pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Audrey: A Personalized Open-Domain Conversational Bot
Authors: Chung Hoon Hong, Yuan Liang, Sagnik Sinha Roy, Arushi Jain, Vihang Agarwal, Ryan Draves, Zhizhuo Zhou, William Chen, Yujian Liu, Martha Miracky, Lily Ge, Nikola Banovic, David Jurgens
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding

Conversational Intelligence requires that a person engage on informational, personal and relational levels. Advances in Natural Language Understanding have helped recent chatbots succeed at dialog on the informational level. However, current techniques still lag for conversing with humans on a personal level and fully relating to them. The University of Michigan's submission to the Alexa Prize Grand Challenge 3, Audrey, is an open-domain conversational chat-bot that aims to engage customers on these levels through interest driven conversations guided by customers' personalities and emotions. Audrey is built from socially-aware models such as Emotion Detection and a Personal Understanding Module to grasp a deeper understanding of users' interests and desires. Our architecture interacts with customers using a hybrid approach balanced between knowledge-driven response generators and context-driven neural response generators to cater to all three levels of conversations. During the semi-finals period, we achieved an average cumulative rating of 3.25 on a 1-5 Likert scale.
ShadowNet: A Secure and Efficient On-device Model Inference System for Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Zhichuang Sun, Ruimin Sun, Changming Liu, Amrita Roy Chowdhury, Long Lu, Somesh Jha
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00

With the increased usage of AI accelerators on mobile and edge devices, on-device machine learning (ML) is gaining popularity. Thousands of proprietary ML models are being deployed today on billions of untrusted devices. This raises serious security concerns about model privacy. However, protecting model privacy without losing access to the untrusted AI accelerators is a challenging problem. In this paper, we present a novel on-device model inference system, ShadowNet. ShadowNet protects the model privacy with Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) while securely outsourcing the heavy linear layers of the model to the untrusted hardware accelerators. ShadowNet achieves this by transforming the weights of the linear layers before outsourcing them and restoring the results inside the TEE. The non-linear layers are also kept secure inside the TEE. ShadowNet's design ensures efficient transformation of the weights and the subsequent restoration of the results. We build a ShadowNet prototype based on TensorFlow Lite and evaluate it on five popular CNNs, namely, MobileNet, ResNet-44, MiniVGG, ResNet-404, and YOLOv4-tiny. Our evaluation shows that ShadowNet achieves strong security guarantees with reasonable performance, offering a practical solution for secure on-device model inference.
A decision-making tool to fine-tune abnormal levels in the complete blood count tests
Authors: Marta Avalos-Fernandez, Helene Touchais, Marcela Henriquez-Henriquez
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The complete blood count (CBC) performed by automated hematology analyzers is one of the most ordered laboratory tests. It is a first-line tool for assessing a patient's general health status, or diagnosing and monitoring disease progression. When the analysis does not fit an expected setting, technologists manually review a blood smear using a microscope. The International Consensus Group for Hematology Review published in 2005 a set of criteria for reviewing CBCs. Commonly, adjustments are locally needed to account for laboratory resources and populations characteristics. Our objective is to provide a decision support tool to identify which CBC variables are associated with higher risks of abnormal smear and at which cutoff values. We propose a cost-sensitive Lasso-penalized additive logistic regression combined with stability selection. Using simulated and real CBC data, we demonstrate that our tool correctly identify the true cutoff values, provided that there is enough available data in their neighbourhood.
Age Gap Reducer-GAN for Recognizing Age-Separated Faces
Authors: Daksha Yadav, Naman Kohli, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, Afzel Noore
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Face Recognition, Face Verification, Generative Adversarial Network

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for matching faces with temporal variations caused due to age progression. The proposed generative adversarial network algorithm is a unified framework that combines facial age estimation and age-separated face verification. The key idea of this approach is to learn the age variations across time by conditioning the input image on the subject's gender and the target age group to which the face needs to be progressed. The loss function accounts for reducing the age gap between the original image and generated face image as well as preserving the identity. Both visual fidelity and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture on different facial age databases for age-separated face recognition.
Transferred Fusion Learning using Skipped Networks
Authors: Vinayaka R Kamath, Vishal S, Varun M
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition, Transfer Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Identification of an entity that is of interest is prominent in any intelligent system. The visual intelligence of the model is enhanced when the capability of recognition is added. Several methods such as transfer learning and zero shot learning help to reuse the existing models or augment the existing model to achieve improved performance at the task of object recognition. Transferred fusion learning is one such mechanism that intends to use the best of both worlds and build a model that is capable of outperforming the models involved in the system. We propose a novel mechanism to amplify the process of transfer learning by introducing a student architecture where the networks learn from each other.
Leveraged Matrix Completion with Noise
Authors: Xinjian Huang, Weiwei Liu, Bo Du, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Matrix Completion

Completing low-rank matrices from subsampled measurements has received much attention in the past decade. Existing works indicate that $\mathcal{O}(nr\log^2(n))$ datums are required to theoretically secure the completion of an $n \times n$ noisy matrix of rank $r$ with high probability, under some quite restrictive assumptions: (1) the underlying matrix must be incoherent; (2) observations follow the uniform distribution. The restrictiveness is partially due to ignoring the roles of the leverage score and the oracle information of each element. In this paper, we employ the leverage scores to characterize the importance of each element and significantly relax assumptions to: (1) not any other structure assumptions are imposed on the underlying low-rank matrix; (2) elements being observed are appropriately dependent on their importance via the leverage score. Under these assumptions, instead of uniform sampling, we devise an ununiform/biased sampling procedure that can reveal the ``importance'' of each observed element. Our proofs are supported by a novel approach that phrases sufficient optimality conditions based on the Golfing Scheme, which would be of independent interest to the wider areas. Theoretical findings show that we can provably recover an unknown $n\times n$ matrix of rank $r$ from just about $\mathcal{O}(nr\log^2 (n))$ entries, even when the observed entries are corrupted with a small amount of noisy information. The empirical results align precisely with our theories.
FAT: Training Neural Networks for Reliable Inference Under Hardware Faults
Authors: Ussama Zahid, Giulio Gambardella, Nicholas J. Fraser, Michaela Blott, Kees Vissers
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are state-of-the-art algorithms for multiple applications, spanning from image classification to speech recognition. While providing excellent accuracy, they often have enormous compute and memory requirements. As a result of this, quantized neural networks (QNNs) are increasingly being adopted and deployed especially on embedded devices, thanks to their high accuracy, but also since they have significantly lower compute and memory requirements compared to their floating point equivalents. QNN deployment is also being evaluated for safety-critical applications, such as automotive, avionics, medical or industrial. These systems require functional safety, guaranteeing failure-free behaviour even in the presence of hardware faults. In general fault tolerance can be achieved by adding redundancy to the system, which further exacerbates the overall computational demands and makes it difficult to meet the power and performance requirements. In order to decrease the hardware cost for achieving functional safety, it is vital to explore domain-specific solutions which can exploit the inherent features of DNNs. In this work we present a novel methodology called fault-aware training (FAT), which includes error modeling during neural network (NN) training, to make QNNs resilient to specific fault models on the device. Our experiments show that by injecting faults in the convolutional layers during training, highly accurate convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can be trained which exhibits much better error tolerance compared to the original. Furthermore, we show that redundant systems which are built from QNNs trained with FAT achieve higher worse-case accuracy at lower hardware cost. This has been validated for numerous classification tasks including CIFAR10, GTSRB, SVHN and ImageNet.
CRPO: A New Approach for Safe Reinforcement Learning with Convergence Guarantee
Authors: Tengyu Xu, Yingbin Liang, Guanghui Lan
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Reinforcement Learning

In safe reinforcement learning (SRL) problems, an agent explores the environment to maximize an expected total reward and meanwhile avoids violation of certain constraints on a number of expected total costs. In general, such SRL problems have nonconvex objective functions subject to multiple nonconvex constraints, and hence are very challenging to solve, particularly to provide a globally optimal policy. Many popular SRL algorithms adopt a primal-dual structure which utilizes the updating of dual variables for satisfying the constraints. In contrast, we propose a primal approach, called constraint-rectified policy optimization (CRPO), which updates the policy alternatingly between objective improvement and constraint satisfaction. CRPO provides a primal-type algorithmic framework to solve SRL problems, where each policy update can take any variant of policy optimization step. To demonstrate the theoretical performance of CRPO, we adopt natural policy gradient (NPG) for each policy update step and show that CRPO achieves an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate to the global optimal policy in the constrained policy set and an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ error bound on constraint satisfaction. This is the first finite-time analysis of primal SRL algorithms with global optimality guarantee. Our empirical results demonstrate that CRPO can outperform the existing primal-dual baseline algorithms significantly.
DeepI2I: Enabling Deep Hierarchical Image-to-Image Translation by Transferring from GANs
Authors: Yaxing Wang, Lu Yu, Joost Van de Weijer
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Attribute, Image-to-Image Translation, Transfer Learning, Translation

Image-to-image translation has recently achieved remarkable results. But despite current success, it suffers from inferior performance when translations between classes require large shape changes. We attribute this to the high-resolution bottlenecks which are used by current state-of-the-art image-to-image methods. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel deep hierarchical Image-to-Image Translation method, called DeepI2I. We learn a model by leveraging hierarchical features: (a) structural information contained in the shallow layers and (b) semantic information extracted from the deep layers. To enable the training of deep I2I models on small datasets, we propose a novel transfer learning method, that transfers knowledge from pre-trained GANs. Specifically, we leverage the discriminator of a pre-trained GANs (i.e. BigGAN or StyleGAN) to initialize both the encoder and the discriminator and the pre-trained generator to initialize the generator of our model. Applying knowledge transfer leads to an alignment problem between the encoder and generator. We introduce an adaptor network to address this. On many-class image-to-image translation on three datasets (Animal faces, Birds, and Foods) we decrease mFID by at least 35% when compared to the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate that transfer learning significantly improves the performance of I2I systems, especially for small datasets. Finally, we are the first to perform I2I translations for domains with over 100 classes.
Offline Learning of Counterfactual Predictions for Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jun Jin, Daniel Graves, Cameron Haigh, Jun Luo, Martin Jagersand
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We consider real-world reinforcement learning (RL) of robotic manipulation tasks that involve both visuomotor skills and contact-rich skills. We aim to train a policy that maps multimodal sensory observations (vision and force) to a manipulator's joint velocities under practical considerations. We propose to use offline samples to learn a set of general value functions (GVFs) that make counterfactual predictions from the visual inputs. We show that combining the offline learned counterfactual predictions with force feedbacks in online policy learning allows efficient reinforcement learning given only a terminal (success/failure) reward. We argue that the learned counterfactual predictions form a compact and informative representation that enables sample efficiency and provides auxiliary reward signals that guide online explorations towards contact-rich states. Various experiments in simulation and real-world settings were performed for evaluation. Recordings of the real-world robot training can be found via https://sites.google.com/view/realrl.
A Survey and Implementation of Performance Metrics for Self-Organized Maps
Authors: Florent Forest, Mustapha Lebbah, Hanane Azzag, Jérôme Lacaille
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Model Selection, Self-Organized Clustering

Self-Organizing Map algorithms have been used for almost 40 years across various application domains such as biology, geology, healthcare, industry and humanities as an interpretable tool to explore, cluster and visualize high-dimensional data sets. In every application, practitioners need to know whether they can \textit{trust} the resulting mapping, and perform model selection to tune algorithm parameters (e.g. the map size). Quantitative evaluation of self-organizing maps (SOM) is a subset of clustering validation, which is a challenging problem as such. Clustering model selection is typically achieved by using clustering validity indices. While they also apply to self-organized clustering models, they ignore the topology of the map, only answering the question: do the SOM code vectors approximate well the data distribution? Evaluating SOM models brings in the additional challenge of assessing their topology: does the mapping preserve neighborhood relationships between the map and the original data? The problem of assessing the performance of SOM models has already been tackled quite thoroughly in literature, giving birth to a family of quality indices incorporating neighborhood constraints, called \textit{topographic} indices. Commonly used examples of such metrics are the topographic error, neighborhood preservation or the topographic product. However, open-source implementations are almost impossible to find. This is the issue we try to solve in this work: after a survey of existing SOM performance metrics, we implemented them in Python and widely used numerical libraries, and provide them as an open-source library, SOMperf. This paper introduces each metric available in our module along with usage examples.
Neural Empirical Bayes: Source Distribution Estimation and its Applications to Simulation-Based Inference
Authors: Maxime Vandegar, Michael Kagan, Antoine Wehenkel, Gilles Louppe
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00

We revisit empirical Bayes in the absence of a tractable likelihood function, as is typical in scientific domains relying on computer simulations. We investigate how the empirical Bayesian can make use of neural density estimators first to use all noise-corrupted observations to estimate a prior or source distribution over uncorrupted samples, and then to perform single-observation posterior inference using the fitted source distribution. We propose an approach based on the direct maximization of the log-marginal likelihood of the observations, examining both biased and de-biased estimators, and comparing to variational approaches. We find that, up to symmetries, a neural empirical Bayes approach recovers ground truth source distributions. With the learned source distribution in hand, we show the applicability to likelihood-free inference and examine the quality of the resulting posterior estimates. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of Neural Empirical Bayes on an inverse problem from collider physics.
Semi-Structured Deep Piecewise Exponential Models
Authors: Philipp Kopper, Sebastian Pölsterl, Christian Wachinger, Bernd Bischl, Andreas Bender, David Rügamer
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

We propose a versatile framework for survival analysis that combines advanced concepts from statistics with deep learning. The presented framework is based on piecewise exponential models and thereby supports various survival tasks, such as competing risks and multi-state modeling, and further allows for estimation of time-varying effects and time-varying features. To also include multiple data sources and higher-order interaction effects into the model, we embed the model class in a neural network and thereby enable the simultaneous estimation of both inherently interpretable structured regression inputs as well as deep neural network components which can potentially process additional unstructured data sources. A proof of concept is provided by using the framework to predict Alzheimer's disease progression based on tabular and 3D point cloud data and applying it to synthetic data.
Where to drive: free space detection with one fisheye camera
Authors: Tobias Scheck, Adarsh Mallandur, Christian Wiede, Gangolf Hirtz
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning

The development in the field of autonomous driving goes hand in hand with ever new developments in the field of image processing and machine learning methods. In order to fully exploit the advantages of deep learning, it is necessary to have sufficient labeled training data available. This is especially not the case for omnidirectional fisheye cameras. As a solution, we propose in this paper to use synthetic training data based on Unity3D. A five-pass algorithm is used to create a virtual fisheye camera. This synthetic training data is evaluated for the application of free space detection for different deep learning network architectures. The results indicate that synthetic fisheye images can be used in deep learning context.
Duality-Induced Regularizer for Tensor Factorization Based Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Zhanqiu Zhang, Jianyu Cai, Jie Wang
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Link Prediction

Tensor factorization based models have shown great power in knowledge graph completion (KGC). However, their performance usually suffers from the overfitting problem seriously. This motivates various regularizers -- such as the squared Frobenius norm and tensor nuclear norm regularizers -- while the limited applicability significantly limits their practical usage. To address this challenge, we propose a novel regularizer -- namely, DUality-induced RegulArizer (DURA) -- which is not only effective in improving the performance of existing models but widely applicable to various methods. The major novelty of DURA is based on the observation that, for an existing tensor factorization based KGC model (primal), there is often another distance based KGC model (dual) closely associated with it. Experiments show that DURA yields consistent and significant improvements on benchmarks.
Dynamic Plane Convolutional Occupancy Networks
Authors: Stefan Lionar, Daniil Emtsev, Dusan Svilarkovic, Songyou Peng
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Surface Reconstruction

Learning-based 3D reconstruction using implicit neural representations has shown promising progress not only at the object level but also in more complicated scenes. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Plane Convolutional Occupancy Networks, a novel implicit representation pushing further the quality of 3D surface reconstruction. The input noisy point clouds are encoded into per-point features that are projected onto multiple 2D dynamic planes. A fully-connected network learns to predict plane parameters that best describe the shapes of objects or scenes. To further exploit translational equivariance, convolutional neural networks are applied to process the plane features. Our method shows superior performance in surface reconstruction from unoriented point clouds in ShapeNet as well as an indoor scene dataset. Moreover, we also provide interesting observations on the distribution of learned dynamic planes.
Regularization of Persistent Homology Gradient Computation
Authors: Padraig Corcoran, Bailin Deng
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop TDA_and_Beyond 2020 12

Persistent homology is a method for computing the topological features present in a given data. Recently, there has been much interest in the integration of persistent homology as a computational step in neural networks or deep learning. In order for a given computation to be integrated in such a way, the computation in question must be differentiable. Computing the gradients of persistent homology is an ill-posed inverse problem with infinitely many solutions. Consequently, it is important to perform regularization so that the solution obtained agrees with known priors. In this work we propose a novel method for regularizing persistent homology gradient computation through the addition of a grouping term. This has the effect of helping to ensure gradients are defined with respect to larger entities and not individual points.