pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning-by-Narrating: Narrative Pre-Training for Zero-Shot Dialogue Comprehension
Authors: Chao Zhao, Wenlin Yao, Dian Yu, Kaiqiang Song, Dong Yu, Jianshu Chen
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Comprehending a dialogue requires a model to capture diverse kinds of key information in the utterances, which are either scattered around or implicitly implied in different turns of conversations. Therefore, dialogue comprehension requires diverse capabilities such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and commonsense reasoning. Towards the objective of pre-training a zero-shot dialogue comprehension model, we develop a novel narrative-guided pre-training strategy that learns by narrating the key information from a dialogue input. However, the dialogue-narrative parallel corpus for such a pre-training strategy is currently unavailable. For this reason, we first construct a dialogue-narrative parallel corpus by automatically aligning movie subtitles and their synopses. We then pre-train a BART model on the data and evaluate its performance on four dialogue-based tasks that require comprehension. Experimental results show that our model not only achieves superior zero-shot performance but also exhibits stronger fine-grained dialogue comprehension capabilities. The data and code are available at https://github.com/zhaochaocs/Diana
ChartQA: A Benchmark for Question Answering about Charts with Visual and Logical Reasoning
Authors: Ahmed Masry, Do Xuan Long, Jia Qing Tan, Shafiq Joty, Enamul Hoque
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Chart Question Answering, Logical Reasoning, Question Answering

Charts are very popular for analyzing data. When exploring charts, people often ask a variety of complex reasoning questions that involve several logical and arithmetic operations. They also commonly refer to visual features of a chart in their questions. However, most existing datasets do not focus on such complex reasoning questions as their questions are template-based and answers come from a fixed-vocabulary. In this work, we present a large-scale benchmark covering 9.6K human-written questions as well as 23.1K questions generated from human-written chart summaries. To address the unique challenges in our benchmark involving visual and logical reasoning over charts, we present two transformer-based models that combine visual features and the data table of the chart in a unified way to answer questions. While our models achieve the state-of-the-art results on the previous datasets as well as on our benchmark, the evaluation also reveals several challenges in answering complex reasoning questions.
DuReader_retrieval: A Large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Retrieval from Web Search Engine
Authors: Yifu Qiu, Hongyu Li, Yingqi Qu, Ying Chen, Qiaoqiao She, Jing Liu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Passage Retrieval, Retrieval

In this paper, we present DuReader_retrieval, a large-scale Chinese dataset for passage retrieval. DuReader_retrieval contains more than 90K queries and over 8M unique passages from a commercial search engine. To alleviate the shortcomings of other datasets and ensure the quality of our benchmark, we (1) reduce the false negatives in development and test sets by manually annotating results pooled from multiple retrievers, and (2) remove the training queries that are semantically similar to the development and testing queries. Additionally, we provide two out-of-domain testing sets for cross-domain evaluation, as well as a set of human translated queries for for cross-lingual retrieval evaluation. The experiments demonstrate that DuReader_retrieval is challenging and a number of problems remain unsolved, such as the salient phrase mismatch and the syntactic mismatch between queries and paragraphs. These experiments also show that dense retrievers do not generalize well across domains, and cross-lingual retrieval is essentially challenging. DuReader_retrieval is publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader/tree/master/DuReader-Retrieval.
Event Coreference Resolution for Contentious Politics Events
Authors: Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Osman Mutlu, Fatih Beyhan, Fırat Duruşan, Ali Safaya, Reyyan Yeniterzi, Erdem Yörük
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Event Coreference Resolution

We propose a dataset for event coreference resolution, which is based on random samples drawn from multiple sources, languages, and countries. Early scholarship on event information collection has not quantified the contribution of event coreference resolution. We prepared and analyzed a representative multilingual corpus and measured the performance and contribution of the state-of-the-art event coreference resolution approaches. We found that almost half of the event mentions in documents co-occur with other event mentions and this makes it inevitable to obtain erroneous or partial event information. We showed that event coreference resolution could help improving this situation. Our contribution sheds light on a challenge that has been overlooked or hard to study to date. Future event information collection studies can be designed based on the results we present in this report. The repository for this study is on https://github.com/emerging-welfare/ECR4-Contentious-Politics.
A New Quantum CNN Model for Image Classification
Authors: X. Q. Zhao, T. L. Chen
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Question Answering

Quantum density matrix represents all the information of the entire quantum system, and novel models of meaning employing density matrices naturally model linguistic phenomena such as hyponymy and linguistic ambiguity, among others in quantum question answering tasks. Naturally, we argue that the quantum density matrix can enhance the image feature information and the relationship between the features for the classical image classification. Specifically, we (i) combine density matrices and CNN to design a new mechanism; (ii) apply the new mechanism to some representative classical image classification tasks. A series of experiments show that the application of quantum density matrix in image classification has the generalization and high efficiency on different datasets. The application of quantum density matrix both in classical question answering tasks and classical image classification tasks show more effective performance.
Linking Theories and Methods in Cognitive Sciences via Joint Embedding of the Scientific Literature: The Example of Cognitive Control
Authors: Morteza Ansarinia, Paul Schrater, Pedro Cardoso-Leite
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Traditionally, theory and practice of Cognitive Control are linked via literature reviews by human domain experts. This approach, however, is inadequate to track the ever-growing literature. It may also be biased, and yield redundancies and confusion. Here we present an alternative approach. We performed automated text analyses on a large body of scientific texts to create a joint representation of tasks and constructs. More specifically, 385,705 scientific abstracts were first mapped into an embedding space using a transformers-based language model. Document embeddings were then used to identify a task-construct graph embedding that grounds constructs on tasks and supports nuanced meaning of the constructs by taking advantage of constrained random walks in the graph. This joint task-construct graph embedding, can be queried to generate task batteries targeting specific constructs, may reveal knowledge gaps in the literature, and inspire new tasks and novel hypotheses.
A Scalable Approach to Modeling on Accelerated Neuromorphic Hardware
Authors: Eric Müller, Elias Arnold, Oliver Breitwieser, Milena Czierlinski, Arne Emmel, Jakob Kaiser, Christian Mauch, Sebastian Schmitt, Philipp Spilger, Raphael Stock, Yannik Stradmann, Johannes Weis, Andreas Baumbach, Sebastian Billaudelle, Benjamin Cramer, Falk Ebert, Julian Göltz, Joscha Ilmberger, Vitali Karasenko, Mitja Kleider, Aron Leibfried, Christian Pehle, Johannes Schemmel
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00

Neuromorphic systems open up opportunities to enlarge the explorative space for computational research. However, it is often challenging to unite efficiency and usability. This work presents the software aspects of this endeavor for the BrainScaleS-2 system, a hybrid accelerated neuromorphic hardware architecture based on physical modeling. We introduce key aspects of the BrainScaleS-2 Operating System: experiment workflow, API layering, software design, and platform operation. We present use cases to discuss and derive requirements for the software and showcase the implementation. The focus lies on novel system and software features such as multi-compartmental neurons, fast re-configuration for hardware-in-the-loop training, applications for the embedded processors, the non-spiking operation mode, interactive platform access, and sustainable hardware/software co-development. Finally, we discuss further developments in terms of hardware scale-up, system usability and efficiency.
Quantum Neural Networks -- Computational Field Theory and Dynamics
Authors: Carlos Pedro Gonçalves
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00

To address Quantum Artificial Neural Networks as quantum dynamical computing systems, a formalization of quantum artificial neural networks as dynamical systems is developed, expanding the concept of unitary map to the neural computation setting and introducing a quantum computing field theory on the network. The formalism is illustrated in a simulation of a quantum recurrent neural network and the resulting field dynamics is researched upon, showing emergent neural waves with excitation and relaxation cycles at the level of the quantum neural activity field, as well as edge of chaos signatures, with the local neurons operating as far-from-equilibrium open quantum systems, exhibiting entropy fluctuations with complex dynamics including complex quasiperiodic patterns and power law signatures. The implications for quantum computer science, quantum complexity research, quantum technologies and neuroscience are also addressed.
Automated Materials Spectroscopy Analysis using Genetic Algorithms
Authors: Miu Lun Lau, Min Long, Jeff Terry
Date: 2022-03-18 00:00:00

We introduce a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based, open-source project to solve multi-objective optimization problems of materials characterization data analysis including EXAFS, XPS and nanoindentation. The modular design and multiple crossover and mutation options make the software extensible for additional materials characterization applications too. This automation of the analysis is crucial in the era when instrumentation acquires data orders of magnitude more rapidly than it can be analyzed by hand. Our results demonstrated good fitness scores with minimal human intervention.
Transfer Dynamics in Emergent Evolutionary Curricula
Authors: Aaron Dharna, Amy K Hoover, Julian Togelius, L. B. Soros
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Artificial Life, Diversity

PINSKY is a system for open-ended learning through neuroevolution in game-based domains. It builds on the Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET) system, which originally explored learning and environment generation for bipedal walkers, and adapts it to games in the General Video Game AI (GVGAI) system. Previous work showed that by co-evolving levels and neural network policies, levels could be found for which successful policies could not be created via optimization alone. Studied in the realm of Artificial Life as a potentially open-ended alternative to gradient-based fitness, minimal criteria (MC)-based selection helps foster diversity in evolutionary populations. The main question addressed by this paper is how the open-ended learning actually works, focusing in particular on the role of transfer of policies from one evolutionary branch ("species") to another. We analyze the dynamics of the system through creating phylogenetic trees, analyzing evolutionary trajectories of policies, and temporally breaking down transfers according to species type. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of the minimal criterion on generated level diversity and inter-species transfer. The most insightful finding is that inter-species transfer, while rare, is crucial to the system's success.
Strong posterior contraction rates via Wasserstein dynamics
Authors: Emanuele Dolera, Stefano Favaro, Edoardo Mainini
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

In Bayesian statistics, posterior contraction rates (PCRs) quantify the speed at which the posterior distribution concentrates on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of a true model, in a suitable way, as the sample size goes to infinity. In this paper, we develop a new approach to PCRs, with respect to strong norm distances on parameter spaces of functions. Critical to our approach is the combination of a local Lipschitz-continuity for the posterior distribution with a dynamic formulation of the Wasserstein distance, which allows to set forth an interesting connection between PCRs and some classical problems arising in mathematical analysis, probability and statistics, e.g., Laplace methods for approximating integrals, Sanov's large deviation principles in the Wasserstein distance, rates of convergence of mean Glivenko-Cantelli theorems, and estimates of weighted Poincar\'e-Wirtinger constants. We first present a theorem on PCRs for a model in the regular infinite-dimensional exponential family, which exploits sufficient statistics of the model, and then extend such a theorem to a general dominated model. These results rely on the development of novel techniques to evaluate Laplace integrals and weighted Poincar\'e-Wirtinger constants in infinite-dimension, which are of independent interest. The proposed approach is applied to the regular parametric model, the multinomial model, the finite-dimensional and the infinite-dimensional logistic-Gaussian model and the infinite-dimensional linear regression. In general, our approach leads to optimal PCRs in finite-dimensional models, whereas for infinite-dimensional models it is shown explicitly how the prior distribution affect PCRs.
Confidence intervals for nonparametric regression
Authors: David Barrera
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We demonstrate and discuss nonasymptotic bounds in probability for the cost of a regression scheme with a general loss function from the perspective of the Rademacher theory, and for the optimality with respect to the average $L^{2}$-distance to the underlying conditional expectations of least squares regression outcomes from the perspective of the Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory. The results follow from an analysis involving independent but possibly nonstationary training samples and can be extended, in a manner that we explain and illustrate, to relevant cases in which the training sample exhibits dependence.
Convergence rates of the stochastic alternating algorithm for bi-objective optimization
Authors: Suyun Liu, Luis Nunes Vicente
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Stochastic alternating algorithms for bi-objective optimization are considered when optimizing two conflicting functions for which optimization steps have to be applied separately for each function. Such algorithms consist of applying a certain number of steps of gradient or subgradient descent on each single objective at each iteration. In this paper, we show that stochastic alternating algorithms achieve a sublinear convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$, under strong convexity, for the determination of a minimizer of a weighted-sum of the two functions, parameterized by the number of steps applied on each of them. An extension to the convex case is presented for which the rate weakens to $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$. These rates are valid also in the non-smooth case. Importantly, by varying the proportion of steps applied to each function, one can determine an approximation to the Pareto front.
Distributionally robust risk evaluation with a causality constraint and structural information
Authors: Bingyan Han
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00

This work studies the distributionally robust evaluation of expected values over temporal data. A set of alternative measures is characterized by the causal optimal transport. We prove the strong duality and recast the causality constraint as minimization over an infinite-dimensional test function space. We approximate test functions by neural networks and prove the sample complexity with Rademacher complexity. An example is given to validate the feasibility of technical assumptions. Moreover, when structural information is available to further restrict the ambiguity set, we prove the dual formulation and provide efficient optimization methods. Our framework outperforms the classic counterparts in the distributionally robust portfolio selection problem. The connection with the naive strategy is also investigated numerically.
How do noise tails impact on deep ReLU networks?
Authors: Jianqing Fan, Yihong Gu, Wen-Xin Zhou
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

This paper investigates the stability of deep ReLU neural networks for nonparametric regression under the assumption that the noise has only a finite p-th moment. We unveil how the optimal rate of convergence depends on p, the degree of smoothness and the intrinsic dimension in a class of nonparametric regression functions with hierarchical composition structure when both the adaptive Huber loss and deep ReLU neural networks are used. This optimal rate of convergence cannot be obtained by the ordinary least squares but can be achieved by the Huber loss with a properly chosen parameter that adapts to the sample size, smoothness, and moment parameters. A concentration inequality for the adaptive Huber ReLU neural network estimators with allowable optimization errors is also derived. To establish a matching lower bound within the class of neural network estimators using the Huber loss, we employ a different strategy from the traditional route: constructing a deep ReLU network estimator that has a better empirical loss than the true function and the difference between these two functions furnishes a low bound. This step is related to the Huberization bias, yet more critically to the approximability of deep ReLU networks. As a result, we also contribute some new results on the approximation theory of deep ReLU neural networks.
When regression coefficients change over time: A proposal
Authors: Malte Schierholz
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

A common approach in forecasting problems is to estimate a least-squares regression (or other statistical learning models) from past data, which is then applied to predict future outcomes. An underlying assumption is that the same correlations that were observed in the past still hold for the future. We propose a model for situations when this assumption is not met: adopting methods from the state space literature, we model how regression coefficients change over time. Our approach can shed light on the large uncertainties associated with forecasting the future, and how much of this is due to changing dynamics of the past. Our simulation study shows that accurate estimates are obtained when the outcome is continuous, but the procedure fails for binary outcomes.
Perturbation Analysis of Randomized SVD and its Applications to Statistics
Authors: Yichi Zhang, Minh Tang
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Matrix Completion

Randomized singular value decomposition (RSVD) is a class of computationally efficient algorithms for computing the truncated SVD of large data matrices. Given an $m \times n$ matrix $\widehat{{\mathbf M}}$, the prototypical RSVD algorithm outputs an approximation of the $k$ leading left singular vectors of $\widehat{\mathbf{M}}$ by computing the SVD of $\widehat{\mathbf{M}} (\widehat{{\mathbf M}}^{\top} \widehat{\mathbf{M}})^{g} \mathbf G$; here $g \geq 1$ is an integer and $\mathbf G \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times \widetilde{k}}$ is a random Gaussian sketching matrix with $\widetilde{k} \geq k$. In this paper we derive upper bounds for the $\ell_2$ and $\ell_{2,\infty}$ distances between the exact left singular vectors $\widehat{\mathbf{U}}$ of $\widehat{\mathbf{M}}$ and its approximation $\widehat{\mathbf{U}}_g$ (obtained via RSVD), as well as entrywise error bounds when $\widehat{\mathbf{M}}$ is projected onto $\widehat{\mathbf{U}}_g \widehat{\mathbf{U}}_g^{\top}$. These bounds depend on the singular values gap and number of power iterations $g$, and smaller gap requires larger values of $g$ to guarantee the convergences of the $\ell_2$ and $\ell_{2,\infty}$ distances. We apply our theoretical results to settings where $\widehat{\mathbf{M}}$ is an additive perturbation of some unobserved signal matrix $\mathbf{M}$. In particular, we obtain the nearly-optimal convergence rate and asymptotic normality for RSVD on three inference problems, namely, subspace estimation and community detection in random graphs, noisy matrix completion, and PCA with missing data.
Convergence Error Analysis of Reflected Gradient Langevin Dynamics for Globally Optimizing Non-Convex Constrained Problems
Authors: Kanji Sato, Akiko Takeda, Reiichiro Kawai, Taiji Suzuki
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

Gradient Langevin dynamics and a variety of its variants have attracted increasing attention owing to their convergence towards the global optimal solution, initially in the unconstrained convex framework while recently even in convex constrained non-convex problems. In the present work, we extend those frameworks to non-convex problems on a non-convex feasible region with a global optimization algorithm built upon reflected gradient Langevin dynamics and derive its convergence rates. By effectively making use of its reflection at the boundary in combination with the probabilistic representation for the Poisson equation with the Neumann boundary condition, we present promising convergence rates, particularly faster than the existing one for convex constrained non-convex problems.
IoT Data Discovery: Routing Table and Summarization Techniques
Authors: Hieu Tran, Son Nguyen, I-Ling Yen, Farokh Bastani
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00

In this paper, we consider the IoT data discovery problem in very large and growing scale networks. Through analysis, examples, and experimental studies, we show the importance of peer-to-peer, unstructured routing for IoT data discovery and point out the space efficiency issue that has been overlooked in keyword-based routing algorithms in unstructured networks. Specifically, as the first in the field, this paper investigates routing table designs and various compression techniques to support effective and space-efficient IoT data discovery routing. Novel summarization algorithms, including alphabetical, hash, and meaning-based summarization and their corresponding coding schemes, are proposed. We also consider routing table design to support summarization without degrading lookup efficiency for discovery query routing. The issue of potentially misleading routing due to summarization is also investigated. Subsequently, we analyze the strategy of when to summarize to balance the tradeoff between the routing table compression rate and the chance of causing misleading routing. For the experimental study, we have collected 100K IoT data streams from various IoT databases as the input dataset. Experimental results show that our summarization solution can reduce the routing table size by 20 to 30 folds with a 2-5% increase in latency compared with similar peer-to-peer discovery routing algorithms without summarization. Also, our approach outperforms DHT-based approaches by 2 to 6 folds in terms of latency and traffic.