pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MLSolv-A: A Novel Machine Learning-Based Prediction of Solvation Free Energies from Pairwise Atomistic Interactions
Authors: Hyuntae Lim, YounJoon Jung
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Recent advances in machine learning and their applications have lead to the development of diverse structure-property relationship models for crucial chemical properties, and the solvation free energy is one of them. Here, we introduce a novel ML-based solvation model, which calculates the solvation energy from pairwise atomistic interactions. The novelty of the proposed model consists of a simple architecture: two encoding functions extract atomic feature vectors from the given chemical structure, while the inner product between two atomistic features calculates their interactions. The results on 6,493 experimental measurements achieve outstanding performance and transferability for enlarging training data due to its solvent-non-specific nature. Analysis of the interaction map shows there is a great potential that our model reproduces group contributions on the solvation energy, which makes us believe that the model not only provides the predicted target property but also gives us more detailed physicochemical insights.
Multiple Imputation for Biomedical Data using Monte Carlo Dropout Autoencoders
Authors: Kristian Miok, Dong Nguyen-Doan, Marko Robnik-Šikonja, Daniela Zaharie
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imputation, Missing Values

Due to complex experimental settings, missing values are common in biomedical data. To handle this issue, many methods have been proposed, from ignoring incomplete instances to various data imputation approaches. With the recent rise of deep neural networks, the field of missing data imputation has oriented towards modelling of the data distribution. This paper presents an approach based on Monte Carlo dropout within (Variational) Autoencoders which offers not only very good adaptation to the distribution of the data but also allows generation of new data, adapted to each specific instance. The evaluation shows that the imputation error and predictive similarity can be improved with the proposed approach.
Parallel Corpus Filtering via Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Boliang Zhang, Ajay Nagesh, Kevin Knight
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Web-crawled data provides a good source of parallel corpora for training machine translation models. It is automatically obtained, but extremely noisy, and recent work shows that neural machine translation systems are more sensitive to noise than traditional statistical machine translation methods. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to filter out noisy sentence pairs from web-crawled corpora via pre-trained language models. We measure sentence parallelism by leveraging the multilingual capability of BERT and use the Generative Pre-training (GPT) language model as a domain filter to balance data domains. We evaluate the proposed method on the WMT 2018 Parallel Corpus Filtering shared task, and on our own web-crawled Japanese-Chinese parallel corpus. Our method significantly outperforms baselines and achieves a new state-of-the-art. In an unsupervised setting, our method achieves comparable performance to the top-1 supervised method. We also evaluate on a web-crawled Japanese-Chinese parallel corpus that we make publicly available.
Panda: Partitioned Data Security on Outsourced Sensitive and Non-sensitive Data
Authors: Sharad Mehrotra, Shantanu Sharma, Jeffrey D. Ullman, Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, Peeyush Gupta
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00

Despite extensive research on cryptography, secure and efficient query processing over outsourced data remains an open challenge. This paper continues along with the emerging trend in secure data processing that recognizes that the entire dataset may not be sensitive, and hence, non-sensitivity of data can be exploited to overcome limitations of existing encryption-based approaches. We, first, provide a new security definition, entitled partitioned data security for guaranteeing that the joint processing of non-sensitive data (in cleartext) and sensitive data (in encrypted form) does not lead to any leakage. Then, this paper proposes a new secure approach, entitled query binning (QB) that allows secure execution of queries over non-sensitive and sensitive parts of the data. QB maps a query to a set of queries over the sensitive and non-sensitive data in a way that no leakage will occur due to the joint processing over sensitive and non-sensitive data. In particular, we propose secure algorithms for selection, range, and join queries to be executed over encrypted sensitive and cleartext non-sensitive datasets. Interestingly, in addition to improving performance, we show that QB actually strengthens the security of the underlying cryptographic technique by preventing size, frequency-count, and workload-skew attacks.
DeepRobust: A PyTorch Library for Adversarial Attacks and Defenses
Authors: Ya-Xin Li, Wei Jin, Han Xu, Jiliang Tang
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00

DeepRobust is a PyTorch adversarial learning library which aims to build a comprehensive and easy-to-use platform to foster this research field. It currently contains more than 10 attack algorithms and 8 defense algorithms in image domain and 9 attack algorithms and 4 defense algorithms in graph domain, under a variety of deep learning architectures. In this manual, we introduce the main contents of DeepRobust with detailed instructions. The library is kept updated and can be found at https://github.com/DSE-MSU/DeepRobust.
A Novel CNet-assisted Evolutionary Level Repairer and Its Applications to Super Mario Bros
Authors: Tianye Shu, Ziqi Wang, Jialin Liu, Xin Yao
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00

Applying latent variable evolution to game level design has become more and more popular as little human expert knowledge is required. However, defective levels with illegal patterns may be generated due to the violation of constraints for level design. A traditional way of repairing the defective levels is programming specific rule-based repairers to patch the flaw. However, programming these constraints is sometimes complex and not straightforward. An autonomous level repairer which is capable of learning the constraints is needed. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, CNet, to learn the probability distribution of tiles giving its surrounding tiles on a set of real levels, and then detect the illegal tiles in generated new levels. Then, an evolutionary repairer is designed to search for optimal replacement schemes equipped with a novel search space being constructed with the help of CNet and a novel heuristic function. The proposed approaches are proved to be effective in our case study of repairing GAN-generated and artificially destroyed levels of Super Mario Bros. game. Our CNet-assisted evolutionary repairer can also be easily applied to other games of which the levels can be represented by a matrix of objects or tiles.
3D Scene Geometry-Aware Constraint for Camera Localization with Deep Learning
Authors: Mi Tian, Qiong Nie, Hao Shen
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Autonomous Driving, Camera Localization

Camera localization is a fundamental and key component of autonomous driving vehicles and mobile robots to localize themselves globally for further environment perception, path planning and motion control. Recently end-to-end approaches based on convolutional neural network have been much studied to achieve or even exceed 3D-geometry based traditional methods. In this work, we propose a compact network for absolute camera pose regression. Inspired from those traditional methods, a 3D scene geometry-aware constraint is also introduced by exploiting all available information including motion, depth and image contents. We add this constraint as a regularization term to our proposed network by defining a pixel-level photometric loss and an image-level structural similarity loss. To benchmark our method, different challenging scenes including indoor and outdoor environment are tested with our proposed approach and state-of-the-arts. And the experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvement of our method on both prediction accuracy and convergence efficiency.
Using Genetic Algorithm To Evolve Cellular Automata In Performing Edge Detection
Authors: Karan Nayak
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection

Cellular automata are discrete and computational models thatcan be shown as general models of complexity. They are used in varied applications to derive the generalized behavior of the presented model. In this paper we have took one such application. We have made an effort to perform edge detection on an image using genetic algorithm. The purpose and the intention here is to analyze the capability and performance of the suggested genetic algorithm. Genetic algorithms are used to depict or obtain a general solution of given problem. Using this feature of GA we have tried to evolve the cellular automata and shown that how with time it converges to the desired results.
Towards Interpretable Deep Learning Models for Knowledge Tracing
Authors: Yu Lu, DeLiang Wang, Qinggang Meng, Penghe Chen
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Knowledge Tracing

As an important technique for modeling the knowledge states of learners, the traditional knowledge tracing (KT) models have been widely used to support intelligent tutoring systems and MOOC platforms. Driven by the fast advancements of deep learning techniques, deep neural network has been recently adopted to design new KT models for achieving better prediction performance. However, the lack of interpretability of these models has painfully impeded their practical applications, as their outputs and working mechanisms suffer from the intransparent decision process and complex inner structures. We thus propose to adopt the post-hoc method to tackle the interpretability issue for deep learning based knowledge tracing (DLKT) models. Specifically, we focus on applying the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method to interpret RNN-based DLKT model by backpropagating the relevance from the model's output layer to its input layer. The experiment results show the feasibility using the LRP method for interpreting the DLKT model's predictions, and partially validate the computed relevance scores from both question level and concept level. We believe it can be a solid step towards fully interpreting the DLKT models and promote their practical applications in the education domain.
Self-Supervised Deep Visual Odometry with Online Adaptation
Authors: Shunkai Li, Xin Wang, Yingdian Cao, Fei Xue, Zike Yan, Hongbin Zha
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Visual Odometry

Self-supervised VO methods have shown great success in jointly estimating camera pose and depth from videos. However, like most data-driven methods, existing VO networks suffer from a notable decrease in performance when confronted with scenes different from the training data, which makes them unsuitable for practical applications. In this paper, we propose an online meta-learning algorithm to enable VO networks to continuously adapt to new environments in a self-supervised manner. The proposed method utilizes convolutional long short-term memory (convLSTM) to aggregate rich spatial-temporal information in the past. The network is able to memorize and learn from its past experience for better estimation and fast adaptation to the current frame. When running VO in the open world, in order to deal with the changing environment, we propose an online feature alignment method by aligning feature distributions at different time. Our VO network is able to seamlessly adapt to different environments. Extensive experiments on unseen outdoor scenes, virtual to real world and outdoor to indoor environments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art self-supervised VO baselines considerably.
Adaptive Rule Discovery for Labeling Text Data
Authors: Sainyam Galhotra, Behzad Golshan, Wang-Chiew Tan
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00

Creating and collecting labeled data is one of the major bottlenecks in machine learning pipelines and the emergence of automated feature generation techniques such as deep learning, which typically requires a lot of training data, has further exacerbated the problem. While weak-supervision techniques have circumvented this bottleneck, existing frameworks either require users to write a set of diverse, high-quality rules to label data (e.g., Snorkel), or require a labeled subset of the data to automatically mine rules (e.g., Snuba). The process of manually writing rules can be tedious and time consuming. At the same time, creating a labeled subset of the data can be costly and even infeasible in imbalanced settings. This is due to the fact that a random sample in imbalanced settings often contains only a few positive instances. To address these shortcomings, we present Darwin, an interactive system designed to alleviate the task of writing rules for labeling text data in weakly-supervised settings. Given an initial labeling rule, Darwin automatically generates a set of candidate rules for the labeling task at hand, and utilizes the annotator's feedback to adapt the candidate rules. We describe how Darwin is scalable and versatile. It can operate over large text corpora (i.e., more than 1 million sentences) and supports a wide range of labeling functions (i.e., any function that can be specified using a context free grammar). Finally, we demonstrate with a suite of experiments over five real-world datasets that Darwin enables annotators to generate weakly-supervised labels efficiently and with a small cost. In fact, our experiments show that rules discovered by Darwin on average identify 40% more positive instances compared to Snuba even when it is provided with 1000 labeled instances.
Response-Anticipated Memory for On-Demand Knowledge Integration in Response Generation
Authors: Zhiliang Tian, Wei Bi, Dongkyu Lee, Lanqing Xue, Yiping Song, Xiaojiang Liu, Nevin L. Zhang
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Informativeness, Response Generation

Neural conversation models are known to generate appropriate but non-informative responses in general. A scenario where informativeness can be significantly enhanced is Conversing by Reading (CbR), where conversations take place with respect to a given external document. In previous work, the external document is utilized by (1) creating a context-aware document memory that integrates information from the document and the conversational context, and then (2) generating responses referring to the memory. In this paper, we propose to create the document memory with some anticipated responses in mind. This is achieved using a teacher-student framework. The teacher is given the external document, the context, and the ground-truth response, and learns how to build a response-aware document memory from three sources of information. The student learns to construct a response-anticipated document memory from the first two sources, and the teacher's insight on memory creation. Empirical results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art for the CbR task.
Screenplay Quality Assessment: Can We Predict Who Gets Nominated?
Authors: Ming-Chang Chiu, Tiantian Feng, Xiang Ren, Shrikanth Narayanan
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7

Deciding which scripts to turn into movies is a costly and time-consuming process for filmmakers. Thus, building a tool to aid script selection, an initial phase in movie production, can be very beneficial. Toward that goal, in this work, we present a method to evaluate the quality of a screenplay based on linguistic cues. We address this in a two-fold approach: (1) we define the task as predicting nominations of scripts at major film awards with the hypothesis that the peer-recognized scripts should have a greater chance to succeed. (2) based on industry opinions and narratology, we extract and integrate domain-specific features into common classification techniques. We face two challenges (1) scripts are much longer than other document datasets (2) nominated scripts are limited and thus difficult to collect. However, with narratology-inspired modeling and domain features, our approach offers clear improvements over strong baselines. Our work provides a new approach for future work in screenplay analysis.
INFOTABS: Inference on Tables as Semi-structured Data
Authors: Vivek Gupta, Maitrey Mehta, Pegah Nokhiz, Vivek Srikumar
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6

In this paper, we observe that semi-structured tabulated text is ubiquitous; understanding them requires not only comprehending the meaning of text fragments, but also implicit relationships between them. We argue that such data can prove as a testing ground for understanding how we reason about information. To study this, we introduce a new dataset called INFOTABS, comprising of human-written textual hypotheses based on premises that are tables extracted from Wikipedia info-boxes. Our analysis shows that the semi-structured, multi-domain and heterogeneous nature of the premises admits complex, multi-faceted reasoning. Experiments reveal that, while human annotators agree on the relationships between a table-hypothesis pair, several standard modeling strategies are unsuccessful at the task, suggesting that reasoning about tables can pose a difficult modeling challenge.
Large Scale Multi-Actor Generative Dialog Modeling
Authors: Alex Boyd, Raul Puri, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Bryan Catanzaro
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Goal-Oriented Dialog, Language Modelling

Non-goal oriented dialog agents (i.e. chatbots) aim to produce varying and engaging conversations with a user; however, they typically exhibit either inconsistent personality across conversations or the average personality of all users. This paper addresses these issues by controlling an agent's persona upon generation via conditioning on prior conversations of a target actor. In doing so, we are able to utilize more abstract patterns within a person's speech and better emulate them in generated responses. This work introduces the Generative Conversation Control model, an augmented and fine-tuned GPT-2 language model that conditions on past reference conversations to probabilistically model multi-turn conversations in the actor's persona. We introduce an accompanying data collection procedure to obtain 10.3M conversations from 6 months worth of Reddit comments. We demonstrate that scaling model sizes from 117M to 8.3B parameters yields an improvement from 23.14 to 13.14 perplexity on 1.7M held out Reddit conversations. Increasing model scale yielded similar improvements in human evaluations that measure preference of model samples to the held out target distribution in terms of realism (31% increased to 37% preference), style matching (37% to 42%), grammar and content quality (29% to 42%), and conversation coherency (32% to 40%). We find that conditionally modeling past conversations improves perplexity by 0.47 in automatic evaluations. Through human trials we identify positive trends between conditional modeling and style matching and outline steps to further improve persona control.
Project RISE: Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions
Authors: Yen-Chia Hsu, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang, Ting-yao Hu, Paul Dille, Sean Prendi, Ryan Hoffman, Anastasia Tsuhlares, Jessica Pachuta, Randy Sargent, Illah Nourbakhsh
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Industrial smoke emissions pose a significant concern to human health. Prior works have shown that using Computer Vision (CV) techniques to identify smoke as visual evidence can influence the attitude of regulators and empower citizens to pursue environmental justice. However, existing datasets are not of sufficient quality nor quantity to train the robust CV models needed to support air quality advocacy. We introduce RISE, the first large-scale video dataset for Recognizing Industrial Smoke Emissions. We adopted a citizen science approach to collaborate with local community members to annotate whether a video clip has smoke emissions. Our dataset contains 12,567 clips from 19 distinct views from cameras that monitored three industrial facilities. These daytime clips span 30 days over two years, including all four seasons. We ran experiments using deep neural networks to establish a strong performance baseline and reveal smoke recognition challenges. Our survey study discussed community feedback, and our data analysis displayed opportunities for integrating citizen scientists and crowd workers into the application of Artificial Intelligence for Social Impact.
Adversarial examples are useful too!
Authors: Ali Borji
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack

Deep learning has come a long way and has enjoyed an unprecedented success. Despite high accuracy, however, deep models are brittle and are easily fooled by imperceptible adversarial perturbations. In contrast to common inference-time attacks, Backdoor (\aka Trojan) attacks target the training phase of model construction, and are extremely difficult to combat since a) the model behaves normally on a pristine testing set and b) the augmented perturbations can be minute and may only affect few training samples. Here, I propose a new method to tell whether a model has been subject to a backdoor attack. The idea is to generate adversarial examples, targeted or untargeted, using conventional attacks such as FGSM and then feed them back to the classifier. By computing the statistics (here simply mean maps) of the images in different categories and comparing them with the statistics of a reference model, it is possible to visually locate the perturbed regions and unveil the attack.
Proxy Experience Replay: Federated Distillation for Distributed Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Han Cha, Jihong Park, Hyesung Kim, Mehdi Bennis, Seong-Lyun Kim
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Data Augmentation, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Privacy Preserving, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Traditional distributed deep reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on exchanging the experience replay memory (RM) of each agent. Since the RM contains all state observations and action policy history, it may incur huge communication overhead while violating the privacy of each agent. Alternatively, this article presents a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving distributed RL framework, coined federated reinforcement distillation (FRD). In FRD, each agent exchanges its proxy experience replay memory (ProxRM), in which policies are locally averaged with respect to proxy states clustering actual states. To provide FRD design insights, we present ablation studies on the impact of ProxRM structures, neural network architectures, and communication intervals. Furthermore, we propose an improved version of FRD, coined mixup augmented FRD (MixFRD), in which ProxRM is interpolated using the mixup data augmentation algorithm. Simulations in a Cartpole environment validate the effectiveness of MixFRD in reducing the variance of mission completion time and communication cost, compared to the benchmark schemes, vanilla FRD, federated reinforcement learning (FRL), and policy distillation (PD).