pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Adversarial Attacks on ML Defense Models Competition
Authors: Yinpeng Dong, Qi-An Fu, Xiao Yang, Wenzhao Xiang, Tianyu Pang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Jiayu Tang, Yuefeng Chen, Xiaofeng Mao, Yuan He, Hui Xue, Chao Li, Ye Liu, Qilong Zhang, Lianli Gao, Yunrui Yu, Xitong Gao, Zhe Zhao, Daquan Lin, Jiadong Lin, Chuanbiao Song, ZiHao Wang, Zhennan Wu, Yang Guo, Jiequan Cui, Xiaogang Xu, Pengguang Chen
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Robustness, image-classification, Image Classification

Due to the vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples, a large number of defense techniques have been proposed to alleviate this problem in recent years. However, the progress of building more robust models is usually hampered by the incomplete or incorrect robustness evaluation. To accelerate the research on reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness of the current defense models in image classification, the TSAIL group at Tsinghua University and the Alibaba Security group organized this competition along with a CVPR 2021 workshop on adversarial machine learning (https://aisecure-workshop.github.io/amlcvpr2021/). The purpose of this competition is to motivate novel attack algorithms to evaluate adversarial robustness more effectively and reliably. The participants were encouraged to develop stronger white-box attack algorithms to find the worst-case robustness of different defenses. This competition was conducted on an adversarial robustness evaluation platform -- ARES (https://github.com/thu-ml/ares), and is held on the TianChi platform (https://tianchi.aliyun.com/competition/entrance/531847/introduction) as one of the series of AI Security Challengers Program. After the competition, we summarized the results and established a new adversarial robustness benchmark at https://ml.cs.tsinghua.edu.cn/ares-bench/, which allows users to upload adversarial attack algorithms and defense models for evaluation.
Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples through An Improved Beam Search Algorithm
Authors: Tengfei Zhao, Zhaocheng Ge, Hanping Hu, Dingmeng Shi
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00

The research of adversarial attacks in the text domain attracts many interests in the last few years, and many methods with a high attack success rate have been proposed. However, these attack methods are inefficient as they require lots of queries for the victim model when crafting text adversarial examples. In this paper, a novel attack model is proposed, its attack success rate surpasses the benchmark attack methods, but more importantly, its attack efficiency is much higher than the benchmark attack methods. The novel method is empirically evaluated by attacking WordCNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, and BERT on four benchmark datasets. For instance, it achieves a 100\% attack success rate higher than the state-of-the-art method when attacking BERT and BiLSTM on IMDB, but the number of queries for the victim models only is 1/4 and 1/6.5 of the state-of-the-art method, respectively. Also, further experiments show the novel method has a good transferability on the generated adversarial examples.
Efficiently Solve the Max-cut Problem via a Quantum Qubit Rotation Algorithm
Authors: Xin Wang
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Optimizing parameterized quantum circuits promises efficient use of near-term quantum computers to achieve the potential quantum advantage. However, there is a notorious tradeoff between the expressibility and trainability of the parameter ansatz. We find that in combinatorial optimization problems, since the solutions are described by bit strings, one can trade the expressiveness of the ansatz for high trainability. To be specific, by focusing on the max-cut problem we introduce a simple yet efficient algorithm named Quantum Qubit Rotation Algorithm (QQRA). The quantum circuits are comprised with single-qubit rotation gates implementing on each qubit. The rotation angles of the gates can be trained free of barren plateaus. Thus, the approximate solution of the max-cut problem can be obtained with probability close to 1. To illustrate the effectiveness of QQRA, we compare it with the well known quantum approximate optimization algorithm and the classical Goemans-Williamson algorithm.
A Survey on State-of-the-art Techniques for Knowledge Graphs Construction and Challenges ahead
Authors: Ali Hur, Naeem Janjua, Mohiuddin Ahmed
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Logical Reasoning, Question Answering, Recommendation Systems

Global datasphere is increasing fast, and it is expected to reach 175 Zettabytes by 20251 . However, most of the content is unstructured and is not understandable by machines. Structuring this data into a knowledge graph enables multitudes of intelligent applications such as deep question answering, recommendation systems, semantic search, etc. The knowledge graph is an emerging technology that allows logical reasoning and uncovers new insights using content along with the context. Thereby, it provides necessary syntax and reasoning semantics that enable machines to solve complex healthcare, security, financial institutions, economics, and business problems. As an outcome, enterprises are putting their effort into constructing and maintaining knowledge graphs to support various downstream applications. Manual approaches are too expensive. Automated schemes can reduce the cost of building knowledge graphs up to 15-250 times. This paper critiques state-of-the-art automated techniques to produce knowledge graphs of near-human quality autonomously. Additionally, it highlights different research issues that need to be addressed to deliver high-quality knowledge graphs
A Broad-persistent Advising Approach for Deep Interactive Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Environments
Authors: Hung Son Nguyen, Francisco Cruz, Richard Dazeley
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Navigation

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DeepRL) methods have been widely used in robotics to learn about the environment and acquire behaviors autonomously. Deep Interactive Reinforcement Learning (DeepIRL) includes interactive feedback from an external trainer or expert giving advice to help learners choosing actions to speed up the learning process. However, current research has been limited to interactions that offer actionable advice to only the current state of the agent. Additionally, the information is discarded by the agent after a single use that causes a duplicate process at the same state for a revisit. In this paper, we present Broad-persistent Advising (BPA), a broad-persistent advising approach that retains and reuses the processed information. It not only helps trainers to give more general advice relevant to similar states instead of only the current state but also allows the agent to speed up the learning process. We test the proposed approach in two continuous robotic scenarios, namely, a cart pole balancing task and a simulated robot navigation task. The obtained results show that the performance of the agent using BPA improves while keeping the number of interactions required for the trainer in comparison to the DeepIRL approach.
NeuroLKH: Combining Deep Learning Model with Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun Heuristic for Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem
Authors: Liang Xin, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Traveling Salesman Problem

We present NeuroLKH, a novel algorithm that combines deep learning with the strong traditional heuristic Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun (LKH) for solving Traveling Salesman Problem. Specifically, we train a Sparse Graph Network (SGN) with supervised learning for edge scores and unsupervised learning for node penalties, both of which are critical for improving the performance of LKH. Based on the output of SGN, NeuroLKH creates the edge candidate set and transforms edge distances to guide the searching process of LKH. Extensive experiments firmly demonstrate that, by training one model on a wide range of problem sizes, NeuroLKH significantly outperforms LKH and generalizes well to much larger sizes. Also, we show that NeuroLKH can be applied to other routing problems such as Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), Pickup and Delivery Problem (PDP), and CVRP with Time Windows (CVRPTW).
Reappraising Domain Generalization in Neural Networks
Authors: Sarath Sivaprasad, Akshay Goindani, Vaibhav Garg, Ritam Basu, Saiteja Kosgi, Vineet Gandhi
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization

Given that Neural Networks generalize unreasonably well in the IID setting (with benign overfitting and betterment in performance with more parameters), OOD presents a consistent failure case to better the understanding of how they learn. This paper focuses on Domain Generalization (DG), which is perceived as the front face of OOD generalization. We find that the presence of multiple domains incentivizes domain agnostic learning and is the primary reason for generalization in Tradition DG. We show that the state-of-the-art results can be obtained by borrowing ideas from IID generalization and the DG tailored methods fail to add any performance gains. Furthermore, we perform explorations beyond the Traditional DG (TDG) formulation and propose a novel ClassWise DG (CWDG) benchmark, where for each class, we randomly select one of the domains and keep it aside for testing. Despite being exposed to all domains during training, CWDG is more challenging than TDG evaluation. We propose a novel iterative domain feature masking approach, achieving state-of-the-art results on the CWDG benchmark. Overall, while explaining these observations, our work furthers insights into the learning mechanisms of neural networks.
Attention-based Estimation and Prediction of Human Intent to augment Haptic Glove aided Control of Robotic Hand
Authors: Muneeb Ahmed, Rajesh Kumar, Qaim Abbas, Brejesh lall, Arzad A. Kherani, Sudipto Mukherjee
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00

The letter focuses on Haptic Glove (HG) based control of a Robotic Hand (RH) executing in-hand manipulation of certain objects of interest. The high dimensional motion signals in HG and RH possess intrinsic variability of kinematics resulting in difficulty to establish a direct mapping of the motion signals from HG onto the RH. An estimation mechanism is proposed to quantify the motion signal acquired from the human controller in relation to the intended goal pose of the object being held by the robotic hand. A control algorithm is presented to transform the synthesized intent at the RH and allow relocation of the object to the expected goal pose. The lag in synthesis of the intent in the presence of communication delay leads to a requirement of predicting the estimated intent. We leverage an attention-based convolutional neural network encoder to predict the trajectory of intent for a certain lookahead to compensate for the delays. The proposed methodology is evaluated across objects of different shapes, mass, and materials. We present a comparative performance of the estimation and prediction mechanisms on 5G-driven real-world robotic setup against benchmark methodologies. The test-MSE in prediction of human intent is reported to yield ~ 97.3 -98.7% improvement of accuracy in comparison to LSTM-based benchmark
Value Penalized Q-Learning for Recommender Systems
Authors: Chengqian Gao, Ke Xu, Kuangqi Zhou, Lanqing Li, Xueqian Wang, Bo Yuan, Peilin Zhao
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Q-Learning, Recommendation Systems, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to recommender systems (RS) is promising since maximizing the expected cumulative rewards for RL agents meets the objective of RS, i.e., improving customers' long-term satisfaction. A key approach to this goal is offline RL, which aims to learn policies from logged data. However, the high-dimensional action space and the non-stationary dynamics in commercial RS intensify distributional shift issues, making it challenging to apply offline RL methods to RS. To alleviate the action distribution shift problem in extracting RL policy from static trajectories, we propose Value Penalized Q-learning (VPQ), an uncertainty-based offline RL algorithm. It penalizes the unstable Q-values in the regression target by uncertainty-aware weights, without the need to estimate the behavior policy, suitable for RS with a large number of items. We derive the penalty weights from the variances across an ensemble of Q-functions. To alleviate distributional shift issues at test time, we further introduce the critic framework to integrate the proposed method with classic RS models. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets show that the proposed method could serve as a gain plugin for existing RS models.
SaLinA: Sequential Learning of Agents
Authors: Ludovic Denoyer, Alfredo De la Fuente, Song Duong, Jean-Baptiste Gaya, Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny, Daniel H. Thompson
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

SaLinA is a simple library that makes implementing complex sequential learning models easy, including reinforcement learning algorithms. It is built as an extension of PyTorch: algorithms coded with \SALINA{} can be understood in few minutes by PyTorch users and modified easily. Moreover, SaLinA naturally works with multiple CPUs and GPUs at train and test time, thus being a good fit for the large-scale training use cases. In comparison to existing RL libraries, SaLinA has a very low adoption cost and capture a large variety of settings (model-based RL, batch RL, hierarchical RL, multi-agent RL, etc.). But SaLinA does not only target RL practitioners, it aims at providing sequential learning capabilities to any deep learning programmer.
Towards Better Plasticity-Stability Trade-off in Incremental Learning: A Simple Linear Connector
Authors: Guoliang Lin, Hanlu Chu, Hanjiang Lai
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Incremental Learning

Plasticity-stability dilemma is a main problem for incremental learning, where plasticity is referring to the ability to learn new knowledge, and stability retains the knowledge of previous tasks. Many methods tackle this problem by storing previous samples, while in some applications, training data from previous tasks cannot be legally stored. In this work, we propose to employ mode connectivity in loss landscapes to achieve better plasticity-stability trade-off without any previous samples. We give an analysis of why and how to connect two independently optimized optima of networks, null-space projection for previous tasks and simple SGD for the current task, can attain a meaningful balance between preserving already learned knowledge and granting sufficient flexibility for learning a new task. This analysis of mode connectivity also provides us a new perspective and technology to control the trade-off between plasticity and stability. We evaluate the proposed method on several benchmark datasets. The results indicate our simple method can achieve notable improvement, and perform well on both the past and current tasks. On 10-split-CIFAR-100 task, our method achieves 79.79% accuracy, which is 6.02% higher. Our method also achieves 6.33% higher accuracy on TinyImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/lingl1024/Connector.
Certainty Modeling of a Decision Support System for Mobile Monitoring of Exercise induced Respiratory Conditions
Authors: Chinazunwa Uwaoma, Gunjan. Mansingh
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Mobile health systems in recent times, have notably improved the healthcare sector by empowering patients to actively participate in their health, and by facilitating access to healthcare professionals. Effective operation of these mobile systems nonetheless, requires high level of intelligence and expertise implemented in the form of decision support systems (DSS). However, common challenges in the implementation include generalization and reliability, due to the dynamics and incompleteness of information presented to the inference models. In this paper, we advance the use of ad hoc mobile decision support system to monitor and detect triggers and early symptoms of respiratory distress provoked by strenuous physical exertion. The focus is on the application of certainty theory to model inexact reasoning by the mobile monitoring system. The aim is to develop a mobile tool to assist patients in managing their conditions, and to provide objective clinical data to aid physicians in the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of the respiratory ailments. We present the proposed model architecture and then describe an application scenario in a clinical setting. We also show implementation of an aspect of the system that enables patients in the self-management of their conditions.
A Machine Learning Approach for Delineating Similar Sound Symptoms of Respiratory Conditions on a Smartphone
Authors: Chinazunwa Uwaoma, Gunjan Mansingh
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Medical Diagnosis

Clinical characterization and interpretation of respiratory sound symptoms have remained a challenge due to the similarities in the audio properties that manifest during auscultation in medical diagnosis. The misinterpretation and conflation of these sounds coupled with the comorbidity cases of the associated ailments particularly, exercised-induced respiratory conditions; result in the under-diagnosis and under-treatment of the conditions. Though several studies have proposed computerized systems for objective classification and evaluation of these sounds, most of the algorithms run on desktop and backend systems. In this study, we leverage the improved computational and storage capabilities of modern smartphones to distinguish the respiratory sound symptoms using machine learning algorithms namely: Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN). The appreciable performance of these classifiers on a mobile phone shows smartphone as an alternate tool for recognition and discrimination of respiratory symptoms in real-time scenarios. Further, the objective clinical data provided by the machine learning process could aid physicians in the screening and treatment of a patient during ambulatory care where specialized medical devices may not be readily available.
Role Similarity Metric Based on Spanning Rooted Forest
Authors: Qi Bao, Zhongzhi Zhang, Haibin Kan
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00

As a fundamental issue in network analysis, structural node similarity has received much attention in academia and is adopted in a wide range of applications. Among these proposed structural node similarity measures, role similarity stands out because of satisfying several axiomatic properties including automorphism conformation. Existing role similarity metrics cannot handle top-k queries on large real-world networks due to the high time and space cost. In this paper, we propose a new role similarity metric, namely \textsf{ForestSim}. We prove that \textsf{ForestSim} is an admissible role similarity metric and devise the corresponding top-k similarity search algorithm, namely \textsf{ForestSimSearch}, which is able to process a top-k query in $O(k)$ time once the precomputation is finished. Moreover, we speed up the precomputation by using a fast approximate algorithm to compute the diagonal entries of the forest matrix, which reduces the time and space complexity of the precomputation to $O(\epsilon^{-2}m\log^5{n}\log{\frac{1}{\epsilon}})$ and $O(m\log^3{n})$, respectively. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on 26 real-world networks. The results show that \textsf{ForestSim} works efficiently on million-scale networks and achieves comparable performance to the state-of-art methods.
Exploring Universal Intrinsic Task Subspace via Prompt Tuning
Authors: Yujia Qin, Xiaozhi Wang, Yusheng Su, Yankai Lin, Ning Ding, Jing Yi, Weize Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00

Why can pre-trained language models (PLMs) learn universal representations and effectively adapt to broad NLP tasks differing a lot superficially? In this work, we empirically find evidence indicating that the adaptations of PLMs to various few-shot tasks can be reparameterized as optimizing only a few free parameters in a unified low-dimensional intrinsic task subspace, which may help us understand why PLMs could easily adapt to various NLP tasks with small-scale data. To find such a subspace and examine its universality, we propose an analysis pipeline called intrinsic prompt tuning (IPT). Specifically, we resort to the recent success of prompt tuning and decompose the soft prompts of multiple NLP tasks into the same low-dimensional nonlinear subspace, then we learn to adapt the PLM to unseen data or tasks by only tuning parameters in this subspace. In the experiments, we study diverse few-shot NLP tasks and surprisingly find that in a 250-dimensional subspace found with 100 tasks, by only tuning 250 free parameters, we can recover 97% and 83% of the full prompt tuning performance for 100 seen tasks (using different training data) and 20 unseen tasks, respectively, showing great generalization ability of the found intrinsic task subspace. Besides being an analysis tool, IPT could further help us improve the prompt tuning stability.
Machine Learning Algorithms In User Authentication Schemes
Authors: Laura Pryor, Dr. Rushit Dave, Dr. Naeem Seliya, Dr. Evelyn R Sowells Boone
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In the past two decades, the number of mobile products being created by companies has grown exponentially. However, although these devices are constantly being upgraded with the newest features, the security measures used to protect these devices has stayed relatively the same over the past two decades. The vast difference in growth patterns between devices and their security is opening up the risk for more and more devices to easily become infiltrated by nefarious users. Working off of previous work in the field, this study looks at the different Machine Learning algorithms used in user authentication schemes involving touch dynamics and device movement. This study aims to give a comprehensive overview of the current uses of different machine learning algorithms that are frequently used in user authentication schemas involving touch dynamics and device movement. The benefits, limitations, and suggestions for future work will be thoroughly discussed throughout this paper.
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation:Can Linguistic Hierarchies Help?
Authors: Fahimeh Saleh, Wray Buntine, Gholamreza Haffari, Lan Du
Date: 2021-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) trains a single NMT model that supports translation between multiple languages, rather than training separate models for different languages. Learning a single model can enhance the low-resource translation by leveraging data from multiple languages. However, the performance of an MNMT model is highly dependent on the type of languages used in training, as transferring knowledge from a diverse set of languages degrades the translation performance due to negative transfer. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Knowledge Distillation (HKD) approach for MNMT which capitalises on language groups generated according to typological features and phylogeny of languages to overcome the issue of negative transfer. HKD generates a set of multilingual teacher-assistant models via a selective knowledge distillation mechanism based on the language groups, and then distils the ultimate multilingual model from those assistants in an adaptive way. Experimental results derived from the TED dataset with 53 languages demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in avoiding the negative transfer effect in MNMT, leading to an improved translation performance (about 1 BLEU score on average) compared to strong baselines.