pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FILM: A Fast, Interpretable, and Low-rank Metric Learning Approach for Sentence Matching
Authors: Xiangru Tang, Alan Aw
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, STS, Triplet

Detection of semantic similarity plays a vital role in sentence matching. It requires to learn discriminative representations of natural language. Recently, owing to more and more sophisticated model architecture, impressive progress has been made, along with a time-consuming training process and not-interpretable inference. To alleviate this problem, we explore a metric learning approach, named FILM (Fast, Interpretable, and Low-rank Metric learning) to efficiently find a high discriminative projection of the high-dimensional data. We construct this metric learning problem as a manifold optimization problem and solve it with the Cayley transformation method with the Barzilai-Borwein step size. In experiments, we apply FILM with triplet loss minimization objective to the Quora Challenge and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) Task. The results demonstrate that the FILM method achieves superior performance as well as the fastest computation speed, which is consistent with our theoretical analysis of time complexity.
Pre-trained Language Model Based Active Learning for Sentence Matching
Authors: Guirong Bai, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Zaiqing Nie
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Active Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

Active learning is able to significantly reduce the annotation cost for data-driven techniques. However, previous active learning approaches for natural language processing mainly depend on the entropy-based uncertainty criterion, and ignore the characteristics of natural language. In this paper, we propose a pre-trained language model based active learning approach for sentence matching. Differing from previous active learning, it can provide linguistic criteria to measure instances and help select more efficient instances for annotation. Experiments demonstrate our approach can achieve greater accuracy with fewer labeled training instances.
A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Empirical Revenue Maximization Algorithm with Endogenous Sampling
Authors: Xiaotie Deng, Ron Lavi, Tao Lin, Qi Qi, Wenwei Wang, Xiang Yan
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

The Empirical Revenue Maximization (ERM) is one of the most important price learning algorithms in auction design: as the literature shows it can learn approximately optimal reserve prices for revenue-maximizing auctioneers in both repeated auctions and uniform-price auctions. However, in these applications the agents who provide inputs to ERM have incentives to manipulate the inputs to lower the outputted price. We generalize the definition of an incentive-awareness measure proposed by Lavi et al (2019), to quantify the reduction of ERM's outputted price due to a change of $m\ge 1$ out of $N$ input samples, and provide specific convergence rates of this measure to zero as $N$ goes to infinity for different types of input distributions. By adopting this measure, we construct an efficient, approximately incentive-compatible, and revenue-optimal learning algorithm using ERM in repeated auctions against non-myopic bidders, and show approximate group incentive-compatibility in uniform-price auctions.
Unsupervised Semantic Aggregation and Deformable Template Matching for Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Tao Han, Junyu Gao, Yuan Yuan, Qi Wang
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Template Matching, Triplet

Unlabeled data learning has attracted considerable attention recently. However, it is still elusive to extract the expected high-level semantic feature with mere unsupervised learning. In the meantime, semi-supervised learning (SSL) demonstrates a promising future in leveraging few samples. In this paper, we combine both to propose an Unsupervised Semantic Aggregation and Deformable Template Matching (USADTM) framework for SSL, which strives to improve the classification performance with few labeled data and then reduce the cost in data annotating. Specifically, unsupervised semantic aggregation based on Triplet Mutual Information (T-MI) loss is explored to generate semantic labels for unlabeled data. Then the semantic labels are aligned to the actual class by the supervision of labeled data. Furthermore, a feature pool that stores the labeled samples is dynamically updated to assign proxy labels for unlabeled data, which are used as targets for cross-entropy minimization. Extensive experiments and analysis across four standard semi-supervised learning benchmarks validate that USADTM achieves top performance (e.g., 90.46$\%$ accuracy on CIFAR-10 with 40 labels and 95.20$\%$ accuracy with 250 labels). The code is released at https://github.com/taohan10200/USADTM.
Explaining Neural Matrix Factorization with Gradient Rollback
Authors: Carolin Lawrence, Timo Sztyler, Mathias Niepert
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Influence Approximation, Knowledge Base Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding

Explaining the predictions of neural black-box models is an important problem, especially when such models are used in applications where user trust is crucial. Estimating the influence of training examples on a learned neural model's behavior allows us to identify training examples most responsible for a given prediction and, therefore, to faithfully explain the output of a black-box model. The most generally applicable existing method is based on influence functions, which scale poorly for larger sample sizes and models. We propose gradient rollback, a general approach for influence estimation, applicable to neural models where each parameter update step during gradient descent touches a smaller number of parameters, even if the overall number of parameters is large. Neural matrix factorization models trained with gradient descent are part of this model class. These models are popular and have found a wide range of applications in industry. Especially knowledge graph embedding methods, which belong to this class, are used extensively. We show that gradient rollback is highly efficient at both training and test time. Moreover, we show theoretically that the difference between gradient rollback's influence approximation and the true influence on a model's behavior is smaller than known bounds on the stability of stochastic gradient descent. This establishes that gradient rollback is robustly estimating example influence. We also conduct experiments which show that gradient rollback provides faithful explanations for knowledge base completion and recommender datasets.
Automatic Quantification of Settlement Damage using Deep Learning of Satellite Images
Authors: Lili Lu, Weisi Guo
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Humanitarian, regression, Scene Parsing

Humanitarian disasters and political violence cause significant damage to our living space. The reparation cost to homes, infrastructure, and the ecosystem is often difficult to quantify in real-time. Real-time quantification is critical to both informing relief operations, but also planning ahead for rebuilding. Here, we use satellite images before and after major crisis around the world to train a robust baseline Residual Network (ResNet) and a disaster quantification Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet). ResNet offers robustness to poor image quality and can identify areas of destruction with high accuracy (92\%), whereas PSPNet offers contextualised quantification of built environment damage with good accuracy (84\%). As there are multiple damage dimensions to consider (e.g. economic loss and fatalities), we fit a multi-linear regression model to quantify the overall damage. To validate our combined system of deep learning and regression modeling, we successfully match our prediction to the ongoing recovery in the 2020 Beirut port explosion. These innovations provide a better quantification of overall disaster magnitude and inform intelligent humanitarian systems of unfolding disasters.
A Sentiment-Controllable Topic-to-Essay Generator with Topic Knowledge Graph
Authors: Lin Qiao, Jianhao Yan, Fandong Meng, Zhendong Yang, Jie zhou
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Sentence, Text Generation

Generating a vivid, novel, and diverse essay with only several given topic words is a challenging task of natural language generation. In previous work, there are two problems left unsolved: neglect of sentiment beneath the text and insufficient utilization of topic-related knowledge. Therefore, we propose a novel Sentiment-Controllable topic-to-essay generator with a Topic Knowledge Graph enhanced decoder, named SCTKG, which is based on the conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) framework. We firstly inject the sentiment information into the generator for controlling sentiment for each sentence, which leads to various generated essays. Then we design a Topic Knowledge Graph enhanced decoder. Unlike existing models that use knowledge entities separately, our model treats the knowledge graph as a whole and encodes more structured, connected semantic information in the graph to generate a more relevant essay. Experimental results show that our SCTKG can generate sentiment controllable essays and outperform the state-of-the-art approach in terms of topic relevance, fluency, and diversity on both automatic and human evaluation.
Implicit Subspace Prior Learning for Dual-Blind Face Restoration
Authors: Lingbo Yang, Pan Wang, Zhanning Gao, Shanshe Wang, Peiran Ren, Siwei Ma, Wen Gao
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Face Restoration

Face restoration is an inherently ill-posed problem, where additional prior constraints are typically considered crucial for mitigating such pathology. However, real-world image prior are often hard to simulate with precise mathematical models, which inevitably limits the performance and generalization ability of existing prior-regularized restoration methods. In this paper, we study the problem of face restoration under a more practical ``dual blind'' setting, i.e., without prior assumptions or hand-crafted regularization terms on the degradation profile or image contents. To this end, a novel implicit subspace prior learning (ISPL) framework is proposed as a generic solution to dual-blind face restoration, with two key elements: 1) an implicit formulation to circumvent the ill-defined restoration mapping and 2) a subspace prior decomposition and fusion mechanism to dynamically handle inputs at varying degradation levels with consistent high-quality restoration results. Experimental results demonstrate significant perception-distortion improvement of ISPL against existing state-of-the-art methods for a variety of restoration subtasks, including a 3.69db PSNR and 45.8% FID gain against ESRGAN, the 2018 NTIRE SR challenge winner. Overall, we prove that it is possible to capture and utilize prior knowledge without explicitly formulating it, which will help inspire new research paradigms towards low-level vision tasks.
Scene Gated Social Graph: Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Based on Dynamic Social Graphs and Scene Constraints
Authors: Hao Xue, Du Q. Huynh, Mark Reynolds
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Pedestrian trajectory prediction is valuable for understanding human motion behaviors and it is challenging because of the social influence from other pedestrians, the scene constraints and the multimodal possibilities of predicted trajectories. Most existing methods only focus on two of the above three key elements. In order to jointly consider all these elements, we propose a novel trajectory prediction method named Scene Gated Social Graph (SGSG). In the proposed SGSG, dynamic graphs are used to describe the social relationship among pedestrians. The social and scene influences are taken into account through the scene gated social graph features which combine the encoded social graph features and semantic scene features. In addition, a VAE module is incorporated to learn the scene gated social feature and sample latent variables for generating multiple trajectories that are socially and environmentally acceptable. We compare our SGSG against twenty state-of-the-art pedestrian trajectory prediction methods and the results show that the proposed method achieves superior performance on two widely used trajectory prediction benchmarks.
A Lightweight Speaker Recognition System Using Timbre Properties
Authors: Abu Quwsar Ohi, M. F. Mridha, Md. Abdul Hamid, Muhammad Mostafa Monowar, Dongsu Lee, Jinsul Kim
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Speaker Identification, Speaker Recognition, Speaker Verification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

Speaker recognition is an active research area that contains notable usage in biometric security and authentication system. Currently, there exist many well-performing models in the speaker recognition domain. However, most of the advanced models implement deep learning that requires GPU support for real-time speech recognition, and it is not suitable for low-end devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight text-independent speaker recognition model based on random forest classifier. It also introduces new features that are used for both speaker verification and identification tasks. The proposed model uses human speech based timbral properties as features that are classified using random forest. Timbre refers to the very basic properties of sound that allow listeners to discriminate among them. The prototype uses seven most actively searched timbre properties, boominess, brightness, depth, hardness, roughness, sharpness, and warmth as features of our speaker recognition model. The experiment is carried out on speaker verification and speaker identification tasks and shows the achievements and drawbacks of the proposed model. In the speaker identification phase, it achieves a maximum accuracy of 78%. On the contrary, in the speaker verification phase, the model maintains an accuracy of 80% having an equal error rate (ERR) of 0.24.
BiPointNet: Binary Neural Network for Point Clouds
Authors: Haotong Qin, Zhongang Cai, Mingyuan Zhang, Yifu Ding, Haiyu Zhao, Shuai Yi, Xianglong Liu, Hao Su
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Binarization

To alleviate the resource constraint for real-time point cloud applications that run on edge devices, in this paper we present BiPointNet, the first model binarization approach for efficient deep learning on point clouds. We discover that the immense performance drop of binarized models for point clouds mainly stems from two challenges: aggregation-induced feature homogenization that leads to a degradation of information entropy, and scale distortion that hinders optimization and invalidates scale-sensitive structures. With theoretical justifications and in-depth analysis, our BiPointNet introduces Entropy-Maximizing Aggregation (EMA) to modulate the distribution before aggregation for the maximum information entropy, and Layer-wise Scale Recovery (LSR) to efficiently restore feature representation capacity. Extensive experiments show that BiPointNet outperforms existing binarization methods by convincing margins, at the level even comparable with the full precision counterpart. We highlight that our techniques are generic, guaranteeing significant improvements on various fundamental tasks and mainstream backbones. Moreover, BiPointNet gives an impressive 14.7x speedup and 18.9x storage saving on real-world resource-constrained devices.
The "Sound of Silence" in EEG -- Cognitive voice activity detection
Authors: Rini A Sharon, Hema A Murthy
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Activity Detection, Brain Computer Interface, EEG, Eeg Decoding, Electroencephalogram (EEG), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech cognition bears potential application as a brain computer interface that can improve the quality of life for the otherwise communication impaired people. While speech and resting state EEG are popularly studied, here we attempt to explore a "non-speech"(NS) state of brain activity corresponding to the silence regions of speech audio. Firstly, speech perception is studied to inspect the existence of such a state, followed by its identification in speech imagination. Analogous to how voice activity detection is employed to enhance the performance of speech recognition, the EEG state activity detection protocol implemented here is applied to boost the confidence of imagined speech EEG decoding. Classification of speech and NS state is done using two datasets collected from laboratory-based and commercial-based devices. The state sequential information thus obtained is further utilized to reduce the search space of imagined EEG unit recognition. Temporal signal structures and topographic maps of NS states are visualized across subjects and sessions. The recognition performance and the visual distinction observed demonstrates the existence of silence signatures in EEG.
Feature Extraction of Text for Deep Learning Algorithms: Application on Fake News Detection
Authors: HyeonJun Kim
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deception Detection, Deep Learning, Fake News Detection

Feature extraction is an important process of machine learning and deep learning, as the process make algorithms function more efficiently, and also accurate. In natural language processing used in deception detection such as fake news detection, several ways of feature extraction in statistical aspect had been introduced (e.g. N-gram). In this research, it will be shown that by using deep learning algorithms and alphabet frequencies of the original text of a news without any information about the sequence of the alphabet can actually be used to classify fake news and trustworthy ones in high accuracy (85\%). As this pre-processing method makes the data notably compact but also include the feature that is needed for the classifier, it seems that alphabet frequencies contains some useful features for understanding complex context or meaning of the original text.
Increasing the Robustness of Semantic Segmentation Models with Painting-by-Numbers
Authors: Christoph Kamann, Burkhard Güssefeld, Robin Hutmacher, Jan Hendrik Metzen, Carsten Rother
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Semantic Segmentation

For safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving, CNNs have to be robust with respect to unavoidable image corruptions, such as image noise. While previous works addressed the task of robust prediction in the context of full-image classification, we consider it for dense semantic segmentation. We build upon an insight from image classification that output robustness can be improved by increasing the network-bias towards object shapes. We present a new training schema that increases this shape bias. Our basic idea is to alpha-blend a portion of the RGB training images with faked images, where each class-label is given a fixed, randomly chosen color that is not likely to appear in real imagery. This forces the network to rely more strongly on shape cues. We call this data augmentation technique ``Painting-by-Numbers''. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our training schema for DeepLabv3+ with various network backbones, MobileNet-V2, ResNets, and Xception, and evaluate it on the Cityscapes dataset. With respect to our 16 different types of image corruptions and 5 different network backbones, we are in 74% better than training with clean data. For cases where we are worse than a model trained without our training schema, it is mostly only marginally worse. However, for some image corruptions such as images with noise, we see a considerable performance gain of up to 25%.
Genetic Bi-objective Optimization Approach to Habitability Score
Authors: Sriram Krishna, Niharika Pentapati
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy

The search for life outside the Solar System is an endeavour of astronomers all around the world. With hundreds of exoplanets being discovered due to advances in astronomy, there is a need to classify the habitability of these exoplanets. This is typically done using various metrics such as the Earth Similarity Index or the Planetary Habitability Index. In this paper, Genetic Algorithms are used to evaluate the best possible habitability scores using the Cobb-Douglas Habitability Score. Genetic Algorithm is a classic evolutionary algorithm used for solving optimization problems. It is based on Darwin's theory of evolution, "Survival of the fittest". The working of the algorithm is established through comparison with various benchmark functions and extended its functionality to Multi-Objective optimization. The Cobb-Douglas Habitability Function is formulated as a bi-objective as well as a single objective optimization problem to find the optimal values to maximize the Cobb-Douglas Habitability Score for a set of promising exoplanets.
A review of the low-cost eye-tracking systems for 2010-2020
Authors: Ildar Rakhmatulin
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00

The manuscript presented an analysis of the work in the field of eye-tracking over the past ten years in the low-cost filed. We researched in detail the methods, algorithms, and developed hardware. To realization, this task we considered the commercial eye-tracking systems with hardware and software and Free software. Additionally, the manuscript considered advances in the neural network fields for eye-tracking tasks and problems which hold back the development of the low-cost eye-tracking system. special attention in the manuscript is given to recommendations for further research in the field of eye-tracking devices in the low-cost field.
Evaluating Factuality in Generation with Dependency-level Entailment
Authors: Tanya Goyal, Greg Durrett
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: ARC, Natural Language Inference, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Sentence, Text Generation

Despite significant progress in text generation models, a serious limitation is their tendency to produce text that is factually inconsistent with information in the input. Recent work has studied whether textual entailment systems can be used to identify factual errors; however, these sentence-level entailment models are trained to solve a different problem than generation filtering and they do not localize which part of a generation is non-factual. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of entailment that decomposes it at the level of dependency arcs. Rather than focusing on aggregate decisions, we instead ask whether the semantic relationship manifested by individual dependency arcs in the generated output is supported by the input. Human judgments on this task are difficult to obtain; we therefore propose a method to automatically create data based on existing entailment or paraphrase corpora. Experiments show that our dependency arc entailment model trained on this data can identify factual inconsistencies in paraphrasing and summarization better than sentence-level methods or those based on question generation, while additionally localizing the erroneous parts of the generation.