pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Compute and Energy Consumption Trends in Deep Learning Inference
Authors: Radosvet Desislavov, Fernando Martínez-Plumed, José Hernández-Orallo
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The progress of some AI paradigms such as deep learning is said to be linked to an exponential growth in the number of parameters. There are many studies corroborating these trends, but does this translate into an exponential increase in energy consumption? In order to answer this question we focus on inference costs rather than training costs, as the former account for most of the computing effort, solely because of the multiplicative factors. Also, apart from algorithmic innovations, we account for more specific and powerful hardware (leading to higher FLOPS) that is usually accompanied with important energy efficiency optimisations. We also move the focus from the first implementation of a breakthrough paper towards the consolidated version of the techniques one or two year later. Under this distinctive and comprehensive perspective, we study relevant models in the areas of computer vision and natural language processing: for a sustained increase in performance we see a much softer growth in energy consumption than previously anticipated. The only caveat is, yet again, the multiplicative factor, as future AI increases penetration and becomes more pervasive.
DRo: A data-scarce mechanism to revolutionize the performance of Deep Learning based Security Systems
Authors: Mohit Sewak, Sanjay K. Sahay, Hemant Rathore
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Clustering, Malware Classification, Malware Detection

Supervised Deep Learning requires plenty of labeled data to converge, and hence perform optimally for task-specific learning. Therefore, we propose a novel mechanism named DRo (for Deep Routing) for data-scarce domains like security. The DRo approach builds upon some of the recent developments in Deep-Clustering. In particular, it exploits the self-augmented training mechanism using synthetically generated local perturbations. DRo not only allays the challenges with sparse-labeled data but also offers many unique advantages. We also developed a system named DRoID that uses the DRo mechanism for enhancing the performance of an existing Malware Detection System that uses (low information features like the) Android implicit Intent(s) as the only features. We conduct experiments on DRoID using a popular and standardized Android malware dataset and found that the DRo mechanism could successfully reduce the false-alarms generated by the downstream classifier by 67.9%, and also simultaneously boosts its accuracy by 11.3%. This is significant not only because the gains achieved are unparalleled but also because the features used were never considered rich enough to train a classifier on; and hence no decent performance could ever be reported by any malware classification system till-date using these features in isolation. Owing to the results achieved, the DRo mechanism claims a dominant position amongst all known systems that aims to enhance the classification performance of deep learning models with sparse-labeled data.
Logic Traps in Evaluating Attribution Scores
Authors: Yiming Ju, Yuanzhe Zhang, Zhao Yang, Zhongtao Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Modern deep learning models are notoriously opaque, which has motivated the development of methods for interpreting how deep models predict. This goal is usually approached with attribution method, which assesses the influence of features on model predictions. As an explanation method, the evaluation criteria of attribution methods is how accurately it re-reflects the actual reasoning process of the model (faithfulness). Meanwhile, since the reasoning process of deep models is inaccessible, researchers design various evaluation methods to demonstrate their arguments. However, some crucial logic traps in these evaluation methods are ignored in most works, causing inaccurate evaluation and unfair comparison. This paper systematically reviews existing methods for evaluating attribution scores and summarizes the logic traps in these methods. We further conduct experiments to demonstrate the existence of each logic trap. Through both the theoretical and experimental analysis, we hope to increase attention on the inaccurate evaluation of attribution scores. Moreover, with this paper, we suggest stopping focusing on improving performance under unreliable evaluation systems and starting efforts on reducing the impact of proposed logic traps
End-to-End Conversational Search for Online Shopping with Utterance Transfer
Authors: Liqiang Xiao, Jun Ma2, Xin Luna Dong, Pascual Martinez-Gomez, Nasser Zalmout, Wei Chen, Tong Zhao, Hao He, Yaohui Jin
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Conversational Search

Successful conversational search systems can present natural, adaptive and interactive shopping experience for online shopping customers. However, building such systems from scratch faces real word challenges from both imperfect product schema/knowledge and lack of training dialog data.In this work we first propose ConvSearch, an end-to-end conversational search system that deeply combines the dialog system with search. It leverages the text profile to retrieve products, which is more robust against imperfect product schema/knowledge compared with using product attributes alone. We then address the lack of data challenges by proposing an utterance transfer approach that generates dialogue utterances by using existing dialog from other domains, and leveraging the search behavior data from e-commerce retailer. With utterance transfer, we introduce a new conversational search dataset for online shopping. Experiments show that our utterance transfer method can significantly improve the availability of training dialogue data without crowd-sourcing, and the conversational search system significantly outperformed the best tested baseline.
Concave Utility Reinforcement Learning with Zero-Constraint Violations
Authors: Mridul Agarwal, Qinbo Bai, Vaneet Aggarwal
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We consider the problem of tabular infinite horizon concave utility reinforcement learning (CURL) with convex constraints. For this, we propose a model-based learning algorithm that also achieves zero constraint violations. Assuming that the concave objective and the convex constraints have a solution interior to the set of feasible occupation measures, we solve a tighter optimization problem to ensure that the constraints are never violated despite the imprecise model knowledge and model stochasticity. We use Bellman error-based analysis for tabular infinite-horizon setups which allows analyzing stochastic policies. Combining the Bellman error-based analysis and tighter optimization equation, for $T$ interactions with the environment, we obtain a high-probability regret guarantee for objective which grows as $\Tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$, excluding other factors. The proposed method can be applied for optimistic algorithms to obtain high-probability regret bounds and also be used for posterior sampling algorithms to obtain a loose Bayesian regret bounds but with significant improvement in computational complexity.
Not All Negatives are Equal: Label-Aware Contrastive Loss for Fine-grained Text Classification
Authors: Varsha Suresh, Desmond C. Ong
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: All, Classification, Emotion Classification, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

Fine-grained classification involves dealing with datasets with larger number of classes with subtle differences between them. Guiding the model to focus on differentiating dimensions between these commonly confusable classes is key to improving performance on fine-grained tasks. In this work, we analyse the contrastive fine-tuning of pre-trained language models on two fine-grained text classification tasks, emotion classification and sentiment analysis. We adaptively embed class relationships into a contrastive objective function to help differently weigh the positives and negatives, and in particular, weighting closely confusable negatives more than less similar negative examples. We find that Label-aware Contrastive Loss outperforms previous contrastive methods, in the presence of larger number and/or more confusable classes, and helps models to produce output distributions that are more differentiated.
Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech for Text-Based Insertion in Audio Narration
Authors: Chuanxin Tang, Chong Luo, Zhiyuan Zhao, Dacheng Yin, Yucheng Zhao, Wenjun Zeng
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Conversion

Given a piece of speech and its transcript text, text-based speech editing aims to generate speech that can be seamlessly inserted into the given speech by editing the transcript. Existing methods adopt a two-stage approach: synthesize the input text using a generic text-to-speech (TTS) engine and then transform the voice to the desired voice using voice conversion (VC). A major problem of this framework is that VC is a challenging problem which usually needs a moderate amount of parallel training data to work satisfactorily. In this paper, we propose a one-stage context-aware framework to generate natural and coherent target speech without any training data of the target speaker. In particular, we manage to perform accurate zero-shot duration prediction for the inserted text. The predicted duration is used to regulate both text embedding and speech embedding. Then, based on the aligned cross-modality input, we directly generate the mel-spectrogram of the edited speech with a transformer-based decoder. Subjective listening tests show that despite the lack of training data for the speaker, our method has achieved satisfactory results. It outperforms a recent zero-shot TTS engine by a large margin.
Learning Selective Communication for Multi-Agent Path Finding
Authors: Ziyuan Ma, Yudong Luo, Jia Pan
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Imitation Learning, Multi-Agent Path Finding, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Learning communication via deep reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) has recently been shown to be an effective way to solve Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF). However, existing communication based MAPF solvers focus on broadcast communication, where an agent broadcasts its message to all other or predefined agents. It is not only impractical but also leads to redundant information that could even impair the multi-agent cooperation. A succinct communication scheme should learn which information is relevant and influential to each agent's decision making process. To address this problem, we consider a request-reply scenario and propose Decision Causal Communication (DCC), a simple yet efficient model to enable agents to select neighbors to conduct communication during both training and execution. Specifically, a neighbor is determined as relevant and influential only when the presence of this neighbor causes the decision adjustment on the central agent. This judgment is learned only based on agent's local observation and thus suitable for decentralized execution to handle large scale problems. Empirical evaluation in obstacle-rich environment indicates the high success rate with low communication overhead of our method.
Guiding Topic Flows in the Generative Chatbot by Enhancing the ConceptNet with the Conversation Corpora
Authors: Pengda Si, Yao Qiu, Jinchao Zhang, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2021-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, World Knowledge

Human conversations consist of reasonable and natural topic flows, which are observed as the shifts of the mentioned concepts across utterances. Previous chatbots that incorporate the external commonsense knowledge graph prove that modeling the concept shifts can effectively alleviate the dull and uninformative response dilemma. However, there still exists a gap between the concept relations in the natural conversation and those in the external commonsense knowledge graph, which is an issue to solve. Specifically, the concept relations in the external commonsense knowledge graph are not intuitively built from the conversational scenario but the world knowledge, which makes them insufficient for the chatbot construction. To bridge the above gap, we propose the method to supply more concept relations extracted from the conversational corpora and reconstruct an enhanced concept graph for the chatbot construction. In addition, we present a novel, powerful, and fast graph encoding architecture named the Edge-Transformer to replace the traditional GNN architecture. Experimental results on the Reddit conversation dataset indicate our proposed method significantly outperforms strong baseline systems and achieves new SOTA results. Further analysis individually proves the effectiveness of the enhanced concept graph and the Edge-Transformer architecture.
On the Initial Behavior Monitoring Issues in Federated Learning
Authors: Ranwa Al Mallah, Godwin Badu-Marfo, Bilal Farooq
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

In Federated Learning (FL), a group of workers participate to build a global model under the coordination of one node, the chief. Regarding the cybersecurity of FL, some attacks aim at injecting the fabricated local model updates into the system. Some defenses are based on malicious worker detection and behavioral pattern analysis. In this context, without timely and dynamic monitoring methods, the chief cannot detect and remove the malicious or unreliable workers from the system. Our work emphasize the urgency to prepare the federated learning process for monitoring and eventually behavioral pattern analysis. We study the information inside the learning process in the early stages of training, propose a monitoring process and evaluate the monitoring period required. The aim is to analyse at what time is it appropriate to start the detection algorithm in order to remove the malicious or unreliable workers from the system and optimise the defense mechanism deployment. We tested our strategy on a behavioral pattern analysis defense applied to the FL process of different benchmark systems for text and image classification. Our results show that the monitoring process lowers false positives and false negatives and consequently increases system efficiency by enabling the distributed learning system to achieve better performance in the early stage of training.
Border-SegGCN: Improving Semantic Segmentation by Refining the Border Outline using Graph Convolutional Network
Authors: Naina Dhingra, George Chogovadze, Andreas Kunz
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present Border-SegGCN, a novel architecture to improve semantic segmentation by refining the border outline using graph convolutional networks (GCN). The semantic segmentation network such as Unet or DeepLabV3+ is used as a base network to have pre-segmented output. This output is converted into a graphical structure and fed into the GCN to improve the border pixel prediction of the pre-segmented output. We explored and studied the factors such as border thickness, number of edges for a node, and the number of features to be fed into the GCN by performing experiments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the Border-SegGCN on the CamVid and Carla dataset, achieving a test set performance of 81.96% without any post-processing on CamVid dataset. It is higher than the reported state of the art mIoU achieved on CamVid dataset by 0.404%
BGT-Net: Bidirectional GRU Transformer Network for Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Naina Dhingra, Florian Ritter, Andreas Kunz
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Object, Relation Prediction, Relationship Detection, Scene Graph Generation, Visual Relationship Detection

Scene graphs are nodes and edges consisting of objects and object-object relationships, respectively. Scene graph generation (SGG) aims to identify the objects and their relationships. We propose a bidirectional GRU (BiGRU) transformer network (BGT-Net) for the scene graph generation for images. This model implements novel object-object communication to enhance the object information using a BiGRU layer. Thus, the information of all objects in the image is available for the other objects, which can be leveraged later in the object prediction step. This object information is used in a transformer encoder to predict the object class as well as to create object-specific edge information via the use of another transformer encoder. To handle the dataset bias induced by the long-tailed relationship distribution, softening with a log-softmax function and adding a bias adaptation term to regulate the bias for every relation prediction individually showed to be an effective approach. We conducted an elaborate study on experiments and ablations using open-source datasets, i.e., Visual Genome, Open-Images, and Visual Relationship Detection datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed model over state of the art.
An Objective Metric for Explainable AI: How and Why to Estimate the Degree of Explainability
Authors: Francesco Sovrano, Fabio Vitali
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Information Retrieval, Philosophy, Retrieval

Explainable AI was born as a pathway to allow humans to explore and understand the inner working of complex systems. However, establishing what is an explanation and objectively evaluating explainability are not trivial tasks. This paper presents a new model-agnostic metric to measure the Degree of Explainability of information in an objective way. We exploit a specific theoretical model from Ordinary Language Philosophy called the Achinstein's Theory of Explanations, implemented with an algorithm relying on deep language models for knowledge graph extraction and information retrieval. To understand whether this metric can measure explainability, we devised a few experiments and user studies involving more than 190 participants, evaluating two realistic systems for healthcare and finance using famous AI technology, including Artificial Neural Networks and TreeSHAP. The results we obtained are statistically significant (with P values lower than .01), suggesting that our proposed metric for measuring the Degree of Explainability is robust in several scenarios, and it aligns with concrete expectations.
On syntactically similar logic programs and sequential decompositions
Authors: Christian Antic
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00

Rule-based reasoning is an essential part of human intelligence prominently formalized in artificial intelligence research via logic programs. Describing complex objects as the composition of elementary ones is a common strategy in computer science and science in general. The author has recently introduced the sequential composition of logic programs in the context of logic-based analogical reasoning and learning in logic programming. Motivated by these applications, in this paper we construct a qualitative and algebraic notion of syntactic logic program similarity from sequential decompositions of programs. We then show how similarity can be used to answer queries across different domains via a one-step reduction. In a broader sense, this paper is a further step towards an algebraic theory of logic programming.
COSMic: A Coherence-Aware Generation Metric for Image Descriptions
Authors: Mert İnan, Piyush Sharma, Baber Khalid, Radu Soricut, Matthew Stone, Malihe Alikhani
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Caption Generation, Image Captioning, Text Generation

Developers of text generation models rely on automated evaluation metrics as a stand-in for slow and expensive manual evaluations. However, image captioning metrics have struggled to give accurate learned estimates of the semantic and pragmatic success of output text. We address this weakness by introducing the first discourse-aware learned generation metric for evaluating image descriptions. Our approach is inspired by computational theories of discourse for capturing information goals using coherence. We present a dataset of image$\unicode{x2013}$description pairs annotated with coherence relations. We then train a coherence-aware metric on a subset of the Conceptual Captions dataset and measure its effectiveness$\unicode{x2014}$its ability to predict human ratings of output captions$\unicode{x2014}$on a test set composed of out-of-domain images. We demonstrate a higher Kendall Correlation Coefficient for our proposed metric with the human judgments for the results of a number of state-of-the-art coherence-aware caption generation models when compared to several other metrics including recently proposed learned metrics such as BLEURT and BERTScore.
Benchmarking Processor Performance by Multi-Threaded Machine Learning Algorithms
Authors: Muhammad Fahad Saleem
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning algorithms have enabled computers to predict things by learning from previous data. The data storage and processing power are increasing rapidly, thus increasing machine learning and Artificial intelligence applications. Much of the work is done to improve the accuracy of the models built in the past, with little research done to determine the computational costs of machine learning acquisitions. In this paper, I will proceed with this later research work and will make a performance comparison of multi-threaded machine learning clustering algorithms. I will be working on Linear Regression, Random Forest, and K-Nearest Neighbors to determine the performance characteristics of the algorithms as well as the computation costs to the obtained results. I will be benchmarking system hardware performance by running these multi-threaded algorithms to train and test the models on a dataset to note the differences in performance matrices of the algorithms. In the end, I will state the best performing algorithms concerning the performance efficiency of these algorithms on my system.
Towards a Rigorous Evaluation of Time-series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Siwon Kim, Kukjin Choi, Hyun-Soo Choi, Byunghan Lee, Sungroh Yoon
Date: 2021-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection

In recent years, proposed studies on time-series anomaly detection (TAD) report high F1 scores on benchmark TAD datasets, giving the impression of clear improvements in TAD. However, most studies apply a peculiar evaluation protocol called point adjustment (PA) before scoring. In this paper, we theoretically and experimentally reveal that the PA protocol has a great possibility of overestimating the detection performance; that is, even a random anomaly score can easily turn into a state-of-the-art TAD method. Therefore, the comparison of TAD methods after applying the PA protocol can lead to misguided rankings. Furthermore, we question the potential of existing TAD methods by showing that an untrained model obtains comparable detection performance to the existing methods even when PA is forbidden. Based on our findings, we propose a new baseline and an evaluation protocol. We expect that our study will help a rigorous evaluation of TAD and lead to further improvement in future researches.