pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Artificial intelligence based writer identification generates new evidence for the unknown scribes of the Dead Sea Scrolls exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa)
Authors: Mladen Popović, Maruf A. Dhali, Lambert Schomaker
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The Dead Sea Scrolls are tangible evidence of the Bible's ancient scribal culture. Palaeography - the study of ancient handwriting - can provide access to this scribal culture. However, one of the problems of traditional palaeography is to determine writer identity when the writing style is near uniform. This is exemplified by the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa). To this end, we used pattern recognition and artificial intelligence techniques to innovate the palaeography of the scrolls regarding writer identification and to pioneer the microlevel of individual scribes to open access to the Bible's ancient scribal culture. Although many scholars believe that 1QIsaa was written by one scribe, we report new evidence for a breaking point in the series of columns in this scroll. Without prior assumption of writer identity, based on point clouds of the reduced-dimensionality feature-space, we found that columns from the first and second halves of the manuscript ended up in two distinct zones of such scatter plots, notably for a range of digital palaeography tools, each addressing very different featural aspects of the script samples. In a secondary, independent, analysis, now assuming writer difference and using yet another independent feature method and several different types of statistical testing, a switching point was found in the column series. A clear phase transition is apparent around column 27. Given the statistically significant differences between the two halves, a tertiary, post-hoc analysis was performed. Demonstrating that two main scribes were responsible for the Great Isaiah Scroll, this study sheds new light on the Bible's ancient scribal culture by providing new, tangible evidence that ancient biblical texts were not copied by a single scribe only but that multiple scribes could closely collaborate on one particular manuscript.
Evaluating Gender Bias in Speech Translation
Authors: Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christine Basta, Gerard I. Gállego
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Translation

The scientific community is increasingly aware of the necessity to embrace pluralism and consistently represent major and minor social groups. Currently, there are no standard evaluation techniques for different types of biases. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to provide evaluation sets and protocols to measure existing biases in our automatic systems. Evaluating the biases should be an essential step towards mitigating them in the systems. This paper introduces WinoST, a new freely available challenge set for evaluating gender bias in speech translation. WinoST is the speech version of WinoMT which is a MT challenge set and both follow an evaluation protocol to measure gender accuracy. Using a state-of-the-art end-to-end speech translation system, we report the gender bias evaluation on four language pairs and we show that gender accuracy in speech translation is more than 23% lower than in MT.
Dynamic Boundary Time Warping for Sub-sequence Matching with Few Examples
Authors: Łukasz Borchmann, Dawid Jurkiewicz, Filip Graliński, Tomasz Górecki
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval

The paper presents a novel method of finding a fragment in a long temporal sequence similar to the set of shorter sequences. We are the first to propose an algorithm for such a search that does not rely on computing the average sequence from query examples. Instead, we use query examples as is, utilizing all of them simultaneously. The introduced method based on the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) technique is suited explicitly for few-shot query-by-example retrieval tasks. We evaluate it on two different few-shot problems from the field of Natural Language Processing. The results show it either outperforms baselines and previous approaches or achieves comparable results when a low number of examples is available.
Deep Probabilistic Imaging: Uncertainty Quantification and Multi-modal Solution Characterization for Computational Imaging
Authors: He Sun, Katherine L. Bouman
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Image Reconstruction, Uncertainty Quantification

Computational image reconstruction algorithms generally produce a single image without any measure of uncertainty or confidence. Regularized Maximum Likelihood (RML) and feed-forward deep learning approaches for inverse problems typically focus on recovering a point estimate. This is a serious limitation when working with underdetermined imaging systems, where it is conceivable that multiple image modes would be consistent with the measured data. Characterizing the space of probable images that explain the observational data is therefore crucial. In this paper, we propose a variational deep probabilistic imaging approach to quantify reconstruction uncertainty. Deep Probabilistic Imaging (DPI) employs an untrained deep generative model to estimate a posterior distribution of an unobserved image. This approach does not require any training data; instead, it optimizes the weights of a neural network to generate image samples that fit a particular measurement dataset. Once the network weights have been learned, the posterior distribution can be efficiently sampled. We demonstrate this approach in the context of interferometric radio imaging, which is used for black hole imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope, and compressed sensing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI).
On Model Identification and Out-of-Sample Prediction of Principal Component Regression: Applications to Synthetic Controls
Authors: Anish Agarwal, Devavrat Shah, Dennis Shen
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00

We analyze principal component regression (PCR) in a high-dimensional error-in-variables setting with fixed design. Under suitable conditions, we show that PCR consistently identifies the unique model with minimum $\ell_2$-norm. These results enable us to establish non-asymptotic out-of-sample prediction guarantees that improve upon the best known rates. In the course of our analysis, we introduce a natural linear algebraic condition between the in- and out-of-sample covariates, which allows us to avoid distributional assumptions for out-of-sample predictions. Our simulations illustrate the importance of this condition for generalization, even under covariate shifts. Accordingly, we construct a hypothesis test to check when this conditions holds in practice. As a byproduct, our results also lead to novel results for the synthetic controls literature, a leading approach for policy evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, our prediction guarantees for the fixed design setting have been elusive in both the high-dimensional error-in-variables and synthetic controls literatures.
Discovering and Interpreting Biased Concepts in Online Communities
Authors: Xavier Ferrer-Aran, Tom van Nuenen, Natalia Criado, Jose M. Such
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Word Embeddings

Language carries implicit human biases, functioning both as a reflection and a perpetuation of stereotypes that people carry with them. Recently, ML-based NLP methods such as word embeddings have been shown to learn such language biases with striking accuracy. This capability of word embeddings has been successfully exploited as a tool to quantify and study human biases. However, previous studies only consider a predefined set of biased concepts to attest (e.g., whether gender is more or less associated with particular jobs), or just discover biased words without helping to understand their meaning at the conceptual level. As such, these approaches can be either unable to find biased concepts that have not been defined in advance, or the biases they find are difficult to interpret and study. This could make existing approaches unsuitable to discover and interpret biases in online communities, as such communities may carry different biases than those in mainstream culture. This paper improves upon, extends, and evaluates our previous data-driven method to automatically discover and help interpret biased concepts encoded in word embeddings. We apply this approach to study the biased concepts present in the language used in online communities and experimentally show the validity and stability of our method
LXPER Index 2.0: Improving Text Readability Assessment Model for L2 English Students in Korea
Authors: Bruce W. Lee, Jason Lee
Date: 2020-10-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: AACL (NLP-TEA) 2020 12

Developing a text readability assessment model specifically for texts in a foreign English Language Training (ELT) curriculum has never had much attention in the field of Natural Language Processing. Hence, most developed models show extremely low accuracy for L2 English texts, up to the point where not many even serve as a fair comparison. In this paper, we investigate a text readability assessment model for L2 English learners in Korea. In accordance, we improve and expand the Text Corpus of the Korean ELT curriculum (CoKEC-text). Each text is labeled with its target grade level. We train our model with CoKEC-text and significantly improve the accuracy of readability assessment for texts in the Korean ELT curriculum.
Can Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control Generalize Across Physics Engines?
Authors: Aaqib Parvez Mohammed, Matias Valdenegro-Toro
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms should learn as much as possible about the environment but not the properties of the physics engines that generate the environment. There are multiple algorithms that solve the task in a physics engine based environment but there is no work done so far to understand if the RL algorithms can generalize across physics engines. In this work, we compare the generalization performance of various deep reinforcement learning algorithms on a variety of control tasks. Our results show that MuJoCo is the best engine to transfer the learning to other engines. On the other hand, none of the algorithms generalize when trained on PyBullet. We also found out that various algorithms have a promising generalizability if the effect of random seeds can be minimized on their performance.
Assured Autonomy: Path Toward Living With Autonomous Systems We Can Trust
Authors: Ufuk Topcu, Nadya Bliss, Nancy Cooke, Missy Cummings, Ashley Llorens, Howard Shrobe, Lenore Zuck
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00

The challenge of establishing assurance in autonomy is rapidly attracting increasing interest in the industry, government, and academia. Autonomy is a broad and expansive capability that enables systems to behave without direct control by a human operator. To that end, it is expected to be present in a wide variety of systems and applications. A vast range of industrial sectors, including (but by no means limited to) defense, mobility, health care, manufacturing, and civilian infrastructure, are embracing the opportunities in autonomy yet face the similar barriers toward establishing the necessary level of assurance sooner or later. Numerous government agencies are poised to tackle the challenges in assured autonomy. Given the already immense interest and investment in autonomy, a series of workshops on Assured Autonomy was convened to facilitate dialogs and increase awareness among the stakeholders in the academia, industry, and government. This series of three workshops aimed to help create a unified understanding of the goals for assured autonomy, the research trends and needs, and a strategy that will facilitate sustained progress in autonomy. The first workshop, held in October 2019, focused on current and anticipated challenges and problems in assuring autonomous systems within and across applications and sectors. The second workshop held in February 2020, focused on existing capabilities, current research, and research trends that could address the challenges and problems identified in workshop. The third event was dedicated to a discussion of a draft of the major findings from the previous two workshops and the recommendations.
Robust Skeletonization for Plant Root Structure Reconstruction from MRI
Authors: Jannis Horn, Yi Zhao, Nils Wandel, Magdalena Landl, Andrea Schnepf, Sven Behnke
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00

Structural reconstruction of plant roots from MRI is challenging, because of low resolution and low signal-to-noise ratio of the 3D measurements which may lead to disconnectivities and wrongly connected roots. We propose a two-stage approach for this task. The first stage is based on semantic root vs. soil segmentation and finds lowest-cost paths from any root voxel to the shoot. The second stage takes the largest fully connected component generated in the first stage and uses 3D skeletonization to extract a graph structure. We evaluate our method on 22 MRI scans and compare to human expert reconstructions.
Structured Visual Search via Composition-aware Learning
Authors: Mert Kilickaya, Arnold W. M. Smeulders
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

This paper studies visual search using structured queries. The structure is in the form of a 2D composition that encodes the position and the category of the objects. The transformation of the position and the category of the objects leads to a continuous-valued relationship between visual compositions, which carries highly beneficial information, although not leveraged by previous techniques. To that end, in this work, our goal is to leverage these continuous relationships by using the notion of symmetry in equivariance. Our model output is trained to change symmetrically with respect to the input transformations, leading to a sensitive feature space. Doing so leads to a highly efficient search technique, as our approach learns from fewer data using a smaller feature space. Experiments on two large-scale benchmarks of MS-COCO and HICO-DET demonstrates that our approach leads to a considerable gain in the performance against competing techniques.
A Simple Spectral Failure Mode for Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Carey E. Priebe, Cencheng Shen, Ningyuan Huang, Tianyi Chen
Date: 2020-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Graph Learning

Neural networks have achieved remarkable successes in machine learning tasks. This has recently been extended to graph learning using neural networks. However, there is limited theoretical work in understanding how and when they perform well, especially relative to established statistical learning techniques such as spectral embedding. In this short paper, we present a simple generative model where unsupervised graph convolutional network fails, while the adjacency spectral embedding succeeds. Specifically, unsupervised graph convolutional network is unable to look beyond the first eigenvector in certain approximately regular graphs, thus missing inference signals in non-leading eigenvectors. The phenomenon is demonstrated by visual illustrations and comprehensive simulations.
Improving Word Recognition using Multiple Hypotheses and Deep Embeddings
Authors: Siddhant Bansal, Praveen Krishnan, C. V. Jawahar
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Triplet

We propose a novel scheme for improving the word recognition accuracy using word image embeddings. We use a trained text recognizer, which can predict multiple text hypothesis for a given word image. Our fusion scheme improves the recognition process by utilizing the word image and text embeddings obtained from a trained word image embedding network. We propose EmbedNet, which is trained using a triplet loss for learning a suitable embedding space where the embedding of the word image lies closer to the embedding of the corresponding text transcription. The updated embedding space thus helps in choosing the correct prediction with higher confidence. To further improve the accuracy, we propose a plug-and-play module called Confidence based Accuracy Booster (CAB). The CAB module takes in the confidence scores obtained from the text recognizer and Euclidean distances between the embeddings to generate an updated distance vector. The updated distance vector has lower distance values for the correct words and higher distance values for the incorrect words. We rigorously evaluate our proposed method systematically on a collection of books in the Hindi language. Our method achieves an absolute improvement of around 10 percent in terms of word recognition accuracy.
On the Transfer of Disentangled Representations in Realistic Settings
Authors: Andrea Dittadi, Frederik Träuble, Francesco Locatello, Manuel Wüthrich, Vaibhav Agrawal, Ole Winther, Stefan Bauer, Bernhard Schölkopf
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Disentanglement, Representation Learning

Learning meaningful representations that disentangle the underlying structure of the data generating process is considered to be of key importance in machine learning. While disentangled representations were found to be useful for diverse tasks such as abstract reasoning and fair classification, their scalability and real-world impact remain questionable. We introduce a new high-resolution dataset with 1M simulated images and over 1,800 annotated real-world images of the same setup. In contrast to previous work, this new dataset exhibits correlations, a complex underlying structure, and allows to evaluate transfer to unseen simulated and real-world settings where the encoder i) remains in distribution or ii) is out of distribution. We propose new architectures in order to scale disentangled representation learning to realistic high-resolution settings and conduct a large-scale empirical study of disentangled representations on this dataset. We observe that disentanglement is a good predictor for out-of-distribution (OOD) task performance.
Pixel-based Facial Expression Synthesis
Authors: Arbish Akram, Nazar Khan
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00

Facial expression synthesis has achieved remarkable advances with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, GAN-based approaches mostly generate photo-realistic results as long as the testing data distribution is close to the training data distribution. The quality of GAN results significantly degrades when testing images are from a slightly different distribution. Moreover, recent work has shown that facial expressions can be synthesized by changing localized face regions. In this work, we propose a pixel-based facial expression synthesis method in which each output pixel observes only one input pixel. The proposed method achieves good generalization capability by leveraging only a few hundred training images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method performs comparably well against state-of-the-art GANs on in-dataset images and significantly better on out-of-dataset images. In addition, the proposed model is two orders of magnitude smaller which makes it suitable for deployment on resource-constrained devices.
Contrastive Learning for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Xu Xie, Fei Sun, Zhaoyang Liu, Shiwen Wu, Jinyang Gao, Bolin Ding, Bin Cui
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation methods play a crucial role in modern recommender systems because of their ability to capture a user's dynamic interest from her/his historical interactions. Despite their success, we argue that these approaches usually rely on the sequential prediction task to optimize the huge amounts of parameters. They usually suffer from the data sparsity problem, which makes it difficult for them to learn high-quality user representations. To tackle that, inspired by recent advances of contrastive learning techniques in the computer version, we propose a novel multi-task model called \textbf{C}ontrastive \textbf{L}earning for \textbf{S}equential \textbf{Rec}ommendation~(\textbf{CL4SRec}). CL4SRec not only takes advantage of the traditional next item prediction task but also utilizes the contrastive learning framework to derive self-supervision signals from the original user behavior sequences. Therefore, it can extract more meaningful user patterns and further encode the user representation effectively. In addition, we propose three data augmentation approaches to construct self-supervision signals. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that CL4SRec achieves state-of-the-art performance over existing baselines by inferring better user representations.
Succinct and Robust Multi-Agent Communication With Temporal Message Control
Authors: Sai Qian Zhang, Jieyu Lin, Qi Zhang
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent studies have shown that introducing communication between agents can significantly improve overall performance in cooperative Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, existing communication schemes often require agents to exchange an excessive number of messages at run-time under a reliable communication channel, which hinders its practicality in many real-world situations. In this paper, we present \textit{Temporal Message Control} (TMC), a simple yet effective approach for achieving succinct and robust communication in MARL. TMC applies a temporal smoothing technique to drastically reduce the amount of information exchanged between agents. Experiments show that TMC can significantly reduce inter-agent communication overhead without impacting accuracy. Furthermore, TMC demonstrates much better robustness against transmission loss than existing approaches in lossy networking environments.
It's all in the (Sub-)title? Expanding Signal Evaluation in Crowdfunding Research
Authors: Constantin von Selasinsky, Andrew Jay Isaak
Date: 2020-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Decision Making

Research on crowdfunding success that incorporates CATA (computer-aided text analysis) is quickly advancing to the big leagues (e.g., Parhankangas and Renko, 2017; Anglin et al., 2018; Moss et al., 2018) and is often theoretically based on information asymmetry, social capital, signaling or a combination thereof. Yet, current papers that explore crowdfunding success criteria fail to take advantage of the full breadth of signals available and only very few such papers examine technology projects. In this paper, we compare and contrast the strength of the entrepreneur's textual success signals to project backers within this category. Based on a random sample of 1,049 technology projects collected from Kickstarter, we evaluate textual information not only from project titles and descriptions but also from video subtitles. We find that incorporating subtitle information increases the variance explained by the respective models and therefore their predictive capability for funding success. By expanding the information landscape, our work advances the field and paves the way for more fine-grained studies of success signals in crowdfunding and therefore for an improved understanding of investor decision-making in the crowd.