pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Feature-Attending Recurrent Modules for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wilka Carvalho, Andrew Lampinen, Kyriacos Nikiforou, Felix Hill, Murray Shanahan
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Many important tasks are defined in terms of object. To generalize across these tasks, a reinforcement learning (RL) agent needs to exploit the structure that the objects induce. Prior work has either hard-coded object-centric features, used complex object-centric generative models, or updated state using local spatial features. However, these approaches have had limited success in enabling general RL agents. Motivated by this, we introduce "Feature-Attending Recurrent Modules" (FARM), an architecture for learning state representations that relies on simple, broadly applicable inductive biases for capturing spatial and temporal regularities. FARM learns a state representation that is distributed across multiple modules that each attend to spatiotemporal features with an expressive feature attention mechanism. We show that this improves an RL agent's ability to generalize across object-centric tasks. We study task suites in both 2D and 3D environments and find that FARM better generalizes compared to competing architectures that leverage attention or multiple modules.
Degendering Resumes for Fair Algorithmic Resume Screening
Authors: Prasanna Parasurama, João Sedoc
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We investigate whether it is feasible to remove gendered information from resumes to mitigate potential bias in algorithmic resume screening. Using a corpus of 709k resumes from IT firms, we first train a series of models to classify the self-reported gender of the applicant, thereby measuring the extent and nature of gendered information encoded in resumes. We then conduct a series of gender obfuscation experiments, where we iteratively remove gendered information from resumes. Finally, we train a resume screening algorithm and investigate the trade-off between gender obfuscation and screening algorithm performance. Results show: (1) There is a significant amount of gendered information in resumes. (2) Lexicon-based gender obfuscation method (i.e. removing tokens that are predictive of gender) can reduce the amount of gendered information to a large extent. However, after a certain point, the performance of the resume screening algorithm starts suffering. (3) General-purpose gender debiasing methods for NLP models such as removing gender subspace from embeddings are not effective in obfuscating gender.
Imbalanced Sample Generation and Evaluation for Power System Transient Stability Using CTGAN
Authors: Gengshi Han, Shunyu Liu, KaiXuan Chen, Na Yu, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Although deep learning has achieved impressive advances in transient stability assessment of power systems, the insufficient and imbalanced samples still trap the training effect of the data-driven methods. This paper proposes a controllable sample generation framework based on Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Network (CTGAN) to generate specified transient stability samples. To fit the complex feature distribution of the transient stability samples, the proposed framework firstly models the samples as tabular data and uses Gaussian mixture models to normalize the tabular data. Then we transform multiple conditions into a single conditional vector to enable multi-conditional generation. Furthermore, this paper introduces three evaluation metrics to verify the quality of generated samples based on the proposed framework. Experimental results on the IEEE 39-bus system show that the proposed framework effectively balances the transient stability samples and significantly improves the performance of transient stability assessment models.
Deep Hash Distillation for Image Retrieval
Authors: Young Kyun Jang, Geonmo Gu, Byungsoo Ko, Isaac Kang, Nam Ik Cho
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Hashing, Image Retrieval, Quantization, Retrieval

In hash-based image retrieval systems, degraded or transformed inputs usually generate different codes from the original, deteriorating the retrieval accuracy. To mitigate this issue, data augmentation can be applied during training. However, even if augmented samples of an image are similar in real feature space, the quantization can scatter them far away in Hamming space. This results in representation discrepancies that can impede training and degrade performance. In this work, we propose a novel self-distilled hashing scheme to minimize the discrepancy while exploiting the potential of augmented data. By transferring the hash knowledge of the weakly-transformed samples to the strong ones, we make the hash code insensitive to various transformations. We also introduce hash proxy-based similarity learning and binary cross entropy-based quantization loss to provide fine quality hash codes. Ultimately, we construct a deep hashing framework that not only improves the existing deep hashing approaches, but also achieves the state-of-the-art retrieval results. Extensive experiments are conducted and confirm the effectiveness of our work.
Long Context Question Answering via Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Avi Caciularu, Ido Dagan, Jacob Goldberger, Arman Cohan
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Question Answering, Video Generation

Long-context question answering (QA) tasks require reasoning over a long document or multiple documents. Addressing these tasks often benefits from identifying a set of evidence spans (e.g., sentences), which provide supporting evidence for answering the question. In this work, we propose a novel method for equipping long-context QA models with an additional sequence-level objective for better identification of the supporting evidence. We achieve this via an additional contrastive supervision signal in finetuning, where the model is encouraged to explicitly discriminate supporting evidence sentences from negative ones by maximizing question-evidence similarity. The proposed additional loss exhibits consistent improvements on three different strong long-context transformer models, across two challenging question answering benchmarks -- HotpotQA and QAsper.
DProST: Dynamic Projective Spatial Transformer Network for 6D Pose Estimation
Authors: Jaewoo Park, Nam Ik Cho
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Object, Pose Estimation

Predicting the object's 6D pose from a single RGB image is a fundamental computer vision task. Generally, the distance between transformed object vertices is employed as an objective function for pose estimation methods. However, projective geometry in the camera space is not considered in those methods and causes performance degradation. In this regard, we propose a new pose estimation system based on a projective grid instead of object vertices. Our pose estimation method, dynamic projective spatial transformer network (DProST), localizes the region of interest grid on the rays in camera space and transforms the grid to object space by estimated pose. The transformed grid is used as both a sampling grid and a new criterion of the estimated pose. Additionally, because DProST does not require object vertices, our method can be used in a mesh-less setting by replacing the mesh with a reconstructed feature. Experimental results show that mesh-less DProST outperforms the state-of-the-art mesh-based methods on the LINEMOD and LINEMOD-OCCLUSION dataset, and shows competitive performance on the YCBV dataset with mesh data. The source code is available at https://github.com/parkjaewoo0611/DProST
CODER: An efficient framework for improving retrieval through COntextual Document Embedding Reranking
Authors: George Zerveas, Navid Rekabsaz, Daniel Cohen, Carsten Eickhoff
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Document Embedding, Reranking, Retrieval

Contrastive learning has been the dominant approach to training dense retrieval models. In this work, we investigate the impact of ranking context - an often overlooked aspect of learning dense retrieval models. In particular, we examine the effect of its constituent parts: jointly scoring a large number of negatives per query, using retrieved (query-specific) instead of random negatives, and a fully list-wise loss. To incorporate these factors into training, we introduce Contextual Document Embedding Reranking (CODER), a highly efficient retrieval framework. When reranking, it incurs only a negligible computational overhead on top of a first-stage method at run time (delay per query in the order of milliseconds), allowing it to be easily combined with any state-of-the-art dual encoder method. After fine-tuning through CODER, which is a lightweight and fast process, models can also be used as stand-alone retrievers. Evaluating CODER in a large set of experiments on the MS~MARCO and TripClick collections, we show that the contextual reranking of precomputed document embeddings leads to a significant improvement in retrieval performance. This improvement becomes even more pronounced when more relevance information per query is available, shown in the TripClick collection, where we establish new state-of-the-art results by a large margin.
Graph Convolutional Networks with Dual Message Passing for Subgraph Isomorphism Counting and Matching
Authors: Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification, Representation Learning

Graph neural networks (GNNs) and message passing neural networks (MPNNs) have been proven to be expressive for subgraph structures in many applications. Some applications in heterogeneous graphs require explicit edge modeling, such as subgraph isomorphism counting and matching. However, existing message passing mechanisms are not designed well in theory. In this paper, we start from a particular edge-to-vertex transform and exploit the isomorphism property in the edge-to-vertex dual graphs. We prove that searching isomorphisms on the original graph is equivalent to searching on its dual graph. Based on this observation, we propose dual message passing neural networks (DMPNNs) to enhance the substructure representation learning in an asynchronous way for subgraph isomorphism counting and matching as well as unsupervised node classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robust performance of DMPNNs by combining both node and edge representation learning in synthetic and real heterogeneous graphs. Code is available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/DualMessagePassing.
CLIN-X: pre-trained language models and a study on cross-task transfer for concept extraction in the clinical domain
Authors: Lukas Lange, Heike Adel, Jannik Strötgen, Dietrich Klakow
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Clinical Concept Extraction, Language Modelling, Sentence, XLM-R

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently seen a large change towards using pre-trained language models for solving almost any task. Despite showing great improvements in benchmark datasets for various tasks, these models often perform sub-optimal in non-standard domains like the clinical domain where a large gap between pre-training documents and target documents is observed. In this paper, we aim at closing this gap with domain-specific training of the language model and we investigate its effect on a diverse set of downstream tasks and settings. We introduce the pre-trained CLIN-X (Clinical XLM-R) language models and show how CLIN-X outperforms other pre-trained transformer models by a large margin for ten clinical concept extraction tasks from two languages. In addition, we demonstrate how the transformer model can be further improved with our proposed task- and language-agnostic model architecture based on ensembles over random splits and cross-sentence context. Our studies in low-resource and transfer settings reveal stable model performance despite a lack of annotated data with improvements of up to 47 F1 points when only 250 labeled sentences are available. Our results highlight the importance of specialized language models as CLIN-X for concept extraction in non-standard domains, but also show that our task-agnostic model architecture is robust across the tested tasks and languages so that domain- or task-specific adaptations are not required.
Knowledge-enhanced Session-based Recommendation with Temporal Transformer
Authors: Rongzhi Zhang, Yulong Gu, Xiaoyu Shen, Hui Su
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning, Session-Based Recommendations

Recent research has achieved impressive progress in the session-based recommendation. However, information such as item knowledge and click time interval, which could be potentially utilized to improve the performance, remains largely unexploited. In this paper, we propose a framework called Knowledge-enhanced Session-based Recommendation with Temporal Transformer (KSTT) to incorporate such information when learning the item and session embeddings. Specifically, a knowledge graph, which models contexts among items within a session and their corresponding attributes, is proposed to obtain item embeddings through graph representation learning. We introduce time interval embedding to represent the time pattern between the item that needs to be predicted and historical click, and use it to replace the position embedding in the original transformer (called temporal transformer). The item embeddings in a session are passed through the temporal transformer network to get the session embedding, based on which the final recommendation is made. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on four benchmark datasets.
Prompt Tuning GPT-2 language model for parameter-efficient domain adaptation of ASR systems
Authors: Saket Dingliwal, Ashish Shenoy, Sravan Bodapati, Ankur Gandhe, Ravi Teja Gadde, Katrin Kirchhoff
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Domain Adaptation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have found their use in numerous industrial applications in very diverse domains creating a need to adapt to new domains with small memory and deployment overhead. In this work, we introduce domain-prompts, a methodology that involves training a small number of domain embedding parameters to prime a Transformer-based Language Model (LM) to a particular domain. Using this domain-adapted LM for rescoring ASR hypotheses can achieve 7-13% WER reduction for a new domain with just 1000 unlabeled textual domain-specific sentences. This improvement is comparable or even better than fully fine-tuned models even though just 0.02% of the parameters of the base LM are updated. Additionally, our method is deployment-friendly as the learnt domain embeddings are prefixed to the input to the model rather than changing the base model architecture. Therefore, our method is an ideal choice for on-the-fly adaptation of LMs used in ASR systems to progressively scale it to new domains.
Isometric MT: Neural Machine Translation for Automatic Dubbing
Authors: Surafel M. Lakew, Yogesh Virkar, Prashant Mathur, Marcello Federico
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Re-Ranking, Self-Learning, Translation

Automatic dubbing (AD) is among the machine translation (MT) use cases where translations should match a given length to allow for synchronicity between source and target speech. For neural MT, generating translations of length close to the source length (e.g. within +-10% in character count), while preserving quality is a challenging task. Controlling MT output length comes at a cost to translation quality, which is usually mitigated with a two step approach of generating N-best hypotheses and then re-ranking based on length and quality. This work introduces a self-learning approach that allows a transformer model to directly learn to generate outputs that closely match the source length, in short Isometric MT. In particular, our approach does not require to generate multiple hypotheses nor any auxiliary ranking function. We report results on four language pairs (English - French, Italian, German, Spanish) with a publicly available benchmark. Automatic and manual evaluations show that our method for Isometric MT outperforms more complex approaches proposed in the literature.
Multi-Camera LiDAR Inertial Extension to the Newer College Dataset
Authors: Lintong Zhang, Marco Camurri, David Wisth, Maurice Fallon
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00

We present a multi-camera LiDAR inertial dataset of 4.5 km walking distance as an expansion of the Newer College Dataset. The global shutter multi-camera device is hardware synchronized with both the IMU and LiDAR, which is more accurate than the original dataset with software synchronization. This dataset also provides six Degrees of Freedom (DoF) ground truth poses at LiDAR frequency (10 Hz). Three data collections are described and an example use case of multi-camera visual-inertial odometry is demonstrated. This expansion dataset contains small and narrow passages, large scale open spaces, as well as vegetated areas, to test localization and mapping systems. Furthermore, some sequences present challenging situations such as abrupt lighting change, textureless surfaces, and aggressive motion. The dataset is available at: https://ori-drs.github. io/newer-college-dataset/
MAVE: A Product Dataset for Multi-source Attribute Value Extraction
Authors: Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Zac Yu, Anand Kulkarni, Sumit Sanghai, Bin Shu, Jon Elsas, Bhargav Kanagal
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Attribute Extraction, Attribute Value Extraction, Retrieval

Attribute value extraction refers to the task of identifying values of an attribute of interest from product information. Product attribute values are essential in many e-commerce scenarios, such as customer service robots, product ranking, retrieval and recommendations. While in the real world, the attribute values of a product are usually incomplete and vary over time, which greatly hinders the practical applications. In this paper, we introduce MAVE, a new dataset to better facilitate research on product attribute value extraction. MAVE is composed of a curated set of 2.2 million products from Amazon pages, with 3 million attribute-value annotations across 1257 unique categories. MAVE has four main and unique advantages: First, MAVE is the largest product attribute value extraction dataset by the number of attribute-value examples. Second, MAVE includes multi-source representations from the product, which captures the full product information with high attribute coverage. Third, MAVE represents a more diverse set of attributes and values relative to what previous datasets cover. Lastly, MAVE provides a very challenging zero-shot test set, as we empirically illustrate in the experiments. We further propose a novel approach that effectively extracts the attribute value from the multi-source product information. We conduct extensive experiments with several baselines and show that MAVE is an effective dataset for attribute value extraction task. It is also a very challenging task on zero-shot attribute extraction. Data is available at {\it \url{https://github.com/google-research-datasets/MAVE}}.
Invariance Through Latent Alignment
Authors: Takuma Yoneda, Ge Yang, Matthew R. Walter, Bradly Stadie
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

A robot's deployment environment often involves perceptual changes that differ from what it has experienced during training. Standard practices such as data augmentation attempt to bridge this gap by augmenting source images in an effort to extend the support of the training distribution to better cover what the agent might experience at test time. In many cases, however, it is impossible to know test-time distribution-shift a priori, making these schemes infeasible. In this paper, we introduce a general approach, called Invariance Through Latent Alignment (ILA), that improves the test-time performance of a visuomotor control policy in deployment environments with unknown perceptual variations. ILA performs unsupervised adaptation at deployment-time by matching the distribution of latent features on the target domain to the agent's prior experience, without relying on paired data. Although simple, we show that this idea leads to surprising improvements on a variety of challenging adaptation scenarios, including changes in lighting conditions, the content in the scene, and camera poses. We present results on calibrated control benchmarks in simulation -- the distractor control suite -- and a physical robot under a sim-to-real setup.
Safety-Critical Control with Input Delay in Dynamic Environment
Authors: Tamas G. Molnar, Adam K. Kiss, Aaron D. Ames, Gábor Orosz
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00

Endowing nonlinear systems with safe behavior is increasingly important in modern control. This task is particularly challenging for real-life control systems that must operate safely in dynamically changing environments. This paper develops a framework for safety-critical control in dynamic environments, by establishing the notion of environmental control barrier functions (ECBFs). The framework is able to guarantee safety even in the presence of input delay, by accounting for the evolution of the environment during the delayed response of the system. The underlying control synthesis relies on predicting the future state of the system and the environment over the delay interval, with robust safety guarantees against prediction errors. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated by a simple adaptive cruise control problem and a more complex robotics application on a Segway platform.
FIgLib & SmokeyNet: Dataset and Deep Learning Model for Real-Time Wildland Fire Smoke Detection
Authors: Anshuman Dewangan, Yash Pande, Hans-Werner Braun, Frank Vernon, Ismael Perez, Ilkay Altintas, Garrison W. Cottrell, Mai H. Nguyen
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The size and frequency of wildland fires in the western United States have dramatically increased in recent years. On high-fire-risk days, a small fire ignition can rapidly grow and become out of control. Early detection of fire ignitions from initial smoke can assist the response to such fires before they become difficult to manage. Past deep learning approaches for wildfire smoke detection have suffered from small or unreliable datasets that make it difficult to extrapolate performance to real-world scenarios. In this work, we present the Fire Ignition Library (FIgLib), a publicly available dataset of nearly 25,000 labeled wildfire smoke images as seen from fixed-view cameras deployed in Southern California. We also introduce SmokeyNet, a novel deep learning architecture using spatiotemporal information from camera imagery for real-time wildfire smoke detection. When trained on the FIgLib dataset, SmokeyNet outperforms comparable baselines and rivals human performance. We hope that the availability of the FIgLib dataset and the SmokeyNet architecture will inspire further research into deep learning methods for wildfire smoke detection, leading to automated notification systems that reduce the time to wildfire response.