pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SoccerMap: A Deep Learning Architecture for Visually-Interpretable Analysis in Soccer
Authors: Javier Fernández, Luke Bornn
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

We present a fully convolutional neural network architecture that is capable of estimating full probability surfaces of potential passes in soccer, derived from high-frequency spatiotemporal data. The network receives layers of low-level inputs and learns a feature hierarchy that produces predictions at different sampling levels, capturing both coarse and fine spatial details. By merging these predictions, we can produce visually-rich probability surfaces for any game situation that allows coaches to develop a fine-grained analysis of players' positioning and decision-making, an as-yet little-explored area in sports. We show the network can perform remarkably well in the estimation of pass success probability, and present how it can be adapted easily to approach two other challenging problems: the estimation of pass-selection likelihood and the prediction of the expected value of a pass. Our approach provides a novel solution for learning a full prediction surface when there is only a single-pixel correspondence between ground-truth outcomes and the predicted probability map. The flexibility of this architecture allows its adaptation to a great variety of practical problems in soccer. We also present a set of practical applications, including the evaluation of passing risk at a player level, the identification of the best potential passing options, and the differentiation of passing tendencies between teams.
Action-Conditional Recurrent Kalman Networks For Forward and Inverse Dynamics Learning
Authors: Vaisakh Shaj, Philipp Becker, Dieter Buchler, Harit Pandya, Niels van Duijkeren, C. James Taylor, Marc Hanheide, Gerhard Neumann
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, State Estimation

Estimating accurate forward and inverse dynamics models is a crucial component of model-based control for sophisticated robots such as robots driven by hydraulics, artificial muscles, or robots dealing with different contact situations. Analytic models to such processes are often unavailable or inaccurate due to complex hysteresis effects, unmodelled friction and stiction phenomena,and unknown effects during contact situations. A promising approach is to obtain spatio-temporal models in a data-driven way using recurrent neural networks, as they can overcome those issues. However, such models often do not meet accuracy demands sufficiently, degenerate in performance for the required high sampling frequencies and cannot provide uncertainty estimates. We adopt a recent probabilistic recurrent neural network architecture, called Re-current Kalman Networks (RKNs), to model learning by conditioning its transition dynamics on the control actions. RKNs outperform standard recurrent networks such as LSTMs on many state estimation tasks. Inspired by Kalman filters, the RKN provides an elegant way to achieve action conditioning within its recurrent cell by leveraging additive interactions between the current latent state and the action variables. We present two architectures, one for forward model learning and one for inverse model learning. Both architectures significantly outperform exist-ing model learning frameworks as well as analytical models in terms of prediction performance on a variety of real robot dynamics models.
ICFHR 2020 Competition on Image Retrieval for Historical Handwritten Fragments
Authors: Mathias Seuret, Anguelos Nicolaou, Dominique Stutzmann, Andreas Maier, Vincent Christlein
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

This competition succeeds upon a line of competitions for writer and style analysis of historical document images. In particular, we investigate the performance of large-scale retrieval of historical document fragments in terms of style and writer identification. The analysis of historic fragments is a difficult challenge commonly solved by trained humanists. In comparison to previous competitions, we make the results more meaningful by addressing the issue of sample granularity and moving from writer to page fragment retrieval. The two approaches, style and author identification, provide information on what kind of information each method makes better use of and indirectly contribute to the interpretability of the participating method. Therefore, we created a large dataset consisting of more than 120 000 fragments. Although the most teams submitted methods based on convolutional neural networks, the winning entry achieves an mAP below 40%.
Optimistic search: Change point estimation for large-scale data via adaptive logarithmic queries
Authors: Solt Kovács, Housen Li, Lorenz Haubner, Axel Munk, Peter Bühlmann
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Point Detection

Change point estimation is often formulated as a search for the maximum of a gain function describing improved fits when segmenting the data. Searching through all candidates requires $O(n)$ evaluations of the gain function for an interval with $n$ observations. If each evaluation is computationally demanding (e.g. in high-dimensional models), this can become infeasible. Instead, we propose optimistic search methods with $O(\log n)$ evaluations exploiting specific structure of the gain function. Towards solid understanding of our strategy, we investigate in detail the $p$-dimensional Gaussian changing means setup, including high-dimensional scenarios. For some of our proposals, we prove asymptotic minimax optimality for detecting change points and derive their asymptotic localization rate. These rates (up to a possible log factor) are optimal for the univariate and multivariate scenarios, and are by far the fastest in the literature under the weakest possible detection condition on the signal-to-noise ratio in the high-dimensional scenario. Computationally, our proposed methodology has the worst case complexity of $O(np)$, which can be improved to be sublinear in $n$ if some a-priori knowledge on the length of the shortest segment is available. Our search strategies generalize far beyond the theoretically analyzed setup. We illustrate, as an example, massive computational speedup in change point detection for high-dimensional Gaussian graphical models.
A Particle Swarm Inspired Approach for Continuous Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems
Authors: Moumita Choudhury, Amit Sarker, Md. Mosaddek Khan, William Yeoh
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) are a widely studied framework for coordinating interactions in cooperative multi-agent systems. In classical DCOPs, variables owned by agents are assumed to be discrete. However, in many applications, such as target tracking or sleep scheduling in sensor networks, continuous-valued variables are more suitable than discrete ones. To better model such applications, researchers have proposed Continuous DCOPs (C-DCOPs), an extension of DCOPs, that can explicitly model problems with continuous variables. The state-of-the-art approaches for solving C-DCOPs experience either onerous memory or computation overhead and unsuitable for non-differentiable optimization problems. To address this issue, we propose a new C-DCOP algorithm, namely Particle Swarm Optimization Based C-DCOP (PCD), which is inspired by Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), a well-known centralized population-based approach for solving continuous optimization problems. In recent years, population-based algorithms have gained significant attention in classical DCOPs due to their ability in producing high-quality solutions. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, this class of algorithms has not been utilized to solve C-DCOPs and there has been no work evaluating the potential of PSO in solving classical DCOPs or C-DCOPs. In light of this observation, we adapted PSO, a centralized algorithm, to solve C-DCOPs in a decentralized manner. The resulting PCD algorithm not only produces good-quality solutions but also finds solutions without any requirement for derivative calculations. Moreover, we design a crossover operator that can be used by PCD to further improve the quality of solutions found. Finally, we theoretically prove that PCD is an anytime algorithm and empirically evaluate PCD against the state-of-the-art C-DCOP algorithms in a wide variety of benchmarks.
The Elliptical Potential Lemma Revisited
Authors: Alexandra Carpentier, Claire Vernade, Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

This note proposes a new proof and new perspectives on the so-called Elliptical Potential Lemma. This result is important in online learning, especially for linear stochastic bandits. The original proof of the result, however short and elegant, does not give much flexibility on the type of potentials considered and we believe that this new interpretation can be of interest for future research in this field.
Robust Imitation Learning from Noisy Demonstrations
Authors: Voot Tangkaratt, Nontawat Charoenphakdee, Masashi Sugiyama
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, continuous-control, Continuous Control, General Classification, Imitation Learning

Robust learning from noisy demonstrations is a practical but highly challenging problem in imitation learning. In this paper, we first theoretically show that robust imitation learning can be achieved by optimizing a classification risk with a symmetric loss. Based on this theoretical finding, we then propose a new imitation learning method that optimizes the classification risk by effectively combining pseudo-labeling with co-training. Unlike existing methods, our method does not require additional labels or strict assumptions about noise distributions. Experimental results on continuous-control benchmarks show that our method is more robust compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Sparse Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Matthew Ashman, Jonathan So, Will Tebbutt, Vincent Fortuin, Michael Pearce, Richard E. Turner
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Variational Inference

Large, multi-dimensional spatio-temporal datasets are omnipresent in modern science and engineering. An effective framework for handling such data are Gaussian process deep generative models (GP-DGMs), which employ GP priors over the latent variables of DGMs. Existing approaches for performing inference in GP-DGMs do not support sparse GP approximations based on inducing points, which are essential for the computational efficiency of GPs, nor do they handle missing data -- a natural occurrence in many spatio-temporal datasets -- in a principled manner. We address these shortcomings with the development of the sparse Gaussian process variational autoencoder (SGP-VAE), characterised by the use of partial inference networks for parameterising sparse GP approximations. Leveraging the benefits of amortised variational inference, the SGP-VAE enables inference in multi-output sparse GPs on previously unobserved data with no additional training. The SGP-VAE is evaluated in a variety of experiments where it outperforms alternative approaches including multi-output GPs and structured VAEs.
Individual corpora predict fast memory retrieval during reading
Authors: Markus J. Hofmann, Lara Müller, Andre Rölke, Ralph Radach, Chris Biemann
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING (CogALex) 2020 12
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval, Sentence

The corpus, from which a predictive language model is trained, can be considered the experience of a semantic system. We recorded everyday reading of two participants for two months on a tablet, generating individual corpus samples of 300/500K tokens. Then we trained word2vec models from individual corpora and a 70 million-sentence newspaper corpus to obtain individual and norm-based long-term memory structure. To test whether individual corpora can make better predictions for a cognitive task of long-term memory retrieval, we generated stimulus materials consisting of 134 sentences with uncorrelated individual and norm-based word probabilities. For the subsequent eye tracking study 1-2 months later, our regression analyses revealed that individual, but not norm-corpus-based word probabilities can account for first-fixation duration and first-pass gaze duration. Word length additionally affected gaze duration and total viewing duration. The results suggest that corpora representative for an individual's longterm memory structure can better explain reading performance than a norm corpus, and that recently acquired information is lexically accessed rapidly.
A Continuous-Time Mirror Descent Approach to Sparse Phase Retrieval
Authors: Fan Wu, Patrick Rebeschini
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Retrieval

We analyze continuous-time mirror descent applied to sparse phase retrieval, which is the problem of recovering sparse signals from a set of magnitude-only measurements. We apply mirror descent to the unconstrained empirical risk minimization problem (batch setting), using the square loss and square measurements. We provide a convergence analysis of the algorithm in this non-convex setting and prove that, with the hypentropy mirror map, mirror descent recovers any $k$-sparse vector $\mathbf{x}^\star\in\mathbb{R}^n$ with minimum (in modulus) non-zero entry on the order of $\| \mathbf{x}^\star \|_2/\sqrt{k}$ from $k^2$ Gaussian measurements, modulo logarithmic terms. This yields a simple algorithm which, unlike most existing approaches to sparse phase retrieval, adapts to the sparsity level, without including thresholding steps or adding regularization terms. Our results also provide a principled theoretical understanding for Hadamard Wirtinger flow [58], as Euclidean gradient descent applied to the empirical risk problem with Hadamard parametrization can be recovered as a first-order approximation to mirror descent in discrete time.
Claw U-Net: A Unet-based Network with Deep Feature Concatenation for Scleral Blood Vessel Segmentation
Authors: Chang Yao, Jingyu Tang, Menghan Hu, Yue Wu, Wenyi Guo, Qingli Li, Xiao-Ping Zhang
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00

Sturge-Weber syndrome (SWS) is a vascular malformation disease, and it may cause blindness if the patient's condition is severe. Clinical results show that SWS can be divided into two types based on the characteristics of scleral blood vessels. Therefore, how to accurately segment scleral blood vessels has become a significant problem in computer-aided diagnosis. In this research, we propose to continuously upsample the bottom layer's feature maps to preserve image details, and design a novel Claw UNet based on UNet for scleral blood vessel segmentation. Specifically, the residual structure is used to increase the number of network layers in the feature extraction stage to learn deeper features. In the decoding stage, by fusing the features of the encoding, upsampling, and decoding parts, Claw UNet can achieve effective segmentation in the fine-grained regions of scleral blood vessels. To effectively extract small blood vessels, we use the attention mechanism to calculate the attention coefficient of each position in images. Claw UNet outperforms other UNet-based networks on scleral blood vessel image dataset.
Extracting Procedural Knowledge from Technical Documents
Authors: Shivali Agarwal, Shubham Atreja, Vikas Agarwal
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Procedures are an important knowledge component of documents that can be leveraged by cognitive assistants for automation, question-answering or driving a conversation. It is a challenging problem to parse big dense documents like product manuals, user guides to automatically understand which parts are talking about procedures and subsequently extract them. Most of the existing research has focused on extracting flows in given procedures or understanding the procedures in order to answer conceptual questions. Identifying and extracting multiple procedures automatically from documents of diverse formats remains a relatively less addressed problem. In this work, we cover some of this ground by -- 1) Providing insights on how structural and linguistic properties of documents can be grouped to define types of procedures, 2) Analyzing documents to extract the relevant linguistic and structural properties, and 3) Formulating procedure identification as a classification problem that leverages the features of the document derived from the above analysis. We first implemented and deployed unsupervised techniques which were used in different use cases. Based on the evaluation in different use cases, we figured out the weaknesses of the unsupervised approach. We then designed an improved version which was supervised. We demonstrate that our technique is effective in identifying procedures from big and complex documents alike by achieving accuracy of 89%.
Feature Inference Attack on Model Predictions in Vertical Federated Learning
Authors: Xinjian Luo, Yuncheng Wu, Xiaokui Xiao, Beng Chin Ooi
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Inference Attack, Prediction, Vertical Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm for facilitating multiple organizations' data collaboration without revealing their private data to each other. Recently, vertical FL, where the participating organizations hold the same set of samples but with disjoint features and only one organization owns the labels, has received increased attention. This paper presents several feature inference attack methods to investigate the potential privacy leakages in the model prediction stage of vertical FL. The attack methods consider the most stringent setting that the adversary controls only the trained vertical FL model and the model predictions, relying on no background information. We first propose two specific attacks on the logistic regression (LR) and decision tree (DT) models, according to individual prediction output. We further design a general attack method based on multiple prediction outputs accumulated by the adversary to handle complex models, such as neural networks (NN) and random forest (RF) models. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attacks and highlight the need for designing private mechanisms to protect the prediction outputs in vertical FL.
Coherent Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification Networks
Authors: Eleonora Giunchiglia, Thomas Lukasiewicz
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Hierarchical Multi-label Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Protein Function Prediction

Hierarchical multi-label classification (HMC) is a challenging classification task extending standard multi-label classification problems by imposing a hierarchy constraint on the classes. In this paper, we propose C-HMCNN(h), a novel approach for HMC problems, which, given a network h for the underlying multi-label classification problem, exploits the hierarchy information in order to produce predictions coherent with the constraint and improve performance. We conduct an extensive experimental analysis showing the superior performance of C-HMCNN(h) when compared to state-of-the-art models.
Local Knowledge Powered Conversational Agents
Authors: Sashank Santhanam, Wei Ping, Raul Puri, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Bryan Catanzaro
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness

State-of-the-art conversational agents have advanced significantly in conjunction with the use of large transformer-based language models. However, even with these advancements, conversational agents still lack the ability to produce responses that are informative and coherent with the local context. In this work, we propose a dialog framework that incorporates both local knowledge as well as users' past dialogues to generate high quality conversations. We introduce an approach to build a dataset based on Reddit conversations, where outbound URL links are widely available in the conversations and the hyperlinked documents can be naturally included as local external knowledge. Using our framework and dataset, we demonstrate that incorporating local knowledge can largely improve informativeness, coherency and realisticness measures using human evaluations. In particular, our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art conversational model on the Reddit dataset across all three measures. We also find that scaling the size of our models from 117M to 8.3B parameters yields consistent improvement of validation perplexity as well as human evaluated metrics. Our model with 8.3B parameters can generate human-like responses as rated by various human evaluations in a single-turn dialog setting.
Tongji University Undergraduate Team for the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge2020
Authors: Shufan Shen, Ran Miao, Yi Wang, Zhihua Wei
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Denoising, Speaker Recognition, Speaker Verification

In this report, we discribe the submission of Tongji University undergraduate team to the CLOSE track of the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC) 2020 at Interspeech 2020. We applied the RSBU-CW module to the ResNet34 framework to improve the denoising ability of the network and better complete the speaker verification task in a complex environment.We trained two variants of ResNet,used score fusion and data-augmentation methods to improve the performance of the model. Our fusion of two selected systems for the CLOSE track achieves 0.2973 DCF and 4.9700\% EER on the challenge evaluation set.
Language Inference with Multi-head Automata through Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Alper Şekerci, Özlem Salehi
Date: 2020-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The purpose of this paper is to use reinforcement learning to model learning agents which can recognize formal languages. Agents are modeled as simple multi-head automaton, a new model of finite automaton that uses multiple heads, and six different languages are formulated as reinforcement learning problems. Two different algorithms are used for optimization. First algorithm is Q-learning which trains gated recurrent units to learn optimal policies. The second one is genetic algorithm which searches for the optimal solution by using evolution inspired operations. The results show that genetic algorithm performs better than Q-learning algorithm in general but Q-learning algorithm finds solutions faster for regular languages.