pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MVIN: Learning Multiview Items for Recommendation
Authors: Chang-You Tai, Meng-Ru Wu, Yun-Wei Chu, Shao-Yu Chu, Lun-Wei Ku
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Knowledge Graphs, Recommendation Systems

Researchers have begun to utilize heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs) as auxiliary information in recommendation systems to mitigate the cold start and sparsity issues. However, utilizing a graph neural network (GNN) to capture information in KG and further apply in RS is still problematic as it is unable to see each item's properties from multiple perspectives. To address these issues, we propose the multi-view item network (MVIN), a GNN-based recommendation model which provides superior recommendations by describing items from a unique mixed view from user and entity angles. MVIN learns item representations from both the user view and the entity view. From the user view, user-oriented modules score and aggregate features to make recommendations from a personalized perspective constructed according to KG entities which incorporates user click information. From the entity view, the mixing layer contrasts layer-wise GCN information to further obtain comprehensive features from internal entity-entity interactions in the KG. We evaluate MVIN on three real-world datasets: MovieLens-1M (ML-1M), LFM-1b 2015 (LFM-1b), and Amazon-Book (AZ-book). Results show that MVIN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on these three datasets. In addition, from user-view cases, we find that MVIN indeed captures entities that attract users. Figures further illustrate that mixing layers in a heterogeneous KG plays a vital role in neighborhood information aggregation.
ParsBERT: Transformer-based Model for Persian Language Understanding
Authors: Mehrdad Farahani, Mohammad Gharachorloo, Marzieh Farahani, Mohammad Manthouri
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification

The surge of pre-trained language models has begun a new era in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by allowing us to build powerful language models. Among these models, Transformer-based models such as BERT have become increasingly popular due to their state-of-the-art performance. However, these models are usually focused on English, leaving other languages to multilingual models with limited resources. This paper proposes a monolingual BERT for the Persian language (ParsBERT), which shows its state-of-the-art performance compared to other architectures and multilingual models. Also, since the amount of data available for NLP tasks in Persian is very restricted, a massive dataset for different NLP tasks as well as pre-training the model is composed. ParsBERT obtains higher scores in all datasets, including existing ones as well as composed ones and improves the state-of-the-art performance by outperforming both multilingual BERT and other prior works in Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification and Named Entity Recognition tasks.
DeepRetinotopy: Predicting the Functional Organization of Human Visual Cortex from Structural MRI Data using Geometric Deep Learning
Authors: Fernanda L. Ribeiro, Steffen Bollmann, Alexander M. Puckett
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: MIDL 2019 7
Tasks: Anatomy

Whether it be in a man-made machine or a biological system, form and function are often directly related. In the latter, however, this particular relationship is often unclear due to the intricate nature of biology. Here we developed a geometric deep learning model capable of exploiting the actual structure of the cortex to learn the complex relationship between brain function and anatomy from structural and functional MRI data. Our model was not only able to predict the functional organization of human visual cortex from anatomical properties alone, but it was also able to predict nuanced variations across individuals.
Learning Whole-Body Human-Robot Haptic Interaction in Social Contexts
Authors: Joseph Campbell, Katsu Yamane
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00

This paper presents a learning-from-demonstration (LfD) framework for teaching human-robot social interactions that involve whole-body haptic interaction, i.e. direct human-robot contact over the full robot body. The performance of existing LfD frameworks suffers in such interactions due to the high dimensionality and spatiotemporal sparsity of the demonstration data. We show that by leveraging this sparsity, we can reduce the data dimensionality without incurring a significant accuracy penalty, and introduce three strategies for doing so. By combining these techniques with an LfD framework for learning multimodal human-robot interactions, we can model the spatiotemporal relationship between the tactile and kinesthetic information during whole-body haptic interactions. Using a teleoperated bimanual robot equipped with 61 force sensors, we experimentally demonstrate that a model trained with 121 sample hugs from 4 participants generalizes well to unseen inputs and human partners.
BEEP! Korean Corpus of Online News Comments for Toxic Speech Detection
Authors: Jihyung Moon, Won Ik Cho, Junbum Lee
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

Toxic comments in online platforms are an unavoidable social issue under the cloak of anonymity. Hate speech detection has been actively done for languages such as English, German, or Italian, where manually labeled corpus has been released. In this work, we first present 9.4K manually labeled entertainment news comments for identifying Korean toxic speech, collected from a widely used online news platform in Korea. The comments are annotated regarding social bias and hate speech since both aspects are correlated. The inter-annotator agreement Krippendorff's alpha score is 0.492 and 0.496, respectively. We provide benchmarks using CharCNN, BiLSTM, and BERT, where BERT achieves the highest score on all tasks. The models generally display better performance on bias identification, since the hate speech detection is a more subjective issue. Additionally, when BERT is trained with bias label for hate speech detection, the prediction score increases, implying that bias and hate are intertwined. We make our dataset publicly available and open competitions with the corpus and benchmarks.
History-Aware Question Answering in a Blocks World Dialogue System
Authors: Benjamin Kane, Georgiy Platonov, Lenhart K. Schubert
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Spatial Reasoning

It is essential for dialogue-based spatial reasoning systems to maintain memory of historical states of the world. In addition to conveying that the dialogue agent is mentally present and engaged with the task, referring to historical states may be crucial for enabling collaborative planning (e.g., for planning to return to a previous state, or diagnosing a past misstep). In this paper, we approach the problem of spatial memory in a multi-modal spoken dialogue system capable of answering questions about interaction history in a physical blocks world setting. This work builds upon a full spatial question-answering pipeline consisting of a vision system, speech input and output mediated by an animated avatar, a dialogue system that robustly interprets spatial queries, and a constraint solver that derives answers based on 3-D spatial modelling. The contributions of this work include a symbolic dialogue context registering knowledge about discourse history and changes in the world, as well as a natural language understanding module capable of interpreting free-form historical questions and querying the dialogue context to form an answer.
CalliGAN: Style and Structure-aware Chinese Calligraphy Character Generator
Authors: Shan-Jean Wu, Chih-Yuan Yang, Jane Yung-jen Hsu
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Chinese calligraphy is the writing of Chinese characters as an art form performed with brushes so Chinese characters are rich of shapes and details. Recent studies show that Chinese characters can be generated through image-to-image translation for multiple styles using a single model. We propose a novel method of this approach by incorporating Chinese characters' component information into its model. We also propose an improved network to convert characters to their embedding space. Experiments show that the proposed method generates high-quality Chinese calligraphy characters over state-of-the-art methods measured through numerical evaluations and human subject studies.
CRUDE: Calibrating Regression Uncertainty Distributions Empirically
Authors: Eric Zelikman, Christopher Healy, Sharon Zhou, Anand Avati
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, General Classification, regression

Calibrated uncertainty estimates in machine learning are crucial to many fields such as autonomous vehicles, medicine, and weather and climate forecasting. While there is extensive literature on uncertainty calibration for classification, the classification findings do not always translate to regression. As a result, modern models for predicting uncertainty in regression settings typically produce uncalibrated and overconfident estimates. To address these gaps, we present a calibration method for regression settings that does not assume a particular uncertainty distribution over the error: Calibrating Regression Uncertainty Distributions Empirically (CRUDE). CRUDE makes the weaker assumption that error distributions have a constant arbitrary shape across the output space, shifted by predicted mean and scaled by predicted standard deviation. We detail a theoretical connection between CRUDE and conformal inference. Across an extensive set of regression tasks, CRUDE demonstrates consistently sharper, better calibrated, and more accurate uncertainty estimates than state-of-the-art techniques.
Towards Fine-grained Human Pose Transfer with Detail Replenishing Network
Authors: Lingbo Yang, Pan Wang, Chang Liu, Zhanning Gao, Peiran Ren, Xinfeng Zhang, Shanshe Wang, Siwei Ma, Xian-Sheng Hua, Wen Gao
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Transfer, Retrieval

Human pose transfer (HPT) is an emerging research topic with huge potential in fashion design, media production, online advertising and virtual reality. For these applications, the visual realism of fine-grained appearance details is crucial for production quality and user engagement. However, existing HPT methods often suffer from three fundamental issues: detail deficiency, content ambiguity and style inconsistency, which severely degrade the visual quality and realism of generated images. Aiming towards real-world applications, we develop a more challenging yet practical HPT setting, termed as Fine-grained Human Pose Transfer (FHPT), with a higher focus on semantic fidelity and detail replenishment. Concretely, we analyze the potential design flaws of existing methods via an illustrative example, and establish the core FHPT methodology by combing the idea of content synthesis and feature transfer together in a mutually-guided fashion. Thereafter, we substantiate the proposed methodology with a Detail Replenishing Network (DRN) and a corresponding coarse-to-fine model training scheme. Moreover, we build up a complete suite of fine-grained evaluation protocols to address the challenges of FHPT in a comprehensive manner, including semantic analysis, structural detection and perceptual quality assessment. Extensive experiments on the DeepFashion benchmark dataset have verified the power of proposed benchmark against start-of-the-art works, with 12\%-14\% gain on top-10 retrieval recall, 5\% higher joint localization accuracy, and near 40\% gain on face identity preservation. Moreover, the evaluation results offer further insights to the subject matter, which could inspire many promising future works along this direction.
Is deeper better? It depends on locality of relevant features
Authors: Takashi Mori, Masahito Ueda
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

It has been recognized that a heavily overparameterized artificial neural network exhibits surprisingly good generalization performance in various machine-learning tasks. Recent theoretical studies have made attempts to unveil the mystery of the overparameterization. In most of those previous works, the overparameterization is achieved by increasing the width of the network, while the effect of increasing the depth has remained less well understood. In this work, we investigate the effect of increasing the depth within an overparameterized regime. To gain an insight into the advantage of depth, we introduce local and global labels as abstract but simple classification rules. It turns out that the locality of the relevant feature for a given classification rule plays a key role; our experimental results suggest that deeper is better for local labels, whereas shallower is better for global labels. We also compare the results of finite networks with those of the neural tangent kernel (NTK), which is equivalent to an infinitely wide network with a proper initialization and an infinitesimal learning rate. It is shown that the NTK does not correctly capture the depth dependence of the generalization performance, which indicates the importance of the feature learning rather than the lazy learning.
Region-adaptive Texture Enhancement for Detailed Person Image Synthesis
Authors: Lingbo Yang, Pan Wang, Xinfeng Zhang, Shanshe Wang, Zhanning Gao, Peiran Ren, Xuansong Xie, Siwei Ma, Wen Gao
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Pose Transfer

The ability to produce convincing textural details is essential for the fidelity of synthesized person images. However, existing methods typically follow a ``warping-based'' strategy that propagates appearance features through the same pathway used for pose transfer. However, most fine-grained features would be lost due to down-sampling, leading to over-smoothed clothes and missing details in the output images. In this paper we presents RATE-Net, a novel framework for synthesizing person images with sharp texture details. The proposed framework leverages an additional texture enhancing module to extract appearance information from the source image and estimate a fine-grained residual texture map, which helps to refine the coarse estimation from the pose transfer module. In addition, we design an effective alternate updating strategy to promote mutual guidance between two modules for better shape and appearance consistency. Experiments conducted on DeepFashion benchmark dataset have demonstrated the superiority of our framework compared with existing networks.
EMT: Explicit Memory Tracker with Coarse-to-Fine Reasoning for Conversational Machine Reading
Authors: Yifan Gao, Chien-Sheng Wu, Shafiq Joty, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu, Steven C. H. Hoi
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Reading Comprehension, Sentence

The goal of conversational machine reading is to answer user questions given a knowledge base text which may require asking clarification questions. Existing approaches are limited in their decision making due to struggles in extracting question-related rules and reasoning about them. In this paper, we present a new framework of conversational machine reading that comprises a novel Explicit Memory Tracker (EMT) to track whether conditions listed in the rule text have already been satisfied to make a decision. Moreover, our framework generates clarification questions by adopting a coarse-to-fine reasoning strategy, utilizing sentence-level entailment scores to weight token-level distributions. On the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out) testset, EMT achieves new state-of-the-art results of 74.6% micro-averaged decision accuracy and 49.5 BLEU4. We also show that EMT is more interpretable by visualizing the entailment-oriented reasoning process as the conversation flows. Code and models are released at \url{https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/explicit_memory_tracker}.
The best way to select features?
Authors: Xin Man, Ernest Chan
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, feature selection

Feature selection in machine learning is subject to the intrinsic randomness of the feature selection algorithms (for example, random permutations during MDA). Stability of selected features with respect to such randomness is essential to the human interpretability of a machine learning algorithm. We proposes a rank based stability metric called instability index to compare the stabilities of three feature selection algorithms MDA, LIME, and SHAP as applied to random forests. Typically, features are selected by averaging many random iterations of a selection algorithm. Though we find that the variability of the selected features does decrease as the number of iterations increases, it does not go to zero, and the features selected by the three algorithms do not necessarily converge to the same set. We find LIME and SHAP to be more stable than MDA, and LIME is at least as stable as SHAP for the top ranked features. Hence overall LIME is best suited for human interpretability. However, the selected set of features from all three algorithms significantly improves various predictive metrics out of sample, and their predictive performances do not differ significantly. Experiments were conducted on synthetic datasets, two public benchmark datasets, and on proprietary data from an active investment strategy.
Identification of Crystal Symmetry from Noisy Diffraction Patterns by A Shape Analysis and Deep Learning
Authors: Leslie Ching Ow Tiong, Jeongrae Kim, Sang Soo Han, Donghun Kim
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Space group classification

The robust and automated determination of crystal symmetry is of utmost importance in material characterization and analysis. Recent studies have shown that deep learning (DL) methods can effectively reveal the correlations between X-ray or electron-beam diffraction patterns and crystal symmetry. Despite their promise, most of these studies have been limited to identifying relatively few classes into which a target material may be grouped. On the other hand, the DL-based identification of crystal symmetry suffers from a drastic drop in accuracy for problems involving classification into tens or hundreds of symmetry classes (e.g., up to 230 space groups), severely limiting its practical usage. Here, we demonstrate that a combined approach of shaping diffraction patterns and implementing them in a multistream DenseNet (MSDN) substantially improves the accuracy of classification. Even with an imbalanced dataset of 108,658 individual crystals sampled from 72 space groups, our model achieves 80.2% space group classification accuracy, outperforming conventional benchmark models by 17-27 percentage points (%p). The enhancement can be largely attributed to the pattern shaping strategy, through which the subtle changes in patterns between symmetrically close crystal systems (e.g., monoclinic vs. orthorhombic or trigonal vs. hexagonal) are well differentiated. We additionally find that the novel MSDN architecture is advantageous for capturing patterns in a richer but less redundant manner relative to conventional convolutional neural networks. The newly proposed protocols in regard to both input descriptor processing and DL architecture enable accurate space group classification and thus improve the practical usage of the DL approach in crystal symmetry identification.
Experimental evaluation of quantum Bayesian networks on IBM QX hardware
Authors: Sima E. Borujeni, Nam H. Nguyen, Saideep Nannapaneni, Elizabeth C. Behrman, James E. Steck
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Stock Prediction

Bayesian Networks (BN) are probabilistic graphical models that are widely used for uncertainty modeling, stochastic prediction and probabilistic inference. A Quantum Bayesian Network (QBN) is a quantum version of the Bayesian network that utilizes the principles of quantum mechanical systems to improve the computational performance of various analyses. In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the performance of QBN on various IBM QX hardware against Qiskit simulator and classical analysis. We consider a 4-node BN for stock prediction for our experimental evaluation. We construct a quantum circuit to represent the 4-node BN using Qiskit, and run the circuit on nine IBM quantum devices: Yorktown, Vigo, Ourense, Essex, Burlington, London, Rome, Athens and Melbourne. We will also compare the performance of each device across the four levels of optimization performed by the IBM Transpiler when mapping a given quantum circuit to a given device. We use the root mean square percentage error as the metric for performance comparison of various hardware.
CARPe Posterum: A Convolutional Approach for Real-time Pedestrian Path Prediction
Authors: Matías Mendieta, Hamed Tabkhi
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Prediction, Video Understanding

Pedestrian path prediction is an essential topic in computer vision and video understanding. Having insight into the movement of pedestrians is crucial for ensuring safe operation in a variety of applications including autonomous vehicles, social robots, and environmental monitoring. Current works in this area utilize complex generative or recurrent methods to capture many possible futures. However, despite the inherent real-time nature of predicting future paths, little work has been done to explore accurate and computationally efficient approaches for this task. To this end, we propose a convolutional approach for real-time pedestrian path prediction, CARPe. It utilizes a variation of Graph Isomorphism Networks in combination with an agile convolutional neural network design to form a fast and accurate path prediction approach. Notable results in both inference speed and prediction accuracy are achieved, improving FPS considerably in comparison to current state-of-the-art methods while delivering competitive accuracy on well-known path prediction datasets.
Learning Robust Feature Representations for Scene Text Detection
Authors: Sihwan Kim, Taejang Park
Date: 2020-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

Scene text detection based on deep neural networks have progressed substantially over the past years. However, previous state-of-the-art methods may still fall short when dealing with challenging public benchmarks because the performances of algorithm are determined by the robust features extraction and components in network architecture. To address this issue, we will present a network architecture derived from the loss to maximize conditional log-likelihood by optimizing the lower bound with a proper approximate posterior that has shown impressive performance in several generative models. In addition, by extending the layer of latent variables to multiple layers, the network is able to learn robust features on scale with no task-specific regularization or data augmentation. We provide a detailed analysis and show the results on three public benchmark datasets to confirm the efficiency and reliability of the proposed algorithm. In experiments, the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both recall and precision. Specifically, it achieves an H-mean of 95.12 and 96.78 on ICDAR 2011 and ICDAR 2013, respectively.