pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
STEP-EZ: Syntax Tree guided semantic ExPlanation for Explainable Zero-shot modeling of clinical depression symptoms from text
Authors: Nawshad Farruque, Randy Goebel, Osmar Zaiane, Sudhakar Sivapalan
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-Shot Learning

We focus on exploring various approaches of Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) and their explainability for a challenging yet important supervised learning task notorious for training data scarcity, i.e. Depression Symptoms Detection (DSD) from text. We start with a comprehensive synthesis of different components of our ZSL modeling and analysis of our ground truth samples and Depression symptom clues curation process with the help of a practicing clinician. We next analyze the accuracy of various state-of-the-art ZSL models and their potential enhancements for our task. Further, we sketch a framework for the use of ZSL for hierarchical text-based explanation mechanism, which we call, Syntax Tree-Guided Semantic Explanation (STEP). Finally, we summarize experiments from which we conclude that we can use ZSL models and achieve reasonable accuracy and explainability, measured by a proposed Explainability Index (EI). This work is, to our knowledge, the first work to exhaustively explore the efficacy of ZSL models for DSD task, both in terms of accuracy and explainability.
Open-set Label Noise Can Improve Robustness Against Inherent Label Noise
Authors: Hongxin Wei, Lue Tao, Renchunzi Xie, Bo An
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Learning with noisy labels, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Weakly-supervised Learning

Learning with noisy labels is a practically challenging problem in weakly supervised learning. In the existing literature, open-set noises are always considered to be poisonous for generalization, similar to closed-set noises. In this paper, we empirically show that open-set noisy labels can be non-toxic and even benefit the robustness against inherent noisy labels. Inspired by the observations, we propose a simple yet effective regularization by introducing Open-set samples with Dynamic Noisy Labels (ODNL) into training. With ODNL, the extra capacity of the neural network can be largely consumed in a way that does not interfere with learning patterns from clean data. Through the lens of SGD noise, we show that the noises induced by our method are random-direction, conflict-free and biased, which may help the model converge to a flat minimum with superior stability and enforce the model to produce conservative predictions on Out-of-Distribution instances. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets with various types of noisy labels demonstrate that the proposed method not only enhances the performance of many existing robust algorithms but also achieves significant improvement on Out-of-Distribution detection tasks even in the label noise setting.
Proceedings Eighteenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge
Authors: Joseph Halpern, Andrés Perea
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Epistemic Reasoning, Philosophy

The TARK conference (Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge) is a biannual conference that aims to bring together researchers from a wide variety of fields, including computer science, artificial intelligence, game theory, decision theory, philosophy, logic, linguistics, and cognitive science. Its goal is to further our understanding of interdisciplinary issues involving reasoning about rationality and knowledge. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, semantic models for knowledge, belief, awareness and uncertainty, bounded rationality and resource-bounded reasoning, commonsense epistemic reasoning, epistemic logic, epistemic game theory, knowledge and action, applications of reasoning about knowledge and other mental states, belief revision, and foundations of multi-agent systems. These proceedings contain the papers that have been accepted for presentation at the Eighteenth Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK 2021), held between June 25 and June 27, 2021, at Tsinghua University at Beijing, China.
Total Generate: Cycle in Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks for Generating Human Faces, Hands, Bodies, and Natural Scenes
Authors: Hao Tang, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

We propose a novel and unified Cycle in Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (C2GAN) for generating human faces, hands, bodies, and natural scenes. Our proposed C2GAN is a cross-modal model exploring the joint exploitation of the input image data and guidance data in an interactive manner. C2GAN contains two different generators, i.e., an image-generation generator and a guidance-generation generator. Both generators are mutually connected and trained in an end-to-end fashion and explicitly form three cycled subnets, i.e., one image generation cycle and two guidance generation cycles. Each cycle aims at reconstructing the input domain and simultaneously produces a useful output involved in the generation of another cycle. In this way, the cycles constrain each other implicitly providing complementary information from both image and guidance modalities and bringing an extra supervision gradient across the cycles, facilitating a more robust optimization of the whole model. Extensive results on four guided image-to-image translation subtasks demonstrate that the proposed C2GAN is effective in generating more realistic images compared with state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/C2GAN.
On the Importance of Environments in Human-Robot Coordination
Authors: Matthew C. Fontaine, Ya-Chuan Hsu, Yulun Zhang, Bryon Tjanaka, Stefanos Nikolaidis
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00

When studying robots collaborating with humans, much of the focus has been on robot policies that coordinate fluently with human teammates in collaborative tasks. However, less emphasis has been placed on the effect of the environment on coordination behaviors. To thoroughly explore environments that result in diverse behaviors, we propose a framework for procedural generation of environments that are (1) stylistically similar to human-authored environments, (2) guaranteed to be solvable by the human-robot team, and (3) diverse with respect to coordination measures. We analyze the procedurally generated environments in the Overcooked benchmark domain via simulation and an online user study. Results show that the environments result in qualitatively different emerging behaviors and statistically significant differences in collaborative fluency metrics, even when the robot runs the same planning algorithm.
Trainable Class Prototypes for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Jianyi Li, Guizhong Liu
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Metric Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Few-Shot Image Classification, Unsupervised Few-Shot Learning

Metric learning is a widely used method for few shot learning in which the quality of prototypes plays a key role in the algorithm. In this paper we propose the trainable prototypes for distance measure instead of the artificial ones within the meta-training and task-training framework. Also to avoid the disadvantages that the episodic meta-training brought, we adopt non-episodic meta-training based on self-supervised learning. Overall we solve the few-shot tasks in two phases: meta-training a transferable feature extractor via self-supervised learning and training the prototypes for metric classification. In addition, the simple attention mechanism is used in both meta-training and task-training. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in a variety of established few-shot tasks on the standard few-shot visual classification dataset, with about 20% increase compared to the available unsupervised few-shot learning methods.
Pay Better Attention to Attention: Head Selection in Multilingual and Multi-Domain Sequence Modeling
Authors: Hongyu Gong, Yun Tang, Juan Pino, Xian Li
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Translation

Multi-head attention has each of the attention heads collect salient information from different parts of an input sequence, making it a powerful mechanism for sequence modeling. Multilingual and multi-domain learning are common scenarios for sequence modeling, where the key challenge is to maximize positive transfer and mitigate negative transfer across languages and domains. In this paper, we find that non-selective attention sharing is sub-optimal for achieving good generalization across all languages and domains. We further propose attention sharing strategies to facilitate parameter sharing and specialization in multilingual and multi-domain sequence modeling. Our approach automatically learns shared and specialized attention heads for different languages and domains to mitigate their interference. Evaluated in various tasks including speech recognition, text-to-text and speech-to-text translation, the proposed attention sharing strategies consistently bring gains to sequence models built upon multi-head attention. For speech-to-text translation, our approach yields an average of $+2.0$ BLEU over $13$ language directions in multilingual setting and $+2.0$ BLEU over $3$ domains in multi-domain setting.
DiGS : Divergence guided shape implicit neural representation for unoriented point clouds
Authors: Yizhak Ben-Shabat, Chamin Hewa Koneputugodage, Stephen Gould
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Surface Reconstruction

Shape implicit neural representations (INRs) have recently shown to be effective in shape analysis and reconstruction tasks. Existing INRs require point coordinates to learn the implicit level sets of the shape. When a normal vector is available for each point, a higher fidelity representation can be learned, however normal vectors are often not provided as raw data. Furthermore, the method's initialization has been shown to play a crucial role for surface reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a divergence guided shape representation learning approach that does not require normal vectors as input. We show that incorporating a soft constraint on the divergence of the distance function favours smooth solutions that reliably orients gradients to match the unknown normal at each point, in some cases even better than approaches that use ground truth normal vectors directly. Additionally, we introduce a novel geometric initialization method for sinusoidal INRs that further improves convergence to the desired solution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on the task of surface reconstruction and shape space learning and show SOTA performance compared to other unoriented methods. Code and model parameters available at our project page https://chumbyte.github.io/DiGS-Site/.
Adversarial Attack on Graph Neural Networks as An Influence Maximization Problem
Authors: Jiaqi Ma, Junwei Deng, Qiaozhu Mei
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted increasing interests. With broad deployments of GNNs in real-world applications, there is an urgent need for understanding the robustness of GNNs under adversarial attacks, especially in realistic setups. In this work, we study the problem of attacking GNNs in a restricted and realistic setup, by perturbing the features of a small set of nodes, with no access to model parameters and model predictions. Our formal analysis draws a connection between this type of attacks and an influence maximization problem on the graph. This connection not only enhances our understanding on the problem of adversarial attack on GNNs, but also allows us to propose a group of effective and practical attack strategies. Our experiments verify that the proposed attack strategies significantly degrade the performance of three popular GNN models and outperform baseline adversarial attack strategies.
OptiDICE: Offline Policy Optimization via Stationary Distribution Correction Estimation
Authors: Jongmin Lee, Wonseok Jeon, Byung-Jun Lee, Joelle Pineau, Kee-Eung Kim
Date: 2021-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We consider the offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting where the agent aims to optimize the policy solely from the data without further environment interactions. In offline RL, the distributional shift becomes the primary source of difficulty, which arises from the deviation of the target policy being optimized from the behavior policy used for data collection. This typically causes overestimation of action values, which poses severe problems for model-free algorithms that use bootstrapping. To mitigate the problem, prior offline RL algorithms often used sophisticated techniques that encourage underestimation of action values, which introduces an additional set of hyperparameters that need to be tuned properly. In this paper, we present an offline RL algorithm that prevents overestimation in a more principled way. Our algorithm, OptiDICE, directly estimates the stationary distribution corrections of the optimal policy and does not rely on policy-gradients, unlike previous offline RL algorithms. Using an extensive set of benchmark datasets for offline RL, we show that OptiDICE performs competitively with the state-of-the-art methods.
Learning to Track Object Position through Occlusion
Authors: Satyaki Chakraborty, Martial Hebert
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Position

Occlusion is one of the most significant challenges encountered by object detectors and trackers. While both object detection and tracking has received a lot of attention in the past, most existing methods in this domain do not target detecting or tracking objects when they are occluded. However, being able to detect or track an object of interest through occlusion has been a long standing challenge for different autonomous tasks. Traditional methods that employ visual object trackers with explicit occlusion modeling experience drift and make several fundamental assumptions about the data. We propose to address this with a `tracking-by-detection` approach that builds upon the success of region based video object detectors. Our video level object detector uses a novel recurrent computational unit at its core that enables long term propagation of object features even under occlusion. Finally, we compare our approach with existing state-of-the-art video object detectors and show that our approach achieves superior results on a dataset of furniture assembly videos collected from the internet, where small objects like screws, nuts, and bolts often get occluded from the camera viewpoint.
Is Shapley Value fair? Improving Client Selection for Mavericks in Federated Learning
Authors: Jiyue Huang, Chi Hong, Lydia Y. Chen, Stefanie Roos
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Shapley Value is commonly adopted to measure and incentivize client participation in federated learning. In this paper, we show -- theoretically and through simulations -- that Shapley Value underestimates the contribution of a common type of client: the Maverick. Mavericks are clients that differ both in data distribution and data quantity and can be the sole owners of certain types of data. Selecting the right clients at the right moment is important for federated learning to reduce convergence times and improve accuracy. We propose FedEMD, an adaptive client selection strategy based on the Wasserstein distance between the local and global data distributions. As FedEMD adapts the selection probability such that Mavericks are preferably selected when the model benefits from improvement on rare classes, it consistently ensures the fast convergence in the presence of different types of Mavericks. Compared to existing strategies, including Shapley Value-based ones, FedEMD improves the convergence of neural network classifiers by at least 26.9% for FedAvg aggregation compared with the state of the art.
Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Novel Class Discovery
Authors: Zhun Zhong, Enrico Fini, Subhankar Roy, Zhiming Luo, Elisa Ricci, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Novel Class Discovery

In this paper, we address Novel Class Discovery (NCD), the task of unveiling new classes in a set of unlabeled samples given a labeled dataset with known classes. We exploit the peculiarities of NCD to build a new framework, named Neighborhood Contrastive Learning (NCL), to learn discriminative representations that are important to clustering performance. Our contribution is twofold. First, we find that a feature extractor trained on the labeled set generates representations in which a generic query sample and its neighbors are likely to share the same class. We exploit this observation to retrieve and aggregate pseudo-positive pairs with contrastive learning, thus encouraging the model to learn more discriminative representations. Second, we notice that most of the instances are easily discriminated by the network, contributing less to the contrastive loss. To overcome this issue, we propose to generate hard negatives by mixing labeled and unlabeled samples in the feature space. We experimentally demonstrate that these two ingredients significantly contribute to clustering performance and lead our model to outperform state-of-the-art methods by a large margin (e.g., clustering accuracy +13% on CIFAR-100 and +8% on ImageNet).
Fast PDN Impedance Prediction Using Deep Learning
Authors: Ling Zhang, Jack Juang, Zurab Kiguradze, Bo Pu, Shuai Jin, Songping Wu, Zhiping Yang, Chulsoon Hwang
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Prediction

Modeling and simulating a power distribution network (PDN) for printed circuit boards (PCBs) with irregular board shapes and multi-layer stackup is computationally inefficient using full-wave simulations. This paper presents a new concept of using deep learning for PDN impedance prediction. A boundary element method (BEM) is applied to efficiently calculate the impedance for arbitrary board shape and stackup. Then over one million boards with different shapes, stackup, IC location, and decap placement are randomly generated to train a deep neural network (DNN). The trained DNN can predict the impedance accurately for new board configurations that have not been used for training. The consumed time using the trained DNN is only 0.1 seconds, which is over 100 times faster than the BEM method and 5000 times faster than full-wave simulations.
MILP, pseudo-boolean, and OMT solvers for optimal fault-tolerant placements of relay nodes in mission critical wireless networks
Authors: Quian Matteo Chen, Alberto Finzi, Toni Mancini, Igor Melatti, Enrico Tronci
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00

In critical infrastructures like airports, much care has to be devoted in protecting radio communication networks from external electromagnetic interference. Protection of such mission-critical radio communication networks is usually tackled by exploiting radiogoniometers: at least three suitably deployed radiogoniometers, and a gateway gathering information from them, permit to monitor and localise sources of electromagnetic emissions that are not supposed to be present in the monitored area. Typically, radiogoniometers are connected to the gateway through relay nodes. As a result, some degree of fault-tolerance for the network of relay nodes is essential in order to offer a reliable monitoring. On the other hand, deployment of relay nodes is typically quite expensive. As a result, we have two conflicting requirements: minimise costs while guaranteeing a given fault-tolerance. In this paper, we address the problem of computing a deployment for relay nodes that minimises the relay node network cost while at the same time guaranteeing proper working of the network even when some of the relay nodes (up to a given maximum number) become faulty (fault-tolerance). We show that, by means of a computation-intensive pre-processing on a HPC infrastructure, the above optimisation problem can be encoded as a 0/1 Linear Program, becoming suitable to be approached with standard Artificial Intelligence reasoners like MILP, PB-SAT, and SMT/OMT solvers. Our problem formulation enables us to present experimental results comparing the performance of these three solving technologies on a real case study of a relay node network deployment in areas of the Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, Italy.
Optimal personalised treatment computation through in silico clinical trials on patient digital twins
Authors: Stefano Sinisi, Vadim Alimguzhin, Toni Mancini, Enrico Tronci, Federico Mari, Brigitte Leeners
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00

In Silico Clinical Trials (ISTC), i.e., clinical experimental campaigns carried out by means of computer simulations, hold the promise to decrease time and cost for the safety and efficacy assessment of pharmacological treatments, reduce the need for animal and human testing, and enable precision medicine. In this paper we present methods and an algorithm that, by means of extensive computer simulation--based experimental campaigns (ISTC) guided by intelligent search, optimise a pharmacological treatment for an individual patient (precision medicine). e show the effectiveness of our approach on a case study involving a real pharmacological treatment, namely the downregulation phase of a complex clinical protocol for assisted reproduction in humans.
Solution for Large-scale Long-tailed Recognition with Noisy Labels
Authors: Yuqiao Xian, Jia-Xin Zhuang, Fufu Yu
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00

This is a technical report for CVPR 2021 AliProducts Challenge. AliProducts Challenge is a competition proposed for studying the large-scale and fine-grained commodity image recognition problem encountered by worldleading ecommerce companies. The large-scale product recognition simultaneously meets the challenge of noisy annotations, imbalanced (long-tailed) data distribution and fine-grained classification. In our solution, we adopt stateof-the-art model architectures of both CNNs and Transformer, including ResNeSt, EfficientNetV2, and DeiT. We found that iterative data cleaning, classifier weight normalization, high-resolution finetuning, and test time augmentation are key components to improve the performance of training with the noisy and imbalanced dataset. Finally, we obtain 6.4365% mean class error rate in the leaderboard with our ensemble model.
Tag, Copy or Predict: A Unified Weakly-Supervised Learning Framework for Visual Information Extraction using Sequences
Authors: Jiapeng Wang, Tianwei Wang, Guozhi Tang, Lianwen Jin, Weihong Ma, Kai Ding, Yichao Huang
Date: 2021-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), TAG, Weakly-supervised Learning

Visual information extraction (VIE) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The existing methods usually first organized optical character recognition (OCR) results into plain texts and then utilized token-level entity annotations as supervision to train a sequence tagging model. However, it expends great annotation costs and may be exposed to label confusion, and the OCR errors will also significantly affect the final performance. In this paper, we propose a unified weakly-supervised learning framework called TCPN (Tag, Copy or Predict Network), which introduces 1) an efficient encoder to simultaneously model the semantic and layout information in 2D OCR results; 2) a weakly-supervised training strategy that utilizes only key information sequences as supervision; and 3) a flexible and switchable decoder which contains two inference modes: one (Copy or Predict Mode) is to output key information sequences of different categories by copying a token from the input or predicting one in each time step, and the other (Tag Mode) is to directly tag the input sequence in a single forward pass. Our method shows new state-of-the-art performance on several public benchmarks, which fully proves its effectiveness.