pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Pareto front of multi-objective COVID-19 mitigation policies using reinforcement learning
Authors: Mathieu Reymond, Conor F. Hayes, Lander Willem, Roxana Rădulescu, Steven Abrams, Diederik M. Roijers, Enda Howley, Patrick Mannion, Niel Hens, Ann Nowé, Pieter Libin
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Infectious disease outbreaks can have a disruptive impact on public health and societal processes. As decision making in the context of epidemic mitigation is hard, reinforcement learning provides a methodology to automatically learn prevention strategies in combination with complex epidemic models. Current research focuses on optimizing policies w.r.t. a single objective, such as the pathogen's attack rate. However, as the mitigation of epidemics involves distinct, and possibly conflicting criteria (i.a., prevalence, mortality, morbidity, cost), a multi-objective approach is warranted to learn balanced policies. To lift this decision-making process to real-world epidemic models, we apply deep multi-objective reinforcement learning and build upon a state-of-the-art algorithm, Pareto Conditioned Networks (PCN), to learn a set of solutions that approximates the Pareto front of the decision problem. We consider the first wave of the Belgian COVID-19 epidemic, which was mitigated by a lockdown, and study different deconfinement strategies, aiming to minimize both COVID-19 cases (i.e., infections and hospitalizations) and the societal burden that is induced by the applied mitigation measures. We contribute a multi-objective Markov decision process that encapsulates the stochastic compartment model that was used to inform policy makers during the COVID-19 epidemic. As these social mitigation measures are implemented in a continuous action space that modulates the contact matrix of the age-structured epidemic model, we extend PCN to this setting. We evaluate the solution returned by PCN, and observe that it correctly learns to reduce the social burden whenever the hospitalization rates are sufficiently low. In this work, we thus show that multi-objective reinforcement learning is attainable in complex epidemiological models and provides essential insights to balance complex mitigation policies.
gTLO: A Generalized and Non-linear Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Johannes Dornheim
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Deep-Sea Treasure, Image version, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In real-world decision optimization, often multiple competing objectives must be taken into account. Following classical reinforcement learning, these objectives have to be combined into a single reward function. In contrast, multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) methods learn from vectors of per-objective rewards instead. In the case of multi-policy MORL, sets of decision policies for various preferences regarding the conflicting objectives are optimized. This is especially important when target preferences are not known during training or when preferences change dynamically during application. While it is, in general, straightforward to extend a single-objective reinforcement learning method for MORL based on linear scalarization, solutions that are reachable by these methods are limited to convex regions of the Pareto front. Non-linear MORL methods like Thresholded Lexicographic Ordering (TLO) are designed to overcome this limitation. Generalized MORL methods utilize function approximation to generalize across objective preferences and thereby implicitly learn multiple policies in a data-efficient manner, even for complex decision problems with high-dimensional or continuous state spaces. In this work, we propose \textit{generalized Thresholded Lexicographic Ordering} (gTLO), a novel method that aims to combine non-linear MORL with the advantages of generalized MORL. We introduce a deep reinforcement learning realization of the algorithm and present promising results on a standard benchmark for non-linear MORL and a real-world application from the domain of manufacturing process control.
Regularization-based Pruning of Irrelevant Weights in Deep Neural Architectures
Authors: Giovanni Bonetta, Matteo Ribero, Rossella Cancelliere
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Text Generation

Deep neural networks exploiting millions of parameters are nowadays the norm in deep learning applications. This is a potential issue because of the great amount of computational resources needed for training, and of the possible loss of generalization performance of overparametrized networks. We propose in this paper a method for learning sparse neural topologies via a regularization technique which identifies non relevant weights and selectively shrinks their norm, while performing a classic update for relevant ones. This technique, which is an improvement of classical weight decay, is based on the definition of a regularization term which can be added to any loss functional regardless of its form, resulting in a unified general framework exploitable in many different contexts. The actual elimination of parameters identified as irrelevant is handled by an iterative pruning algorithm. We tested the proposed technique on different image classification and Natural language generation tasks, obtaining results on par or better then competitors in terms of sparsity and metrics, while achieving strong models compression.
Commonality in Natural Images Rescues GANs: Pretraining GANs with Generic and Privacy-free Synthetic Data
Authors: Kyungjune Baek, Hyunjung Shim
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Inference Attack, Membership Inference Attack, Transfer Learning

Transfer learning for GANs successfully improves generation performance under low-shot regimes. However, existing studies show that the pretrained model using a single benchmark dataset is not generalized to various target datasets. More importantly, the pretrained model can be vulnerable to copyright or privacy risks as membership inference attack advances. To resolve both issues, we propose an effective and unbiased data synthesizer, namely Primitives-PS, inspired by the generic characteristics of natural images. Specifically, we utilize 1) the generic statistics on the frequency magnitude spectrum, 2) the elementary shape (i.e., image composition via elementary shapes) for representing the structure information, and 3) the existence of saliency as prior. Since our synthesizer only considers the generic properties of natural images, the single model pretrained on our dataset can be consistently transferred to various target datasets, and even outperforms the previous methods pretrained with the natural images in terms of Fr'echet inception distance. Extensive analysis, ablation study, and evaluations demonstrate that each component of our data synthesizer is effective, and provide insights on the desirable nature of the pretrained model for the transferability of GANs.
Value-based Practical Reasoning: Modal Logic + Argumentation
Authors: Jieting Luo, Beishui Liao, Dov Gabbay
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00

Autonomous agents are supposed to be able to finish tasks or achieve goals that are assigned by their users through performing a sequence of actions. Since there might exist multiple plans that an agent can follow and each plan might promote or demote different values along each action, the agent should be able to resolve the conflicts between them and evaluate which plan he should follow. In this paper, we develop a logic-based framework that combines modal logic and argumentation for value-based practical reasoning with plans. Modal logic is used as a technique to represent and verify whether a plan with its local properties of value promotion or demotion can be followed to achieve an agent's goal. We then propose an argumentation-based approach that allows an agent to reason about his plans in the form of supporting or objecting to a plan using the verification results.
When NAS Meets Trees: An Efficient Algorithm for Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Guocheng Qian, Xuanyang Zhang, Guohao Li, Chen Zhao, Yukang Chen, Xiangyu Zhang, Bernard Ghanem, Jian Sun
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search

The key challenge in neural architecture search (NAS) is designing how to explore wisely in the huge search space. We propose a new NAS method called TNAS (NAS with trees), which improves search efficiency by exploring only a small number of architectures while also achieving a higher search accuracy. TNAS introduces an architecture tree and a binary operation tree, to factorize the search space and substantially reduce the exploration size. TNAS performs a modified bi-level Breadth-First Search in the proposed trees to discover a high-performance architecture. Impressively, TNAS finds the global optimal architecture on CIFAR-10 with test accuracy of 94.37\% in four GPU hours in NAS-Bench-201. The average test accuracy is 94.35\%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/guochengqian/TNAS}.
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Conversational Semantic Role Labeling
Authors: Han Wu, Haochen Tan, Kun Xu, Shuqi Liu, Lianwei Wu, Linqi Song
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (NAACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Response Generation, Semantic Role Labeling

While conversational semantic role labeling (CSRL) has shown its usefulness on Chinese conversational tasks, it is still under-explored in non-Chinese languages due to the lack of multilingual CSRL annotations for the parser training. To avoid expensive data collection and error-propagation of translation-based methods, we present a simple but effective approach to perform zero-shot cross-lingual CSRL. Our model implicitly learns language-agnostic, conversational structure-aware and semantically rich representations with the hierarchical encoders and elaborately designed pre-training objectives. Experimental results show that our model outperforms all baselines by large margins on two newly collected English CSRL test sets. More importantly, we confirm the usefulness of CSRL to non-Chinese conversational tasks such as the question-in-context rewriting task in English and the multi-turn dialogue response generation tasks in English, German and Japanese by incorporating the CSRL information into the downstream conversation-based models. We believe this finding is significant and will facilitate the research of non-Chinese dialogue tasks which suffer the problems of ellipsis and anaphora.
Methods of Informational Trends Analytics and Fake News Detection on Twitter
Authors: Bohdan M. Pavlyshenko
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection

In the paper, different approaches for the analysis of news trends on Twitter has been considered. For the analysis and case study, informational trends on Twitter caused by Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 year have been studied. A deep learning approach for fake news detection has been analyzed. The use of the theory of frequent itemsets and association rules, graph theory for news trends analytics have been considered.
Knowledge Graph and Accurate Portrait Construction of Scientific and Technological Academic Conferences
Authors: Runyu Yu, Zhe Xue, Ang Li
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00

In recent years, with the continuous progress of science and technology, the number of scientific research achievements is increasing day by day, as the exchange platform and medium of scientific research achievements, the scientific and technological academic conferences have become more and more abundant. The convening of scientific and technological academic conferences will bring large number of academic papers, researchers, research institutions and other data, and the massive data brings difficulties for researchers to obtain valuable information. Therefore, it is of great significance to use deep learning technology to mine the core information in the data of scientific and technological academic conferences, and to realize a knowledge graph and accurate portrait system of scientific and technological academic conferences, so that researchers can obtain scientific research information faster.
Research on Cross-media Science and Technology Information Data Retrieval
Authors: Yang Jiang, Zhe Xue, Ang Li
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Since the era of big data, the Internet has been flooded with all kinds of information. Browsing information through the Internet has become an integral part of people's daily life. Unlike the news data and social data in the Internet, the cross-media technology information data has different characteristics. This data has become an important basis for researchers and scholars to track the current hot spots and explore the future direction of technology development. As the volume of science and technology information data becomes richer, the traditional science and technology information retrieval system, which only supports unimodal data retrieval and uses outdated data keyword matching model, can no longer meet the daily retrieval needs of science and technology scholars. Therefore, in view of the above research background, it is of profound practical significance to study the cross-media science and technology information data retrieval system based on deep semantic features, which is in line with the development trend of domestic and international technologies.
Accurate Portraits of Scientific Resources and Knowledge Service Components
Authors: Yue Wang, Zhe Xue, Ang Li
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Management

With the advent of the cloud computing era, the cost of creating, capturing and managing information has gradually decreased. The amount of data in the Internet is also showing explosive growth, and more and more scientific and technological resources are uploaded to the network. Different from news and social media data ubiquitous in the Internet, the main body of scientific and technological resources is composed of academic-style resources or entities such as papers, patents, authors, and research institutions. There is a rich relationship network between resources, from which a large amount of cutting-edge scientific and technological information can be mined. There are a large number of management and classification standards for existing scientific and technological resources, but these standards are difficult to completely cover all entities and associations of scientific and technological resources, and cannot accurately extract important information contained in scientific and technological resources. How to construct a complete and accurate representation of scientific and technological resources from structured and unstructured reports and texts in the network, and how to tap the potential value of scientific and technological resources is an urgent problem. The solution is to construct accurate portraits of scientific and technological resources in combination with knowledge graph related technologies.
How to Find Your Friendly Neighborhood: Graph Attention Design with Self-Supervision
Authors: Dongkwan Kim, Alice Oh
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Graph Attention

Attention mechanism in graph neural networks is designed to assign larger weights to important neighbor nodes for better representation. However, what graph attention learns is not understood well, particularly when graphs are noisy. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised graph attention network (SuperGAT), an improved graph attention model for noisy graphs. Specifically, we exploit two attention forms compatible with a self-supervised task to predict edges, whose presence and absence contain the inherent information about the importance of the relationships between nodes. By encoding edges, SuperGAT learns more expressive attention in distinguishing mislinked neighbors. We find two graph characteristics influence the effectiveness of attention forms and self-supervision: homophily and average degree. Thus, our recipe provides guidance on which attention design to use when those two graph characteristics are known. Our experiment on 17 real-world datasets demonstrates that our recipe generalizes across 15 datasets of them, and our models designed by recipe show improved performance over baselines.
Adapting BigScience Multilingual Model to Unseen Languages
Authors: Zheng-Xin Yong, Vassilina Nikoulina
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

We benchmark different strategies of adding new languages (German and Korean) into the BigScience's pretrained multilingual language model with 1.3 billion parameters that currently supports 13 languages. We investigate the factors that affect the language adaptability of the model and the trade-offs between computational costs and expected performance.
SUMD: Super U-shaped Matrix Decomposition Convolutional neural network for Image denoising
Authors: QiFan Li
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient CNN-based framework that leverages local and global context information for image denoising. Due to the limitations of convolution itself, the CNN-based method is generally unable to construct an effective and structured global feature representation, usually called the long-distance dependencies in the Transformer-based method. To tackle this problem, we introduce the matrix decomposition module(MD) in the network to establish the global context feature, comparable to the Transformer based method performance. Inspired by the design of multi-stage progressive restoration of U-shaped architecture, we further integrate the MD module into the multi-branches to acquire the relative global feature representation of the patch range at the current stage. Then, the stage input gradually rises to the overall scope and continuously improves the final feature. Experimental results on various image denoising datasets: SIDD, DND, and synthetic Gaussian noise datasets show that our model(SUMD) can produce comparable visual quality and accuracy results with Transformer-based methods.
Fusion of Self-supervised Learned Models for MOS Prediction
Authors: Zhengdong Yang, Wangjin Zhou, Chenhui Chu, Sheng Li, Raj Dabre, Raphael Rubino, Yi Zhao
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00

We participated in the mean opinion score (MOS) prediction challenge, 2022. This challenge aims to predict MOS scores of synthetic speech on two tracks, the main track and a more challenging sub-track: out-of-domain (OOD). To improve the accuracy of the predicted scores, we have explored several model fusion-related strategies and proposed a fused framework in which seven pretrained self-supervised learned (SSL) models have been engaged. These pretrained SSL models are derived from three ASR frameworks, including Wav2Vec, Hubert, and WavLM. For the OOD track, we followed the 7 SSL models selected on the main track and adopted a semi-supervised learning method to exploit the unlabeled data. According to the official analysis results, our system has achieved 1st rank in 6 out of 16 metrics and is one of the top 3 systems for 13 out of 16 metrics. Specifically, we have achieved the highest LCC, SRCC, and KTAU scores at the system level on main track, as well as the best performance on the LCC, SRCC, and KTAU evaluation metrics at the utterance level on OOD track. Compared with the basic SSL models, the prediction accuracy of the fused system has been largely improved, especially on OOD sub-track.
Towards Homogeneous Modality Learning and Multi-Granularity Information Exploration for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification
Authors: Haojie Liu, Daoxun Xia, Wei Jiang, Chao Xu
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Person Re-Identification, Retrieval

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is a challenging and essential task, which aims to retrieve a set of person images over visible and infrared camera views. In order to mitigate the impact of large modality discrepancy existing in heterogeneous images, previous methods attempt to apply generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate the modality-consisitent data. However, due to severe color variations between the visible domain and infrared domain, the generated fake cross-modality samples often fail to possess good qualities to fill the modality gap between synthesized scenarios and target real ones, which leads to sub-optimal feature representations. In this work, we address cross-modality matching problem with Aligned Grayscale Modality (AGM), an unified dark-line spectrum that reformulates visible-infrared dual-mode learning as a gray-gray single-mode learning problem. Specifically, we generate the grasycale modality from the homogeneous visible images. Then, we train a style tranfer model to transfer infrared images into homogeneous grayscale images. In this way, the modality discrepancy is significantly reduced in the image space. In order to reduce the remaining appearance discrepancy, we further introduce a multi-granularity feature extraction network to conduct feature-level alignment. Rather than relying on the global information, we propose to exploit local (head-shoulder) features to assist person Re-ID, which complements each other to form a stronger feature descriptor. Comprehensive experiments implemented on the mainstream evaluation datasets include SYSU-MM01 and RegDB indicate that our method can significantly boost cross-modality retrieval performance against the state of the art methods.
Autonomous Mobile Clinics: Empowering Affordable Anywhere Anytime Healthcare Access
Authors: Shaoshan Liu, Yuzhang Huang, Leiyu Shi
Date: 2022-04-11 00:00:00

We are facing a global healthcare crisis today as the healthcare cost is ever climbing, but with the aging population, government fiscal revenue is ever dropping. To create a more efficient and effective healthcare system, three technical challenges immediately present themselves: healthcare access, healthcare equity, and healthcare efficiency. An autonomous mobile clinic solves the healthcare access problem by bringing healthcare services to the patient by the order of the patient's fingertips. Nevertheless, to enable a universal autonomous mobile clinic network, a three-stage technical roadmap needs to be achieved: In stage one, we focus on solving the inequity challenge in the existing healthcare system by combining autonomous mobility and telemedicine. In stage two, we develop an AI doctor for primary care, which we foster from infancy to adulthood with clean healthcare data. With the AI doctor, we can solve the inefficiency problem. In stage three, after we have proven that the autonomous mobile clinic network can truly solve the target clinical use cases, we shall open up the platform for all medical verticals, thus enabling universal healthcare through this whole new system.