pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
From partners to populations: A hierarchical Bayesian account of coordination and convention
Authors: Robert D. Hawkins, Michael Franke, Michael C. Frank, Adele E. Goldberg, Kenny Smith, Thomas L. Griffiths, Noah D. Goodman
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Languages are powerful solutions to coordination problems: they provide stable, shared expectations about how the words we say correspond to the beliefs and intentions in our heads. Yet language use in a variable and non-stationary social environment requires linguistic representations to be flexible: old words acquire new ad hoc or partner-specific meanings on the fly. In this paper, we introduce CHAI (Continual Hierarchical Adaptation through Inference), a hierarchical Bayesian theory of coordination and convention formation that aims to reconcile the long-standing tension between these two basic observations. We argue that the central computational problem of communication is not simply transmission, as in classical formulations, but continual learning and adaptation over multiple timescales. Partner-specific common ground quickly emerges from social inferences within dyadic interactions, while community-wide social conventions are stable priors that have been abstracted away from interactions with multiple partners. We present new empirical data alongside simulations showing how our model provides a computational foundation for several phenomena that have posed a challenge for previous accounts: (1) the convergence to more efficient referring expressions across repeated interaction with the same partner, (2) the gradual transfer of partner-specific common ground to strangers, and (3) the influence of communicative context on which conventions eventually form.
Family of Origin and Family of Choice: Massively Parallel Lexiconized Iterative Pretraining for Severely Low Resource Machine Translation
Authors: Zhong Zhou, Alex Waibel
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We translate a closed text that is known in advance into a severely low resource language by leveraging massive source parallelism. In other words, given a text in 124 source languages, we translate it into a severely low resource language using only ~1,000 lines of low resource data without any external help. Firstly, we propose a systematic method to rank and choose source languages that are close to the low resource language. We call the linguistic definition of language family Family of Origin (FAMO), and we call the empirical definition of higher-ranked languages using our metrics Family of Choice (FAMC). Secondly, we build an Iteratively Pretrained Multilingual Order-preserving Lexiconized Transformer (IPML) to train on ~1,000 lines (~3.5%) of low resource data. To translate named entities correctly, we build a massive lexicon table for 2,939 Bible named entities in 124 source languages, and include many that occur once and covers more than 66 severely low resource languages. Moreover, we also build a novel method of combining translations from different source languages into one. Using English as a hypothetical low resource language, we get a +23.9 BLEU increase over a multilingual baseline, and a +10.3 BLEU increase over our asymmetric baseline in the Bible dataset. We get a 42.8 BLEU score for Portuguese-English translation on the medical EMEA dataset. We also have good results for a real severely low resource Mayan language, Eastern Pokomchi.
Visual Goal-Step Inference using wikiHow
Authors: Yue Yang, Artemis Panagopoulou, Qing Lyu, Li Zhang, Mark Yatskar, Chris Callison-Burch
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Multimodal Reasoning, VGSI

Understanding what sequence of steps are needed to complete a goal can help artificial intelligence systems reason about human activities. Past work in NLP has examined the task of goal-step inference for text. We introduce the visual analogue. We propose the Visual Goal-Step Inference (VGSI) task, where a model is given a textual goal and must choose which of four images represents a plausible step towards that goal. With a new dataset harvested from wikiHow consisting of 772,277 images representing human actions, we show that our task is challenging for state-of-the-art multimodal models. Moreover, the multimodal representation learned from our data can be effectively transferred to other datasets like HowTo100m, increasing the VGSI accuracy by 15 - 20%. Our task will facilitate multimodal reasoning about procedural events.
Relational World Knowledge Representation in Contextual Language Models: A Review
Authors: Tara Safavi, Danai Koutra
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: World Knowledge

Relational knowledge bases (KBs) are commonly used to represent world knowledge in machines. However, while advantageous for their high degree of precision and interpretability, KBs are usually organized according to manually-defined schemas, which limit their expressiveness and require significant human efforts to engineer and maintain. In this review, we take a natural language processing perspective to these limitations, examining how they may be addressed in part by training deep contextual language models (LMs) to internalize and express relational knowledge in more flexible forms. We propose to organize knowledge representation strategies in LMs by the level of KB supervision provided, from no KB supervision at all to entity- and relation-level supervision. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We provide a high-level, extensible taxonomy for knowledge representation in LMs; (2) Within our taxonomy, we highlight notable models, evaluation tasks, and findings, in order to provide an up-to-date review of current knowledge representation capabilities in LMs; and (3) We suggest future research directions that build upon the complementary aspects of LMs and KBs as knowledge representations.
Semantic Segmentation with Generative Models: Semi-Supervised Learning and Strong Out-of-Domain Generalization
Authors: Daiqing Li, Junlin Yang, Karsten Kreis, Antonio Torralba, Sanja Fidler
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Training deep networks with limited labeled data while achieving a strong generalization ability is key in the quest to reduce human annotation efforts. This is the goal of semi-supervised learning, which exploits more widely available unlabeled data to complement small labeled data sets. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for discriminative pixel-level tasks using a generative model of both images and labels. Concretely, we learn a generative adversarial network that captures the joint image-label distribution and is trained efficiently using a large set of unlabeled images supplemented with only few labeled ones. We build our architecture on top of StyleGAN2, augmented with a label synthesis branch. Image labeling at test time is achieved by first embedding the target image into the joint latent space via an encoder network and test-time optimization, and then generating the label from the inferred embedding. We evaluate our approach in two important domains: medical image segmentation and part-based face segmentation. We demonstrate strong in-domain performance compared to several baselines, and are the first to showcase extreme out-of-domain generalization, such as transferring from CT to MRI in medical imaging, and photographs of real faces to paintings, sculptures, and even cartoons and animal faces. Project Page: \url{https://nv-tlabs.github.io/semanticGAN/}
SpartQA: : A Textual Question Answering Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning
Authors: Roshanak Mirzaee, Hossein Rajaby Faghihi, Qiang Ning, Parisa Kordjmashidi
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Spatial Reasoning

This paper proposes a question-answering (QA) benchmark for spatial reasoning on natural language text which contains more realistic spatial phenomena not covered by prior work and is challenging for state-of-the-art language models (LM). We propose a distant supervision method to improve on this task. Specifically, we design grammar and reasoning rules to automatically generate a spatial description of visual scenes and corresponding QA pairs. Experiments show that further pretraining LMs on these automatically generated data significantly improves LMs' capability on spatial understanding, which in turn helps to better solve two external datasets, bAbI, and boolQ. We hope that this work can foster investigations into more sophisticated models for spatial reasoning over text.
On the Linear Ordering Problem and the Rankability of Data
Authors: Thomas R. Cameron, Sebastian Charmot, Jonad Pulaj
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

In 2019, Anderson et al. proposed the concept of rankability, which refers to a dataset's inherent ability to be meaningfully ranked. In this article, we give an expository review of the linear ordering problem (LOP) and then use it to analyze the rankability of data. Specifically, the degree of linearity is used to quantify what percentage of the data aligns with an optimal ranking. In a sports context, this is analogous to the number of games that a ranking can correctly predict in hindsight. In fact, under the appropriate objective function, we show that the optimal rankings computed via the LOP maximize the hindsight accuracy of a ranking. Moreover, we develop a binary program to compute the maximal Kendall tau ranking distance between two optimal rankings, which can be used to measure the diversity among optimal rankings without having to enumerate all optima. Finally, we provide several examples from the world of sports and college rankings to illustrate these concepts and demonstrate our results.
Does My Representation Capture X? Probe-Ably
Authors: Deborah Ferreira, Julia Rozanova, Mokanarangan Thayaparan, Marco Valentino, André Freitas
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Diagnostic

Probing (or diagnostic classification) has become a popular strategy for investigating whether a given set of intermediate features is present in the representations of neural models. Probing studies may have misleading results, but various recent works have suggested more reliable methodologies that compensate for the possible pitfalls of probing. However, these best practices are numerous and fast-evolving. To simplify the process of running a set of probing experiments in line with suggested methodologies, we introduce Probe-Ably: an extendable probing framework which supports and automates the application of probing methods to the user's inputs.
A Recipe for Global Convergence Guarantee in Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Kenji Kawaguchi, Qingyun Sun
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00

Existing global convergence guarantees of (stochastic) gradient descent do not apply to practical deep networks in the practical regime of deep learning beyond the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime. This paper proposes an algorithm, which is ensured to have global convergence guarantees in the practical regime beyond the NTK regime, under a verifiable condition called the expressivity condition. The expressivity condition is defined to be both data-dependent and architecture-dependent, which is the key property that makes our results applicable for practical settings beyond the NTK regime. On the one hand, the expressivity condition is theoretically proven to hold data-independently for fully-connected deep neural networks with narrow hidden layers and a single wide layer. On the other hand, the expressivity condition is numerically shown to hold data-dependently for deep (convolutional) ResNet with batch normalization with various standard image datasets. We also show that the proposed algorithm has generalization performances comparable with those of the heuristic algorithm, with the same hyper-parameters and total number of iterations. Therefore, the proposed algorithm can be viewed as a step towards providing theoretical guarantees for deep learning in the practical regime.
Censored Semi-Bandits for Resource Allocation
Authors: Arun Verma, Manjesh K. Hanawal, Arun Rajkumar, Raman Sankaran
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

We consider the problem of sequentially allocating resources in a censored semi-bandits setup, where the learner allocates resources at each step to the arms and observes loss. The loss depends on two hidden parameters, one specific to the arm but independent of the resource allocation, and the other depends on the allocated resource. More specifically, the loss equals zero for an arm if the resource allocated to it exceeds a constant (but unknown) arm dependent threshold. The goal is to learn a resource allocation that minimizes the expected loss. The problem is challenging because the loss distribution and threshold value of each arm are unknown. We study this setting by establishing its `equivalence' to Multiple-Play Multi-Armed Bandits (MP-MAB) and Combinatorial Semi-Bandits. Exploiting these equivalences, we derive optimal algorithms for our problem setting using known algorithms for MP-MAB and Combinatorial Semi-Bandits. The experiments on synthetically generated data validate the performance guarantees of the proposed algorithms.
Approximate Computing for Robotic path planning -- Experimentation, Case Study and Practical Implications
Authors: Hrishav Bakul Barua
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00

Approximate computing is a computation domain which can be used to trade time and energy with quality and therefore is useful in embedded systems. Energy is the prime resource in battery-driven embedded systems, like robots. Approximate computing can be used as a technique to generate approximate version of the control functionalities of a robot, enabling it to ration energy for computation at the cost of degraded quality. Usually, the programmer of the function specifies the extent of degradation that is safe for the overall safety of the system. However, in a collaborative environment, where several sub-systems co-exist and some of the functionality of each of them have been approximated, the safety of the overall system may be compromised. In this paper, we consider multiple identical robots operate in a warehouse, and the path planning function of the robot is approximated. Although the planned paths are safe for individual robots (i.e. they do not collide with the racks), we show that this leads to a collision among the robots. So, a controlled approximation needs to be carried out in such situations to harness the full power of this new paradigm if it needs to be a mainstream paradigm in future.
Towards Extremely Compact RNNs for Video Recognition with Fully Decomposed Hierarchical Tucker Structure
Authors: Miao Yin, Siyu Liao, Xiao-Yang Liu, Xiaodong Wang, Bo Yuan
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Tensor Decomposition, Video Recognition

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely used in sequence analysis and modeling. However, when processing high-dimensional data, RNNs typically require very large model sizes, thereby bringing a series of deployment challenges. Although various prior works have been proposed to reduce the RNN model sizes, executing RNN models in resource-restricted environments is still a very challenging problem. In this paper, we propose to develop extremely compact RNN models with fully decomposed hierarchical Tucker (FDHT) structure. The HT decomposition does not only provide much higher storage cost reduction than the other tensor decomposition approaches but also brings better accuracy performance improvement for the compact RNN models. Meanwhile, unlike the existing tensor decomposition-based methods that can only decompose the input-to-hidden layer of RNNs, our proposed fully decomposition approach enables the comprehensive compression for the entire RNN models with maintaining very high accuracy. Our experimental results on several popular video recognition datasets show that our proposed fully decomposed hierarchical tucker-based LSTM (FDHT-LSTM) is extremely compact and highly efficient. To the best of our knowledge, FDHT-LSTM, for the first time, consistently achieves very high accuracy with only few thousand parameters (3,132 to 8,808) on different datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art compressed RNN models, such as TT-LSTM, TR-LSTM and BT-LSTM, our FDHT-LSTM simultaneously enjoys both order-of-magnitude (3,985x to 10,711x) fewer parameters and significant accuracy improvement (0.6% to 12.7%).
Tensor Processing Primitives: A Programming Abstraction for Efficiency and Portability in Deep Learning & HPC Workloads
Authors: Evangelos Georganas, Dhiraj Kalamkar, Sasikanth Avancha, Menachem Adelman, Deepti Aggarwal, Cristina Anderson, Alexander Breuer, Jeremy Bruestle, Narendra Chaudhary, Abhisek Kundu, Denise Kutnick, Frank Laub, Vasimuddin Md, Sanchit Misra, Ramanarayan Mohanty, Hans Pabst, Brian Retford, Barukh Ziv, Alexander Heinecke
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00

During the past decade, novel Deep Learning (DL) algorithms, workloads and hardware have been developed to tackle a wide range of problems. Despite the advances in workload and hardware ecosystems, the programming methodology of DL systems is stagnant. DL workloads leverage either highly-optimized, yet platform-specific and inflexible kernels from DL libraries, or in the case of novel operators, reference implementations are built via DL framework primitives with underwhelming performance. This work introduces the Tensor Processing Primitives (TPP), a programming abstraction striving for efficient, portable implementation of DL workloads with high-productivity. TPPs define a compact, yet versatile set of 2D-tensor operators (or a virtual Tensor ISA), which subsequently can be utilized as building-blocks to construct complex operators on high-dimensional tensors. The TPP specification is platform-agnostic, thus code expressed via TPPs is portable, whereas the TPP implementation is highly-optimized and platform-specific. We demonstrate the efficacy and viability of our approach using standalone kernels and end-to-end DL & HPC workloads expressed entirely via TPPs that outperform state-of-the-art implementations on multiple platforms.
Towards a parallel corpus of Portuguese and the Bantu language Emakhuwa of Mozambique
Authors: Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Andrew Caines, Jaimito L. A. Malavi
Date: 2021-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Major advancement in the performance of machine translation models has been made possible in part thanks to the availability of large-scale parallel corpora. But for most languages in the world, the existence of such corpora is rare. Emakhuwa, a language spoken in Mozambique, is like most African languages low-resource in NLP terms. It lacks both computational and linguistic resources and, to the best of our knowledge, few parallel corpora including Emakhuwa already exist. In this paper we describe the creation of the Emakhuwa-Portuguese parallel corpus, which is a collection of texts from the Jehovah's Witness website and a variety of other sources including the African Story Book website, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Mozambican legal documents. The dataset contains 47,415 sentence pairs, amounting to 699,976 word tokens of Emakhuwa and 877,595 word tokens in Portuguese. After normalization processes which remain to be completed, the corpus will be made freely available for research use.
Systemic formalisation of Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS): A systematic literature review
Authors: Bereket Abera Yilma, Hervé Panetto, Yannick Naudet
Date: 2021-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Dynamics, Systematic Literature Review

The notion of Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS) is an emerging concept developed as a result of the need to understand the impact of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) on humans and vice versa. This paradigm shift from CPS to CPSS was mainly attributed to the increasing use of sensor-enabled smart devices and the tight link with the users. The concept of CPSS has been around for over a decade and it has gained increasing attention over the past few years. The evolution to incorporate human aspects in the CPS research has unlocked a number of research challenges. Particularly human dynamics brings additional complexity that is yet to be explored. The exploration to conceptualise the notion of CPSS has been partially addressed in few scientific literatures. Although its conceptualisation has always been use-case dependent. Thus, there is a lack of generic view as most works focus on specific domains. Furthermore, the systemic core and design principles linking it with the theory of systems are loose. This work aims at addressing these issues by first exploring and analysing scientific literature to understand the complete spectrum of CPSS through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). Thereby identifying the state-of-the-art perspectives on CPSS regarding definitions, underlining principles and application areas. Subsequently, based on the findings of the SLR, we propose a domain-independent definition and a meta-model for CPSS, grounded in the Theory of Systems. Finally, a discussion on feasible future research directions is presented based on the systemic notion and the proposed meta-models.
Exploration of Spanish Olive Oil Quality with a Miniaturized Low-Cost Fluorescence Sensor and Machine Learning Techniques
Authors: Francesca Venturini, Michela Sperti, Umberto Michelucci, Ivo Herzig, Michael Baumgartner, Josep Palau Caballero, Arturo Jimenez, and Marco Agostino Deriu
Date: 2021-04-09 00:00:00

Extra virgin olive oil (EVOO) is the highest quality of olive oil and is characterized by highly beneficial nutritional properties. The large increase in both consumption and fraud, for example through adulteration, creates new challenges and an increasing demand for developing new quality assessment methodologies that are easier and cheaper to perform. As of today, the determination of olive oil quality is performed by producers through chemical analysis and organoleptic evaluation. The chemical analysis requires the advanced equipment and chemical knowledge of certified laboratories, and has therefore a limited accessibility. In this work a minimalist, portable and low-cost sensor is presented, which can perform olive oil quality assessment using fluorescence spectroscopy. The potential of the proposed technology is explored by analyzing several olive oils of different quality levels, EVOO, virgin olive oil (VOO), and lampante olive oil (LOO). The spectral data were analyzed using a large number of machine learning methods, including artificial neural networks. The analysis performed in this work demonstrates the possibility of performing classification of olive oil in the three mentioned classes with an accuracy of 100$\%$. These results confirm that this minimalist low-cost sensor has the potential of substituting expensive and complex chemical analysis.