pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PatentMatch: A Dataset for Matching Patent Claims & Prior Art
Authors: Julian Risch, Nicolas Alder, Christoph Hewel, Ralf Krestel
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Semantic correspondence

Patent examiners need to solve a complex information retrieval task when they assess the novelty and inventive step of claims made in a patent application. Given a claim, they search for prior art, which comprises all relevant publicly available information. This time-consuming task requires a deep understanding of the respective technical domain and the patent-domain-specific language. For these reasons, we address the computer-assisted search for prior art by creating a training dataset for supervised machine learning called PatentMatch. It contains pairs of claims from patent applications and semantically corresponding text passages of different degrees from cited patent documents. Each pair has been labeled by technically-skilled patent examiners from the European Patent Office. Accordingly, the label indicates the degree of semantic correspondence (matching), i.e., whether the text passage is prejudicial to the novelty of the claimed invention or not. Preliminary experiments using a baseline system show that PatentMatch can indeed be used for training a binary text pair classifier on this challenging information retrieval task. The dataset is available online: https://hpi.de/naumann/s/patentmatch.
SG-Net: Syntax Guided Transformer for Language Representation
Authors: Zhuosheng Zhang, Yuwei Wu, Junru Zhou, Sufeng Duan, Hai Zhao, Rui Wang
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Reading Comprehension, Machine Translation, Natural Language Inference, Reading Comprehension, Translation

Understanding human language is one of the key themes of artificial intelligence. For language representation, the capacity of effectively modeling the linguistic knowledge from the detail-riddled and lengthy texts and getting rid of the noises is essential to improve its performance. Traditional attentive models attend to all words without explicit constraint, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words. In this work, we propose using syntax to guide the text modeling by incorporating explicit syntactic constraints into attention mechanisms for better linguistically motivated word representations. In detail, for self-attention network (SAN) sponsored Transformer-based encoder, we introduce syntactic dependency of interest (SDOI) design into the SAN to form an SDOI-SAN with syntax-guided self-attention. Syntax-guided network (SG-Net) is then composed of this extra SDOI-SAN and the SAN from the original Transformer encoder through a dual contextual architecture for better linguistics inspired representation. The proposed SG-Net is applied to typical Transformer encoders. Extensive experiments on popular benchmark tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, and neural machine translation show the effectiveness of the proposed SG-Net design.
Exploring Emotion Features and Fusion Strategies for Audio-Video Emotion Recognition
Authors: Hengshun Zhou, Debin Meng, Yuanyuan Zhang, Xiaojiang Peng, Jun Du, Kai Wang, Yu Qiao
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Video Emotion Recognition

The audio-video based emotion recognition aims to classify a given video into basic emotions. In this paper, we describe our approaches in EmotiW 2019, which mainly explores emotion features and feature fusion strategies for audio and visual modality. For emotion features, we explore audio feature with both speech-spectrogram and Log Mel-spectrogram and evaluate several facial features with different CNN models and different emotion pretrained strategies. For fusion strategies, we explore intra-modal and cross-modal fusion methods, such as designing attention mechanisms to highlights important emotion feature, exploring feature concatenation and factorized bilinear pooling (FBP) for cross-modal feature fusion. With careful evaluation, we obtain 65.5% on the AFEW validation set and 62.48% on the test set and rank third in the challenge.
Improving Opinion Spam Detection by Cumulative Relative Frequency Distribution
Authors: Michela Fazzolari, Francesco Buccafurri, Gianluca Lax, Marinella Petrocchi
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Spam detection

Over the last years, online reviews became very important since they can influence the purchase decision of consumers and the reputation of businesses, therefore, the practice of writing fake reviews can have severe consequences on customers and service providers. Various approaches have been proposed for detecting opinion spam in online reviews, especially based on supervised classifiers. In this contribution, we start from a set of effective features used for classifying opinion spam and we re-engineered them, by considering the Cumulative Relative Frequency Distribution of each feature. By an experimental evaluation carried out on real data from Yelp.com, we show that the use of the distributional features is able to improve the performances of classifiers.
LCCNet: LiDAR and Camera Self-Calibration using Cost Volume Network
Authors: Xudong Lv, Boya Wang, Dong Ye, Shuo Wang
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

In this paper, we propose a novel online self-calibration approach for Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and camera sensors. Compared to the previous CNN-based methods that concatenate the feature maps of the RGB image and decalibrated depth image, we exploit the cost volume inspired by the PWC-Net for feature matching. Besides the smooth L1-Loss of the predicted extrinsic calibration parameters, an additional point cloud loss is applied. Instead of regress the extrinsic parameters between LiDAR and camera directly, we predict the decalibrated deviation from initial calibration to the ground truth. During inference, the calibration error decreases further with the usage of iterative refinement and the temporal filtering approach. The evaluation results on the KITTI dataset illustrate that our approach outperforms CNN-based state-of-the-art methods in terms of a mean absolute calibration error of 0.297cm in translation and 0.017{\deg} in rotation with miscalibration magnitudes of up to 1.5m and 20{\deg}.
Layer Decomposition Learning Based on Gaussian Convolution Model and Residual Deblurring for Inverse Halftoning
Authors: Chang-Hwan Son
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Restoration

Layer decomposition to separate an input image into base and detail layers has been steadily used for image restoration. Existing residual networks based on an additive model require residual layers with a small output range for fast convergence and visual quality improvement. However, in inverse halftoning, homogenous dot patterns hinder a small output range from the residual layers. Therefore, a new layer decomposition network based on the Gaussian convolution model (GCM) and structure-aware deblurring strategy is presented to achieve residual learning for both the base and detail layers. For the base layer, a new GCM-based residual subnetwork is presented. The GCM utilizes a statistical distribution, in which the image difference between a blurred continuous-tone image and a blurred halftoned image with a Gaussian filter can result in a narrow output range. Subsequently, the GCM-based residual subnetwork uses a Gaussian-filtered halftoned image as input and outputs the image difference as residual, thereby generating the base layer, i.e., the Gaussian-blurred continuous-tone image. For the detail layer, a new structure-aware residual deblurring subnetwork (SARDS) is presented. To remove the Gaussian blurring of the base layer, the SARDS uses the predicted base layer as input and outputs the deblurred version. To more effectively restore image structures such as lines and texts, a new image structure map predictor is incorporated into the deblurring network to induce structure-adaptive learning. This paper provides a method to realize the residual learning of both the base and detail layers based on the GCM and SARDS. In addition, it is verified that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods based on U-Net, direct deblurring networks, and progressively residual networks.
Adaptive Graph-based Generalized Regression Model for Unsupervised Feature Selection
Authors: Yanyong Huang, Zongxin Shen, Fuxu Cai, Tianrui Li, Fengmao Lv
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, feature selection, regression, Retrieval

Unsupervised feature selection is an important method to reduce dimensions of high dimensional data without labels, which is benefit to avoid ``curse of dimensionality'' and improve the performance of subsequent machine learning tasks, like clustering and retrieval. How to select the uncorrelated and discriminative features is the key problem of unsupervised feature selection. Many proposed methods select features with strong discriminant and high redundancy, or vice versa. However, they only satisfy one of these two criteria. Other existing methods choose the discriminative features with low redundancy by constructing the graph matrix on the original feature space. Since the original feature space usually contains redundancy and noise, it will degrade the performance of feature selection. In order to address these issues, we first present a novel generalized regression model imposed by an uncorrelated constraint and the $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularization. It can simultaneously select the uncorrelated and discriminative features as well as reduce the variance of these data points belonging to the same neighborhood, which is help for the clustering task. Furthermore, the local intrinsic structure of data is constructed on the reduced dimensional space by learning the similarity-induced graph adaptively. Then the learnings of the graph structure and the indicator matrix based on the spectral analysis are integrated into the generalized regression model. Finally, we develop an alternative iterative optimization algorithm to solve the objective function. A series of experiments are carried out on nine real-world data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison with other competing approaches.
Universal Approximation Theorem for Equivariant Maps by Group CNNs
Authors: Wataru Kumagai, Akiyoshi Sannai
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00

Group symmetry is inherent in a wide variety of data distributions. Data processing that preserves symmetry is described as an equivariant map and often effective in achieving high performance. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been known as models with equivariance and shown to approximate equivariant maps for some specific groups. However, universal approximation theorems for CNNs have been separately derived with individual techniques according to each group and setting. This paper provides a unified method to obtain universal approximation theorems for equivariant maps by CNNs in various settings. As its significant advantage, we can handle non-linear equivariant maps between infinite-dimensional spaces for non-compact groups.
An Embarrassingly Simple Model for Dialogue Relation Extraction
Authors: Fuzhao Xue, Aixin Sun, Hao Zhang, Jinjie Ni, Eng Siong Chng
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialog Relation Extraction, model, Relation, Sentence

Dialogue relation extraction (RE) is to predict the relation type of two entities mentioned in a dialogue. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective model named SimpleRE for the RE task. SimpleRE captures the interrelations among multiple relations in a dialogue through a novel input format named BERT Relation Token Sequence (BRS). In BRS, multiple [CLS] tokens are used to capture possible relations between different pairs of entities mentioned in the dialogue. A Relation Refinement Gate (RRG) is then designed to extract relation-specific semantic representation in an adaptive manner. Experiments on the DialogRE dataset show that SimpleRE achieves the best performance, with much shorter training time. Further, SimpleRE outperforms all direct baselines on sentence-level RE without using external resources.
My Teacher Thinks The World Is Flat! Interpreting Automatic Essay Scoring Mechanism
Authors: Swapnil Parekh, Yaman Kumar Singla, Changyou Chen, Junyi Jessy Li, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Natural Language Understanding, World Knowledge

Significant progress has been made in deep-learning based Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) systems in the past two decades. However, little research has been put to understand and interpret the black-box nature of these deep-learning based scoring models. Recent work shows that automated scoring systems are prone to even common-sense adversarial samples. Their lack of natural language understanding capability raises questions on the models being actively used by millions of candidates for life-changing decisions. With scoring being a highly multi-modal task, it becomes imperative for scoring models to be validated and tested on all these modalities. We utilize recent advances in interpretability to find the extent to which features such as coherence, content and relevance are important for automated scoring mechanisms and why they are susceptible to adversarial samples. We find that the systems tested consider essays not as a piece of prose having the characteristics of natural flow of speech and grammatical structure, but as `word-soups' where a few words are much more important than the other words. Removing the context surrounding those few important words causes the prose to lose the flow of speech and grammar, however has little impact on the predicted score. We also find that since the models are not semantically grounded with world-knowledge and common sense, adding false facts such as ``the world is flat'' actually increases the score instead of decreasing it.
Histogram Matching Augmentation for Domain Adaptation with Application to Multi-Centre, Multi-Vendor and Multi-Disease Cardiac Image Segmentation
Authors: Jun Ma
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved high accuracy for cardiac structure segmentation if training cases and testing cases are from the same distribution. However, the performance would be degraded if the testing cases are from a distinct domain (e.g., new MRI scanners, clinical centers). In this paper, we propose a histogram matching (HM) data augmentation method to eliminate the domain gap. Specifically, our method generates new training cases by using HM to transfer the intensity distribution of testing cases to existing training cases. The proposed method is quite simple and can be used in a plug-and-play way in many segmentation tasks. The method is evaluated on MICCAI 2020 M\&Ms challenge, and achieves average Dice scores of 0.9051, 0.8405, and 0.8749, and Hausdorff Distances of 9.996, 12.49, and 12.68 for the left ventricular, myocardium, and right ventricular, respectively. Our results rank the third place in MICCAI 2020 M\&Ms challenge. The code and trained models are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/JunMa11/HM_DataAug}.
Neural Closure Models for Dynamical Systems
Authors: Abhinav Gupta, Pierre F. J. Lermusiaux
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00

Complex dynamical systems are used for predictions in many domains. Because of computational costs, models are truncated, coarsened, or aggregated. As the neglected and unresolved terms become important, the utility of model predictions diminishes. We develop a novel, versatile, and rigorous methodology to learn non-Markovian closure parameterizations for known-physics/low-fidelity models using data from high-fidelity simulations. The new "neural closure models" augment low-fidelity models with neural delay differential equations (nDDEs), motivated by the Mori-Zwanzig formulation and the inherent delays in complex dynamical systems. We demonstrate that neural closures efficiently account for truncated modes in reduced-order-models, capture the effects of subgrid-scale processes in coarse models, and augment the simplification of complex biological and physical-biogeochemical models. We find that using non-Markovian over Markovian closures improves long-term prediction accuracy and requires smaller networks. We derive adjoint equations and network architectures needed to efficiently implement the new discrete and distributed nDDEs, for any time-integration schemes and allowing nonuniformly-spaced temporal training data. The performance of discrete over distributed delays in closure models is explained using information theory, and we find an optimal amount of past information for a specified architecture. Finally, we analyze computational complexity and explain the limited additional cost due to neural closure models.
Learning Light-Weight Translation Models from Deep Transformer
Authors: Bei Li, Ziyang Wang, Hui Liu, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, Chunliang Zhang, Jingbo Zhu
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Recently, deep models have shown tremendous improvements in neural machine translation (NMT). However, systems of this kind are computationally expensive and memory intensive. In this paper, we take a natural step towards learning strong but light-weight NMT systems. We proposed a novel group-permutation based knowledge distillation approach to compressing the deep Transformer model into a shallow model. The experimental results on several benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our method. Our compressed model is 8X shallower than the deep model, with almost no loss in BLEU. To further enhance the teacher model, we present a Skipping Sub-Layer method to randomly omit sub-layers to introduce perturbation into training, which achieves a BLEU score of 30.63 on English-German newstest2014. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/libeineu/GPKD.
ANL: Anti-Noise Learning for Cross-Domain Person Re-Identification
Authors: Hongliang Zhang, Shoudong Han, Xiaofeng Pan, Jun Zhao
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Person Re-Identification

Due to the lack of labels and the domain diversities, it is a challenge to study person re-identification in the cross-domain setting. An admirable method is to optimize the target model by assigning pseudo-labels for unlabeled samples through clustering. Usually, attributed to the domain gaps, the pre-trained source domain model cannot extract appropriate target domain features, which will dramatically affect the clustering performance and the accuracy of pseudo-labels. Extensive label noise will lead to sub-optimal solutions doubtlessly. To solve these problems, we propose an Anti-Noise Learning (ANL) approach, which contains two modules. The Feature Distribution Alignment (FDA) module is designed to gather the id-related samples and disperse id-unrelated samples, through the camera-wise contrastive learning and adversarial adaptation. Creating a friendly cross-feature foundation for clustering that is to reduce clustering noise. Besides, the Reliable Sample Selection (RSS) module utilizes an Auxiliary Model to correct noisy labels and select reliable samples for the Main Model. In order to effectively utilize the outlier information generated by the clustering algorithm and RSS module, we train these samples at the instance-level. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed ANL framework can effectively reduce the domain conflicts and alleviate the influence of noisy samples, as well as superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
SparsePipe: Parallel Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Keke Zhai, Pan He, Tania Banerjee, Anand Rangarajan, Sanjay Ranka
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, GPU

We propose SparsePipe, an efficient and asynchronous parallelism approach for handling 3D point clouds with multi-GPU training. SparsePipe is built to support 3D sparse data such as point clouds. It achieves this by adopting generalized convolutions with sparse tensor representation to build expressive high-dimensional convolutional neural networks. Compared to dense solutions, the new models can efficiently process irregular point clouds without densely sliding over the entire space, significantly reducing the memory requirements and allowing higher resolutions of the underlying 3D volumes for better performance. SparsePipe exploits intra-batch parallelism that partitions input data into multiple processors and further improves the training throughput with inter-batch pipelining to overlap communication and computing. Besides, it suitably partitions the model when the GPUs are heterogeneous such that the computing is load-balanced with reduced communication overhead. Using experimental results on an eight-GPU platform, we show that SparsePipe can parallelize effectively and obtain better performance on current point cloud benchmarks for both training and inference, compared to its dense solutions.
Understanding Decoupled and Early Weight Decay
Authors: Johan Bjorck, Kilian Weinberger, Carla Gomes
Date: 2020-12-27 00:00:00

Weight decay (WD) is a traditional regularization technique in deep learning, but despite its ubiquity, its behavior is still an area of active research. Golatkar et al. have recently shown that WD only matters at the start of the training in computer vision, upending traditional wisdom. Loshchilov et al. show that for adaptive optimizers, manually decaying weights can outperform adding an $l_2$ penalty to the loss. This technique has become increasingly popular and is referred to as decoupled WD. The goal of this paper is to investigate these two recent empirical observations. We demonstrate that by applying WD only at the start, the network norm stays small throughout training. This has a regularizing effect as the effective gradient updates become larger. However, traditional generalizations metrics fail to capture this effect of WD, and we show how a simple scale-invariant metric can. We also show how the growth of network weights is heavily influenced by the dataset and its generalization properties. For decoupled WD, we perform experiments in NLP and RL where adaptive optimizers are the norm. We demonstrate that the primary issue that decoupled WD alleviates is the mixing of gradients from the objective function and the $l_2$ penalty in the buffers of Adam (which stores the estimates of the first-order moment). Adaptivity itself is not problematic and decoupled WD ensures that the gradients from the $l_2$ term cannot "drown out" the true objective, facilitating easier hyperparameter tuning.
Spatial Contrastive Learning for Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Yassine Ouali, Céline Hudelot, Myriam Tami
Date: 2020-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification

In this paper, we explore contrastive learning for few-shot classification, in which we propose to use it as an additional auxiliary training objective acting as a data-dependent regularizer to promote more general and transferable features. In particular, we present a novel attention-based spatial contrastive objective to learn locally discriminative and class-agnostic features. As a result, our approach overcomes some of the limitations of the cross-entropy loss, such as its excessive discrimination towards seen classes, which reduces the transferability of features to unseen classes. With extensive experiments, we show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, confirming the importance of learning good and transferable embeddings for few-shot learning.