiments that if more time is spent on optimizing the hyperparameters, better results could be achieved. Theoretically, if we had unlimited time and CPU power, we could find the optimized hyperparameters and achieve the best results in the future.
Learning Physical Constraints with Neural Projections
Authors: Shuqi Yang, Xingzhe He, Bo Zhu
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

We propose a new family of neural networks to predict the behaviors of physical systems by learning their underpinning constraints. A neural projection operator lies at the heart of our approach, composed of a lightweight network with an embedded recursive architecture that interactively enforces learned underpinning constraints and predicts the various governed behaviors of different physical systems. Our neural projection operator is motivated by the position-based dynamics model that has been used widely in game and visual effects industries to unify the various fast physics simulators. Our method can automatically and effectively uncover a broad range of constraints from observation point data, such as length, angle, bending, collision, boundary effects, and their arbitrary combinations, without any connectivity priors. We provide a multi-group point representation in conjunction with a configurable network connection mechanism to incorporate prior inputs for processing complex physical systems. We demonstrated the efficacy of our approach by learning a set of challenging physical systems all in a unified and simple fashion including: rigid bodies with complex geometries, ropes with varying length and bending, articulated soft and rigid bodies, and multi-object collisions with complex boundaries.
Maximizing Submodular or Monotone Functions under Partition Matroid Constraints by Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms
Authors: Anh Viet Do, Frank Neumann
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Many important problems can be regarded as maximizing submodular functions under some constraints. A simple multi-objective evolutionary algorithm called GSEMO has been shown to achieve good approximation for submodular functions efficiently. While there have been many studies on the subject, most of existing run-time analyses for GSEMO assume a single cardinality constraint. In this work, we extend the theoretical results to partition matroid constraints which generalize cardinality constraints, and show that GSEMO can generally guarantee good approximation performance within polynomial expected run time. Furthermore, we conducted experimental comparison against a baseline GREEDY algorithm in maximizing undirected graph cuts on random graphs, under various partition matroid constraints. The results show GSEMO tends to outperform GREEDY in quadratic run time.
Particle Swarm Optimization for Energy Disaggregation in Industrial and Commercial Buildings
Authors: Karoline Brucke, Stefan Arens, Jan-Simon Telle, Sunke~Schlüters, Benedikt Hanke, Karsten von Maydell, Carsten Agert
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

This paper provides a formalization of the energy disaggregation problem for particle swarm optimization and shows the successful application of particle swarm optimization for disaggregation in a multi-tenant commercial building. The developed mathmatical description of the disaggregation problem using a state changes matrix belongs to the group of non-event based methods for energy disaggregation. This work includes the development of an objective function in the power domain and the description of position and velocity of each particle in a high dimensional state space. For the particle swarm optimization, four adaptions have been applied to improve the results of disaggregation, increase the robustness of the optimizer regarding local optima and reduce the computational time. The adaptions are varying movement constants, shaking of particles, framing and an early stopping criterion. In this work we use two unlabelled power datasets with a granularity of 1 s. Therefore, the results are validated in the power domain in which good results regarding multiple error measures like root mean squared error or the percentage energy error can be shown.
hxtorch: PyTorch for BrainScaleS-2 -- Perceptrons on Analog Neuromorphic Hardware
Authors: Philipp Spilger, Eric Müller, Arne Emmel, Aron Leibfried, Christian Mauch, Christian Pehle, Johannes Weis, Oliver Breitwieser, Sebastian Billaudelle, Sebastian Schmitt, Timo C. Wunderlich, Yannik Stradmann, Johannes Schemmel
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

We present software facilitating the usage of the BrainScaleS-2 analog neuromorphic hardware system as an inference accelerator for artificial neural networks. The accelerator hardware is transparently integrated into the PyTorch machine learning framework using its extension interface. In particular, we provide accelerator support for vector-matrix multiplications and convolutions; corresponding software-based autograd functionality is provided for hardware-in-the-loop training. Automatic partitioning of neural networks onto one or multiple accelerator chips is supported. We analyze implementation runtime overhead during training as well as inference, provide measurements for existing setups and evaluate the results in terms of the accelerator hardware design limitations. As an application of the introduced framework, we present a model that classifies activities of daily living with smartphone sensor data.
Inference with Artificial Neural Networks on Analog Neuromorphic Hardware
Authors: Johannes Weis, Philipp Spilger, Sebastian Billaudelle, Yannik Stradmann, Arne Emmel, Eric Müller, Oliver Breitwieser, Andreas Grübl, Joscha Ilmberger, Vitali Karasenko, Mitja Kleider, Christian Mauch, Korbinian Schreiber, Johannes Schemmel
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

The neuromorphic BrainScaleS-2 ASIC comprises mixed-signal neurons and synapse circuits as well as two versatile digital microprocessors. Primarily designed to emulate spiking neural networks, the system can also operate in a vector-matrix multiplication and accumulation mode for artificial neural networks. Analog multiplication is carried out in the synapse circuits, while the results are accumulated on the neurons' membrane capacitors. Designed as an analog, in-memory computing device, it promises high energy efficiency. Fixed-pattern noise and trial-to-trial variations, however, require the implemented networks to cope with a certain level of perturbations. Further limitations are imposed by the digital resolution of the input values (5 bit), matrix weights (6 bit) and resulting neuron activations (8 bit). In this paper, we discuss BrainScaleS-2 as an analog inference accelerator and present calibration as well as optimization strategies, highlighting the advantages of training with hardware in the loop. Among other benchmarks, we classify the MNIST handwritten digits dataset using a two-dimensional convolution and two dense layers. We reach 98.0% test accuracy, closely matching the performance of the same network evaluated in software.
LAMP: Large Deep Nets with Automated Model Parallelism for Image Segmentation
Authors: Wentao Zhu, Can Zhao, Wenqi Li, Holger Roth, Ziyue Xu, Daguang Xu
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep Learning (DL) models are becoming larger, because the increase in model size might offer significant accuracy gain. To enable the training of large deep networks, data parallelism and model parallelism are two well-known approaches for parallel training. However, data parallelism does not help reduce memory footprint per device. In this work, we introduce Large deep 3D ConvNets with Automated Model Parallelism (LAMP) and investigate the impact of both input's and deep 3D ConvNets' size on segmentation accuracy. Through automated model parallelism, it is feasible to train large deep 3D ConvNets with a large input patch, even the whole image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, facilitated by the automated model parallelism, the segmentation accuracy can be improved through increasing model size and input context size, and large input yields significant inference speedup compared with sliding window of small patches in the inference. Code is available\footnote{https://monai.io/research/lamp-automated-model-parallelism}.
NeuralScale: Efficient Scaling of Neurons for Resource-Constrained Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Eugene Lee, Chen-Yi Lee
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6

Deciding the amount of neurons during the design of a deep neural network to maximize performance is not intuitive. In this work, we attempt to search for the neuron (filter) configuration of a fixed network architecture that maximizes accuracy. Using iterative pruning methods as a proxy, we parameterize the change of the neuron (filter) number of each layer with respect to the change in parameters, allowing us to efficiently scale an architecture across arbitrary sizes. We also introduce architecture descent which iteratively refines the parameterized function used for model scaling. The combination of both proposed methods is coined as NeuralScale. To prove the efficiency of NeuralScale in terms of parameters, we show empirical simulations on VGG11, MobileNetV2 and ResNet18 using CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and TinyImageNet as benchmark datasets. Our results show an increase in accuracy of 3.04%, 8.56% and 3.41% for VGG11, MobileNetV2 and ResNet18 on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and TinyImageNet respectively under a parameter-constrained setting (output neurons (filters) of default configuration with scaling factor of 0.25).