pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Question Format Independent Numerical Reasoning: A Set of Prerequisite Tasks
Authors: Swaroop Mishra, Arindam Mitra, Neeraj Varshney, Bhavdeep Sachdeva, Chitta Baral
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Numerical reasoning is often important to accurately understand the world. Recently, several format-specific datasets have been proposed, such as numerical reasoning in the settings of Natural Language Inference (NLI), Reading Comprehension (RC), and Question Answering (QA). Several format-specific models and architectures in response to those datasets have also been proposed. However, there exists a strong need for a benchmark which can evaluate the abilities of models, in performing question format independent numerical reasoning, as (i) the numerical reasoning capabilities we want to teach are not controlled by question formats, (ii) for numerical reasoning technology to have the best possible application, it must be able to process language and reason in a way that is not exclusive to a single format, task, dataset or domain. In pursuit of this goal, we introduce NUMBERGAME, a multifaceted benchmark to evaluate model performance across numerical reasoning tasks of eight diverse formats. We add four existing question types in our compilation. Two of the new types we add are about questions that require external numerical knowledge, commonsense knowledge and domain knowledge. For building a more practical numerical reasoning system, NUMBERGAME demands four capabilities beyond numerical reasoning: (i) detecting question format directly from data (ii) finding intermediate common format to which every format can be converted (iii) incorporating commonsense knowledge (iv) handling data imbalance across formats. We build several baselines, including a new model based on knowledge hunting using a cheatsheet. However, all baselines perform poorly in contrast to the human baselines, indicating the hardness of our benchmark. Our work takes forward the recent progress in generic system development, demonstrating the scope of these under-explored tasks.
Spatio-Temporal Graph Transformer Networks for Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Cunjun Yu, Xiao Ma, Jiawei Ren, Haiyu Zhao, Shuai Yi
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Understanding crowd motion dynamics is critical to real-world applications, e.g., surveillance systems and autonomous driving. This is challenging because it requires effectively modeling the socially aware crowd spatial interaction and complex temporal dependencies. We believe attention is the most important factor for trajectory prediction. In this paper, we present STAR, a Spatio-Temporal grAph tRansformer framework, which tackles trajectory prediction by only attention mechanisms. STAR models intra-graph crowd interaction by TGConv, a novel Transformer-based graph convolution mechanism. The inter-graph temporal dependencies are modeled by separate temporal Transformers. STAR captures complex spatio-temporal interactions by interleaving between spatial and temporal Transformers. To calibrate the temporal prediction for the long-lasting effect of disappeared pedestrians, we introduce a read-writable external memory module, consistently being updated by the temporal Transformer. We show that with only attention mechanism, STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 commonly used real-world pedestrian prediction datasets.
Improving Learning Efficiency for Wireless Resource Allocation with Symmetric Prior
Authors: Chengjian Sun, Jiajun Wu, Chenyang Yang
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00

Improving learning efficiency is paramount for learning resource allocation with deep neural networks (DNNs) in wireless communications over highly dynamic environments. Incorporating domain knowledge into learning is a promising way of dealing with this issue, which is an emerging topic in the wireless community. In this article, we first briefly summarize two classes of approaches to using domain knowledge: introducing mathematical models or prior knowledge to deep learning. Then, we consider a kind of symmetric prior, permutation equivariance, which widely exists in wireless tasks. To explain how such a generic prior is harnessed to improve learning efficiency, we resort to ranking, which jointly sorts the input and output of a DNN. We use power allocation among subcarriers, probabilistic content caching, and interference coordination to illustrate the improvement of learning efficiency by exploiting the property. From the case study, we find that the required training samples to achieve given system performance decreases with the number of subcarriers or contents, owing to an interesting phenomenon: "sample hardening". Simulation results show that the training samples, the free parameters in DNNs and the training time can be reduced dramatically by harnessing the prior knowledge. The samples required to train a DNN after ranking can be reduced by $15 \sim 2,400$ folds to achieve the same system performance as the counterpart without using prior.
COVI White Paper
Authors: Hannah Alsdurf, Edmond Belliveau, Yoshua Bengio, Tristan Deleu, Prateek Gupta, Daphne Ippolito, Richard Janda, Max Jarvie, Tyler Kolody, Sekoul Krastev, Tegan Maharaj, Robert Obryk, Dan Pilat, Valerie Pisano, Benjamin Prud'homme, Meng Qu, Nasim Rahaman, Irina Rish, Jean-Francois Rousseau, Abhinav Sharma, Brooke Struck, Jian Tang, Martin Weiss, Yun William Yu
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has caused significant strain on public health institutions around the world. Contact tracing is an essential tool to change the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Manual contact tracing of Covid-19 cases has significant challenges that limit the ability of public health authorities to minimize community infections. Personalized peer-to-peer contact tracing through the use of mobile apps has the potential to shift the paradigm. Some countries have deployed centralized tracking systems, but more privacy-protecting decentralized systems offer much of the same benefit without concentrating data in the hands of a state authority or for-profit corporations. Machine learning methods can circumvent some of the limitations of standard digital tracing by incorporating many clues and their uncertainty into a more graded and precise estimation of infection risk. The estimated risk can provide early risk awareness, personalized recommendations and relevant information to the user. Finally, non-identifying risk data can inform epidemiological models trained jointly with the machine learning predictor. These models can provide statistical evidence for the importance of factors involved in disease transmission. They can also be used to monitor, evaluate and optimize health policy and (de)confinement scenarios according to medical and economic productivity indicators. However, such a strategy based on mobile apps and machine learning should proactively mitigate potential ethical and privacy risks, which could have substantial impacts on society (not only impacts on health but also impacts such as stigmatization and abuse of personal data). Here, we present an overview of the rationale, design, ethical considerations and privacy strategy of `COVI,' a Covid-19 public peer-to-peer contact tracing and risk awareness mobile application developed in Canada.
VecQ: Minimal Loss DNN Model Compression With Vectorized Weight Quantization
Authors: Cheng Gong, Yao Chen, Ye Lu, Tao Li, Cong Hao, Deming Chen
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization

Quantization has been proven to be an effective method for reducing the computing and/or storage cost of DNNs. However, the trade-off between the quantization bitwidth and final accuracy is complex and non-convex, which makes it difficult to be optimized directly. Minimizing direct quantization loss (DQL) of the coefficient data is an effective local optimization method, but previous works often neglect the accurate control of the DQL, resulting in a higher loss of the final DNN model accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel metric called Vector Loss. Based on this new metric, we develop a new quantization solution called VecQ, which can guarantee minimal direct quantization loss and better model accuracy. In addition, in order to speed up the proposed quantization process during model training, we accelerate the quantization process with a parameterized probability estimation method and template-based derivation calculation. We evaluate our proposed algorithm on MNIST, CIFAR, ImageNet, IMDB movie review and THUCNews text data sets with numerical DNN models. The results demonstrate that our proposed quantization solution is more accurate and effective than the state-of-the-art approaches yet with more flexible bitwidth support. Moreover, the evaluation of our quantized models on Saliency Object Detection (SOD) tasks maintains comparable feature extraction quality with up to 16$\times$ weight size reduction.
Attention-based Transducer for Online Speech Recognition
Authors: Bin Wang, Yan Yin, Hui Lin
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Decoder, Quantization, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recent studies reveal the potential of recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) for end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition. Among some most popular E2E systems including RNN-T, Attention Encoder-Decoder (AED), and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC), RNN-T has some clear advantages given that it supports streaming recognition and does not have frame-independency assumption. Although significant progresses have been made for RNN-T research, it is still facing performance challenges in terms of training speed and accuracy. We propose attention-based transducer with modification over RNN-T in two aspects. First, we introduce chunk-wise attention in the joint network. Second, self-attention is introduced in the encoder. Our proposed model outperforms RNN-T for both training speed and accuracy. For training, we achieves over 1.7x speedup. With 500 hours LAIX non-native English training data, attention-based transducer yields ~10.6% WER reduction over baseline RNN-T. Trained with full set of over 10K hours data, our final system achieves ~5.5% WER reduction over that trained with the best Kaldi TDNN-f recipe. After 8-bit weight quantization without WER degradation, RTF and latency drop to 0.34~0.36 and 268~409 milliseconds respectively on a single CPU core of a production server.
Graphs, Entities, and Step Mixture
Authors: Kyuyong Shin, Wonyoung Shin, Jung-Woo Ha, Sunyoung Kwon
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Inductive Learning

Existing approaches for graph neural networks commonly suffer from the oversmoothing issue, regardless of how neighborhoods are aggregated. Most methods also focus on transductive scenarios for fixed graphs, leading to poor generalization for unseen graphs. To address these issues, we propose a new graph neural network that considers both edge-based neighborhood relationships and node-based entity features, i.e. Graph Entities with Step Mixture via random walk (GESM). GESM employs a mixture of various steps through random walk to alleviate the oversmoothing problem, attention to dynamically reflect interrelations depending on node information, and structure-based regularization to enhance embedding representation. With intensive experiments, we show that the proposed GESM achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performances on eight benchmark graph datasets comprising transductive and inductive learning tasks. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate the significance of considering global information.
Variational Hyper-Encoding Networks
Authors: Phuoc Nguyen, Truyen Tran, Sunil Gupta, Santu Rana, Hieu-Chi Dam, Svetha Venkatesh
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Density Estimation, Outlier Detection, Variational Inference

We propose a framework called HyperVAE for encoding distributions of distributions. When a target distribution is modeled by a VAE, its neural network parameters \theta is drawn from a distribution p(\theta) which is modeled by a hyper-level VAE. We propose a variational inference using Gaussian mixture models to implicitly encode the parameters \theta into a low dimensional Gaussian distribution. Given a target distribution, we predict the posterior distribution of the latent code, then use a matrix-network decoder to generate a posterior distribution q(\theta). HyperVAE can encode the parameters \theta in full in contrast to common hyper-networks practices, which generate only the scale and bias vectors as target-network parameters. Thus HyperVAE preserves much more information about the model for each task in the latent space. We discuss HyperVAE using the minimum description length (MDL) principle and show that it helps HyperVAE to generalize. We evaluate HyperVAE in density estimation tasks, outlier detection and discovery of novel design classes, demonstrating its efficacy.
Non-Clicks Mean Irrelevant? Propensity Ratio Scoring As a Correction
Authors: Nan Wang, Zhen Qin, Xuanhui Wang, Hongning Wang
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank

Recent advances in unbiased learning to rank (LTR) count on Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) to eliminate bias in implicit feedback. Though theoretically sound in correcting the bias introduced by treating clicked documents as relevant, IPS ignores the bias caused by (implicitly) treating non-clicked ones as irrelevant. In this work, we first rigorously prove that such use of click data leads to unnecessary pairwise comparisons between relevant documents, which prevent unbiased ranker optimization. Based on the proof, we derive a simple yet well justified new weighting scheme, called Propensity Ratio Scoring (PRS), which provides treatments on both clicks and non-clicks. Besides correcting the bias in clicks, PRS avoids relevant-relevant document comparisons in LTR training and enjoys a lower variability. Our extensive empirical evaluations confirm that PRS ensures a more effective use of click data and improved performance in both synthetic data from a set of LTR benchmarks, as well as in the real-world large-scale data from GMail search.
Large-Scale Secure XGB for Vertical Federated Learning
Authors: Wenjing Fang, Derun Zhao, Jin Tan, Chaochao Chen, Chaofan Yu, Li Wang, Lei Wang, Jun Zhou, Benyu Zhang
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Vertical Federated Learning

Privacy-preserving machine learning has drawn increasingly attention recently, especially with kinds of privacy regulations come into force. Under such situation, Federated Learning (FL) appears to facilitate privacy-preserving joint modeling among multiple parties. Although many federated algorithms have been extensively studied, there is still a lack of secure and practical gradient tree boosting models (e.g., XGB) in literature. In this paper, we aim to build large-scale secure XGB under vertically federated learning setting. We guarantee data privacy from three aspects. Specifically, (i) we employ secure multi-party computation techniques to avoid leaking intermediate information during training, (ii) we store the output model in a distributed manner in order to minimize information release, and (iii) we provide a novel algorithm for secure XGB predict with the distributed model. Furthermore, by proposing secure permutation protocols, we can improve the training efficiency and make the framework scale to large dataset. We conduct extensive experiments on both public datasets and real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed XGB models provide not only competitive accuracy but also practical performance.
Text Classification with Few Examples using Controlled Generalization
Authors: Abhijit Mahabal, Jason Baldridge, Burcu Karagol Ayan, Vincent Perot, Dan Roth
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2019 6
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, Word Embeddings

Training data for text classification is often limited in practice, especially for applications with many output classes or involving many related classification problems. This means classifiers must generalize from limited evidence, but the manner and extent of generalization is task dependent. Current practice primarily relies on pre-trained word embeddings to map words unseen in training to similar seen ones. Unfortunately, this squishes many components of meaning into highly restricted capacity. Our alternative begins with sparse pre-trained representations derived from unlabeled parsed corpora; based on the available training data, we select features that offers the relevant generalizations. This produces task-specific semantic vectors; here, we show that a feed-forward network over these vectors is especially effective in low-data scenarios, compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. By further pairing this network with a convolutional neural network, we keep this edge in low data scenarios and remain competitive when using full training sets.
Deep Latent-Variable Kernel Learning
Authors: Haitao Liu, Yew-Soon Ong, Xiaomo Jiang, Xiaofang Wang
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00

Deep kernel learning (DKL) leverages the connection between Gaussian process (GP) and neural networks (NN) to build an end-to-end, hybrid model. It combines the capability of NN to learn rich representations under massive data and the non-parametric property of GP to achieve automatic regularization that incorporates a trade-off between model fit and model complexity. However, the deterministic encoder may weaken the model regularization of the following GP part, especially on small datasets, due to the free latent representation. We therefore present a complete deep latent-variable kernel learning (DLVKL) model wherein the latent variables perform stochastic encoding for regularized representation. We further enhance the DLVKL from two aspects: (i) the expressive variational posterior through neural stochastic differential equation (NSDE) to improve the approximation quality, and (ii) the hybrid prior taking knowledge from both the SDE prior and the posterior to arrive at a flexible trade-off. Intensive experiments imply that the DLVKL-NSDE performs similarly to the well calibrated GP on small datasets, and outperforms existing deep GPs on large datasets.
Context-aware and Scale-insensitive Temporal Repetition Counting
Authors: Huaidong Zhang, Xuemiao Xu, Guoqiang Han, Shengfeng He
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: regression

Temporal repetition counting aims to estimate the number of cycles of a given repetitive action. Existing deep learning methods assume repetitive actions are performed in a fixed time-scale, which is invalid for the complex repetitive actions in real life. In this paper, we tailor a context-aware and scale-insensitive framework, to tackle the challenges in repetition counting caused by the unknown and diverse cycle-lengths. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) Cycle lengths from different actions are unpredictable that require large-scale searching, but, once a coarse cycle length is determined, the variety between repetitions can be overcome by regression. (2) Determining the cycle length cannot only rely on a short fragment of video but a contextual understanding. The first point is implemented by a coarse-to-fine cycle refinement method. It avoids the heavy computation of exhaustively searching all the cycle lengths in the video, and, instead, it propagates the coarse prediction for further refinement in a hierarchical manner. We secondly propose a bidirectional cycle length estimation method for a context-aware prediction. It is a regression network that takes two consecutive coarse cycles as input, and predicts the locations of the previous and next repetitive cycles. To benefit the training and evaluation of temporal repetition counting area, we construct a new and largest benchmark, which contains 526 videos with diverse repetitive actions. Extensive experiments show that the proposed network trained on a single dataset outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks, indicating that the proposed framework is general enough to capture repetition patterns across domains.
Feature Transformation Ensemble Model with Batch Spectral Regularization for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Bingyu Liu, Zhen Zhao, Zhenpeng Li, Jianan Jiang, Yuhong Guo, Jieping Ye
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, cross-domain few-shot learning, Data Augmentation, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we propose a feature transformation ensemble model with batch spectral regularization for the Cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) challenge. Specifically, we proposes to construct an ensemble prediction model by performing diverse feature transformations after a feature extraction network. On each branch prediction network of the model we use a batch spectral regularization term to suppress the singular values of the feature matrix during pre-training to improve the generalization ability of the model. The proposed model can then be fine tuned in the target domain to address few-shot classification. We also further apply label propagation, entropy minimization and data augmentation to mitigate the shortage of labeled data in target domains. Experiments are conducted on a number of CD-FSL benchmark tasks with four target domains and the results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.
Bayesian convolutional neural network based MRI brain extraction on nonhuman primates
Authors: Gengyan Zhao, Fang Liu, Jonathan A. Oler, Mary E. Meyerand, Ned H. Kalin, Rasmus M. Birn
Date: 2020-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Segmentation, Skull Stripping

Brain extraction or skull stripping of magnetic resonance images (MRI) is an essential step in neuroimaging studies, the accuracy of which can severely affect subsequent image processing procedures. Current automatic brain extraction methods demonstrate good results on human brains, but are often far from satisfactory on nonhuman primates, which are a necessary part of neuroscience research. To overcome the challenges of brain extraction in nonhuman primates, we propose a fully-automated brain extraction pipeline combining deep Bayesian convolutional neural network (CNN) and fully connected three-dimensional (3D) conditional random field (CRF). The deep Bayesian CNN, Bayesian SegNet, is used as the core segmentation engine. As a probabilistic network, it is not only able to perform accurate high-resolution pixel-wise brain segmentation, but also capable of measuring the model uncertainty by Monte Carlo sampling with dropout in the testing stage. Then, fully connected 3D CRF is used to refine the probability result from Bayesian SegNet in the whole 3D context of the brain volume. The proposed method was evaluated with a manually brain-extracted dataset comprising T1w images of 100 nonhuman primates. Our method outperforms six popular publicly available brain extraction packages and three well-established deep learning based methods with a mean Dice coefficient of 0.985 and a mean average symmetric surface distance of 0.220 mm. A better performance against all the compared methods was verified by statistical tests (all p-values<10-4, two-sided, Bonferroni corrected). The maximum uncertainty of the model on nonhuman primate brain extraction has a mean value of 0.116 across all the 100 subjects...