pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CoDA: Contrast-enhanced and Diversity-promoting Data Augmentation for Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Yanru Qu, Dinghan Shen, Yelong Shen, Sandra Sajeev, Jiawei Han, Weizhu Chen
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Natural Language Understanding

Data augmentation has been demonstrated as an effective strategy for improving model generalization and data efficiency. However, due to the discrete nature of natural language, designing label-preserving transformations for text data tends to be more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation framework dubbed CoDA, which synthesizes diverse and informative augmented examples by integrating multiple transformations organically. Moreover, a contrastive regularization objective is introduced to capture the global relationship among all the data samples. A momentum encoder along with a memory bank is further leveraged to better estimate the contrastive loss. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we apply CoDA to Transformer-based models on a wide range of natural language understanding tasks. On the GLUE benchmark, CoDA gives rise to an average improvement of 2.2% while applied to the RoBERTa-large model. More importantly, it consistently exhibits stronger results relative to several competitive data augmentation and adversarial training base-lines (including the low-resource settings). Extensive experiments show that the proposed contrastive objective can be flexibly combined with various data augmentation approaches to further boost their performance, highlighting the wide applicability of the CoDA framework.
Robot Learning with Crash Constraints
Authors: Alonso Marco, Dominik Baumann, Majid Khadiv, Philipp Hennig, Ludovic Righetti, Sebastian Trimpe
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

In the past decade, numerous machine learning algorithms have been shown to successfully learn optimal policies to control real robotic systems. However, it is common to encounter failing behaviors as the learning loop progresses. Specifically, in robot applications where failing is undesired but not catastrophic, many algorithms struggle with leveraging data obtained from failures. This is usually caused by (i) the failed experiment ending prematurely, or (ii) the acquired data being scarce or corrupted. Both complicate the design of proper reward functions to penalize failures. In this paper, we propose a framework that addresses those issues. We consider failing behaviors as those that violate a constraint and address the problem of learning with crash constraints, where no data is obtained upon constraint violation. The no-data case is addressed by a novel GP model (GPCR) for the constraint that combines discrete events (failure/success) with continuous observations (only obtained upon success). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on simulated benchmarks and on a real jumping quadruped, where the constraint threshold is unknown a priori. Experimental data is collected, by means of constrained Bayesian optimization, directly on the real robot. Our results outperform manual tuning and GPCR proves useful on estimating the constraint threshold.
Active Domain Adaptation via Clustering Uncertainty-weighted Embeddings
Authors: Viraj Prabhu, Arjun Chandrasekaran, Kate Saenko, Judy Hoffman
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Active Learning, Clustering, Diversity, Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification

Generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains is critical to their real-world utility. In practice, it may be feasible to get some target data labeled, but to be cost-effective it is desirable to select a maximally-informative subset via active learning (AL). We study the problem of AL under a domain shift, called Active Domain Adaptation (Active DA). We demonstrate how existing AL approaches based solely on model uncertainty or diversity sampling are less effective for Active DA. We propose Clustering Uncertainty-weighted Embeddings (CLUE), a novel label acquisition strategy for Active DA that performs uncertainty-weighted clustering to identify target instances for labeling that are both uncertain under the model and diverse in feature space. CLUE consistently outperforms competing label acquisition strategies for Active DA and AL across learning settings on 6 diverse domain shifts for image classification.
Generalized Intersection Algorithms with Fixpoints for Image Decomposition Learning
Authors: Robin Richter, Duy H. Thai, Stephan F. Huckemann
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

In image processing, classical methods minimize a suitable functional that balances between computational feasibility (convexity of the functional is ideal) and suitable penalties reflecting the desired image decomposition. The fact that algorithms derived from such minimization problems can be used to construct (deep) learning architectures has spurred the development of algorithms that can be trained for a specifically desired image decomposition, e.g. into cartoon and texture. While many such methods are very successful, theoretical guarantees are only scarcely available. To this end, in this contribution, we formalize a general class of intersection point problems encompassing a wide range of (learned) image decomposition models, and we give an existence result for a large subclass of such problems, i.e. giving the existence of a fixpoint of the corresponding algorithm. This class generalizes classical model-based variational problems, such as the TV-l2 -model or the more general TV-Hilbert model. To illustrate the potential for learned algorithms, novel (non learned) choices within our class show comparable results in denoising and texture removal.
Semantics of the Black-Box: Can knowledge graphs help make deep learning systems more interpretable and explainable?
Authors: Manas Gaur, Keyur Faldu, Amit Sheth
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

The recent series of innovations in deep learning (DL) have shown enormous potential to impact individuals and society, both positively and negatively. The DL models utilizing massive computing power and enormous datasets have significantly outperformed prior historical benchmarks on increasingly difficult, well-defined research tasks across technology domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, signal processing, and human-computer interactions. However, the Black-Box nature of DL models and their over-reliance on massive amounts of data condensed into labels and dense representations poses challenges for interpretability and explainability of the system. Furthermore, DLs have not yet been proven in their ability to effectively utilize relevant domain knowledge and experience critical to human understanding. This aspect is missing in early data-focused approaches and necessitated knowledge-infused learning and other strategies to incorporate computational knowledge. This article demonstrates how knowledge, provided as a knowledge graph, is incorporated into DL methods using knowledge-infused learning, which is one of the strategies. We then discuss how this makes a fundamental difference in the interpretability and explainability of current approaches, and illustrate it with examples from natural language processing for healthcare and education applications.
Wireless Localisation in WiFi using Novel Deep Architectures
Authors: Peizheng Li, Han Cui, Aftab Khan, Usman Raza, Robert Piechocki, Angela Doufexi, Tim Farnham
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00

This paper studies the indoor localisation of WiFi devices based on a commodity chipset and standard channel sounding. First, we present a novel shallow neural network (SNN) in which features are extracted from the channel state information (CSI) corresponding to WiFi subcarriers received on different antennas and used to train the model. The single-layer architecture of this localisation neural network makes it lightweight and easy-to-deploy on devices with stringent constraints on computational resources. We further investigate for localisation the use of deep learning models and design novel architectures for convolutional neural network (CNN) and long-short term memory (LSTM). We extensively evaluate these localisation algorithms for continuous tracking in indoor environments. Experimental results prove that even an SNN model, after a careful handcrafted feature extraction, can achieve accurate localisation. Meanwhile, using a well-organised architecture, the neural network models can be trained directly with raw data from the CSI and localisation features can be automatically extracted to achieve accurate position estimates. We also found that the performance of neural network-based methods are directly affected by the number of anchor access points (APs) regardless of their structure. With three APs, all neural network models proposed in this paper can obtain localisation accuracy of around 0.5 metres. In addition the proposed deep NN architecture reduces the data pre-processing time by 6.5 hours compared with a shallow NN using the data collected in our testbed. In the deployment phase, the inference time is also significantly reduced to 0.1 ms per sample. We also demonstrate the generalisation capability of the proposed method by evaluating models using different target movement characteristics to the ones in which they were trained.
Class-incremental Learning with Pre-allocated Fixed Classifiers
Authors: Federico Pernici, Matteo Bruni, Claudio Baecchi, Francesco Turchini, Alberto del Bimbo
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

In class-incremental learning, a learning agent faces a stream of data with the goal of learning new classes while not forgetting previous ones. Neural networks are known to suffer under this setting, as they forget previously acquired knowledge. To address this problem, effective methods exploit past data stored in an episodic memory while expanding the final classifier nodes to accommodate the new classes. In this work, we substitute the expanding classifier with a novel fixed classifier in which a number of pre-allocated output nodes are subject to the classification loss right from the beginning of the learning phase. Contrarily to the standard expanding classifier, this allows: (a) the output nodes of future unseen classes to firstly see negative samples since the beginning of learning together with the positive samples that incrementally arrive; (b) to learn features that do not change their geometric configuration as novel classes are incorporated in the learning model. Experiments with public datasets show that the proposed approach is as effective as the expanding classifier while exhibiting novel intriguing properties of the internal feature representation that are otherwise not-existent. Our ablation study on pre-allocating a large number of classes further validates the approach.
Adaptive Dense-to-Sparse Paradigm for Pruning Online Recommendation System with Non-Stationary Data
Authors: Mao Ye, Dhruv Choudhary, Jiecao Yu, Ellie Wen, Zeliang Chen, Jiyan Yang, Jongsoo Park, Qiang Liu, Arun Kejariwal
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Large scale deep learning provides a tremendous opportunity to improve the quality of content recommendation systems by employing both wider and deeper models, but this comes at great infrastructural cost and carbon footprint in modern data centers. Pruning is an effective technique that reduces both memory and compute demand for model inference. However, pruning for online recommendation systems is challenging due to the continuous data distribution shift (a.k.a non-stationary data). Although incremental training on the full model is able to adapt to the non-stationary data, directly applying it on the pruned model leads to accuracy loss. This is because the sparsity pattern after pruning requires adjustment to learn new patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide in-depth analysis and discussion of applying pruning to online recommendation systems with non-stationary data distribution. Overall, this work makes the following contributions: 1) We present an adaptive dense to sparse paradigm equipped with a novel pruning algorithm for pruning a large scale recommendation system with non-stationary data distribution; 2) We design the pruning algorithm to automatically learn the sparsity across layers to avoid repeating hand-tuning, which is critical for pruning the heterogeneous architectures of recommendation systems trained with non-stationary data.
Cross-Lingual Relation Extraction with Transformers
Authors: Jian Ni, Taesun Moon, Parul Awasthy, Radu Florian
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Relation, Relation Extraction, Representation Learning

Relation extraction (RE) is one of the most important tasks in information extraction, as it provides essential information for many NLP applications. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual RE approach that does not require any human annotation in a target language or any cross-lingual resources. Building upon unsupervised cross-lingual representation learning frameworks, we develop several deep Transformer based RE models with a novel encoding scheme that can effectively encode both entity location and entity type information. Our RE models, when trained with English data, outperform several deep neural network based English RE models. More importantly, our models can be applied to perform zero-shot cross-lingual RE, achieving the state-of-the-art cross-lingual RE performance on two datasets (68-89% of the accuracy of the supervised target-language RE model). The high cross-lingual transfer efficiency without requiring additional training data or cross-lingual resources shows that our RE models are especially useful for low-resource languages.
Reinforcement Learning for Efficient and Tuning-Free Link Adaptation
Authors: Vidit Saxena, Hugo Tullberg, Joakim Jaldén
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Thompson Sampling

Wireless links adapt the data transmission parameters to the dynamic channel state -- this is called link adaptation. Classical link adaptation relies on tuning parameters that are challenging to configure for optimal link performance. Recently, reinforcement learning has been proposed to automate link adaptation, where the transmission parameters are modeled as discrete arms of a multi-armed bandit. In this context, we propose a latent learning model for link adaptation that exploits the correlation between data transmission parameters. Further, motivated by the recent success of Thompson sampling for multi-armed bandit problems, we propose a latent Thompson sampling (LTS) algorithm that quickly learns the optimal parameters for a given channel state. We extend LTS to fading wireless channels through a tuning-free mechanism that automatically tracks the channel dynamics. In numerical evaluations with fading wireless channels, LTS improves the link throughout by up to 100% compared to the state-of-the-art link adaptation algorithms.
Ensembling Low Precision Models for Binary Biomedical Image Segmentation
Authors: Tianyu Ma, Hang Zhang, Hanley Ong, Amar Vora, Thanh D. Nguyen, Ajay Gupta, Yi Wang, Mert Sabuncu
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Myocardium Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segmentation of anatomical regions of interest such as vessels or small lesions in medical images is still a difficult problem that is often tackled with manual input by an expert. One of the major challenges for this task is that the appearance of foreground (positive) regions can be similar to background (negative) regions. As a result, many automatic segmentation algorithms tend to exhibit asymmetric errors, typically producing more false positives than false negatives. In this paper, we aim to leverage this asymmetry and train a diverse ensemble of models with very high recall, while sacrificing their precision. Our core idea is straightforward: A diverse ensemble of low precision and high recall models are likely to make different false positive errors (classifying background as foreground in different parts of the image), but the true positives will tend to be consistent. Thus, in aggregate the false positive errors will cancel out, yielding high performance for the ensemble. Our strategy is general and can be applied with any segmentation model. In three different applications (carotid artery segmentation in a neck CT angiography, myocardium segmentation in a cardiovascular MRI and multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation in a brain MRI), we show how the proposed approach can significantly boost the performance of a baseline segmentation method.
Zoom-CAM: Generating Fine-grained Pixel Annotations from Image Labels
Authors: Xiangwei Shi, Seyran Khademi, Yunqiang Li, Jan van Gemert
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Localization, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Object Localization, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Current weakly supervised object localization and segmentation rely on class-discriminative visualization techniques to generate pseudo-labels for pixel-level training. Such visualization methods, including class activation mapping (CAM) and Grad-CAM, use only the deepest, lowest resolution convolutional layer, missing all information in intermediate layers. We propose Zoom-CAM: going beyond the last lowest resolution layer by integrating the importance maps over all activations in intermediate layers. Zoom-CAM captures fine-grained small-scale objects for various discriminative class instances, which are commonly missed by the baseline visualization methods. We focus on generating pixel-level pseudo-labels from class labels. The quality of our pseudo-labels evaluated on the ImageNet localization task exhibits more than 2.8% improvement on top-1 error. For weakly supervised semantic segmentation our generated pseudo-labels improve a state of the art model by 1.1%.
Multimodal Speech Recognition with Unstructured Audio Masking
Authors: Tejas Srinivasan, Ramon Sanabria, Florian Metze, Desmond Elliott
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (nlpbt) 2020 11
Tasks: 8k, Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Visual context has been shown to be useful for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems when the speech signal is noisy or corrupted. Previous work, however, has only demonstrated the utility of visual context in an unrealistic setting, where a fixed set of words are systematically masked in the audio. In this paper, we simulate a more realistic masking scenario during model training, called RandWordMask, where the masking can occur for any word segment. Our experiments on the Flickr 8K Audio Captions Corpus show that multimodal ASR can generalize to recover different types of masked words in this unstructured masking setting. Moreover, our analysis shows that our models are capable of attending to the visual signal when the audio signal is corrupted. These results show that multimodal ASR systems can leverage the visual signal in more generalized noisy scenarios.
A general approach to compute the relevance of middle-level input features
Authors: Andrea Apicella, Salvatore Giugliano, Francesco Isgrò, Roberto Prevete
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), image-classification, Image Classification

This work proposes a novel general framework, in the context of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), to construct explanations for the behaviour of Machine Learning (ML) models in terms of middle-level features. One can isolate two different ways to provide explanations in the context of XAI: low and middle-level explanations. Middle-level explanations have been introduced for alleviating some deficiencies of low-level explanations such as, in the context of image classification, the fact that human users are left with a significant interpretive burden: starting from low-level explanations, one has to identify properties of the overall input that are perceptually salient for the human visual system. However, a general approach to correctly evaluate the elements of middle-level explanations with respect ML model responses has never been proposed in the literature.
Universal guarantees for decision tree induction via a higher-order splitting criterion
Authors: Guy Blanc, Neha Gupta, Jane Lange, Li-Yang Tan
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

We propose a simple extension of top-down decision tree learning heuristics such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. Our algorithm achieves provable guarantees for all target functions $f: \{-1,1\}^n \to \{-1,1\}$ with respect to the uniform distribution, circumventing impossibility results showing that existing heuristics fare poorly even for simple target functions. The crux of our extension is a new splitting criterion that takes into account the correlations between $f$ and small subsets of its attributes. The splitting criteria of existing heuristics (e.g. Gini impurity and information gain), in contrast, are based solely on the correlations between $f$ and its individual attributes. Our algorithm satisfies the following guarantee: for all target functions $f : \{-1,1\}^n \to \{-1,1\}$, sizes $s\in \mathbb{N}$, and error parameters $\epsilon$, it constructs a decision tree of size $s^{\tilde{O}((\log s)^2/\epsilon^2)}$ that achieves error $\le O(\mathsf{opt}_s) + \epsilon$, where $\mathsf{opt}_s$ denotes the error of the optimal size $s$ decision tree. A key technical notion that drives our analysis is the noise stability of $f$, a well-studied smoothness measure.
Minimax Quasi-Bayesian estimation in sparse canonical correlation analysis via a Rayleigh quotient function
Authors: Qiuyun Zhu, Yves Atchade
Date: 2020-10-16 00:00:00

Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) is a popular statistical technique for exploring relationships between datasets. In recent years, the estimation of sparse canonical vectors has emerged as an important but challenging variant of the CCA problem, with widespread applications. Unfortunately, existing rate-optimal estimators for sparse canonical vectors have high computational cost. We propose a quasi-Bayesian estimation procedure that not only achieves the minimax estimation rate, but also is easy to compute by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The method builds on Tan et al. (2018) and uses a re-scaled Rayleigh quotient function as the quasi-log-likelihood. However, unlike Tan et al. (2018), we adopt a Bayesian framework that combines this quasi-log-likelihood with a spike-and-slab prior to regularize the inference and promote sparsity. We investigate the empirical behavior of the proposed method on both continuous and truncated data, and we demonstrate that it outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. As an application, we use the proposed methodology to maximally correlate clinical variables and proteomic data for better understanding the Covid-19 disease.