pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Continuous Speech for Improved Learning Pathological Voice Disorders
Authors: Syu-Siang Wang, Chi-Te Wang, Chih-Chung Lai, Yu Tsao, Shih-Hau Fang
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00

Goal: Numerous studies had successfully differentiated normal and abnormal voice samples. Nevertheless, further classification had rarely been attempted. This study proposes a novel approach, using continuous Mandarin speech instead of a single vowel, to classify four common voice disorders (i.e. functional dysphonia, neoplasm, phonotrauma, and vocal palsy). Methods: In the proposed framework, acoustic signals are transformed into mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and a bi-directional long-short term memory network (BiLSTM) is adopted to model the sequential features. The experiments were conducted on a large-scale database, wherein 1,045 continuous speech were collected by the speech clinic of a hospital from 2012 to 2019. Results: Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed framework yields significant accuracy and unweighted average recall improvements of 78.12-89.27% and 50.92-80.68%, respectively, compared with systems that use a single vowel. Conclusions: The results are consistent with other machine learning algorithms, including gated recurrent units, random forest, deep neural networks, and LSTM. The sensitivities for each disorder were also analyzed, and the model capabilities were visualized via principal component analysis. An alternative experiment based on a balanced dataset again confirms the advantages of using continuous speech for learning voice disorders.
RuCLIP -- new models and experiments: a technical report
Authors: Alex Shonenkov, Andrey Kuznetsov, Denis Dimitrov, Tatyana Shavrina, Daniil Chesakov, Anastasia Maltseva, Alena Fenogenova, Igor Pavlov, Anton Emelyanov, Sergey Markov, Daria Bakshandaeva, Vera Shybaeva, Andrey Chertok
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

In the report we propose six new implementations of ruCLIP model trained on our 240M pairs. The accuracy results are compared with original CLIP model with Ru-En translation (OPUS-MT) on 16 datasets from different domains. Our best implementations outperform CLIP + OPUS-MT solution on most of the datasets in few-show and zero-shot tasks. In the report we briefly describe the implementations and concentrate on the conducted experiments. Inference execution time comparison is also presented in the report.
VU-BERT: A Unified framework for Visual Dialog
Authors: Tong Ye, Shijing Si, Jianzong Wang, Rui Wang, Ning Cheng, Jing Xiao
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Retrieval, Visual Dialog

The visual dialog task attempts to train an agent to answer multi-turn questions given an image, which requires the deep understanding of interactions between the image and dialog history. Existing researches tend to employ the modality-specific modules to model the interactions, which might be troublesome to use. To fill in this gap, we propose a unified framework for image-text joint embedding, named VU-BERT, and apply patch projection to obtain vision embedding firstly in visual dialog tasks to simplify the model. The model is trained over two tasks: masked language modeling and next utterance retrieval. These tasks help in learning visual concepts, utterances dependence, and the relationships between these two modalities. Finally, our VU-BERT achieves competitive performance (0.7287 NDCG scores) on VisDial v1.0 Datasets.
Combating Distribution Shift for Accurate Time Series Forecasting via Hypernetworks
Authors: Wenying Duan, Xiaoxi He, Lu Zhou, Lothar Thiele, HONG RAO
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting has widespread applications in urban life ranging from air quality monitoring to traffic analysis. However, accurate time series forecasting is challenging because real-world time series suffer from the distribution shift problem, where their statistical properties change over time. Despite extensive solutions to distribution shifts in domain adaptation or generalization, they fail to function effectively in unknown, constantly-changing distribution shifts, which are common in time series. In this paper, we propose Hyper Time- Series Forecasting (HTSF), a hypernetwork-based framework for accurate time series forecasting under distribution shift. HTSF jointly learns the time-varying distributions and the corresponding forecasting models in an end-to-end fashion. Specifically, HTSF exploits the hyper layers to learn the best characterization of the distribution shifts, generating the model parameters for the main layers to make accurate predictions. We implement HTSF as an extensible framework that can incorporate diverse time series forecasting models such as RNNs and Transformers. Extensive experiments on 9 benchmarks demonstrate that HTSF achieves state-of-the-art performances.
Speciesist bias in AI -- How AI applications perpetuate discrimination and unfair outcomes against animals
Authors: Thilo Hagendorff, Leonie Bossert, Tse Yip Fai, Peter Singer
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness, Recommendation Systems

Massive efforts are made to reduce biases in both data and algorithms in order to render AI applications fair. These efforts are propelled by various high-profile cases where biased algorithmic decision-making caused harm to women, people of color, minorities, etc. However, the AI fairness field still succumbs to a blind spot, namely its insensitivity to discrimination against animals. This paper is the first to describe the 'speciesist bias' and investigate it in several different AI systems. Speciesist biases are learned and solidified by AI applications when they are trained on datasets in which speciesist patterns prevail. These patterns can be found in image recognition systems, large language models, and recommender systems. Therefore, AI technologies currently play a significant role in perpetuating and normalizing violence against animals. This can only be changed when AI fairness frameworks widen their scope and include mitigation measures for speciesist biases. This paper addresses the AI community in this regard and stresses the influence AI systems can have on either increasing or reducing the violence that is inflicted on animals, and especially on farmed animals.
Choquet-Based Fuzzy Rough Sets
Authors: Adnan Theerens, Oliver Urs Lenz, Chris Cornelis
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Outlier Detection

Fuzzy rough set theory can be used as a tool for dealing with inconsistent data when there is a gradual notion of indiscernibility between objects. It does this by providing lower and upper approximations of concepts. In classical fuzzy rough sets, the lower and upper approximations are determined using the minimum and maximum operators, respectively. This is undesirable for machine learning applications, since it makes these approximations sensitive to outlying samples. To mitigate this problem, ordered weighted average (OWA) based fuzzy rough sets were introduced. In this paper, we show how the OWA-based approach can be interpreted intuitively in terms of vague quantification, and then generalize it to Choquet-based fuzzy rough sets (CFRS). This generalization maintains desirable theoretical properties, such as duality and monotonicity. Furthermore, it provides more flexibility for machine learning applications. In particular, we show that it enables the seamless integration of outlier detection algorithms, to enhance the robustness of machine learning algorithms based on fuzzy rough sets.
Evaluating Persian Tokenizers
Authors: Danial Kamali, Behrooz Janfada, Mohammad Ebrahim Shenasa, Behrouz Minaei-Bidgoli
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Lexical Analysis, Semantic Parsing

Tokenization plays a significant role in the process of lexical analysis. Tokens become the input for other natural language processing tasks, like semantic parsing and language modeling. Natural Language Processing in Persian is challenging due to Persian's exceptional cases, such as half-spaces. Thus, it is crucial to have a precise tokenizer for Persian. This article provides a novel work by introducing the most widely used tokenizers for Persian and comparing and evaluating their performance on Persian texts using a simple algorithm with a pre-tagged Persian dependency dataset. After evaluating tokenizers with the F1-Score, the hybrid version of the Farsi Verb and Hazm with bounded morphemes fixing showed the best performance with an F1 score of 98.97%.
Relational Algebra and Calculus with SQL Null Values
Authors: Enrico Franconi, Sergio Tessaris
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

The logic of nulls in databases has been subject of investigation since their introduction in Codd's Relational Model, which is the foundation of the SQL standard. We show a logical characterisation of a first-order fragment of SQL with null values, by first focussing on a simple extension with null values of standard relational algebra, which captures exactly the SQL fragment, and then proposing two different domain relational calculi, in which the null value is a term of the language but it does not appear as an element of the semantic interpretation domain of the logics. In one calculus, a relation can be seen as a set of partial tuples, while in the other (equivalent) calculus, a relation is horizontally decomposed as a set of relations each one holding regular total tuples. We extend Codd's theorem by proving the equivalence of the relational algebra with both domain relational calculi in presence of SQL null values.
Remaining Useful Life Prediction Using Temporal Deep Degradation Network for Complex Machinery with Attention-based Feature Extraction
Authors: Yuwen Qin, Ningbo Cai, Chen Gao, Yadong Zhang, Yonghong Cheng, Xin Chen
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

The precise estimate of remaining useful life (RUL) is vital for the prognostic analysis and predictive maintenance that can significantly reduce failure rate and maintenance costs. The degradation-related features extracted from the sensor streaming data with neural networks can dramatically improve the accuracy of the RUL prediction. The Temporal deep degradation network (TDDN) model is proposed to make the RUL prediction with the degradation-related features given by the one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D CNN) feature extraction and attention mechanism. 1D CNN is used to extract the temporal features from the streaming sensor data. Temporal features have monotonic degradation trends from the fluctuating raw sensor streaming data. Attention mechanism can improve the RUL prediction performance by capturing the fault characteristics and the degradation development with the attention weights. The performance of the TDDN model is evaluated on the public C-MAPSS dataset and compared with the existing methods. The results show that the TDDN model can achieve the best RUL prediction accuracy in complex conditions compared to current machine learning models. The degradation-related features extracted from the high-dimension sensor streaming data demonstrate the clear degradation trajectories and degradation stages that enable TDDN to predict the turbofan-engine RUL accurately and efficiently.
Transformation Coding: Simple Objectives for Equivariant Representations
Authors: Mehran Shakerinava, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

We present a simple non-generative approach to deep representation learning that seeks equivariant deep embedding through simple objectives. In contrast to existing equivariant networks, our transformation coding approach does not constrain the choice of the feed-forward layer or the architecture and allows for an unknown group action on the input space. We introduce several such transformation coding objectives for different Lie groups such as the Euclidean, Orthogonal and the Unitary groups. When using product groups, the representation is decomposed and disentangled. We show that the presence of additional information on different transformations improves disentanglement in transformation coding. We evaluate the representations learnt by transformation coding both qualitatively and quantitatively on downstream tasks, including reinforcement learning.
Letters of the Alphabet: Discovering Natural Feature Sets
Authors: Ezana N. Beyenne
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00

Deep learning networks find intricate features in large datasets using the backpropagation algorithm. This algorithm repeatedly adjusts the network connections.' weights and examining the "hidden" nodes behavior between the input and output layer provides better insight into how neural networks create feature representations. Experiments built on each other show that activity differences computed within a layer can guide learning. A simple neural network is used, which includes a data set comprised of the alphabet letters, where each letter forms 81 input nodes comprised of 0 and 1s and a single hidden layer and an output layer. The first experiment explains how the hidden layers in this simple neural network represent the input data's features. The second experiment attempts to reverse-engineer the neural network to find the alphabet's natural feature sets. As the network interprets features, we can understand how it derives the natural feature sets for a given data. This understanding is essential to delve deeper into deep generative models, such as Boltzmann machines. Deep generative models are a class of unsupervised deep learning algorithms. The primary function of deep generative models is to find the natural feature sets for a given data set.
EF-Train: Enable Efficient On-device CNN Training on FPGA Through Data Reshaping for Online Adaptation or Personalization
Authors: Yue Tang, Xinyi Zhang, Peipei Zhou, Jingtong Hu
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Conventionally, DNN models are trained once in the cloud and deployed in edge devices such as cars, robots, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for real-time inference. However, there are many cases that require the models to adapt to new environments, domains, or new users. In order to realize such domain adaption or personalization, the models on devices need to be continuously trained on the device. In this work, we design EF-Train, an efficient DNN training accelerator with a unified channel-level parallelism-based convolution kernel that can achieve end-to-end training on resource-limited low-power edge-level FPGAs. It is challenging to implement on-device training on resource-limited FPGAs due to the low efficiency caused by different memory access patterns among forward, backward propagation, and weight update. Therefore, we developed a data reshaping approach with intra-tile continuous memory allocation and weight reuse. An analytical model is established to automatically schedule computation and memory resources to achieve high energy efficiency on edge FPGAs. The experimental results show that our design achieves 46.99 GFLOPS and 6.09GFLOPS/W in terms of throughput and energy efficiency, respectively.
Gradient Based Activations for Accurate Bias-Free Learning
Authors: Vinod K Kurmi, Rishabh Sharma, Yash Vardhan Sharma, Vinay P. Namboodiri
Date: 2022-02-17 00:00:00

Bias mitigation in machine learning models is imperative, yet challenging. While several approaches have been proposed, one view towards mitigating bias is through adversarial learning. A discriminator is used to identify the bias attributes such as gender, age or race in question. This discriminator is used adversarially to ensure that it cannot distinguish the bias attributes. The main drawback in such a model is that it directly introduces a trade-off with accuracy as the features that the discriminator deems to be sensitive for discrimination of bias could be correlated with classification. In this work we solve the problem. We show that a biased discriminator can actually be used to improve this bias-accuracy tradeoff. Specifically, this is achieved by using a feature masking approach using the discriminator's gradients. We ensure that the features favoured for the bias discrimination are de-emphasized and the unbiased features are enhanced during classification. We show that this simple approach works well to reduce bias as well as improve accuracy significantly. We evaluate the proposed model on standard benchmarks. We improve the accuracy of the adversarial methods while maintaining or even improving the unbiasness and also outperform several other recent methods.
Provably convergent quasistatic dynamics for mean-field two-player zero-sum games
Authors: Chao Ma, Lexing Ying
Date: 2022-02-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

In this paper, we study the problem of finding mixed Nash equilibrium for mean-field two-player zero-sum games. Solving this problem requires optimizing over two probability distributions. We consider a quasistatic Wasserstein gradient flow dynamics in which one probability distribution follows the Wasserstein gradient flow, while the other one is always at the equilibrium. Theoretical analysis are conducted on this dynamics, showing its convergence to the mixed Nash equilibrium under mild conditions. Inspired by the continuous dynamics of probability distributions, we derive a quasistatic Langevin gradient descent method with inner-outer iterations, and test the method on different problems, including training mixture of GANs.
The Winning Solution to the iFLYTEK Challenge 2021 Cultivated Land Extraction from High-Resolution Remote Sensing Image
Authors: Zhen Zhao, Yuqiu Liu, Gang Zhang, Liang Tang, Xiaolin Hu
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Extracting cultivated land accurately from high-resolution remote images is a basic task for precision agriculture. This report introduces our solution to the iFLYTEK challenge 2021 cultivated land extraction from high-resolution remote sensing image. The challenge requires segmenting cultivated land objects in very high-resolution multispectral remote sensing images. We established a highly effective and efficient pipeline to solve this problem. We first divided the original images into small tiles and separately performed instance segmentation on each tile. We explored several instance segmentation algorithms that work well on natural images and developed a set of effective methods that are applicable to remote sensing images. Then we merged the prediction results of all small tiles into seamless, continuous segmentation results through our proposed overlap-tile fusion strategy. We achieved the first place among 486 teams in the challenge.
Enabling Reproducibility and Meta-learning Through a Lifelong Database of Experiments (LDE)
Authors: Jason Tsay, Andrea Bartezzaghi, Aleke Nolte, Cristiano Malossi
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI) development is inherently iterative and experimental. Over the course of normal development, especially with the advent of automated AI, hundreds or thousands of experiments are generated and are often lost or never examined again. There is a lost opportunity to document these experiments and learn from them at scale, but the complexity of tracking and reproducing these experiments is often prohibitive to data scientists. We present the Lifelong Database of Experiments (LDE) that automatically extracts and stores linked metadata from experiment artifacts and provides features to reproduce these artifacts and perform meta-learning across them. We store context from multiple stages of the AI development lifecycle including datasets, pipelines, how each is configured, and training runs with information about their runtime environment. The standardized nature of the stored metadata allows for querying and aggregation, especially in terms of ranking artifacts by performance metrics. We exhibit the capabilities of the LDE by reproducing an existing meta-learning study and storing the reproduced metadata in our system. Then, we perform two experiments on this metadata: 1) examining the reproducibility and variability of the performance metrics and 2) implementing a number of meta-learning algorithms on top of the data and examining how variability in experimental results impacts recommendation performance. The experimental results suggest significant variation in performance, especially depending on dataset configurations; this variation carries over when meta-learning is built on top of the results, with performance improving when using aggregated results. This suggests that a system that automatically collects and aggregates results such as the LDE not only assists in implementing meta-learning but may also improve its performance.
Temporal Subtyping of Alzheimer's Disease Using Medical Conditions Preceding Alzheimer's Disease Onset in Electronic Health Records
Authors: Zhe He, Shubo Tian, Arslan Erdengasileng, Neil Charness, Jiang Bian
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Management, Prognosis

Subtyping of Alzheimer's disease (AD) can facilitate diagnosis, treatment, prognosis and disease management. It can also support the testing of new prevention and treatment strategies through clinical trials. In this study, we employed spectral clustering to cluster 29,922 AD patients in the OneFlorida Data Trust using their longitudinal EHR data of diagnosis and conditions into four subtypes. These subtypes exhibit different patterns of progression of other conditions prior to the first AD diagnosis. In addition, according to the results of various statistical tests, these subtypes are also significantly different with respect to demographics, mortality, and prescription medications after the AD diagnosis. This study could potentially facilitate early detection and personalized treatment of AD as well as data-driven generalizability assessment of clinical trials for AD.
Learning Dynamics and Structure of Complex Systems Using Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zhe Li, Andreas S. Tolias, Xaq Pitkow
Date: 2022-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Many complex systems are composed of interacting parts, and the underlying laws are usually simple and universal. While graph neural networks provide a useful relational inductive bias for modeling such systems, generalization to new system instances of the same type is less studied. In this work we trained graph neural networks to fit time series from an example nonlinear dynamical system, the belief propagation algorithm. We found simple interpretations of the learned representation and model components, and they are consistent with core properties of the probabilistic inference algorithm. We successfully identified a 'graph translator' between the statistical interactions in belief propagation and parameters of the corresponding trained network, and showed that it enables two types of novel generalization: to recover the underlying structure of a new system instance based solely on time series observations, or to construct a new network from this structure directly. Our results demonstrated a path towards understanding both dynamics and structure of a complex system and how such understanding can be used for generalization.