pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Read what you need: Controllable Aspect-based Opinion Summarization of Tourist Reviews
Authors: Rajdeep Mukherjee, Hari Chandana Peruri, Uppada Vishnu, Pawan Goyal, Sourangshu Bhattacharya, Niloy Ganguly
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization, Opinion Summarization

Manually extracting relevant aspects and opinions from large volumes of user-generated text is a time-consuming process. Summaries, on the other hand, help readers with limited time budgets to quickly consume the key ideas from the data. State-of-the-art approaches for multi-document summarization, however, do not consider user preferences while generating summaries. In this work, we argue the need and propose a solution for generating personalized aspect-based opinion summaries from large collections of online tourist reviews. We let our readers decide and control several attributes of the summary such as the length and specific aspects of interest among others. Specifically, we take an unsupervised approach to extract coherent aspects from tourist reviews posted on TripAdvisor. We then propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) based extractive technique to select an informative subset of opinions around the identified aspects while respecting the user-specified values for various control parameters. Finally, we evaluate and compare our summaries using crowdsourcing and ROUGE-based metrics and obtain competitive results.
Random Hypervolume Scalarizations for Provable Multi-Objective Black Box Optimization
Authors: Daniel Golovin, Qiuyi Zhang
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Thompson Sampling

Single-objective black box optimization (also known as zeroth-order optimization) is the process of minimizing a scalar objective $f(x)$, given evaluations at adaptively chosen inputs $x$. In this paper, we consider multi-objective optimization, where $f(x)$ outputs a vector of possibly competing objectives and the goal is to converge to the Pareto frontier. Quantitatively, we wish to maximize the standard hypervolume indicator metric, which measures the dominated hypervolume of the entire set of chosen inputs. In this paper, we introduce a novel scalarization function, which we term the hypervolume scalarization, and show that drawing random scalarizations from an appropriately chosen distribution can be used to efficiently approximate the hypervolume indicator metric. We utilize this connection to show that Bayesian optimization with our scalarization via common acquisition functions, such as Thompson Sampling or Upper Confidence Bound, provably converges to the whole Pareto frontier by deriving tight hypervolume regret bounds on the order of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$. Furthermore, we highlight the general utility of our scalarization framework by showing that any provably convergent single-objective optimization process can be effortlessly converted to a multi-objective optimization process with provable convergence guarantees.
Graph-based Visual-Semantic Entanglement Network for Zero-shot Image Recognition
Authors: Yang Hu, Guihua Wen, Adriane Chapman, Pei Yang, Mingnan Luo, Yingxue Xu, Dan Dai, Wendy Hall
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning uses semantic attributes to connect the search space of unseen objects. In recent years, although the deep convolutional network brings powerful visual modeling capabilities to the ZSL task, its visual features have severe pattern inertia and lack of representation of semantic relationships, which leads to severe bias and ambiguity. In response to this, we propose the Graph-based Visual-Semantic Entanglement Network to conduct graph modeling of visual features, which is mapped to semantic attributes by using a knowledge graph, it contains several novel designs: 1. it establishes a multi-path entangled network with the convolutional neural network (CNN) and the graph convolutional network (GCN), which input the visual features from CNN to GCN to model the implicit semantic relations, then GCN feedback the graph modeled information to CNN features; 2. it uses attribute word vectors as the target for the graph semantic modeling of GCN, which forms a self-consistent regression for graph modeling and supervise GCN to learn more personalized attribute relations; 3. it fuses and supplements the hierarchical visual-semantic features refined by graph modeling into visual embedding. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on multiple representative ZSL datasets: AwA2, CUB, and SUN by promoting the semantic linkage modelling of visual features.
Neural Architecture Search without Training
Authors: Joseph Mellor, Jack Turner, Amos Storkey, Elliot J. Crowley
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search

The time and effort involved in hand-designing deep neural networks is immense. This has prompted the development of Neural Architecture Search (NAS) techniques to automate this design. However, NAS algorithms tend to be slow and expensive; they need to train vast numbers of candidate networks to inform the search process. This could be alleviated if we could partially predict a network's trained accuracy from its initial state. In this work, we examine the overlap of activations between datapoints in untrained networks and motivate how this can give a measure which is usefully indicative of a network's trained performance. We incorporate this measure into a simple algorithm that allows us to search for powerful networks without any training in a matter of seconds on a single GPU, and verify its effectiveness on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, NATS-Bench, and Network Design Spaces. Our approach can be readily combined with more expensive search methods; we examine a simple adaptation of regularised evolutionary search. Code for reproducing our experiments is available at https://github.com/BayesWatch/nas-without-training.
Continuous Learning and Inference of Individual Probability of SARS-CoV-2 Infection Based on Interaction Data
Authors: Shangching Liu, Koyun Liu, Hwaihai Chiang, Jianwei Zhang, Tsungyao Chang
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00

This study presents a new approach to determine the likelihood of asymptomatic carriers of the SARS-CoV-2 virus by using interaction-based continuous learning and inference of individual probability (CLIIP) for contagious ranking. This approach is developed based on an individual directed graph (IDG), using multi-layer bidirectional path tracking and inference searching. The IDG is determined by the appearance timeline and spatial data that can adapt over time. Additionally, the approach takes into consideration the incubation period and several features that can represent real-world circumstances, such as the number of asymptomatic carriers present. After each update of confirmed cases, the model collects the interaction features and infers the individual person's probability of getting infected using the status of the surrounding people. The CLIIP approach is validated using the individualized bidirectional SEIR model to simulate the contagion process. Compared to traditional contact tracing methods, our approach significantly reduces the screening and quarantine required to search for the potential asymptomatic virus carriers by as much as 94%.
ColdGANs: Taming Language GANs with Cautious Sampling Strategies
Authors: Thomas Scialom, Paul-Alexis Dray, Sylvain Lamprier, Benjamin Piwowarski, Jacopo Staiano
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Text Generation

Training regimes based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) suffer from known limitations, often leading to poorly generated text sequences. At the root of these limitations is the mismatch between training and inference, i.e. the so-called exposure bias, exacerbated by considering only the reference texts as correct, while in practice several alternative formulations could be as good. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can mitigate those limitations but the discrete nature of text has hindered their application to language generation: the approaches proposed so far, based on Reinforcement Learning, have been shown to underperform MLE. Departing from previous works, we analyze the exploration step in GANs applied to text generation, and show how classical sampling results in unstable training. We propose to consider alternative exploration strategies in a GAN framework that we name ColdGANs, where we force the sampling to be close to the distribution modes to get smoother learning dynamics. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the proposed language GANs compare favorably to MLE, and obtain improvements over the state-of-the-art on three generative tasks, namely unconditional text generation, question generation, and abstractive summarization.
The Dual Information Bottleneck
Authors: Zoe Piran, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Naftali Tishby
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Plane

The Information Bottleneck (IB) framework is a general characterization of optimal representations obtained using a principled approach for balancing accuracy and complexity. Here we present a new framework, the Dual Information Bottleneck (dualIB), which resolves some of the known drawbacks of the IB. We provide a theoretical analysis of the dualIB framework; (i) solving for the structure of its solutions (ii) unraveling its superiority in optimizing the mean prediction error exponent and (iii) demonstrating its ability to preserve exponential forms of the original distribution. To approach large scale problems, we present a novel variational formulation of the dualIB for Deep Neural Networks. In experiments on several data-sets, we compare it to a variational form of the IB. This exposes superior Information Plane properties of the dualIB and its potential in improvement of the error.
Graph Representation Learning Network via Adaptive Sampling
Authors: Anderson de Andrade, Chen Liu
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Graph Representation Learning, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Graph Attention Network (GAT) and GraphSAGE are neural network architectures that operate on graph-structured data and have been widely studied for link prediction and node classification. One challenge raised by GraphSAGE is how to smartly combine neighbour features based on graph structure. GAT handles this problem through attention, however the challenge with GAT is its scalability over large and dense graphs. In this work, we proposed a new architecture to address these issues that is more efficient and is capable of incorporating different edge type information. It generates node representations by attending to neighbours sampled from weighted multi-step transition probabilities. We conduct experiments on both transductive and inductive settings. Experiments achieved comparable or better results on several graph benchmarks, including the Cora, Citeseer, Pubmed, PPI, Twitter, and YouTube datasets.
Learning to Play No-Press Diplomacy with Best Response Policy Iteration
Authors: Thomas Anthony, Tom Eccles, Andrea Tacchetti, János Kramár, Ian Gemp, Thomas C. Hudson, Nicolas Porcel, Marc Lanctot, Julien Pérolat, Richard Everett, Roman Werpachowski, Satinder Singh, Thore Graepel, Yoram Bachrach
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Starcraft

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have led to considerable progress in many 2-player zero-sum games, such as Go, Poker and Starcraft. The purely adversarial nature of such games allows for conceptually simple and principled application of RL methods. However real-world settings are many-agent, and agent interactions are complex mixtures of common-interest and competitive aspects. We consider Diplomacy, a 7-player board game designed to accentuate dilemmas resulting from many-agent interactions. It also features a large combinatorial action space and simultaneous moves, which are challenging for RL algorithms. We propose a simple yet effective approximate best response operator, designed to handle large combinatorial action spaces and simultaneous moves. We also introduce a family of policy iteration methods that approximate fictitious play. With these methods, we successfully apply RL to Diplomacy: we show that our agents convincingly outperform the previous state-of-the-art, and game theoretic equilibrium analysis shows that the new process yields consistent improvements.
All your loss are belong to Bayes
Authors: Christian Walder, Richard Nock
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: All, Gaussian Processes

Loss functions are a cornerstone of machine learning and the starting point of most algorithms. Statistics and Bayesian decision theory have contributed, via properness, to elicit over the past decades a wide set of admissible losses in supervised learning, to which most popular choices belong (logistic, square, Matsushita, etc.). Rather than making a potentially biased ad hoc choice of the loss, there has recently been a boost in efforts to fit the loss to the domain at hand while training the model itself. The key approaches fit a canonical link, a function which monotonically relates the closed unit interval to R and can provide a proper loss via integration. In this paper, we rely on a broader view of proper composite losses and a recent construct from information geometry, source functions, whose fitting alleviates constraints faced by canonical links. We introduce a trick on squared Gaussian Processes to obtain a random process whose paths are compliant source functions with many desirable properties in the context of link estimation. Experimental results demonstrate substantial improvements over the state of the art.
Model-agnostic Feature Importance and Effects with Dependent Features -- A Conditional Subgroup Approach
Authors: Christoph Molnar, Gunnar König, Bernd Bischl, Giuseppe Casalicchio
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

The interpretation of feature importance in machine learning models is challenging when features are dependent. Permutation feature importance (PFI) ignores such dependencies, which can cause misleading interpretations due to extrapolation. A possible remedy is more advanced conditional PFI approaches that enable the assessment of feature importance conditional on all other features. Due to this shift in perspective and in order to enable correct interpretations, it is therefore important that the conditioning is transparent and humanly comprehensible. In this paper, we propose a new sampling mechanism for the conditional distribution based on permutations in conditional subgroups. As these subgroups are constructed using decision trees (transformation trees), the conditioning becomes inherently interpretable. This not only provides a simple and effective estimator of conditional PFI, but also local PFI estimates within the subgroups. In addition, we apply the conditional subgroups approach to partial dependence plots (PDP), a popular method for describing feature effects that can also suffer from extrapolation when features are dependent and interactions are present in the model. We show that PFI and PDP based on conditional subgroups often outperform methods such as conditional PFI based on knockoffs, or accumulated local effect plots. Furthermore, our approach allows for a more fine-grained interpretation of feature effects and importance within the conditional subgroups.
Trade-offs between membership privacy & adversarially robust learning
Authors: Jamie Hayes
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Malware Classification

Historically, machine learning methods have not been designed with security in mind. In turn, this has given rise to adversarial examples, carefully perturbed input samples aimed to mislead detection at test time, which have been applied to attack spam and malware classification, and more recently to attack image classification. Consequently, an abundance of research has been devoted to designing machine learning methods that are robust to adversarial examples. Unfortunately, there are desiderata besides robustness that a secure and safe machine learning model must satisfy, such as fairness and privacy. Recent work by Song et al. (2019) has shown, empirically, that there exists a trade-off between robust and private machine learning models. Models designed to be robust to adversarial examples often overfit on training data to a larger extent than standard (non-robust) models. If a dataset contains private information, then any statistical test that separates training and test data by observing a model's outputs can represent a privacy breach, and if a model overfits on training data, these statistical tests become easier. In this work, we identify settings where standard models will overfit to a larger extent in comparison to robust models, and as empirically observed in previous works, settings where the opposite behavior occurs. Thus, it is not necessarily the case that privacy must be sacrificed to achieve robustness. The degree of overfitting naturally depends on the amount of data available for training. We go on to characterize how the training set size factors into the privacy risks exposed by training a robust model on a simple Gaussian data task, and show empirically that our findings hold on image classification benchmark datasets, such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.
Adversarial Feature Desensitization
Authors: Pouya Bashivan, Reza Bayat, Adam Ibrahim, Kartik Ahuja, Mojtaba Faramarzi, Touraj Laleh, Blake Aaron Richards, Irina Rish
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Domain Adaptation, Robust classification

Neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks -- slight but carefully constructed perturbations of the inputs which can drastically impair the network's performance. Many defense methods have been proposed for improving robustness of deep networks by training them on adversarially perturbed inputs. However, these models often remain vulnerable to new types of attacks not seen during training, and even to slightly stronger versions of previously seen attacks. In this work, we propose a novel approach to adversarial robustness, which builds upon the insights from the domain adaptation field. Our method, called Adversarial Feature Desensitization (AFD), aims at learning features that are invariant towards adversarial perturbations of the inputs. This is achieved through a game where we learn features that are both predictive and robust (insensitive to adversarial attacks), i.e. cannot be used to discriminate between natural and adversarial data. Empirical results on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach against a wide range of attack types and attack strengths. Our code is available at https://github.com/BashivanLab/afd.
SEFR: A Fast Linear-Time Classifier for Ultra-Low Power Devices
Authors: Hamidreza Keshavarz, Mohammad Saniee Abadeh, Reza Rawassizadeh
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

A fundamental challenge for running machine learning algorithms on battery-powered devices is the time and energy limitations, as these devices have constraints on resources. There are resource-efficient classifier algorithms that can run on these devices, but their accuracy is often sacrificed for resource efficiency. Here, we propose an ultra-low power classifier, SEFR, with linear time complexity, both in the training and the testing phases. SEFR is comparable to state-of-the-art classifiers in terms of classification accuracy, but it is 63 times faster and 70 times more energy efficient than the average of state-of-the-art and baseline classifiers on binary class datasets. The energy and memory consumption of SEFR is very insignificant, and it can even perform both train and test phases on microcontrollers. To our knowledge, this is the first multipurpose classification algorithm specifically designed to perform both training and testing on ultra-low power devices.
A Comprehensive Survey on Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Kaustubh Yadav
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Sentiment Analysis, Survey

Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is the sub-field of Natural Language Processing that deals with essentially splitting our data into aspects ad finally extracting the sentiment information. ABSA is known to provide more information about the context than general sentiment analysis. In this study, our aim is to explore the various methodologies practiced while performing ABSA, and providing a comparative study. This survey paper discusses various solutions in-depth and gives a comparison between them. And is conveniently divided into sections to get a holistic view on the process.
SoftFlow: Probabilistic Framework for Normalizing Flow on Manifolds
Authors: Hyeongju Kim, Hyeonseung Lee, Woo Hyun Kang, Joun Yeop Lee, Nam Soo Kim
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Point Cloud Generation

Flow-based generative models are composed of invertible transformations between two random variables of the same dimension. Therefore, flow-based models cannot be adequately trained if the dimension of the data distribution does not match that of the underlying target distribution. In this paper, we propose SoftFlow, a probabilistic framework for training normalizing flows on manifolds. To sidestep the dimension mismatch problem, SoftFlow estimates a conditional distribution of the perturbed input data instead of learning the data distribution directly. We experimentally show that SoftFlow can capture the innate structure of the manifold data and generate high-quality samples unlike the conventional flow-based models. Furthermore, we apply the proposed framework to 3D point clouds to alleviate the difficulty of forming thin structures for flow-based models. The proposed model for 3D point clouds, namely SoftPointFlow, can estimate the distribution of various shapes more accurately and achieves state-of-the-art performance in point cloud generation.