pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Distributional Time Series Models and the Probabilistic Forecasting of Intraday Electricity Prices
Authors: Nadja Klein, Michael Stanley Smith, David J. Nott
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with rich feature vectors of past values can provide accurate point forecasts for series that exhibit complex serial dependence. We propose two approaches to constructing deep time series probabilistic models based on a variant of RNN called an echo state network (ESN). The first is where the output layer of the ESN has stochastic disturbances and a shrinkage prior for additional regularization. The second approach employs the implicit copula of an ESN with Gaussian disturbances, which is a deep copula process on the feature space. Combining this copula with a non-parametrically estimated marginal distribution produces a deep distributional time series model. The resulting probabilistic forecasts are deep functions of the feature vector and also marginally calibrated. In both approaches, Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to estimate the models and compute forecasts. The proposed models are suitable for the complex task of forecasting intraday electricity prices. Using data from the Australian National Electricity Market, we show that our deep time series models provide accurate short term probabilistic price forecasts, with the copula model dominating. Moreover, the models provide a flexible framework for incorporating probabilistic forecasts of electricity demand as additional features, which increases upper tail forecast accuracy from the copula model significantly.
Depth-wise layering of 3d images using dense depth maps: a threshold based approach
Authors: Seyedsaeid Mirkamali, P. Nagabhushan
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Image segmentation has long been a basic problem in computer vision. Depth-wise Layering is a kind of segmentation that slices an image in a depth-wise sequence unlike the conventional image segmentation problems dealing with surface-wise decomposition. The proposed Depth-wise Layering technique uses a single depth image of a static scene to slice it into multiple layers. The technique employs a thresholding approach to segment rows of the dense depth map into smaller partitions called Line-Segments in this paper. Then, it uses the line-segment labelling method to identify number of objects and layers of the scene independently. The final stage is to link objects of the scene to their respective object-layers. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed technique by applying that on many images along with their dense depth maps. The experiments have shown promising results of layering.
Discern: Discourse-Aware Entailment Reasoning Network for Conversational Machine Reading
Authors: Yifan Gao, Chien-Sheng Wu, Jingjing Li, Shafiq Joty, Steven C. H. Hoi, Caiming Xiong, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Decision Making, Discourse Segmentation, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Reading Comprehension

Document interpretation and dialog understanding are the two major challenges for conversational machine reading. In this work, we propose Discern, a discourse-aware entailment reasoning network to strengthen the connection and enhance the understanding for both document and dialog. Specifically, we split the document into clause-like elementary discourse units (EDU) using a pre-trained discourse segmentation model, and we train our model in a weakly-supervised manner to predict whether each EDU is entailed by the user feedback in a conversation. Based on the learned EDU and entailment representations, we either reply to the user our final decision "yes/no/irrelevant" of the initial question, or generate a follow-up question to inquiry more information. Our experiments on the ShARC benchmark (blind, held-out test set) show that Discern achieves state-of-the-art results of 78.3% macro-averaged accuracy on decision making and 64.0 BLEU1 on follow-up question generation. Code and models are released at https://github.com/Yifan-Gao/Discern.
Data Augmentation at the LHC through Analysis-specific Fast Simulation with Deep Learning
Authors: Cheng Chen, Olmo Cerri, Thong Q. Nguyen, Jean-Roch Vlimant, Maurizio Pierini
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

We present a fast simulation application based on a Deep Neural Network, designed to create large analysis-specific datasets. Taking as an example the generation of W+jet events produced in sqrt(s)= 13 TeV proton-proton collisions, we train a neural network to model detector resolution effects as a transfer function acting on an analysis-specific set of relevant features, computed at generation level, i.e., in absence of detector effects. Based on this model, we propose a novel fast-simulation workflow that starts from a large amount of generator-level events to deliver large analysis-specific samples. The adoption of this approach would result in about an order-of-magnitude reduction in computing and storage requirements for the collision simulation workflow. This strategy could help the high energy physics community to face the computing challenges of the future High-Luminosity LHC.
On the Frailty of Universal POS Tags for Neural UD Parsers
Authors: Mark Anderson, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2020
Tasks: POS

We present an analysis on the effect UPOS accuracy has on parsing performance. Results suggest that leveraging UPOS tags as features for neural parsers requires a prohibitively high tagging accuracy and that the use of gold tags offers a non-linear increase in performance, suggesting some sort of exceptionality. We also investigate what aspects of predicted UPOS tags impact parsing accuracy the most, highlighting some potentially meaningful linguistic facets of the problem.
TabEAno: Table to Knowledge Graph Entity Annotation
Authors: Phuc Nguyen, Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn, Ryutaro Ichise, Hideaki Takeda
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00

In the Open Data era, a large number of table resources have been made available on the Web and data portals. However, it is difficult to directly utilize such data due to the ambiguity of entities, name variations, heterogeneous schema, missing, or incomplete metadata. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, namely TabEAno, to semantically annotate table rows toward knowledge graph entities. Specifically, we introduce a "two-cells" lookup strategy bases on the assumption that there is an existing logical relation occurring in the knowledge graph between the two closed cells in the same row of the table. Despite the simplicity of the approach, TabEAno outperforms the state of the art approaches in the two standard datasets e.g, T2D, Limaye with, and in the large-scale Wikipedia tables dataset.
PMI-Masking: Principled masking of correlated spans
Authors: Yoav Levine, Barak Lenz, Opher Lieber, Omri Abend, Kevin Leyton-Brown, Moshe Tennenholtz, Yoav Shoham
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

Masking tokens uniformly at random constitutes a common flaw in the pretraining of Masked Language Models (MLMs) such as BERT. We show that such uniform masking allows an MLM to minimize its training objective by latching onto shallow local signals, leading to pretraining inefficiency and suboptimal downstream performance. To address this flaw, we propose PMI-Masking, a principled masking strategy based on the concept of Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI), which jointly masks a token n-gram if it exhibits high collocation over the corpus. PMI-Masking motivates, unifies, and improves upon prior more heuristic approaches that attempt to address the drawback of random uniform token masking, such as whole-word masking, entity/phrase masking, and random-span masking. Specifically, we show experimentally that PMI-Masking reaches the performance of prior masking approaches in half the training time, and consistently improves performance at the end of training.
Class-Wise Difficulty-Balanced Loss for Solving Class-Imbalance
Authors: Saptarshi Sinha, Hiroki Ohashi, Katsuyuki Nakamura
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-tail Learning

Class-imbalance is one of the major challenges in real world datasets, where a few classes (called majority classes) constitute much more data samples than the rest (called minority classes). Learning deep neural networks using such datasets leads to performances that are typically biased towards the majority classes. Most of the prior works try to solve class-imbalance by assigning more weights to the minority classes in various manners (e.g., data re-sampling, cost-sensitive learning). However, we argue that the number of available training data may not be always a good clue to determine the weighting strategy because some of the minority classes might be sufficiently represented even by a small number of training data. Overweighting samples of such classes can lead to drop in the model's overall performance. We claim that the 'difficulty' of a class as perceived by the model is more important to determine the weighting. In this light, we propose a novel loss function named Class-wise Difficulty-Balanced loss, or CDB loss, which dynamically distributes weights to each sample according to the difficulty of the class that the sample belongs to. Note that the assigned weights dynamically change as the 'difficulty' for the model may change with the learning progress. Extensive experiments are conducted on both image (artificially induced class-imbalanced MNIST, long-tailed CIFAR and ImageNet-LT) and video (EGTEA) datasets. The results show that CDB loss consistently outperforms the recently proposed loss functions on class-imbalanced datasets irrespective of the data type (i.e., video or image).
Quantifying Statistical Significance of Neural Network-based Image Segmentation by Selective Inference
Authors: Vo Nguyen Le Duy, Shogo Iwazaki, Ichiro Takeuchi
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Two-sample testing, valid

Although a vast body of literature relates to image segmentation methods that use deep neural networks (DNNs), less attention has been paid to assessing the statistical reliability of segmentation results. In this study, we interpret the segmentation results as hypotheses driven by DNN (called DNN-driven hypotheses) and propose a method by which to quantify the reliability of these hypotheses within a statistical hypothesis testing framework. Specifically, we consider a statistical hypothesis test for the difference between the object and background regions. This problem is challenging, as the difference would be falsely large because of the adaptation of the DNN to the data. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a conditional selective inference (SI) framework -- a new statistical inference framework for data-driven hypotheses that has recently received considerable attention -- to compute exact (non-asymptotic) valid p-values for the segmentation results. To use the conditional SI framework for DNN-based segmentation, we develop a new SI algorithm based on the homotopy method, which enables us to derive the exact (non-asymptotic) sampling distribution of DNN-driven hypothesis. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, through which we offer evidence that our proposed method can successfully control the false positive rate, has good performance in terms of computational efficiency, and provides good results when applied to medical image data.
Bigeminal Priors Variational auto-encoder
Authors: Xuming Ran, Mingkun Xu, Qi Xu, Huihui Zhou, Quanying Liu
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are an influential and generally-used class of likelihood-based generative models in unsupervised learning. The likelihood-based generative models have been reported to be highly robust to the out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs and can be a detector by assuming that the model assigns higher likelihoods to the samples from the in-distribution (ID) dataset than an OOD dataset. However, recent works reported a phenomenon that VAE recognizes some OOD samples as ID by assigning a higher likelihood to the OOD inputs compared to the one from ID. In this work, we introduce a new model, namely Bigeminal Priors Variational auto-encoder (BPVAE), to address this phenomenon. The BPVAE aims to enhance the robustness of the VAEs by combing the power of VAE with the two independent priors that belong to the training dataset and simple dataset, which complexity is lower than the training dataset, respectively. BPVAE learns two datasets'features, assigning a higher likelihood for the training dataset than the simple dataset. In this way, we can use BPVAE's density estimate for detecting the OOD samples. Quantitative experimental results suggest that our model has better generalization capability and stronger robustness than the standard VAEs, proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach of hybrid learning by collaborative priors. Overall, this work paves a new avenue to potentially overcome the OOD problem via multiple latent priors modeling.
An Efficient Algorithm for Cooperative Semi-Bandits
Authors: Riccardo Della Vecchia, Tommaso Cesari
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

We consider the problem of asynchronous online combinatorial optimization on a network of communicating agents. At each time step, some of the agents are stochastically activated, requested to make a prediction, and the system pays the corresponding loss. Then, neighbors of active agents receive semi-bandit feedback and exchange some succinct local information. The goal is to minimize the network regret, defined as the difference between the cumulative loss of the predictions of active agents and that of the best action in hindsight, selected from a combinatorial decision set. The main challenge in such a context is to control the computational complexity of the resulting algorithm while retaining minimax optimal regret guarantees. We introduce Coop-FTPL, a cooperative version of the well-known Follow The Perturbed Leader algorithm, that implements a new loss estimation procedure generalizing the Geometric Resampling of Neu and Bart{\'o}k [2013] to our setting. Assuming that the elements of the decision set are k-dimensional binary vectors with at most m non-zero entries and $\alpha$ 1 is the independence number of the network, we show that the expected regret of our algorithm after T time steps is of order Q mkT log(k)(k$\alpha$ 1 /Q + m), where Q is the total activation probability mass. Furthermore, we prove that this is only $\sqrt$ k log k-away from the best achievable rate and that Coop-FTPL has a state-of-the-art T 3/2 worst-case computational complexity.
Off-the-grid data-driven optimization of sampling schemes in MRI
Authors: Alban Gossard, Frédéric de Gournay, Pierre Weiss
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00

We propose a novel learning based algorithm to generate efficient and physically plausible sampling patterns in MRI. This method has a few advantages compared to recent learning based approaches: i) it works off-the-grid and ii) allows to handle arbitrary physical constraints. These two features allow for much more versatility in the sampling patterns that can take advantage of all the degrees of freedom offered by an MRI scanner. The method consists in a high dimensional optimization of a cost function defined implicitly by an algorithm. We propose various numerical tools to address this numerical challenge.
Painting Outside as Inside: Edge Guided Image Outpainting via Bidirectional Rearrangement with Progressive Step Learning
Authors: Kyunghun Kim, Yeohun Yun, Keon-Woo Kang, Kyeongbo Kong, Siyeong Lee, Suk-Ju Kang
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Image Outpainting, Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Image outpainting is a very intriguing problem as the outside of a given image can be continuously filled by considering as the context of the image. This task has two main challenges. The first is to maintain the spatial consistency in contents of generated regions and the original input. The second is to generate a high-quality large image with a small amount of adjacent information. Conventional image outpainting methods generate inconsistent, blurry, and repeated pixels. To alleviate the difficulty of an outpainting problem, we propose a novel image outpainting method using bidirectional boundary region rearrangement. We rearrange the image to benefit from the image inpainting task by reflecting more directional information. The bidirectional boundary region rearrangement enables the generation of the missing region using bidirectional information similar to that of the image inpainting task, thereby generating the higher quality than the conventional methods using unidirectional information. Moreover, we use the edge map generator that considers images as original input with structural information and hallucinates the edges of unknown regions to generate the image. Our proposed method is compared with other state-of-the-art outpainting and inpainting methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. We further compared and evaluated them using BRISQUE, one of the No-Reference image quality assessment (IQA) metrics, to evaluate the naturalness of the output. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other methods and generates new images with 360{\deg}panoramic characteristics.
Long-tailed Recognition by Routing Diverse Distribution-Aware Experts
Authors: Xudong Wang, Long Lian, Zhongqi Miao, Ziwei Liu, Stella X. Yu
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Diversity, Image Classification, imbalanced classification, Long-tail Learning

Natural data are often long-tail distributed over semantic classes. Existing recognition methods tackle this imbalanced classification by placing more emphasis on the tail data, through class re-balancing/re-weighting or ensembling over different data groups, resulting in increased tail accuracies but reduced head accuracies. We take a dynamic view of the training data and provide a principled model bias and variance analysis as the training data fluctuates: Existing long-tail classifiers invariably increase the model variance and the head-tail model bias gap remains large, due to more and larger confusion with hard negatives for the tail. We propose a new long-tailed classifier called RoutIng Diverse Experts (RIDE). It reduces the model variance with multiple experts, reduces the model bias with a distribution-aware diversity loss, reduces the computational cost with a dynamic expert routing module. RIDE outperforms the state-of-the-art by 5% to 7% on CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT and iNaturalist 2018 benchmarks. It is also a universal framework that is applicable to various backbone networks, long-tailed algorithms, and training mechanisms for consistent performance gains. Our code is available at: https://github.com/frank-xwang/RIDE-LongTailRecognition.
Graph Cross Networks with Vertex Infomax Pooling
Authors: Maosen Li, Siheng Chen, Ya zhang, Ivor W. Tsang
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Graph Classification

We propose a novel graph cross network (GXN) to achieve comprehensive feature learning from multiple scales of a graph. Based on trainable hierarchical representations of a graph, GXN enables the interchange of intermediate features across scales to promote information flow. Two key ingredients of GXN include a novel vertex infomax pooling (VIPool), which creates multiscale graphs in a trainable manner, and a novel feature-crossing layer, enabling feature interchange across scales. The proposed VIPool selects the most informative subset of vertices based on the neural estimation of mutual information between vertex features and neighborhood features. The intuition behind is that a vertex is informative when it can maximally reflect its neighboring information. The proposed feature-crossing layer fuses intermediate features between two scales for mutual enhancement by improving information flow and enriching multiscale features at hidden layers. The cross shape of the feature-crossing layer distinguishes GXN from many other multiscale architectures. Experimental results show that the proposed GXN improves the classification accuracy by 2.12% and 1.15% on average for graph classification and vertex classification, respectively. Based on the same network, the proposed VIPool consistently outperforms other graph-pooling methods.
Understanding Catastrophic Overfitting in Single-step Adversarial Training
Authors: Hoki Kim, Woojin Lee, Jaewook Lee
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00

Although fast adversarial training has demonstrated both robustness and efficiency, the problem of "catastrophic overfitting" has been observed. This is a phenomenon in which, during single-step adversarial training, the robust accuracy against projected gradient descent (PGD) suddenly decreases to 0% after a few epochs, whereas the robust accuracy against fast gradient sign method (FGSM) increases to 100%. In this paper, we demonstrate that catastrophic overfitting is very closely related to the characteristic of single-step adversarial training which uses only adversarial examples with the maximum perturbation, and not all adversarial examples in the adversarial direction, which leads to decision boundary distortion and a highly curved loss surface. Based on this observation, we propose a simple method that not only prevents catastrophic overfitting, but also overrides the belief that it is difficult to prevent multi-step adversarial attacks with single-step adversarial training.
DCT-SNN: Using DCT to Distribute Spatial Information over Time for Learning Low-Latency Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Isha Garg, Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury, Kaushik Roy
Date: 2020-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising alternative to traditional deep learning frameworks, since they provide higher computational efficiency due to event-driven information processing. SNNs distribute the analog values of pixel intensities into binary spikes over time. However, the most widely used input coding schemes, such as Poisson based rate-coding, do not leverage the additional temporal learning capability of SNNs effectively. Moreover, these SNNs suffer from high inference latency which is a major bottleneck to their deployment. To overcome this, we propose a scalable time-based encoding scheme that utilizes the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to reduce the number of timesteps required for inference. DCT decomposes an image into a weighted sum of sinusoidal basis images. At each time step, the Hadamard product of the DCT coefficients and a single frequency base, taken in order, is given to an accumulator that generates spikes upon crossing a threshold. We use the proposed scheme to learn DCT-SNN, a low-latency deep SNN with leaky-integrate-and-fire neurons, trained using surrogate gradient descent based backpropagation. We achieve top-1 accuracy of 89.94%, 68.3% and 52.43% on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet, respectively using VGG architectures. Notably, DCT-SNN performs inference with 2-14X reduced latency compared to other state-of-the-art SNNs, while achieving comparable accuracy to their standard deep learning counterparts. The dimension of the transform allows us to control the number of timesteps required for inference. Additionally, we can trade-off accuracy with latency in a principled manner by dropping the highest frequency components during inference.