pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
What are the Statistical Limits of Offline RL with Linear Function Approximation?
Authors: Ruosong Wang, Dean P. Foster, Sham M. Kakade
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation methods (to deal with the curse of dimensionality) can provide a means to help alleviate the excessive sample complexity burden in modern sequential decision making problems. However, the extent to which this broader approach can be effective is not well understood, where the literature largely consists of sufficient conditions. This work focuses on the basic question of what are necessary representational and distributional conditions that permit provable sample-efficient offline reinforcement learning. Perhaps surprisingly, our main result shows that even if: i) we have realizability in that the true value function of \emph{every} policy is linear in a given set of features and 2) our off-policy data has good coverage over all features (under a strong spectral condition), then any algorithm still (information-theoretically) requires a number of offline samples that is exponential in the problem horizon in order to non-trivially estimate the value of \emph{any} given policy. Our results highlight that sample-efficient offline policy evaluation is simply not possible unless significantly stronger conditions hold; such conditions include either having low distribution shift (where the offline data distribution is close to the distribution of the policy to be evaluated) or significantly stronger representational conditions (beyond realizability).
GAZED- Gaze-guided Cinematic Editing of Wide-Angle Monocular Video Recordings
Authors: K L Bhanu Moorthy, Moneish Kumar, Ramanathan Subramaniam, Vineet Gandhi
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: valid, Video Editing

We present GAZED- eye GAZe-guided EDiting for videos captured by a solitary, static, wide-angle and high-resolution camera. Eye-gaze has been effectively employed in computational applications as a cue to capture interesting scene content; we employ gaze as a proxy to select shots for inclusion in the edited video. Given the original video, scene content and user eye-gaze tracks are combined to generate an edited video comprising cinematically valid actor shots and shot transitions to generate an aesthetic and vivid representation of the original narrative. We model cinematic video editing as an energy minimization problem over shot selection, whose constraints capture cinematographic editing conventions. Gazed scene locations primarily determine the shots constituting the edited video. Effectiveness of GAZED against multiple competing methods is demonstrated via a psychophysical study involving 12 users and twelve performance videos.
AEGIS: A real-time multimodal augmented reality computer vision based system to assist facial expression recognition for individuals with autism spectrum disorder
Authors: James Ren Hou Lee, Alexander Wong
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

The ability to interpret social cues comes naturally for most people, but for those living with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), some experience a deficiency in this area. This paper presents the development of a multimodal augmented reality (AR) system which combines the use of computer vision and deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) in order to assist individuals with the detection and interpretation of facial expressions in social settings. The proposed system, which we call AEGIS (Augmented-reality Expression Guided Interpretation System), is an assistive technology deployable on a variety of user devices including tablets, smartphones, video conference systems, or smartglasses, showcasing its extreme flexibility and wide range of use cases, to allow integration into daily life with ease. Given a streaming video camera source, each real-world frame is passed into AEGIS, processed for facial bounding boxes, and then fed into our novel deep convolutional time windowed neural network (TimeConvNet). We leverage both spatial and temporal information in order to provide an accurate expression prediction, which is then converted into its corresponding visualization and drawn on top of the original video frame. The system runs in real-time, requires minimal set up and is simple to use. With the use of AEGIS, we can assist individuals living with ASD to learn to better identify expressions and thus improve their social experiences.
Learning Invariances in Neural Networks
Authors: Gregory Benton, Marc Finzi, Pavel Izmailov, Andrew Gordon Wilson
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Molecular Property Prediction, Property Prediction, regression

Invariances to translations have imbued convolutional neural networks with powerful generalization properties. However, we often do not know a priori what invariances are present in the data, or to what extent a model should be invariant to a given symmetry group. We show how to \emph{learn} invariances and equivariances by parameterizing a distribution over augmentations and optimizing the training loss simultaneously with respect to the network parameters and augmentation parameters. With this simple procedure we can recover the correct set and extent of invariances on image classification, regression, segmentation, and molecular property prediction from a large space of augmentations, on training data alone.
Error Bounds of Imitating Policies and Environments
Authors: Tian Xu, Ziniu Li, Yang Yu
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Imitation learning trains a policy by mimicking expert demonstrations. Various imitation methods were proposed and empirically evaluated, meanwhile, their theoretical understanding needs further studies. In this paper, we firstly analyze the value gap between the expert policy and imitated policies by two imitation methods, behavioral cloning and generative adversarial imitation. The results support that generative adversarial imitation can reduce the compounding errors compared to behavioral cloning, and thus has a better sample complexity. Noticed that by considering the environment transition model as a dual agent, imitation learning can also be used to learn the environment model. Therefore, based on the bounds of imitating policies, we further analyze the performance of imitating environments. The results show that environment models can be more effectively imitated by generative adversarial imitation than behavioral cloning, suggesting a novel application of adversarial imitation for model-based reinforcement learning. We hope these results could inspire future advances in imitation learning and model-based reinforcement learning.
Scene-Agnostic Multi-Microphone Speech Dereverberation
Authors: Yochai Yemini, Ethan Fetaya, Haggai Maron, Sharon Gannot
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Speech Dereverberation

Neural networks (NNs) have been widely applied in speech processing tasks, and, in particular, those employing microphone arrays. Nevertheless, most existing NN architectures can only deal with fixed and position-specific microphone arrays. In this paper, we present an NN architecture that can cope with microphone arrays whose number and positions of the microphones are unknown, and demonstrate its applicability in the speech dereverberation task. To this end, our approach harnesses recent advances in deep learning on set-structured data to design an architecture that enhances the reverberant log-spectrum. We use noisy and noiseless versions of a simulated reverberant dataset to test the proposed architecture. Our experiments on the noisy data show that the proposed scene-agnostic setup outperforms a powerful scene-aware framework, sometimes even with fewer microphones. With the noiseless dataset we show that, in most cases, our method outperforms the position-aware network as well as the state-of-the-art weighted linear prediction error (WPE) algorithm.
Towards Listening to 10 People Simultaneously: An Efficient Permutation Invariant Training of Audio Source Separation Using Sinkhorn's Algorithm
Authors: Hideyuki Tachibana
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Source Separation, Speech Separation

In neural network-based monaural speech separation techniques, it has been recently common to evaluate the loss using the permutation invariant training (PIT) loss. However, the ordinary PIT requires to try all $N!$ permutations between $N$ ground truths and $N$ estimates. Since the factorial complexity explodes very rapidly as $N$ increases, a PIT-based training works only when the number of source signals is small, such as $N = 2$ or $3$. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a SinkPIT, a novel variant of the PIT losses, which is much more efficient than the ordinary PIT loss when $N$ is large. The SinkPIT is based on Sinkhorn's matrix balancing algorithm, which efficiently finds a doubly stochastic matrix which approximates the best permutation in a differentiable manner. The author conducted an experiment to train a neural network model to decompose a single-channel mixture into 10 sources using the SinkPIT, and obtained promising results.
Rewriting Meaningful Sentences via Conditional BERT Sampling and an application on fooling text classifiers
Authors: Lei Xu, Ivan Ramirez, Kalyan Veeramachaneni
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence

Most adversarial attack methods that are designed to deceive a text classifier change the text classifier's prediction by modifying a few words or characters. Few try to attack classifiers by rewriting a whole sentence, due to the difficulties inherent in sentence-level rephrasing as well as the problem of setting the criteria for legitimate rewriting. In this paper, we explore the problem of creating adversarial examples with sentence-level rewriting. We design a new sampling method, named ParaphraseSampler, to efficiently rewrite the original sentence in multiple ways. Then we propose a new criteria for modification, called a sentence-level threaten model. This criteria allows for both word- and sentence-level changes, and can be adjusted independently in two dimensions: semantic similarity and grammatical quality. Experimental results show that many of these rewritten sentences are misclassified by the classifier. On all 6 datasets, our ParaphraseSampler achieves a better attack success rate than our baseline.
Planning with Submodular Objective Functions
Authors: Ruosong Wang, Hanrui Zhang, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Denis Garagić, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00

We study planning with submodular objective functions, where instead of maximizing the cumulative reward, the goal is to maximize the objective value induced by a submodular function. Our framework subsumes standard planning and submodular maximization with cardinality constraints as special cases, and thus many practical applications can be naturally formulated within our framework. Based on the notion of multilinear extension, we propose a novel and theoretically principled algorithmic framework for planning with submodular objective functions, which recovers classical algorithms when applied to the two special cases mentioned above. Empirically, our approach significantly outperforms baseline algorithms on synthetic environments and navigation tasks.
Not all parameters are born equal: Attention is mostly what you need
Authors: Nikolay Bogoychev
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (BlackboxNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: All, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Translation

Transformers are widely used in state-of-the-art machine translation, but the key to their success is still unknown. To gain insight into this, we consider three groups of parameters: embeddings, attention, and feed forward neural network (FFN) layers. We examine the relative importance of each by performing an ablation study where we initialise them at random and freeze them, so that their weights do not change over the course of the training. Through this, we show that the attention and FFN are equally important and fulfil the same functionality in a model. We show that the decision about whether a component is frozen or allowed to train is at least as important for the final model performance as its number of parameters. At the same time, the number of parameters alone is not indicative of a component's importance. Finally, while the embedding layer is the least essential for machine translation tasks, it is the most important component for language modelling tasks.
Global optimality of softmax policy gradient with single hidden layer neural networks in the mean-field regime
Authors: Andrea Agazzi, Jianfeng Lu
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

We study the problem of policy optimization for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes with softmax policy and nonlinear function approximation trained with policy gradient algorithms. We concentrate on the training dynamics in the mean-field regime, modeling e.g., the behavior of wide single hidden layer neural networks, when exploration is encouraged through entropy regularization. The dynamics of these models is established as a Wasserstein gradient flow of distributions in parameter space. We further prove global optimality of the fixed points of this dynamics under mild conditions on their initialization.
XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering
Authors: Akari Asai, Jungo Kasai, Jonathan H. Clark, Kenton Lee, Eunsol Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Articles, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Retrieval, Translation

Multilingual question answering tasks typically assume answers exist in the same language as the question. Yet in practice, many languages face both information scarcity -- where languages have few reference articles -- and information asymmetry -- where questions reference concepts from other cultures. This work extends open-retrieval question answering to a cross-lingual setting enabling questions from one language to be answered via answer content from another language. We construct a large-scale dataset built on questions from TyDi QA lacking same-language answers. Our task formulation, called Cross-lingual Open Retrieval Question Answering (XOR QA), includes 40k information-seeking questions from across 7 diverse non-English languages. Based on this dataset, we introduce three new tasks that involve cross-lingual document retrieval using multi-lingual and English resources. We establish baselines with state-of-the-art machine translation systems and cross-lingual pretrained models. Experimental results suggest that XOR QA is a challenging task that will facilitate the development of novel techniques for multilingual question answering. Our data and code are available at https://nlp.cs.washington.edu/xorqa.
Detecting and Exorcising Statistical Demons from Language Models with Anti-Models of Negative Data
Authors: Michael L. Wick, Kate Silverstein, Jean-Baptiste Tristan, Adam Pocock, Mark Johnson
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

It's been said that "Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners." Indeed, self-supervised language models trained on "positive" examples of English text generalize in desirable ways to many natural language tasks. But if such models can stray so far from an initial self-supervision objective, a wayward model might generalize in undesirable ways too, say to nonsensical "negative" examples of unnatural language. A key question in this work is: do language models trained on (positive) training data also generalize to (negative) test data? We use this question as a contrivance to assess the extent to which language models learn undesirable properties of text, such as n-grams, that might interfere with the learning of more desirable properties of text, such as syntax. We find that within a model family, as the number of parameters, training epochs, and data set size increase, so does a model's ability to generalize to negative n-gram data, indicating standard self-supervision generalizes too far. We propose a form of inductive bias that attenuates such undesirable signals with negative data distributions automatically learned from positive data. We apply the method to remove n-gram signals from LSTMs and find that doing so causes them to favor syntactic signals, as demonstrated by large error reductions (up to 46% on the hardest cases) on a syntactic subject-verb agreement task.
STAR: A Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset for Transfer Learning
Authors: Johannes E. M. Mosig, Shikib Mehri, Thomas Kober
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning, Zero-shot Generalization

We present STAR, a schema-guided task-oriented dialog dataset consisting of 127,833 utterances and knowledge base queries across 5,820 task-oriented dialogs in 13 domains that is especially designed to facilitate task and domain transfer learning in task-oriented dialog. Furthermore, we propose a scalable crowd-sourcing paradigm to collect arbitrarily large datasets of the same quality as STAR. Moreover, we introduce novel schema-guided dialog models that use an explicit description of the task(s) to generalize from known to unknown tasks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these models, particularly for zero-shot generalization across tasks and domains.
Efficient Robust Optimal Transport with Application to Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Pratik Jawanpuria, N T V Satyadev, Bamdev Mishra
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-class Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, TAG

Optimal transport (OT) is a powerful geometric tool for comparing two distributions and has been employed in various machine learning applications. In this work, we propose a novel OT formulation that takes feature correlations into account while learning the transport plan between two distributions. We model the feature-feature relationship via a symmetric positive semi-definite Mahalanobis metric in the OT cost function. For a certain class of regularizers on the metric, we show that the optimization strategy can be considerably simplified by exploiting the problem structure. For high-dimensional data, we additionally propose suitable low-dimensional modeling of the Mahalanobis metric. Overall, we view the resulting optimization problem as a non-linear OT problem, which we solve using the Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Empirical results on the discriminative learning setting, such as tag prediction and multi-class classification, illustrate the good performance of our approach.
From Conjunctive Queries to Instance Queries in Ontology-Mediated Querying
Authors: Cristina Feier, Carsten Lutz, Frank Wolter
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

We consider ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on expressive description logics of the ALC family and (unions) of conjunctive queries, studying the rewritability into OMQs based on instance queries (IQs). Our results include exact characterizations of when such a rewriting is possible and tight complexity bounds for deciding rewritability. We also give a tight complexity bound for the related problem of deciding whether a given MMSNP sentence is equivalent to a CSP.
Spatio-temporal Features for Generalized Detection of Deepfake Videos
Authors: Ipek Ganiyusufoglu, L. Minh Ngô, Nedko Savov, Sezer Karaoglu, Theo Gevers
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

For deepfake detection, video-level detectors have not been explored as extensively as image-level detectors, which do not exploit temporal data. In this paper, we empirically show that existing approaches on image and sequence classifiers generalize poorly to new manipulation techniques. To this end, we propose spatio-temporal features, modeled by 3D CNNs, to extend the generalization capabilities to detect new sorts of deepfake videos. We show that spatial features learn distinct deepfake-method-specific attributes, while spatio-temporal features capture shared attributes between deepfake methods. We provide an in-depth analysis of how the sequential and spatio-temporal video encoders are utilizing temporal information using DFDC dataset arXiv:2006.07397. Thus, we unravel that our approach captures local spatio-temporal relations and inconsistencies in the deepfake videos while existing sequence encoders are indifferent to it. Through large scale experiments conducted on the FaceForensics++ arXiv:1901.08971 and Deeper Forensics arXiv:2001.03024 datasets, we show that our approach outperforms existing methods in terms of generalization capabilities.
Containment in Monadic Disjunctive Datalog, MMSNP, and Expressive Description Logics
Authors: Pierre Bourhis, Carsten Lutz
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00

We study query containment in three closely related formalisms: monadic disjunctive Datalog (MDDLog), MMSNP (a logical generalization of constraint satisfaction problems), and ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on expressive description logics and unions of conjunctive queries. Containment in MMSNP was known to be decidable due to a result by Feder and Vardi, but its exact complexity has remained open. We prove 2NEXPTIME-completeness and extend this result to monadic disjunctive Datalog and to OMQs.
Blind Video Temporal Consistency via Deep Video Prior
Authors: Chenyang Lei, Yazhou Xing, Qifeng Chen
Date: 2020-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Colorization, Image Dehazing, Image Enhancement, Optical Flow Estimation, Style Transfer, Video Temporal Consistency

Applying image processing algorithms independently to each video frame often leads to temporal inconsistency in the resulting video. To address this issue, we present a novel and general approach for blind video temporal consistency. Our method is only trained on a pair of original and processed videos directly instead of a large dataset. Unlike most previous methods that enforce temporal consistency with optical flow, we show that temporal consistency can be achieved by training a convolutional network on a video with the Deep Video Prior. Moreover, a carefully designed iteratively reweighted training strategy is proposed to address the challenging multimodal inconsistency problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on 7 computer vision tasks on videos. Extensive quantitative and perceptual experiments show that our approach obtains superior performance than state-of-the-art methods on blind video temporal consistency. Our source codes are publicly available at github.com/ChenyangLEI/deep-video-prior.