pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LSA: Modeling Aspect Sentiment Coherency via Local Sentiment Aggregation
Authors: Heng Yang, Ke Li
Date: 2021-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Sentiment Classification, Sentiment Dependency Learning

Aspect sentiment coherency is an intriguing yet underexplored topic in the field of aspect-based sentiment classification. This concept reflects the common pattern where adjacent aspects often share similar sentiments. Despite its prevalence, current studies have not fully recognized the potential of modeling aspect sentiment coherency, including its implications in adversarial defense. To model aspect sentiment coherency, we propose a novel local sentiment aggregation (LSA) paradigm based on constructing a differential-weighted sentiment aggregation window. We have rigorously evaluated our model through experiments, and the results affirm the proficiency of LSA in terms of aspect coherency prediction and aspect sentiment classification. For instance, it outperforms existing models and achieves state-of-the-art sentiment classification performance across five public datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the promising ability of LSA in ABSC adversarial defense, thanks to its sentiment coherency modeling. To encourage further exploration and application of this concept, we have made our code publicly accessible. This will provide researchers with a valuable tool to delve into sentiment coherency modeling in future research.
LoveDA: A Remote Sensing Land-Cover Dataset for Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Junjue Wang, Zhuo Zheng, Ailong Ma, Xiaoyan Lu, Yanfei Zhong
Date: 2021-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Pseudo Label, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Deep learning approaches have shown promising results in remote sensing high spatial resolution (HSR) land-cover mapping. However, urban and rural scenes can show completely different geographical landscapes, and the inadequate generalizability of these algorithms hinders city-level or national-level mapping. Most of the existing HSR land-cover datasets mainly promote the research of learning semantic representation, thereby ignoring the model transferability. In this paper, we introduce the Land-cOVEr Domain Adaptive semantic segmentation (LoveDA) dataset to advance semantic and transferable learning. The LoveDA dataset contains 5987 HSR images with 166768 annotated objects from three different cities. Compared to the existing datasets, the LoveDA dataset encompasses two domains (urban and rural), which brings considerable challenges due to the: 1) multi-scale objects; 2) complex background samples; and 3) inconsistent class distributions. The LoveDA dataset is suitable for both land-cover semantic segmentation and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) tasks. Accordingly, we benchmarked the LoveDA dataset on eleven semantic segmentation methods and eight UDA methods. Some exploratory studies including multi-scale architectures and strategies, additional background supervision, and pseudo-label analysis were also carried out to address these challenges. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Junjue-Wang/LoveDA.
Graph Partner Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs
Authors: Langzhang Liang, Cuiyun Gao, Shiyi Chen, Shishi Duan, Yu Pan, Junjin Zheng, Lei Wang, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Graph Classification, Link Prediction, Node Classification

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are powerful for processing graph-structured data and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in several tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification. However, it is inevitable for deep GCNs to suffer from an over-smoothing issue that the representations of nodes will tend to be indistinguishable after repeated graph convolution operations. To address this problem, we propose the Graph Partner Neural Network (GPNN) which incorporates a de-parameterized GCN and a parameter-sharing MLP. We provide empirical and theoretical evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MLP partner on tackling over-smoothing while benefiting from appropriate smoothness. To further tackle over-smoothing and regulate the learning process, we introduce a well-designed consistency contrastive loss and KL divergence loss. Besides, we present a graph enhancement technique to improve the overall quality of edges in graphs. While most GCNs can work with shallow architecture only, GPNN can obtain better results through increasing model depth. Experiments on various node classification tasks have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of GPNN. Meanwhile, extensive ablation studies are conducted to investigate the contributions of each component in tackling over-smoothing and improving performance.
Discovering and Achieving Goals via World Models
Authors: Russell Mendonca, Oleh Rybkin, Kostas Daniilidis, Danijar Hafner, Deepak Pathak
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

How can artificial agents learn to solve many diverse tasks in complex visual environments in the absence of any supervision? We decompose this question into two problems: discovering new goals and learning to reliably achieve them. We introduce Latent Explorer Achiever (LEXA), a unified solution to these that learns a world model from image inputs and uses it to train an explorer and an achiever policy from imagined rollouts. Unlike prior methods that explore by reaching previously visited states, the explorer plans to discover unseen surprising states through foresight, which are then used as diverse targets for the achiever to practice. After the unsupervised phase, LEXA solves tasks specified as goal images zero-shot without any additional learning. LEXA substantially outperforms previous approaches to unsupervised goal-reaching, both on prior benchmarks and on a new challenging benchmark with a total of 40 test tasks spanning across four standard robotic manipulation and locomotion domains. LEXA further achieves goals that require interacting with multiple objects in sequence. Finally, to demonstrate the scalability and generality of LEXA, we train a single general agent across four distinct environments. Code and videos at https://orybkin.github.io/lexa/
MG-GCN: Scalable Multi-GPU GCN Training Framework
Authors: Muhammed Fatih Balin, Kaan Sancak, Ümit V. Çatalyürek
Date: 2021-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Full batch training of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models is not feasible on a single GPU for large graphs containing tens of millions of vertices or more. Recent work has shown that, for the graphs used in the machine learning community, communication becomes a bottleneck and scaling is blocked outside of the single machine regime. Thus, we propose MG-GCN, a multi-GPU GCN training framework taking advantage of the high-speed communication links between the GPUs present in multi-GPU systems. MG-GCN employs multiple High-Performance Computing optimizations, including efficient re-use of memory buffers to reduce the memory footprint of training GNN models, as well as communication and computation overlap. These optimizations enable execution on larger datasets, that generally do not fit into memory of a single GPU in state-of-the-art implementations. Furthermore, they contribute to achieve superior speedup compared to the state-of-the-art. For example, MG-GCN achieves super-linear speedup with respect to DGL, on the Reddit graph on both DGX-1 (V100) and DGX-A100.
Unsupervised Learned Kalman Filtering
Authors: Guy Revach, Nir Shlezinger, Timur Locher, Xiaoyong Ni, Ruud J. G. van Sloun, Yonina C. Eldar
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00

In this paper we adapt KalmanNet, which is a recently pro-posed deep neural network (DNN)-aided system whose architecture follows the operation of the model-based Kalman filter (KF), to learn its mapping in an unsupervised manner, i.e., without requiring ground-truth states. The unsupervised adaptation is achieved by exploiting the hybrid model-based/data-driven architecture of KalmanNet, which internally predicts the next observation as the KF does. These internal features are then used to compute the loss rather than the state estimate at the output of the system. With the capability of unsupervised learning, one can use KalmanNet not only to track the hidden state, but also to adapt to variations in the state space (SS) model. We numerically demonstrate that when the noise statistics are unknown, unsupervised KalmanNet achieves a similar performance to KalmanNet with supervised learning. We also show that we can adapt a pre-trained KalmanNet to changing SS models without providing additional data thanks to the unsupervised capabilities.
In a Nutshell, the Human Asked for This: Latent Goals for Following Temporal Specifications
Authors: Borja G. León, Murray Shanahan, Francesco Belardinelli
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

We address the problem of building agents whose goal is to learn to execute out-of distribution (OOD) multi-task instructions expressed in temporal logic (TL) by using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Recent works provided evidence that the agent's neural architecture is a key feature when DRL agents are learning to solve OOD tasks in TL. Yet, the studies on this topic are still in their infancy. In this work, we propose a new deep learning configuration with inductive biases that lead agents to generate latent representations of their current goal, yielding a stronger generalization performance. We use these latent-goal networks within a neuro-symbolic framework that executes multi-task formally-defined instructions and contrast the performance of the proposed neural networks against employing different state-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures when generalizing to unseen instructions in OOD environments.
NormFormer: Improved Transformer Pretraining with Extra Normalization
Authors: Sam Shleifer, Jason Weston, Myle Ott
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling

During pretraining, the Pre-LayerNorm transformer suffers from a gradient magnitude mismatch: gradients at early layers are much larger than at later layers. These issues can be alleviated by our proposed NormFormer architecture, which adds three normalization operations to each layer: a Layer Norm after self attention, head-wise scaling of self-attention outputs, and a Layer Norm after the first fully connected layer. The extra operations incur negligible compute cost (+0.4% parameter increase), but improve pretraining perplexity and downstream task performance for both causal and masked language models ranging from 125 Million to 2.7 Billion parameters. For example, adding NormFormer on top of our strongest 1.3B parameter baseline can reach equal perplexity 24% faster, or converge 0.27 perplexity better in the same compute budget. This model reaches GPT3-Large (1.3B) zero shot performance 60% faster. For masked language modeling, NormFormer improves fine-tuned GLUE performance by 1.9% on average. Code to train NormFormer models is available in fairseq https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/main/examples/normformer .
TLDR: Twin Learning for Dimensionality Reduction
Authors: Yannis Kalantidis, Carlos Lassance, Jon Almazan, Diane Larlus
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning

Dimensionality reduction methods are unsupervised approaches which learn low-dimensional spaces where some properties of the initial space, typically the notion of "neighborhood", are preserved. Such methods usually require propagation on large k-NN graphs or complicated optimization solvers. On the other hand, self-supervised learning approaches, typically used to learn representations from scratch, rely on simple and more scalable frameworks for learning. In this paper, we propose TLDR, a dimensionality reduction method for generic input spaces that is porting the recent self-supervised learning framework of Zbontar et al. (2021) to the specific task of dimensionality reduction, over arbitrary representations. We propose to use nearest neighbors to build pairs from a training set and a redundancy reduction loss to learn an encoder that produces representations invariant across such pairs. TLDR is a method that is simple, easy to train, and of broad applicability; it consists of an offline nearest neighbor computation step that can be highly approximated, and a straightforward learning process. Aiming for scalability, we focus on improving linear dimensionality reduction, and show consistent gains on image and document retrieval tasks, e.g. gaining +4% mAP over PCA on ROxford for GeM- AP, improving the performance of DINO on ImageNet or retaining it with a 10x compression.
Beltrami Flow and Neural Diffusion on Graphs
Authors: Benjamin Paul Chamberlain, James Rowbottom, Davide Eynard, Francesco Di Giovanni, Xiaowen Dong, Michael M Bronstein
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

We propose a novel class of graph neural networks based on the discretised Beltrami flow, a non-Euclidean diffusion PDE. In our model, node features are supplemented with positional encodings derived from the graph topology and jointly evolved by the Beltrami flow, producing simultaneously continuous feature learning and topology evolution. The resulting model generalises many popular graph neural networks and achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.
Goal Agnostic Planning using Maximum Likelihood Paths in Hypergraph World Models
Authors: Christopher Robinson
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this paper, we present a hypergraph--based machine learning algorithm, a datastructure--driven maintenance method, and a planning algorithm based on a probabilistic application of Dijkstra's algorithm. Together, these form a goal agnostic automated planning engine for an autonomous learning agent which incorporates beneficial properties of both classical Machine Learning and traditional Artificial Intelligence. We prove that the algorithm determines optimal solutions within the problem space, mathematically bound learning performance, and supply a mathematical model analyzing system state progression through time yielding explicit predictions for learning curves, goal achievement rates, and response to abstractions and uncertainty. To validate performance, we exhibit results from applying the agent to three archetypal planning problems, including composite hierarchical domains, and highlight empirical findings which illustrate properties elucidated in the analysis.
FMFCC-A: A Challenging Mandarin Dataset for Synthetic Speech Detection
Authors: Zhenyu Zhang, Yewei Gu, Xiaowei Yi, Xianfeng Zhao
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, Synthetic Speech Detection, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Conversion

As increasing development of text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) technologies, the detection of synthetic speech has been suffered dramatically. In order to promote the development of synthetic speech detection model against Mandarin TTS and VC technologies, we have constructed a challenging Mandarin dataset and organized the accompanying audio track of the first fake media forensic challenge of China Society of Image and Graphics (FMFCC-A). The FMFCC-A dataset is by far the largest publicly-available Mandarin dataset for synthetic speech detection, which contains 40,000 synthesized Mandarin utterances that generated by 11 Mandarin TTS systems and two Mandarin VC systems, and 10,000 genuine Mandarin utterances collected from 58 speakers. The FMFCC-A dataset is divided into the training, development and evaluation sets, which are used for the research of detection of synthesized Mandarin speech under various previously unknown speech synthesis systems or audio post-processing operations. In addition to describing the construction of the FMFCC-A dataset, we provide a detailed analysis of two baseline methods and the top-performing submissions from the FMFCC-A, which illustrates the usefulness and challenge of FMFCC-A dataset. We hope that the FMFCC-A dataset can fill the gap of lack of Mandarin datasets for synthetic speech detection.
Measuring Cognitive Status from Speech in a Smart Home Environment
Authors: Kathleen C. Fraser, Majid Komeili
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00

The population is aging, and becoming more tech-savvy. The United Nations predicts that by 2050, one in six people in the world will be over age 65 (up from one in 11 in 2019), and this increases to one in four in Europe and Northern America. Meanwhile, the proportion of American adults over 65 who own a smartphone has risen 24 percentage points from 2013-2017, and the majority have Internet in their homes. Smart devices and smart home technology have profound potential to transform how people age, their ability to live independently in later years, and their interactions with their circle of care. Cognitive health is a key component to independence and well-being in old age, and smart homes present many opportunities to measure cognitive status in a continuous, unobtrusive manner. In this article, we focus on speech as a measurement instrument for cognitive health. Existing methods of cognitive assessment suffer from a number of limitations that could be addressed through smart home speech sensing technologies. We begin with a brief tutorial on measuring cognitive status from speech, including some pointers to useful open-source software toolboxes for the interested reader. We then present an overview of the preliminary results from pilot studies on active and passive smart home speech sensing for the measurement of cognitive health, and conclude with some recommendations and challenge statements for the next wave of work in this area, to help overcome both technical and ethical barriers to success.
Ceasing hate withMoH: Hate Speech Detection in Hindi-English Code-Switched Language
Authors: Arushi Sharma, Anubha Kabra, Minni Jain
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection, Language Identification, Transliteration

Social media has become a bedrock for people to voice their opinions worldwide. Due to the greater sense of freedom with the anonymity feature, it is possible to disregard social etiquette online and attack others without facing severe consequences, inevitably propagating hate speech. The current measures to sift the online content and offset the hatred spread do not go far enough. One factor contributing to this is the prevalence of regional languages in social media and the paucity of language flexible hate speech detectors. The proposed work focuses on analyzing hate speech in Hindi-English code-switched language. Our method explores transformation techniques to capture precise text representation. To contain the structure of data and yet use it with existing algorithms, we developed MoH or Map Only Hindi, which means "Love" in Hindi. MoH pipeline consists of language identification, Roman to Devanagari Hindi transliteration using a knowledge base of Roman Hindi words. Finally, it employs the fine-tuned Multilingual Bert and MuRIL language models. We conducted several quantitative experiment studies on three datasets and evaluated performance using Precision, Recall, and F1 metrics. The first experiment studies MoH mapped text's performance with classical machine learning models and shows an average increase of 13% in F1 scores. The second compares the proposed work's scores with those of the baseline models and offers a rise in performance by 6%. Finally, the third reaches the proposed MoH technique with various data simulations using the existing transliteration library. Here, MoH outperforms the rest by 15%. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement in the state-of-the-art scores on all three datasets.
Neuro-Symbolic Forward Reasoning
Authors: Hikaru Shindo, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Object

Reasoning is an essential part of human intelligence and thus has been a long-standing goal in artificial intelligence research. With the recent success of deep learning, incorporating reasoning with deep learning systems, i.e., neuro-symbolic AI has become a major field of interest. We propose the Neuro-Symbolic Forward Reasoner (NSFR), a new approach for reasoning tasks taking advantage of differentiable forward-chaining using first-order logic. The key idea is to combine differentiable forward-chaining reasoning with object-centric (deep) learning. Differentiable forward-chaining reasoning computes logical entailments smoothly, i.e., it deduces new facts from given facts and rules in a differentiable manner. The object-centric learning approach factorizes raw inputs into representations in terms of objects. Thus, it allows us to provide a consistent framework to perform the forward-chaining inference from raw inputs. NSFR factorizes the raw inputs into the object-centric representations, converts them into probabilistic ground atoms, and finally performs differentiable forward-chaining inference using weighted rules for inference. Our comprehensive experimental evaluations on object-centric reasoning data sets, 2D Kandinsky patterns and 3D CLEVR-Hans, and a variety of tasks show the effectiveness and advantage of our approach.
Forecasting Nonverbal Social Signals during Dyadic Interactions with Generative Adversarial Neural Networks
Authors: Nguyen Tan Viet Tuyen, Oya Celiktutan
Date: 2021-10-18 00:00:00

We are approaching a future where social robots will progressively become widespread in many aspects of our daily lives, including education, healthcare, work, and personal use. All of such practical applications require that humans and robots collaborate in human environments, where social interaction is unavoidable. Along with verbal communication, successful social interaction is closely coupled with the interplay between nonverbal perception and action mechanisms, such as observation of gaze behaviour and following their attention, coordinating the form and function of hand gestures. Humans perform nonverbal communication in an instinctive and adaptive manner, with no effort. For robots to be successful in our social landscape, they should therefore engage in social interactions in a humanlike way, with increasing levels of autonomy. In particular, nonverbal gestures are expected to endow social robots with the capability of emphasizing their speech, or showing their intentions. Motivated by this, our research sheds a light on modeling human behaviors in social interactions, specifically, forecasting human nonverbal social signals during dyadic interactions, with an overarching goal of developing robotic interfaces that can learn to imitate human dyadic interactions. Such an approach will ensure the messages encoded in the robot gestures could be perceived by interacting partners in a facile and transparent manner, which could help improve the interacting partner perception and makes the social interaction outcomes enhanced.