pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Structure-Enhanced Pop Music Generation via Harmony-Aware Learning
Authors: Xueyao Zhang, Jinchao Zhang, Yao Qiu, Li Wang, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Music Generation

Pop music generation has always been an attractive topic for both musicians and scientists for a long time. However, automatically composing pop music with a satisfactory structure is still a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose to leverage harmony-aware learning for structure-enhanced pop music generation. On the one hand, one of the participants of harmony, chord, represents the harmonic set of multiple notes, which is integrated closely with the spatial structure of music, the texture. On the other hand, the other participant of harmony, chord progression, usually accompanies the development of the music, which promotes the temporal structure of music, the form. Moreover, when chords evolve into chord progression, the texture and form can be bridged by the harmony naturally, which contributes to the joint learning of the two structures. Furthermore, we propose the Harmony-Aware Hierarchical Music Transformer (HAT), which can exploit the structure adaptively from the music, and make the musical tokens interact hierarchically to enhance the structure in multi-level musical elements. Experimental results reveal that compared to the existing methods, HAT owns a much better understanding of the structure and it can also improve the quality of generated music, especially in the form and texture.
Tesla-Rapture: A Lightweight Gesture Recognition System from mmWave Radar Point Clouds
Authors: Dariush Salami, Ramin Hasibi, Sameera Palipana, Petar Popovski, Tom Michoel, Stephan Sigg
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition, Raspberry Pi 4

We present Tesla-Rapture, a gesture recognition interface for point clouds generated by mmWave Radars. State of the art gesture recognition models are either too resource consuming or not sufficiently accurate for integration into real-life scenarios using wearable or constrained equipment such as IoT devices (e.g. Raspberry PI), XR hardware (e.g. HoloLens), or smart-phones. To tackle this issue, we developed Tesla, a Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) graph convolution approach for mmWave radar point clouds. The model outperforms the state of the art on two datasets in terms of accuracy while reducing the computational complexity and, hence, the execution time. In particular, the approach, is able to predict a gesture almost 8 times faster than the most accurate competitor. Our performance evaluation in different scenarios (environments, angles, distances) shows that Tesla generalizes well and improves the accuracy up to 20% in challenging scenarios like a through-wall setting and sensing at extreme angles. Utilizing Tesla, we develop Tesla-Rapture, a real-time implementation using a mmWave Radar on a Raspberry PI 4 and evaluate its accuracy and time-complexity. We also publish the source code, the trained models, and the implementation of the model for embedded devices.
Deep hierarchical reinforcement agents for automated penetration testing
Authors: Khuong Tran, Ashlesha Akella, Maxwell Standen, Junae Kim, David Bowman, Toby Richer, Chin-Teng Lin
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning

Penetration testing the organised attack of a computer system in order to test existing defences has been used extensively to evaluate network security. This is a time consuming process and requires in-depth knowledge for the establishment of a strategy that resembles a real cyber-attack. This paper presents a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture with hierarchically structured agents called HA-DRL, which employs an algebraic action decomposition strategy to address the large discrete action space of an autonomous penetration testing simulator where the number of actions is exponentially increased with the complexity of the designed cybersecurity network. The proposed architecture is shown to find the optimal attacking policy faster and more stably than a conventional deep Q-learning agent which is commonly used as a method to apply artificial intelligence in automatic penetration testing.
A Machine-learning Framework for Acoustic Design Assessment in Early Design Stages
Authors: Reyhane Abarghooie, Zahra Sadat Zomorodian, Mohammad Tahsildoost, Zohreh Shaghaghian
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In time-cost scale model studies, predicting acoustic performance by using simulation methods is a commonly used method that is preferred. In this field, building acoustic simulation tools are complicated by several challenges, including the high cost of acoustic tools, the need for acoustic expertise, and the time-consuming process of acoustic simulation. The goal of this project is to introduce a simple model with a short calculation time to estimate the room acoustic condition in the early design stages of the building. This paper presents a working prototype for a new method of machine learning (ML) to approximate a series of typical room acoustic parameters using only geometric data as input characteristics. A novel dataset consisting of acoustical simulations of a single room with 2916 different configurations are used to train and test the proposed model. In the stimulation process, features that include room dimensions, window size, material absorption coefficient, furniture, and shading type have been analysed by using Pachyderm acoustic software. The mentioned dataset is used as the input of seven machine-learning models based on fully connected Deep Neural Networks (DNN). The average error of ML models is between 1% to 3%, and the average error of the new predicted samples after the validation process is between 2% to 12%.
Dodging Attack Using Carefully Crafted Natural Makeup
Authors: Nitzan Guetta, Asaf Shabtai, Inderjeet Singh, Satoru Momiyama, Yuval Elovici
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Deep learning face recognition models are used by state-of-the-art surveillance systems to identify individuals passing through public areas (e.g., airports). Previous studies have demonstrated the use of adversarial machine learning (AML) attacks to successfully evade identification by such systems, both in the digital and physical domains. Attacks in the physical domain, however, require significant manipulation to the human participant's face, which can raise suspicion by human observers (e.g. airport security officers). In this study, we present a novel black-box AML attack which carefully crafts natural makeup, which, when applied on a human participant, prevents the participant from being identified by facial recognition models. We evaluated our proposed attack against the ArcFace face recognition model, with 20 participants in a real-world setup that includes two cameras, different shooting angles, and different lighting conditions. The evaluation results show that in the digital domain, the face recognition system was unable to identify all of the participants, while in the physical domain, the face recognition system was able to identify the participants in only 1.22% of the frames (compared to 47.57% without makeup and 33.73% with random natural makeup), which is below a reasonable threshold of a realistic operational environment.
Bayesian AirComp with Sign-Alignment Precoding for Wireless Federated Learning
Authors: Chanho Park, Seunghoon Lee, Namyoon Lee
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

In this paper, we consider the problem of wireless federated learning based on sign stochastic gradient descent (signSGD) algorithm via a multiple access channel. When sending locally computed gradient's sign information, each mobile device requires to apply precoding to circumvent wireless fading effects. In practice, however, acquiring perfect knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at all mobile devices is infeasible. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective precoding method with limited channel knowledge, called sign-alignment precoding. The idea of sign-alignment precoding is to protect sign-flipping errors from wireless fadings. Under the Gaussian prior assumption on the local gradients, we also derive the mean squared error (MSE)-optimal aggregation function called Bayesian over-the-air computation (BayAirComp). Our key finding is that one-bit precoding with BayAirComp aggregation can provide a better learning performance than the existing precoding method even using perfect CSI with AirComp aggregation.
Non-Parametric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Xin Zheng, Zhirui Zhang, ShuJian Huang, Boxing Chen, Jun Xie, Weihua Luo, Jiajun Chen
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, NMT, Retrieval, Translation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recently, $k$NN-MT has shown the promising capability of directly incorporating the pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with domain-specific token-level $k$-nearest-neighbor ($k$NN) retrieval to achieve domain adaptation without retraining. Despite being conceptually attractive, it heavily relies on high-quality in-domain parallel corpora, limiting its capability on unsupervised domain adaptation, where in-domain parallel corpora are scarce or nonexistent. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences in the target language to construct an effective datastore for $k$-nearest-neighbor retrieval. To this end, we first introduce an autoencoder task based on the target language, and then insert lightweight adapters into the original NMT model to map the token-level representation of this task to the ideal representation of translation task. Experiments on multi-domain datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly improves the translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data, while achieving comparable performance with back-translation.
Statistical limits of dictionary learning: random matrix theory and the spectral replica method
Authors: Jean Barbier, Nicolas Macris
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Dictionary Learning

We consider increasingly complex models of matrix denoising and dictionary learning in the Bayes-optimal setting, in the challenging regime where the matrices to infer have a rank growing linearly with the system size. This is in contrast with most existing literature concerned with the low-rank (i.e., constant-rank) regime. We first consider a class of rotationally invariant matrix denoising problems whose mutual information and minimum mean-square error are computable using techniques from random matrix theory. Next, we analyze the more challenging models of dictionary learning. To do so we introduce a novel combination of the replica method from statistical mechanics together with random matrix theory, coined spectral replica method. This allows us to derive variational formulas for the mutual information between hidden representations and the noisy data of the dictionary learning problem, as well as for the overlaps quantifying the optimal reconstruction error. The proposed method reduces the number of degrees of freedom from $\Theta(N^2)$ matrix entries to $\Theta(N)$ eigenvalues (or singular values), and yields Coulomb gas representations of the mutual information which are reminiscent of matrix models in physics. The main ingredients are a combination of large deviation results for random matrices together with a new replica symmetric decoupling ansatz at the level of the probability distributions of eigenvalues (or singular values) of certain overlap matrices and the use of HarishChandra-Itzykson-Zuber spherical integrals.
Scalable Font Reconstruction with Dual Latent Manifolds
Authors: Nikita Srivatsan, Si Wu, Jonathan T. Barron, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Style Transfer

We propose a deep generative model that performs typography analysis and font reconstruction by learning disentangled manifolds of both font style and character shape. Our approach enables us to massively scale up the number of character types we can effectively model compared to previous methods. Specifically, we infer separate latent variables representing character and font via a pair of inference networks which take as input sets of glyphs that either all share a character type, or belong to the same font. This design allows our model to generalize to characters that were not observed during training time, an important task in light of the relative sparsity of most fonts. We also put forward a new loss, adapted from prior work that measures likelihood using an adaptive distribution in a projected space, resulting in more natural images without requiring a discriminator. We evaluate on the task of font reconstruction over various datasets representing character types of many languages, and compare favorably to modern style transfer systems according to both automatic and manually-evaluated metrics.
Deep Convolutional Generative Modeling for Artificial Microstructure Development of Aluminum-Silicon Alloy
Authors: Akshansh Mishra, Tarushi Pathak
Date: 2021-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning which is a sub-domain of an Artificial Intelligence which is finding various applications in manufacturing and material science sectors. In the present study, Deep Generative Modeling which a type of unsupervised machine learning technique has been adapted for the constructing the artificial microstructure of Aluminium-Silicon alloy. Deep Generative Adversarial Networks has been used for developing the artificial microstructure of the given microstructure image dataset. The results obtained showed that the developed models had learnt to replicate the lining near the certain images of the microstructures.
Learnable Discrete Wavelet Pooling (LDW-Pooling) For Convolutional Networks
Authors: Bor-Shiun Wang, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Ming-Ching Chang, Ping-Yang Chen, Lipeng Ke, Siwei Lyu
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00

Pooling is a simple but essential layer in modern deep CNN architectures for feature aggregation and extraction. Typical CNN design focuses on the conv layers and activation functions, while leaving the pooling layers with fewer options. We introduce the Learning Discrete Wavelet Pooling (LDW-Pooling) that can be applied universally to replace standard pooling operations to better extract features with improved accuracy and efficiency. Motivated from the wavelet theory, we adopt the low-pass (L) and high-pass (H) filters horizontally and vertically for pooling on a 2D feature map. Feature signals are decomposed into four (LL, LH, HL, HH) subbands to retain features better and avoid information dropping. The wavelet transform ensures features after pooling can be fully preserved and recovered. We next adopt an energy-based attention learning to fine-select crucial and representative features. LDW-Pooling is effective and efficient when compared with other state-of-the-art pooling techniques such as WaveletPooling and LiftPooling. Extensive experimental validation shows that LDW-Pooling can be applied to a wide range of standard CNN architectures and consistently outperform standard (max, mean, mixed, and stochastic) pooling operations.
Identifying partial mouse brain microscopy images from Allen reference atlas using a contrastively learned semantic space
Authors: Justinas Antanavicius, Roberto Leiras, Raghavendra Selvan
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Precise identification of mouse brain microscopy images is a crucial first step when anatomical structures in the mouse brain are to be registered to a reference atlas. Practitioners usually rely on manual comparison of images or tools that assume the presence of complete images. This work explores Siamese Networks as the method for finding corresponding 2D reference atlas plates for given partial 2D mouse brain images. Siamese networks are a class of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that use weight-shared paths to obtain low dimensional embeddings of pairs of input images. The correspondence between the partial mouse brain image and reference atlas plate is determined based on the distance between low dimensional embeddings of brain slices and atlas plates that are obtained from Siamese networks using contrastive learning. Experiments showed that Siamese CNNs can precisely identify brain slices using the Allen mouse brain atlas when training and testing images come from the same source. They achieved TOP-1 and TOP-5 accuracy of 25% and 100%, respectively, taking only 7.2 seconds to identify 29 images.
Specified Certainty Classification, with Application to Read Classification for Reference-Guided Metagenomic Assembly
Authors: Alan F. Karr, Jason Hauzel, Prahlad Menon, Adam A. Porter, Marcel Schaefer
Date: 2021-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Specified Certainty Classification (SCC) is a new paradigm for employing classifiers whose outputs carry uncertainties, typically in the form of Bayesian posterior probabilities. By allowing the classifier output to be less precise than one of a set of atomic decisions, SCC allows all decisions to achieve a specified level of certainty, as well as provides insights into classifier behavior by examining all decisions that are possible. Our primary illustration is read classification for reference-guided genome assembly, but we demonstrate the breadth of SCC by also analyzing COVID-19 vaccination data.
Reactive and Safe Road User Simulations using Neural Barrier Certificates
Authors: Yue Meng, Zengyi Qin, Chuchu Fan
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, User Simulation

Reactive and safe agent modelings are important for nowadays traffic simulator designs and safe planning applications. In this work, we proposed a reactive agent model which can ensure safety without comprising the original purposes, by learning only high-level decisions from expert data and a low-level decentralized controller guided by the jointly learned decentralized barrier certificates. Empirical results show that our learned road user simulation models can achieve a significant improvement in safety comparing to state-of-the-art imitation learning and pure control-based methods, while being similar to human agents by having smaller errors to the expert data. Moreover, our learned reactive agents are shown to generalize better to unseen traffic conditions, and react better to other road users and therefore can help understand challenging planning problems pragmatically.
LRWR: Large-Scale Benchmark for Lip Reading in Russian language
Authors: Evgeniy Egorov, Vasily Kostyumov, Mikhail Konyk, Sergey Kolesnikov
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Lipreading, Lip Reading, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

Lipreading, also known as visual speech recognition, aims to identify the speech content from videos by analyzing the visual deformations of lips and nearby areas. One of the significant obstacles for research in this field is the lack of proper datasets for a wide variety of languages: so far, these methods have been focused only on English or Chinese. In this paper, we introduce a naturally distributed large-scale benchmark for lipreading in Russian language, named LRWR, which contains 235 classes and 135 speakers. We provide a detailed description of the dataset collection pipeline and dataset statistics. We also present a comprehensive comparison of the current popular lipreading methods on LRWR and conduct a detailed analysis of their performance. The results demonstrate the differences between the benchmarked languages and provide several promising directions for lipreading models finetuning. Thanks to our findings, we also achieved new state-of-the-art results on the LRW benchmark.
An Apparatus for the Simulation of Breathing Disorders: Physically Meaningful Generation of Surrogate Data
Authors: Harry J. Davies, Ghena Hammour, Hongjian Xiao, Danilo P. Mandic
Date: 2021-09-14 00:00:00

The rapidly increasing prevalence of debilitating breathing disorders, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), calls for a meaningful integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare. While this promises improved detection and monitoring of breathing disorders, AI techniques are almost invariably "data hungry" which highlights the importance of generating physically meaningful surrogate data. Indeed, domain aware surrogates would enable both an improved understanding of respiratory waveform changes with different breathing disorders, and enhance the training of machine learning algorithms. To this end, we introduce an apparatus comprising of PVC tubes and 3D printed parts as a simple yet effective method of simulating both obstructive and restrictive respiratory waveforms in healthy subjects. Independent control over both inspiratory and expiratory resistances allows for the simulation of obstructive breathing disorders through the whole spectrum of FEV1/FVC spirometry ratios (used to classify COPD), ranging from healthy values to values seen in severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Moreover, waveform characteristics of breathing disorders, such as a change in inspiratory duty cycle or peak flow are also observed in the waveforms resulting from use of the artificial breathing disorder simulation apparatus. Overall, the proposed apparatus provides us with a simple, effective and physically meaningful way to generate faithful surrogate breathing disorder waveforms, a prerequisite for the use of artificial intelligence in respiratory health.
Neural Upscaling from Residue-level Protein Structure Networks to Atomistic Structure
Authors: Vy Duong, Elizabeth Diessner, Gianmarc Grazioli, Rachel W. Martin, Carter T. Butts
Date: 2021-08-25 00:00:00

Coarse-graining is a powerful tool for extending the reach of dynamic models of proteins and other biological macromolecules. Topological coarse-graining, in which biomolecules or sets thereof are represented via graph structures, is a particularly useful way of obtaining highly compressed representations of molecular structure, and simulations operating via such representations can achieve substantial computational savings. A drawback of coarse-graining, however, is the loss of atomistic detail - an effect that is especially acute for topological representations such as protein structure networks (PSNs). Here, we introduce an approach based on a combination of machine learning and physically-guided refinement for inferring atomic coordinates from PSNs. This "neural upscaling" procedure exploits the constraints implied by PSNs on possible configurations, as well as differences in the likelihood of observing different configurations with the same PSN. Using a 1 $\mu$s atomistic molecular dynamics trajectory of A$\beta_{1-40}$, we show that neural upscaling is able to effectively recapitulate detailed structural information for intrinsically disordered proteins, being particularly successful in recovering features such as transient secondary structure. These results suggest that scalable network-based models for protein structure and dynamics may be used in settings where atomistic detail is desired, with upscaling employed to impute atomic coordinates from PSNs.