pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamically Sampled Nonlocal Gradients for Stronger Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Leo Schwinn, An Nguyen, René Raab, Dario Zanca, Bjoern Eskofier, Daniel Tenbrinck, Martin Burger
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to small and even imperceptible perturbations has become a central topic in deep learning research. Although several sophisticated defense mechanisms have been introduced, most were later shown to be ineffective. However, a reliable evaluation of model robustness is mandatory for deployment in safety-critical scenarios. To overcome this problem we propose a simple yet effective modification to the gradient calculation of state-of-the-art first-order adversarial attacks. Normally, the gradient update of an attack is directly calculated for the given data point. This approach is sensitive to noise and small local optima of the loss function. Inspired by gradient sampling techniques from non-convex optimization, we propose Dynamically Sampled Nonlocal Gradient Descent (DSNGD). DSNGD calculates the gradient direction of the adversarial attack as the weighted average over past gradients of the optimization history. Moreover, distribution hyperparameters that define the sampling operation are automatically learned during the optimization scheme. We empirically show that by incorporating this nonlocal gradient information, we are able to give a more accurate estimation of the global descent direction on noisy and non-convex loss surfaces. In addition, we show that DSNGD-based attacks are on average 35% faster while achieving 0.9% to 27.1% higher success rates compared to their gradient descent-based counterparts.
Improving Commonsense Question Answering by Graph-based Iterative Retrieval over Multiple Knowledge Sources
Authors: Qianglong Chen, Feng Ji, Haiqing Chen, Yin Zhang
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Retrieval

In order to facilitate natural language understanding, the key is to engage commonsense or background knowledge. However, how to engage commonsense effectively in question answering systems is still under exploration in both research academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel question-answering method by integrating multiple knowledge sources, i.e. ConceptNet, Wikipedia, and the Cambridge Dictionary, to boost the performance. More concretely, we first introduce a novel graph-based iterative knowledge retrieval module, which iteratively retrieves concepts and entities related to the given question and its choices from multiple knowledge sources. Afterward, we use a pre-trained language model to encode the question, retrieved knowledge and choices, and propose an answer choice-aware attention mechanism to fuse all hidden representations of the previous modules. Finally, the linear classifier for specific tasks is used to predict the answer. Experimental results on the CommonsenseQA dataset show that our method significantly outperforms other competitive methods and achieves the new state-of-the-art. In addition, further ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our graph-based iterative knowledge retrieval module and the answer choice-aware attention module in retrieving and synthesizing background knowledge from multiple knowledge sources.
A Black-Box Attack Model for Visually-Aware Recommender Systems
Authors: Rami Cohen, Oren Sar Shalom, Dietmar Jannach, Amihood Amir
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Due to the advances in deep learning, visually-aware recommender systems (RS) have recently attracted increased research interest. Such systems combine collaborative signals with images, usually represented as feature vectors outputted by pre-trained image models. Since item catalogs can be huge, recommendation service providers often rely on images that are supplied by the item providers. In this work, we show that relying on such external sources can make an RS vulnerable to attacks, where the goal of the attacker is to unfairly promote certain pushed items. Specifically, we demonstrate how a new visual attack model can effectively influence the item scores and rankings in a black-box approach, i.e., without knowing the parameters of the model. The main underlying idea is to systematically create small human-imperceptible perturbations of the pushed item image and to devise appropriate gradient approximation methods to incrementally raise the pushed item's score. Experimental evaluations on two datasets show that the novel attack model is effective even when the contribution of the visual features to the overall performance of the recommender system is modest.
Exact Phase Transitions of Model RB with Slower-Growing Domains
Authors: Jun Liu, Ke Xu, Guangyan Zhou
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00

The second moment method has always been an effective tool to lower bound the satisfiability threshold of many random constraint satisfaction problems. However, the calculation is usually hard to carry out and as a result, only some loose results can be obtained. In this paper, based on a delicate analysis which fully exploit the power of the second moment method, we prove that random RB instances can exhibit exact phase transition under more relaxed conditions, especially slower-growing domain size. These results are the best by using the second moment method, and new tools should be introduced for any better results.
Center-wise Local Image Mixture For Contrastive Representation Learning
Authors: Hao Li, Xiaopeng Zhang, Hongkai Xiong
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Linear evaluation, Representation Learning, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Contrastive learning based on instance discrimination trains model to discriminate different transformations of the anchor sample from other samples, which does not consider the semantic similarity among samples. This paper proposes a new kind of contrastive learning method, named CLIM, which uses positives from other samples in the dataset. This is achieved by searching local similar samples of the anchor, and selecting samples that are closer to the corresponding cluster center, which we denote as center-wise local image selection. The selected samples are instantiated via an data mixture strategy, which performs as a smoothing regularization. As a result, CLIM encourages both local similarity and global aggregation in a robust way, which we find is beneficial for feature representation. Besides, we introduce \emph{multi-resolution} augmentation, which enables the representation to be scale invariant. We reach 75.5% top-1 accuracy with linear evaluation over ResNet-50, and 59.3% top-1 accuracy when fine-tuned with only 1% labels.
Amortized Conditional Normalized Maximum Likelihood: Reliable Out of Distribution Uncertainty Estimation
Authors: Aurick Zhou, Sergey Levine
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

While deep neural networks provide good performance for a range of challenging tasks, calibration and uncertainty estimation remain major challenges, especially under distribution shift. In this paper, we propose the amortized conditional normalized maximum likelihood (ACNML) method as a scalable general-purpose approach for uncertainty estimation, calibration, and out-of-distribution robustness with deep networks. Our algorithm builds on the conditional normalized maximum likelihood (CNML) coding scheme, which has minimax optimal properties according to the minimum description length principle, but is computationally intractable to evaluate exactly for all but the simplest of model classes. We propose to use approximate Bayesian inference technqiues to produce a tractable approximation to the CNML distribution. Our approach can be combined with any approximate inference algorithm that provides tractable posterior densities over model parameters. We demonstrate that ACNML compares favorably to a number of prior techniques for uncertainty estimation in terms of calibration on out-of-distribution inputs.
Binary Neural Network Aided CSI Feedback in Massive MIMO System
Authors: Zhilin Lu, Jintao Wang, Jian Song
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, channel state information (CSI) is essential for the base station to achieve high performance gain. Recently, deep learning is widely used in CSI compression to fight against the growing feedback overhead brought by massive MIMO in frequency division duplexing system. However, applying neural network brings extra memory and computation cost, which is non-negligible especially for the resource limited user equipment (UE). In this paper, a novel binarization aided feedback network named BCsiNet is introduced. Moreover, BCsiNet variants are designed to boost the performance under customized training and inference schemes. Experiments shows that BCsiNet offers over 30$\times$ memory saving and around 2$\times$ inference acceleration for encoder at UE compared with CsiNet. Furthermore, the feedback performance of BCsiNet is comparable with original CsiNet. The key results can be reproduced with https://github.com/Kylin9511/BCsiNet.
Entity Linking in 100 Languages
Authors: Jan A. Botha, Zifei Shan, Daniel Gillick
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Entity Disambiguation, Entity Linking, Entity Retrieval, Retrieval

We propose a new formulation for multilingual entity linking, where language-specific mentions resolve to a language-agnostic Knowledge Base. We train a dual encoder in this new setting, building on prior work with improved feature representation, negative mining, and an auxiliary entity-pairing task, to obtain a single entity retrieval model that covers 100+ languages and 20 million entities. The model outperforms state-of-the-art results from a far more limited cross-lingual linking task. Rare entities and low-resource languages pose challenges at this large-scale, so we advocate for an increased focus on zero- and few-shot evaluation. To this end, we provide Mewsli-9, a large new multilingual dataset (http://goo.gle/mewsli-dataset) matched to our setting, and show how frequency-based analysis provided key insights for our model and training enhancements.
Context-Aware Answer Extraction in Question Answering
Authors: Yeon Seonwoo, Ji-Hoon Kim, Jung-Woo Ha, Alice Oh
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Prediction, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Extractive QA models have shown very promising performance in predicting the correct answer to a question for a given passage. However, they sometimes result in predicting the correct answer text but in a context irrelevant to the given question. This discrepancy becomes especially important as the number of occurrences of the answer text in a passage increases. To resolve this issue, we propose \textbf{BLANC} (\textbf{BL}ock \textbf{A}ttentio\textbf{N} for \textbf{C}ontext prediction) based on two main ideas: context prediction as an auxiliary task in multi-task learning manner, and a block attention method that learns the context prediction task. With experiments on reading comprehension, we show that BLANC outperforms the state-of-the-art QA models, and the performance gap increases as the number of answer text occurrences increases. We also conduct an experiment of training the models using SQuAD and predicting the supporting facts on HotpotQA and show that BLANC outperforms all baseline models in this zero-shot setting.
Investigating Societal Biases in a Poetry Composition System
Authors: Emily Sheng, David Uthus
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: GeBNLP (COLING) 2020 12
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Retrieval, Style Transfer

There is a growing collection of work analyzing and mitigating societal biases in language understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks, though examining biases in creative tasks remains underexplored. Creative language applications are meant for direct interaction with users, so it is important to quantify and mitigate societal biases in these applications. We introduce a novel study on a pipeline to mitigate societal biases when retrieving next verse suggestions in a poetry composition system. Our results suggest that data augmentation through sentiment style transfer has potential for mitigating societal biases.
Nonparametric Variable Screening with Optimal Decision Stumps
Authors: Jason M. Klusowski, Peter M. Tian
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Model Selection, Variable Selection

Decision trees and their ensembles are endowed with a rich set of diagnostic tools for ranking and screening variables in a predictive model. Despite the widespread use of tree based variable importance measures, pinning down their theoretical properties has been challenging and therefore largely unexplored. To address this gap between theory and practice, we derive finite sample performance guarantees for variable selection in nonparametric models using a single-level CART decision tree (a decision stump). Under standard operating assumptions in variable screening literature, we find that the marginal signal strength of each variable and ambient dimensionality can be considerably weaker and higher, respectively, than state-of-the-art nonparametric variable selection methods. Furthermore, unlike previous marginal screening methods that attempt to directly estimate each marginal projection via a truncated basis expansion, the fitted model used here is a simple, parsimonious decision stump, thereby eliminating the need for tuning the number of basis terms. Thus, surprisingly, even though decision stumps are highly inaccurate for estimation purposes, they can still be used to perform consistent model selection.
Multi-task learning for electronic structure to predict and explore molecular potential energy surfaces
Authors: Zhuoran Qiao, Feizhi Ding, Matthew Welborn, Peter J. Bygrave, Daniel G. A. Smith, Animashree Anandkumar, Frederick R. Manby, Thomas F. Miller III
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Multi-Task Learning

We refine the OrbNet model to accurately predict energy, forces, and other response properties for molecules using a graph neural-network architecture based on features from low-cost approximated quantum operators in the symmetry-adapted atomic orbital basis. The model is end-to-end differentiable due to the derivation of analytic gradients for all electronic structure terms, and is shown to be transferable across chemical space due to the use of domain-specific features. The learning efficiency is improved by incorporating physically motivated constraints on the electronic structure through multi-task learning. The model outperforms existing methods on energy prediction tasks for the QM9 dataset and for molecular geometry optimizations on conformer datasets, at a computational cost that is thousand-fold or more reduced compared to conventional quantum-chemistry calculations (such as density functional theory) that offer similar accuracy.
A Multi-resolution Model for Histopathology Image Classification and Localization with Multiple Instance Learning
Authors: Jiayun Li, Wenyuan Li, Anthony Sisk, Huihui Ye, W. Dean Wallace, William Speier, Corey W. Arnold
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Multiple Instance Learning, whole slide images

Histopathological images provide rich information for disease diagnosis. Large numbers of histopathological images have been digitized into high resolution whole slide images, opening opportunities in developing computational image analysis tools to reduce pathologists' workload and potentially improve inter- and intra- observer agreement. Most previous work on whole slide image analysis has focused on classification or segmentation of small pre-selected regions-of-interest, which requires fine-grained annotation and is non-trivial to extend for large-scale whole slide analysis. In this paper, we proposed a multi-resolution multiple instance learning model that leverages saliency maps to detect suspicious regions for fine-grained grade prediction. Instead of relying on expensive region- or pixel-level annotations, our model can be trained end-to-end with only slide-level labels. The model is developed on a large-scale prostate biopsy dataset containing 20,229 slides from 830 patients. The model achieved 92.7% accuracy, 81.8% Cohen's Kappa for benign, low grade (i.e. Grade group 1) and high grade (i.e. Grade group >= 2) prediction, an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 98.2% and an average precision (AP) of 97.4% for differentiating malignant and benign slides. The model obtained an AUROC of 99.4% and an AP of 99.8% for cancer detection on an external dataset.
BW-EDA-EEND: Streaming End-to-End Neural Speaker Diarization for a Variable Number of Speakers
Authors: Eunjung Han, Chul Lee, Andreas Stolcke
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Decoder, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization

We present a novel online end-to-end neural diarization system, BW-EDA-EEND, that processes data incrementally for a variable number of speakers. The system is based on the Encoder-Decoder-Attractor (EDA) architecture of Horiguchi et al., but utilizes the incremental Transformer encoder, attending only to its left contexts and using block-level recurrence in the hidden states to carry information from block to block, making the algorithm complexity linear in time. We propose two variants: For unlimited-latency BW-EDA-EEND, which processes inputs in linear time, we show only moderate degradation for up to two speakers using a context size of 10 seconds compared to offline EDA-EEND. With more than two speakers, the accuracy gap between online and offline grows, but the algorithm still outperforms a baseline offline clustering diarization system for one to four speakers with unlimited context size, and shows comparable accuracy with context size of 10 seconds. For limited-latency BW-EDA-EEND, which produces diarization outputs block-by-block as audio arrives, we show accuracy comparable to the offline clustering-based system.
Defense-friendly Images in Adversarial Attacks: Dataset and Metrics for Perturbation Difficulty
Authors: Camilo Pestana, Wei Liu, David Glance, Ajmal Mian
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Benchmarking

Dataset bias is a problem in adversarial machine learning, especially in the evaluation of defenses. An adversarial attack or defense algorithm may show better results on the reported dataset than can be replicated on other datasets. Even when two algorithms are compared, their relative performance can vary depending on the dataset. Deep learning offers state-of-the-art solutions for image recognition, but deep models are vulnerable even to small perturbations. Research in this area focuses primarily on adversarial attacks and defense algorithms. In this paper, we report for the first time, a class of robust images that are both resilient to attacks and that recover better than random images under adversarial attacks using simple defense techniques. Thus, a test dataset with a high proportion of robust images gives a misleading impression about the performance of an adversarial attack or defense. We propose three metrics to determine the proportion of robust images in a dataset and provide scoring to determine the dataset bias. We also provide an ImageNet-R dataset of 15000+ robust images to facilitate further research on this intriguing phenomenon of image strength under attack. Our dataset, combined with the proposed metrics, is valuable for unbiased benchmarking of adversarial attack and defense algorithms.
AOT: Appearance Optimal Transport Based Identity Swapping for Forgery Detection
Authors: Hao Zhu, Chaoyou Fu, Qianyi Wu, Wayne Wu, Chen Qian, Ran He
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Visual Object Tracking

Recent studies have shown that the performance of forgery detection can be improved with diverse and challenging Deepfakes datasets. However, due to the lack of Deepfakes datasets with large variance in appearance, which can be hardly produced by recent identity swapping methods, the detection algorithm may fail in this situation. In this work, we provide a new identity swapping algorithm with large differences in appearance for face forgery detection. The appearance gaps mainly arise from the large discrepancies in illuminations and skin colors that widely exist in real-world scenarios. However, due to the difficulties of modeling the complex appearance mapping, it is challenging to transfer fine-grained appearances adaptively while preserving identity traits. This paper formulates appearance mapping as an optimal transport problem and proposes an Appearance Optimal Transport model (AOT) to formulate it in both latent and pixel space. Specifically, a relighting generator is designed to simulate the optimal transport plan. It is solved via minimizing the Wasserstein distance of the learned features in the latent space, enabling better performance and less computation than conventional optimization. To further refine the solution of the optimal transport plan, we develop a segmentation game to minimize the Wasserstein distance in the pixel space. A discriminator is introduced to distinguish the fake parts from a mix of real and fake image patches. Extensive experiments reveal that the superiority of our method when compared with state-of-the-art methods and the ability of our generated data to improve the performance of face forgery detection.
Stochastic Approximation for High-frequency Observations in Data Assimilation
Authors: Shushu Zhang, Vivak Patel
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

With the increasing penetration of high-frequency sensors across a number of biological and physical systems, the abundance of the resulting observations offers opportunities for higher statistical accuracy of down-stream estimates, but their frequency results in a plethora of computational problems in data assimilation tasks. The high-frequency of these observations has been traditionally dealt with by using data modification strategies such as accumulation, averaging, and sampling. However, these data modification strategies will reduce the quality of the estimates, which may be untenable for many systems. Therefore, to ensure high-quality estimates, we adapt stochastic approximation methods to address the unique challenges of high-frequency observations in data assimilation. As a result, we are able to produce estimates that leverage all of the observations in a manner that avoids the aforementioned computational problems and preserves the statistical accuracy of the estimates.
HILONet: Hierarchical Imitation Learning from Non-Aligned Observations
Authors: Shanqi Liu, Junjie Cao, Wenzhou Chen, Licheng Wen, Yong liu
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Position

It is challenging learning from demonstrated observation-only trajectories in a non-time-aligned environment because most imitation learning methods aim to imitate experts by following the demonstration step-by-step. However, aligned demonstrations are seldom obtainable in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a new imitation learning approach called Hierarchical Imitation Learning from Observation(HILONet), which adopts a hierarchical structure to choose feasible sub-goals from demonstrated observations dynamically. Our method can solve all kinds of tasks by achieving these sub-goals, whether it has a single goal position or not. We also present three different ways to increase sample efficiency in the hierarchical structure. We conduct extensive experiments using several environments. The results show the improvement in both performance and learning efficiency.