pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reinforcement Learning based Air Combat Maneuver Generation
Authors: Muhammed Murat Ozbek, Emre Koyuncu
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The advent of artificial intelligence technology paved the way of many researches to be made within air combat sector. Academicians and many other researchers did a research on a prominent research direction called autonomous maneuver decision of UAV. Elaborative researches produced some outcomes, but decisions that include Reinforcement Learning(RL) came out to be more efficient. There have been many researches and experiments done to make an agent reach its target in an optimal way, most prominent are Genetic Algorithm(GA) , A star, RRT and other various optimization techniques have been used. But Reinforcement Learning is the well known one for its success. In DARPHA Alpha Dogfight Trials, reinforcement learning prevailed against a real veteran F16 human pilot who was trained by Boeing. This successor model was developed by Heron Systems. After this accomplishment, reinforcement learning bring tremendous attention on itself. In this research we aimed our UAV which has a dubin vehicle dynamic property to move to the target in two dimensional space in an optimal path using Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (TD3) and used in experience replay Hindsight Experience Replay(HER).We did tests on two different environments and used simulations.
Emergence of Machine Language: Towards Symbolic Intelligence with Neural Networks
Authors: Yuqi Wang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00

Representation is a core issue in artificial intelligence. Humans use discrete language to communicate and learn from each other, while machines use continuous features (like vector, matrix, or tensor in deep neural networks) to represent cognitive patterns. Discrete symbols are low-dimensional, decoupled, and have strong reasoning ability, while continuous features are high-dimensional, coupled, and have incredible abstracting capabilities. In recent years, deep learning has developed the idea of continuous representation to the extreme, using millions of parameters to achieve high accuracies. Although this is reasonable from the statistical perspective, it has other major problems like lacking interpretability, poor generalization, and is easy to be attacked. Since both paradigms have strengths and weaknesses, a better choice is to seek reconciliation. In this paper, we make an initial attempt towards this direction. Specifically, we propose to combine symbolism and connectionism principles by using neural networks to derive a discrete representation. This process is highly similar to human language, which is a natural combination of discrete symbols and neural systems, where the brain processes continuous signals and represents intelligence via discrete language. To mimic this functionality, we denote our approach as machine language. By designing an interactive environment and task, we demonstrated that machines could generate a spontaneous, flexible, and semantic language through cooperation. Moreover, through experiments we show that discrete language representation has several advantages compared with continuous feature representation, from the aspects of interpretability, generalization, and robustness.
Bayesian sense of time in biological and artificial brains
Authors: Zafeirios Fountas, Alexey Zakharov
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Enquiries concerning the underlying mechanisms and the emergent properties of a biological brain have a long history of theoretical postulates and experimental findings. Today, the scientific community tends to converge to a single interpretation of the brain's cognitive underpinnings -- that it is a Bayesian inference machine. This contemporary view has naturally been a strong driving force in recent developments around computational and cognitive neurosciences. Of particular interest is the brain's ability to process the passage of time -- one of the fundamental dimensions of our experience. How can we explain empirical data on human time perception using the Bayesian brain hypothesis? Can we replicate human estimation biases using Bayesian models? What insights can the agent-based machine learning models provide for the study of this subject? In this chapter, we review some of the recent advancements in the field of time perception and discuss the role of Bayesian processing in the construction of temporal models.
Progressively Optimized Bi-Granular Document Representation for Scalable Embedding Based Retrieval
Authors: Shitao Xiao, Zheng Liu, Weihao Han, Jianjin Zhang, Yingxia Shao, Defu Lian, Chaozhuo Li, Hao Sun, Denvy Deng, Liangjie Zhang, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Retrieval

Ad-hoc search calls for the selection of appropriate answers from a massive-scale corpus. Nowadays, the embedding-based retrieval (EBR) becomes a promising solution, where deep learning based document representation and ANN search techniques are allied to handle this task. However, a major challenge is that the ANN index can be too large to fit into memory, given the considerable size of answer corpus. In this work, we tackle this problem with Bi-Granular Document Representation, where the lightweight sparse embeddings are indexed and standby in memory for coarse-grained candidate search, and the heavyweight dense embeddings are hosted in disk for fine-grained post verification. For the best of retrieval accuracy, a Progressive Optimization framework is designed. The sparse embeddings are learned ahead for high-quality search of candidates. Conditioned on the candidate distribution induced by the sparse embeddings, the dense embeddings are continuously learned to optimize the discrimination of ground-truth from the shortlisted candidates. Besides, two techniques: the contrastive quantization and the locality-centric sampling are introduced for the learning of sparse and dense embeddings, which substantially contribute to their performances. Thanks to the above features, our method effectively handles massive-scale EBR with strong advantages in accuracy: with up to +4.3% recall gain on million-scale corpus, and up to +17.5% recall gain on billion-scale corpus. Besides, Our method is applied to a major sponsored search platform with substantial gains on revenue (+1.95%), Recall (+1.01%) and CTR (+0.49%). Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/BiDR.
Synthesising Electronic Health Records: Cystic Fibrosis Patient Group
Authors: Emily Muller, Xu Zheng, Jer Hayes
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00

Class imbalance can often degrade predictive performance of supervised learning algorithms. Balanced classes can be obtained by oversampling exact copies, with noise, or interpolation between nearest neighbours (as in traditional SMOTE methods). Oversampling tabular data using augmentation, as is typical in computer vision tasks, can be achieved with deep generative models. Deep generative models are effective data synthesisers due to their ability to capture complex underlying distributions. Synthetic data in healthcare can enhance interoperability between healthcare providers by ensuring patient privacy. Equipped with large synthetic datasets which do well to represent small patient groups, machine learning in healthcare can address the current challenges of bias and generalisability. This paper evaluates synthetic data generators ability to synthesise patient electronic health records. We test the utility of synthetic data for patient outcome classification, observing increased predictive performance when augmenting imbalanced datasets with synthetic data.
Reinforcement Learning to Solve NP-hard Problems: an Application to the CVRP
Authors: Leo Ardon
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

In this paper, we evaluate the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to solve a classic combinatorial optimization problem: the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). We formalize this problem in the RL framework and compare two of the most promising RL approaches with traditional solving techniques on a set of benchmark instances. We measure the different approaches with the quality of the solution returned and the time required to return it. We found that despite not returning the best solution, the RL approach has many advantages over traditional solvers. First, the versatility of the framework allows the resolution of more complex combinatorial problems. Moreover, instead of trying to solve a specific instance of the problem, the RL algorithm learns the skills required to solve the problem. The trained policy can then quasi instantly provide a solution to an unseen problem without having to solve it from scratch. Finally, the use of trained models makes the RL solver by far the fastest, and therefore make this approach more suited for commercial use where the user experience is paramount. Techniques like Knowledge Transfer can also be used to improve the training efficiency of the algorithm and help solve bigger and more complex problems.
Artificial Intelligence in Software Testing : Impact, Problems, Challenges and Prospect
Authors: Zubair Khaliq, Sheikh Umar Farooq, Dawood Ashraf Khan
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, software testing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making a significant impact in multiple areas like medical, military, industrial, domestic, law, arts as AI is capable to perform several roles such as managing smart factories, driving autonomous vehicles, creating accurate weather forecasts, detecting cancer and personal assistants, etc. Software testing is the process of putting the software to test for some abnormal behaviour of the software. Software testing is a tedious, laborious and most time-consuming process. Automation tools have been developed that help to automate some activities of the testing process to enhance quality and timely delivery. Over time with the inclusion of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, automation tools are becoming less effective. The testing community is turning to AI to fill the gap as AI is able to check the code for bugs and errors without any human intervention and in a much faster way than humans. In this study, we aim to recognize the impact of AI technologies on various software testing activities or facets in the STLC. Further, the study aims to recognize and explain some of the biggest challenges software testers face while applying AI to testing. The paper also proposes some key contributions of AI in the future to the domain of software testing.
Polarity and Subjectivity Detection with Multitask Learning and BERT Embedding
Authors: Ranjan Satapathy, Shweta Pardeshi, Erik Cambria
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00

Multitask learning often helps improve the performance of related tasks as these often have inter-dependence on each other and perform better when solved in a joint framework. In this paper, we present a deep multitask learning framework that jointly performs polarity and subjective detection. We propose an attention-based multitask model for predicting polarity and subjectivity. The input sentences are transformed into vectors using pre-trained BERT and Glove embeddings, and the results depict that BERT embedding based model works better than the Glove based model. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art models in both subjective and polarity classification single-task and multitask frameworks. The proposed approach reports baseline performances for both polarity detection and subjectivity detection.
CommonsenseQA 2.0: Exposing the Limits of AI through Gamification
Authors: Alon Talmor, Ori Yoran, Ronan Le Bras, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yoav Goldberg, Yejin Choi, Jonathan Berant
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Natural Language Understanding

Constructing benchmarks that test the abilities of modern natural language understanding models is difficult - pre-trained language models exploit artifacts in benchmarks to achieve human parity, but still fail on adversarial examples and make errors that demonstrate a lack of common sense. In this work, we propose gamification as a framework for data construction. The goal of players in the game is to compose questions that mislead a rival AI while using specific phrases for extra points. The game environment leads to enhanced user engagement and simultaneously gives the game designer control over the collected data, allowing us to collect high-quality data at scale. Using our method we create CommonsenseQA 2.0, which includes 14,343 yes/no questions, and demonstrate its difficulty for models that are orders-of-magnitude larger than the AI used in the game itself. Our best baseline, the T5-based Unicorn with 11B parameters achieves an accuracy of 70.2%, substantially higher than GPT-3 (52.9%) in a few-shot inference setup. Both score well below human performance which is at 94.1%.
Applying a Generic Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Simple and Effective Keyphrase Generation
Authors: Md Faisal Mahbub Chowdhury, Gaetano Rossiello, Michael Glass, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Alfio Gliozzo
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyphrase Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In recent years, a number of keyphrase generation (KPG) approaches were proposed consisting of complex model architectures, dedicated training paradigms and decoding strategies. In this work, we opt for simplicity and show how a commonly used seq2seq language model, BART, can be easily adapted to generate keyphrases from the text in a single batch computation using a simple training procedure. Empirical results on five benchmarks show that our approach is as good as the existing state-of-the-art KPG systems, but using a much simpler and easy to deploy framework.
Multi-Narrative Semantic Overlap Task: Evaluation and Benchmark
Authors: Naman Bansal, Mousumi Akter, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Text Summarization

In this paper, we introduce an important yet relatively unexplored NLP task called Multi-Narrative Semantic Overlap (MNSO), which entails generating a Semantic Overlap of multiple alternate narratives. As no benchmark dataset is readily available for this task, we created one by crawling 2,925 narrative pairs from the web and then, went through the tedious process of manually creating 411 different ground-truth semantic overlaps by engaging human annotators. As a way to evaluate this novel task, we first conducted a systematic study by borrowing the popular ROUGE metric from text-summarization literature and discovered that ROUGE is not suitable for our task. Subsequently, we conducted further human annotations/validations to create 200 document-level and 1,518 sentence-level ground-truth labels which helped us formulate a new precision-recall style evaluation metric, called SEM-F1 (semantic F1). Experimental results show that the proposed SEM-F1 metric yields higher correlation with human judgement as well as higher inter-rater-agreement compared to ROUGE metric.
The Fairness Field Guide: Perspectives from Social and Formal Sciences
Authors: Alycia N. Carey, Xintao Wu
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, Philosophy, Sociology

Over the past several years, a slew of different methods to measure the fairness of a machine learning model have been proposed. However, despite the growing number of publications and implementations, there is still a critical lack of literature that explains the interplay of fair machine learning with the social sciences of philosophy, sociology, and law. We hope to remedy this issue by accumulating and expounding upon the thoughts and discussions of fair machine learning produced by both social and formal (specifically machine learning and statistics) sciences in this field guide. Specifically, in addition to giving the mathematical and algorithmic backgrounds of several popular statistical and causal-based fair machine learning methods, we explain the underlying philosophical and legal thoughts that support them. Further, we explore several criticisms of the current approaches to fair machine learning from sociological and philosophical viewpoints. It is our hope that this field guide will help fair machine learning practitioners better understand how their algorithms align with important humanistic values (such as fairness) and how we can, as a field, design methods and metrics to better serve oppressed and marginalized populaces.
Structured access: an emerging paradigm for safe AI deployment
Authors: Toby Shevlane
Date: 2022-01-13 00:00:00

Structured access is an emerging paradigm for the safe deployment of artificial intelligence (AI). Instead of openly disseminating AI systems, developers facilitate controlled, arm's length interactions with their AI systems. The aim is to prevent dangerous AI capabilities from being widely accessible, whilst preserving access to AI capabilities that can be used safely. The developer must both restrict how the AI system can be used, and prevent the user from circumventing these restrictions through modification or reverse engineering of the AI system. Structured access is most effective when implemented through cloud-based AI services, rather than disseminating AI software that runs locally on users' hardware. Cloud-based interfaces provide the AI developer greater scope for controlling how the AI system is used, and for protecting against unauthorized modifications to the system's design. This chapter expands the discussion of "publication norms" in the AI community, which to date has focused on the question of how the informational content of AI research projects should be disseminated (e.g., code and models). Although this is an important question, there are limits to what can be achieved through the control of information flows. Structured access views AI software not only as information that can be shared but also as a tool with which users can have arm's length interactions. There are early examples of structured access being practiced by AI developers, but there is much room for further development, both in the functionality of cloud-based interfaces and in the wider institutional framework.
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Online Recommender Systems and User Modeling -- ORSUM 2021
Authors: João Vinagre, Alípio Mário Jorge, Marie Al-Ghossein, Albert Bifet
Date: 2022-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Modern online services continuously generate data at very fast rates. This continuous flow of data encompasses content - e.g., posts, news, products, comments -, but also user feedback - e.g., ratings, views, reads, clicks -, together with context data - user device, spatial or temporal data, user task or activity, weather. This can be overwhelming for systems and algorithms designed to train in batches, given the continuous and potentially fast change of content, context and user preferences or intents. Therefore, it is important to investigate online methods able to transparently adapt to the inherent dynamics of online services. Incremental models that learn from data streams are gaining attention in the recommender systems community, given their natural ability to deal with the continuous flows of data generated in dynamic, complex environments. User modeling and personalization can particularly benefit from algorithms capable of maintaining models incrementally and online. The objective of this workshop is to foster contributions and bring together a growing community of researchers and practitioners interested in online, adaptive approaches to user modeling, recommendation and personalization, and their implications regarding multiple dimensions, such as evaluation, reproducibility, privacy and explainability.
When less is more: Simplifying inputs aids neural network understanding
Authors: Robin Tibor Schirrmeister, Rosanne Liu, Sara Hooker, Tonio Ball
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Condensation

How do neural network image classifiers respond to simpler and simpler inputs? And what do such responses reveal about the learning process? To answer these questions, we need a clear measure of input simplicity (or inversely, complexity), an optimization objective that correlates with simplification, and a framework to incorporate such objective into training and inference. Lastly we need a variety of testbeds to experiment and evaluate the impact of such simplification on learning. In this work, we measure simplicity with the encoding bit size given by a pretrained generative model, and minimize the bit size to simplify inputs in training and inference. We investigate the effect of such simplification in several scenarios: conventional training, dataset condensation and post-hoc explanations. In all settings, inputs are simplified along with the original classification task, and we investigate the trade-off between input simplicity and task performance. For images with injected distractors, such simplification naturally removes superfluous information. For dataset condensation, we find that inputs can be simplified with almost no accuracy degradation. When used in post-hoc explanation, our learning-based simplification approach offers a valuable new tool to explore the basis of network decisions.
Domain Adaptation in LiDAR Semantic Segmentation via Alternating Skip Connections and Hybrid Learning
Authors: Eduardo R. Corral-Soto, Mrigank Rochan, Yannis Y. He, Shubhra Aich, Yang Liu, Liu Bingbing
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image-to-Image Translation, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Translation

In this paper we address the challenging problem of domain adaptation in LiDAR semantic segmentation. We consider the setting where we have a fully-labeled data set from source domain and a target domain with a few labeled and many unlabeled examples. We propose a domain adaption framework that mitigates the issue of domain shift and produces appealing performance on the target domain. To this end, we develop a GAN-based image-to-image translation engine that has generators with alternating connections, and couple it with a state-of-the-art LiDAR semantic segmentation network. Our framework is hybrid in nature in the sense that our model learning is composed of self-supervision, semi-supervision and unsupervised learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark LiDAR semantic segmentation data sets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in comparison to strong baselines and prior arts.
Multimodal registration of FISH and nanoSIMS images using convolutional neural network models
Authors: Xiaojia He, Christof Meile, Suchendra M. Bhandarkar
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization

Nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry (nanoSIMS) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) microscopy provide high-resolution, multimodal image representations of the identity and cell activity respectively of targeted microbial communities in microbiological research. Despite its importance to microbiologists, multimodal registration of FISH and nanoSIMS images is challenging given the morphological distortion and background noise in both images. In this study, we use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for multiscale feature extraction, shape context for computation of the minimum transformation cost feature matching and the thin-plate spline (TPS) model for multimodal registration of the FISH and nanoSIMS images. Registration accuracy was quantitatively assessed against manually registered images, at both, the pixel and structural levels using standard metrics. Although all six tested CNN models performed well, ResNet18 was observed to outperform VGG16, VGG19, GoogLeNet and ShuffleNet and ResNet101 based on most metrics. This study demonstrates the utility of CNNs in the registration of multimodal images with significant background noise and morphology distortion. We also show aggregate shape, preserved by binarization, to be a robust feature for registering multimodal microbiology-related images.