pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DEXTER: Deep Encoding of External Knowledge for Named Entity Recognition in Virtual Assistants
Authors: Deepak Muralidharan, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Weicheng Zhang, Stephen Pulman, Lin Li, Megan Barnes, Jingjing Pan, Jason Williams, Alex Acero
Date: 2021-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Semantic Parsing, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) is usually developed and tested on text from well-written sources. However, in intelligent voice assistants, where NER is an important component, input to NER may be noisy because of user or speech recognition error. In applications, entity labels may change frequently, and non-textual properties like topicality or popularity may be needed to choose among alternatives. We describe a NER system intended to address these problems. We test and train this system on a proprietary user-derived dataset. We compare with a baseline text-only NER system; the baseline enhanced with external gazetteers; and the baseline enhanced with the search and indirect labelling techniques we describe below. The final configuration gives around 6% reduction in NER error rate. We also show that this technique improves related tasks, such as semantic parsing, with an improvement of up to 5% in error rate.
Continuous-Time Sequential Recommendation with Temporal Graph Collaborative Transformer
Authors: Ziwei Fan, Zhiwei Liu, Jiawei Zhang, Yun Xiong, Lei Zheng, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

In order to model the evolution of user preference, we should learn user/item embeddings based on time-ordered item purchasing sequences, which is defined as Sequential Recommendation (SR) problem. Existing methods leverage sequential patterns to model item transitions. However, most of them ignore crucial temporal collaborative signals, which are latent in evolving user-item interactions and coexist with sequential patterns. Therefore, we propose to unify sequential patterns and temporal collaborative signals to improve the quality of recommendation, which is rather challenging. Firstly, it is hard to simultaneously encode sequential patterns and collaborative signals. Secondly, it is non-trivial to express the temporal effects of collaborative signals. Hence, we design a new framework Temporal Graph Sequential Recommender (TGSRec) upon our defined continuous-time bi-partite graph. We propose a novel Temporal Collaborative Trans-former (TCT) layer in TGSRec, which advances the self-attention mechanism by adopting a novel collaborative attention. TCT layer can simultaneously capture collaborative signals from both users and items, as well as considering temporal dynamics inside sequential patterns. We propagate the information learned fromTCTlayerover the temporal graph to unify sequential patterns and temporal collaborative signals. Empirical results on five datasets show that TGSRec significantly outperforms other baselines, in average up to 22.5% and 22.1%absolute improvements in Recall@10and MRR, respectively.
Adaptive Selection of Informative Path Planning Strategies via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Taeyeong Choi, Grzegorz Cielniak
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: GPR, Prediction, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Spatial Interpolation, Traveling Salesman Problem

In our previous work, we designed a systematic policy to prioritize sampling locations to lead significant accuracy improvement in spatial interpolation by using the prediction uncertainty of Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) as "attraction force" to deployed robots in path planning. Although the integration with Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solvers was also shown to produce relatively short travel distance, we here hypothesise several factors that could decrease the overall prediction precision as well because sub-optimal locations may eventually be included in their paths. To address this issue, in this paper, we first explore "local planning" approaches adopting various spatial ranges within which next sampling locations are prioritized to investigate their effects on the prediction performance as well as incurred travel distance. Also, Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based high-level controllers are trained to adaptively produce blended plans from a particular set of local planners to inherit unique strengths from that selection depending on latest prediction states. Our experiments on use cases of temperature monitoring robots demonstrate that the dynamic mixtures of planners can not only generate sophisticated, informative plans that a single planner could not create alone but also ensure significantly reduced travel distances at no cost of prediction reliability without any assist of additional modules for shortest path calculation.
Offline-Online Reinforcement Learning for Energy Pricing in Office Demand Response: Lowering Energy and Data Costs
Authors: Doseok Jang, Lucas Spangher, Manan Khattar, Utkarsha Agwan, Selvaprabuh Nadarajah, Costas Spanos
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Our team is proposing to run a full-scale energy demand response experiment in an office building. Although this is an exciting endeavor which will provide value to the community, collecting training data for the reinforcement learning agent is costly and will be limited. In this work, we examine how offline training can be leveraged to minimize data costs (accelerate convergence) and program implementation costs. We present two approaches to doing so: pretraining our model to warm start the experiment with simulated tasks, and using a planning model trained to simulate the real world's rewards to the agent. We present results that demonstrate the utility of offline reinforcement learning to efficient price-setting in the energy demand response problem.
A Microscopic Pandemic Simulator for Pandemic Prediction Using Scalable Million-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zhenggang Tang, Kai Yan, Liting Sun, Wei Zhan, Changliu Liu
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Microscopic epidemic models are powerful tools for government policy makers to predict and simulate epidemic outbreaks, which can capture the impact of individual behaviors on the macroscopic phenomenon. However, existing models only consider simple rule-based individual behaviors, limiting their applicability. This paper proposes a deep-reinforcement-learning-powered microscopic model named Microscopic Pandemic Simulator (MPS). By replacing rule-based agents with rational agents whose behaviors are driven to maximize rewards, the MPS provides a better approximation of real world dynamics. To efficiently simulate with massive amounts of agents in MPS, we propose Scalable Million-Agent DQN (SMADQN). The MPS allows us to efficiently evaluate the impact of different government strategies. This paper first calibrates the MPS against real-world data in Allegheny, US, then demonstratively evaluates two government strategies: information disclosure and quarantine. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. As a broad impact, this paper provides novel insights for the application of DRL in large scale agent-based networks such as economic and social networks.
Stacked Hourglass Network with a Multi-level Attention Mechanism: Where to Look for Intervertebral Disc Labeling
Authors: Reza Azad, Lucas Rouhier, Julien Cohen-Adad
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Labeling vertebral discs from MRI scans is important for the proper diagnosis of spinal related diseases, including multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, degenerative cervical myelopathy and cancer. Automatic labeling of the vertebral discs in MRI data is a difficult task because of the similarity between discs and bone area, the variability in the geometry of the spine and surrounding tissues across individuals, and the variability across scans (manufacturers, pulse sequence, image contrast, resolution and artefacts). In previous studies, vertebral disc labeling is often done after a disc detection step and mostly fails when the localization algorithm misses discs or has false positive detection. In this work, we aim to mitigate this problem by reformulating the semantic vertebral disc labeling using the pose estimation technique. To do so, we propose a stacked hourglass network with multi-level attention mechanism to jointly learn intervertebral disc position and their skeleton structure. The proposed deep learning model takes into account the strength of semantic segmentation and pose estimation technique to handle the missing area and false positive detection. To further improve the performance of the proposed method, we propose a skeleton-based search space to reduce false positive detection. The proposed method evaluated on spine generic public multi-center dataset and demonstrated better performance comparing to previous work, on both T1w and T2w contrasts. The method is implemented in ivadomed (https://ivadomed.org).
Neuron Campaign for Initialization Guided by Information Bottleneck Theory
Authors: Haitao Mao, Xu Chen, Qiang Fu, Lun Du, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00

Initialization plays a critical role in the training of deep neural networks (DNN). Existing initialization strategies mainly focus on stabilizing the training process to mitigate gradient vanish/explosion problems. However, these initialization methods are lacking in consideration about how to enhance generalization ability. The Information Bottleneck (IB) theory is a well-known understanding framework to provide an explanation about the generalization of DNN. Guided by the insights provided by IB theory, we design two criteria for better initializing DNN. And we further design a neuron campaign initialization algorithm to efficiently select a good initialization for a neural network on a given dataset. The experiments on MNIST dataset show that our method can lead to a better generalization performance with faster convergence.
Fractional Transfer Learning for Deep Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Remo Sasso, Matthia Sabatelli, Marco A. Wiering
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is well known for requiring large amounts of data in order for RL agents to learn to perform complex tasks. Recent progress in model-based RL allows agents to be much more data-efficient, as it enables them to learn behaviors of visual environments in imagination by leveraging an internal World Model of the environment. Improved sample efficiency can also be achieved by reusing knowledge from previously learned tasks, but transfer learning is still a challenging topic in RL. Parameter-based transfer learning is generally done using an all-or-nothing approach, where the network's parameters are either fully transferred or randomly initialized. In this work we present a simple alternative approach: fractional transfer learning. The idea is to transfer fractions of knowledge, opposed to discarding potentially useful knowledge as is commonly done with random initialization. Using the World Model-based Dreamer algorithm, we identify which type of components this approach is applicable to, and perform experiments in a new multi-source transfer learning setting. The results show that fractional transfer learning often leads to substantially improved performance and faster learning compared to learning from scratch and random initialization.
Appropriate Fairness Perceptions? On the Effectiveness of Explanations in Enabling People to Assess the Fairness of Automated Decision Systems
Authors: Jakob Schoeffer, Niklas Kuehl
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

It is often argued that one goal of explaining automated decision systems (ADS) is to facilitate positive perceptions (e.g., fairness or trustworthiness) of users towards such systems. This viewpoint, however, makes the implicit assumption that a given ADS is fair and trustworthy, to begin with. If the ADS issues unfair outcomes, then one might expect that explanations regarding the system's workings will reveal its shortcomings and, hence, lead to a decrease in fairness perceptions. Consequently, we suggest that it is more meaningful to evaluate explanations against their effectiveness in enabling people to appropriately assess the quality (e.g., fairness) of an associated ADS. We argue that for an effective explanation, perceptions of fairness should increase if and only if the underlying ADS is fair. In this in-progress work, we introduce the desideratum of appropriate fairness perceptions, propose a novel study design for evaluating it, and outline next steps towards a comprehensive experiment.
Joint Optimization in Edge-Cloud Continuum for Federated Unsupervised Person Re-identification
Authors: Weiming Zhuang, Yonggang Wen, Shuai Zhang
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (ReID) aims to re-identify a person from non-overlapping camera views. Since person ReID data contains sensitive personal information, researchers have adopted federated learning, an emerging distributed training method, to mitigate the privacy leakage risks. However, existing studies rely on data labels that are laborious and time-consuming to obtain. We present FedUReID, a federated unsupervised person ReID system to learn person ReID models without any labels while preserving privacy. FedUReID enables in-situ model training on edges with unlabeled data. A cloud server aggregates models from edges instead of centralizing raw data to preserve data privacy. Moreover, to tackle the problem that edges vary in data volumes and distributions, we personalize training in edges with joint optimization of cloud and edge. Specifically, we propose personalized epoch to reassign computation throughout training, personalized clustering to iteratively predict suitable labels for unlabeled data, and personalized update to adapt the server aggregated model to each edge. Extensive experiments on eight person ReID datasets demonstrate that FedUReID not only achieves higher accuracy but also reduces computation cost by 29%. Our FedUReID system with the joint optimization will shed light on implementing federated learning to more multimedia tasks without data labels.
Collaborative Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning from Decentralized Data
Authors: Weiming Zhuang, Xin Gan, Yonggang Wen, Shuai Zhang, Shuai Yi
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Federated Learning, Federated Unsupervised Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Unsupervised representation learning has achieved outstanding performances using centralized data available on the Internet. However, the increasing awareness of privacy protection limits sharing of decentralized unlabeled image data that grows explosively in multiple parties (e.g., mobile phones and cameras). As such, a natural problem is how to leverage these data to learn visual representations for downstream tasks while preserving data privacy. To address this problem, we propose a novel federated unsupervised learning framework, FedU. In this framework, each party trains models from unlabeled data independently using contrastive learning with an online network and a target network. Then, a central server aggregates trained models and updates clients' models with the aggregated model. It preserves data privacy as each party only has access to its raw data. Decentralized data among multiple parties are normally non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID), leading to performance degradation. To tackle this challenge, we propose two simple but effective methods: 1) We design the communication protocol to upload only the encoders of online networks for server aggregation and update them with the aggregated encoder; 2) We introduce a new module to dynamically decide how to update predictors based on the divergence caused by non-IID. The predictor is the other component of the online network. Extensive experiments and ablations demonstrate the effectiveness and significance of FedU. It outperforms training with only one party by over 5% and other methods by over 14% in linear and semi-supervised evaluation on non-IID data.
Investigating Bias In Automatic Toxic Comment Detection: An Empirical Study
Authors: Ayush Kumar, Pratik Kumar
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00

With surge in online platforms, there has been an upsurge in the user engagement on these platforms via comments and reactions. A large portion of such textual comments are abusive, rude and offensive to the audience. With machine learning systems in-place to check such comments coming onto platform, biases present in the training data gets passed onto the classifier leading to discrimination against a set of classes, religion and gender. In this work, we evaluate different classifiers and feature to estimate the bias in these classifiers along with their performance on downstream task of toxicity classification. Results show that improvement in performance of automatic toxic comment detection models is positively correlated to mitigating biases in these models. In our work, LSTM with attention mechanism proved to be a better modelling strategy than a CNN model. Further analysis shows that fasttext embeddings is marginally preferable than glove embeddings on training models for toxicity comment detection. Deeper analysis reveals the findings that such automatic models are particularly biased to specific identity groups even though the model has a high AUC score. Finally, in effort to mitigate bias in toxicity detection models, a multi-task setup trained with auxiliary task of toxicity sub-types proved to be useful leading to upto 0.26% (6% relative) gain in AUC scores.
MatSat: a matrix-based differentiable SAT solver
Authors: Taisuke Sato, Ryosuke Kojima
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00

We propose a new approach to SAT solving which solves SAT problems in vector spaces as a cost minimization problem of a non-negative differentiable cost function J^sat. In our approach, a solution, i.e., satisfying assignment, for a SAT problem in n variables is represented by a binary vector u in {0,1}^n that makes J^sat(u) zero. We search for such u in a vector space R^n by cost minimization, i.e., starting from an initial u_0 and minimizing J to zero while iteratively updating u by Newton's method. We implemented our approach as a matrix-based differential SAT solver MatSat. Although existing main-stream SAT solvers decide each bit of a solution assignment one by one, be they of conflict driven clause learning (CDCL) type or of stochastic local search (SLS) type, MatSat fundamentally differs from them in that it continuously approach a solution in a vector space. We conducted an experiment to measure the scalability of MatSat with random 3-SAT problems in which MatSat could find a solution up to n=10^5 variables. We also compared MatSat with four state-of-the-art SAT solvers including winners of SAT competition 2018 and SAT Race 2019 in terms of time for finding a solution, using a random benchmark set from SAT 2018 competition and an artificial random 3-SAT instance set. The result shows that MatSat comes in second in both test sets and outperforms all the CDCL type solvers.
Contrastive Self-supervised Sequential Recommendation with Robust Augmentation
Authors: Zhiwei Liu, Yongjun Chen, Jia Li, Philip S. Yu, Julian McAuley, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential Recommendationdescribes a set of techniques to model dynamic user behavior in order to predict future interactions in sequential user data. At their core, such approaches model transition probabilities between items in a sequence, whether through Markov chains, recurrent networks, or more recently, Transformers. However both old and new issues remain, including data-sparsity and noisy data; such issues can impair the performance, especially in complex, parameter-hungry models. In this paper, we investigate the application of contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) to the sequential recommendation, as a way to alleviate some of these issues. Contrastive SSL constructs augmentations from unlabelled instances, where agreements among positive pairs are maximized. It is challenging to devise a contrastive SSL framework for a sequential recommendation, due to its discrete nature, correlations among items, and skewness of length distributions. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Contrastive Self-supervised Learning for sequential Recommendation (CoSeRec). We introduce two informative augmentation operators leveraging item correlations to create high-quality views for contrastive learning. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on improving model performance and the robustness against sparse and noisy data. Our implementation is available online at \url{https://github.com/YChen1993/CoSeRec}
Optimal Approximation with Sparse Neural Networks and Applications
Authors: Khay Boon Hong
Date: 2021-08-14 00:00:00

We use deep sparsely connected neural networks to measure the complexity of a function class in $L^2(\mathbb R^d)$ by restricting connectivity and memory requirement for storing the neural networks. We also introduce representation system - a countable collection of functions to guide neural networks, since approximation theory with representation system has been well developed in Mathematics. We then prove the fundamental bound theorem, implying a quantity intrinsic to the function class itself can give information about the approximation ability of neural networks and representation system. We also provides a method for transferring existing theories about approximation by representation systems to that of neural networks, greatly amplifying the practical values of neural networks. Finally, we use neural networks to approximate B-spline functions, which are used to generate the B-spline curves. Then, we analyse the complexity of a class called $\beta$ cartoon-like functions using rate-distortion theory and wedgelets construction.
Metadata-based Multi-Task Bandits with Bayesian Hierarchical Models
Authors: Runzhe Wan, Lin Ge, Rui Song
Date: 2021-08-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits, Thompson Sampling

How to explore efficiently is a central problem in multi-armed bandits. In this paper, we introduce the metadata-based multi-task bandit problem, where the agent needs to solve a large number of related multi-armed bandit tasks and can leverage some task-specific features (i.e., metadata) to share knowledge across tasks. As a general framework, we propose to capture task relations through the lens of Bayesian hierarchical models, upon which a Thompson sampling algorithm is designed to efficiently learn task relations, share information, and minimize the cumulative regrets. Two concrete examples for Gaussian bandits and Bernoulli bandits are carefully analyzed. The Bayes regret for Gaussian bandits clearly demonstrates the benefits of information sharing with our algorithm. The proposed method is further supported by extensive experiments.