pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep LF-Net: Semantic Lung Segmentation from Indian Chest Radiographs Including Severely Unhealthy Images
Authors: Anushikha Singh, Brejesh lall, B. K. Panigrahi, Anjali Agrawal, Anurag Agrawal, DJ Christopher, Balamugesh Thangakunam
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

A chest radiograph, commonly called chest x-ray (CxR), plays a vital role in the diagnosis of various lung diseases, such as lung cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and many more. Automated segmentation of the lungs is an important step to design a computer-aided diagnostic tool for examination of a CxR. Precise lung segmentation is considered extremely challenging because of variance in the shape of the lung caused by health issues, age, and gender. The proposed work investigates the use of an efficient deep convolutional neural network for accurate segmentation of lungs from CxR. We attempt an end to end DeepLabv3+ network which integrates DeepLab architecture, encoder-decoder, and dilated convolution for semantic lung segmentation with fast training and high accuracy. We experimented with the different pre-trained base networks: Resnet18 and Mobilenetv2, associated with the Deeplabv3+ model for performance analysis. The proposed approach does not require any pre-processing technique on chest x-ray images before being fed to a neural network. Morphological operations were used to remove false positives that occurred during semantic segmentation. We construct a CxR dataset of the Indian population that contain healthy and unhealthy CxRs of clinically confirmed patients of tuberculosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, interstitial lung disease, pleural effusion, and lung cancer. The proposed method is tested on 688 images of our Indian CxR dataset including images with severe abnormal findings to validate its robustness. We also experimented on commonly used benchmark datasets such as Japanese Society of Radiological Technology; Montgomery County, USA; and Shenzhen, China for state-of-the-art comparison. The performance of our method is tested against techniques described in the literature and achieved the highest accuracy for lung segmentation on Indian and public datasets.
Quantum Multiple Kernel Learning
Authors: Seyed Shakib Vedaie, Moslem Noori, Jaspreet S. Oberoi, Barry C. Sanders, Ehsan Zahedinejad
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Binary Classification

Kernel methods play an important role in machine learning applications due to their conceptual simplicity and superior performance on numerous machine learning tasks. Expressivity of a machine learning model, referring to the ability of the model to approximate complex functions, has a significant influence on its performance in these tasks. One approach to enhancing the expressivity of kernel machines is to combine multiple individual kernels to arrive at a more expressive combined kernel. This approach is referred to as multiple kernel learning (MKL). In this work, we propose an MKL method we refer to as quantum MKL, which combines multiple quantum kernels. Our method leverages the power of deterministic quantum computing with one qubit (DQC1) to estimate the combined kernel for a set of classically intractable individual quantum kernels. The combined kernel estimation is achieved without explicitly computing each individual kernel, while still allowing for the tuning of individual kernels in order to achieve better expressivity. Our simulations on two binary classification problems---one performed on a synthetic dataset and the other on a German credit dataset---demonstrate the superiority of the quantum MKL method over single quantum kernel machines.
SentiLSTM: A Deep Learning Approach for Sentiment Analysis of Restaurant Reviews
Authors: Eftekhar Hossain, Omar Sharif, Mohammed Moshiul Hoque, Iqbal H. Sarker
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

The amount of textual data generation has increased enormously due to the effortless access of the Internet and the evolution of various web 2.0 applications. These textual data productions resulted because of the people express their opinion, emotion or sentiment about any product or service in the form of tweets, Facebook post or status, blog write up, and reviews. Sentiment analysis deals with the process of computationally identifying and categorizing opinions expressed in a piece of text, especially in order to determine whether the writer's attitude toward a particular topic is positive, negative, or neutral. The impact of customer review is significant to perceive the customer attitude towards a restaurant. Thus, the automatic detection of sentiment from reviews is advantageous for the restaurant owners, or service providers and customers to make their decisions or services more satisfactory. This paper proposes, a deep learning-based technique (i.e., BiLSTM) to classify the reviews provided by the clients of the restaurant into positive and negative polarities. A corpus consists of 8435 reviews is constructed to evaluate the proposed technique. In addition, a comparative analysis of the proposed technique with other machine learning algorithms presented. The results of the evaluation on test dataset show that BiLSTM technique produced in the highest accuracy of 91.35%.
Categorical exploratory data analysis on goodness-of-fit issues
Authors: Sabrina Enriquez, Fushing Hsieh
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00

If the aphorism "All models are wrong"- George Box, continues to be true in data analysis, particularly when analyzing real-world data, then we should annotate this wisdom with visible and explainable data-driven patterns. Such annotations can critically shed invaluable light on validity as well as limitations of statistical modeling as a data analysis approach. In an effort to avoid holding our real data to potentially unattainable or even unrealistic theoretical structures, we propose to utilize the data analysis paradigm called Categorical Exploratory Data Analysis (CEDA). We illustrate the merits of this proposal with two real-world data sets from the perspective of goodness-of-fit. In both data sets, the Normal distribution's bell shape seemingly fits rather well by first glance. We apply CEDA to bring out where and how each data fits or deviates from the model shape via several important distributional aspects. We also demonstrate that CEDA affords a version of tree-based p-value, and compare it with p-values based on traditional statistical approaches. Along our data analysis, we invest computational efforts in making graphic display to illuminate the advantages of using CEDA as one primary way of data analysis in Data Science education.
Scalable Graph Neural Networks for Heterogeneous Graphs
Authors: Lingfan Yu, Jiajun Shen, Jinyang Li, Adam Lerer
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Heterogeneous Node Classification, Node Property Prediction

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of parametric model for learning over graph-structured data. Recent work has argued that GNNs primarily use the graph for feature smoothing, and have shown competitive results on benchmark tasks by simply operating on graph-smoothed node features, rather than using end-to-end learned feature hierarchies that are challenging to scale to large graphs. In this work, we ask whether these results can be extended to heterogeneous graphs, which encode multiple types of relationship between different entities. We propose Neighbor Averaging over Relation Subgraphs (NARS), which trains a classifier on neighbor-averaged features for randomly-sampled subgraphs of the "metagraph" of relations. We describe optimizations to allow these sets of node features to be computed in a memory-efficient way, both at training and inference time. NARS achieves a new state of the art accuracy on several benchmark datasets, outperforming more expensive GNN-based methods
Defocus Blur Detection via Salient Region Detection Prior
Authors: Ming Qian, Min Xia, Chunyi Sun, Zhiwei Wang, Liguo Weng
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Defocus Blur Detection

Defocus blur always occurred in photos when people take photos by Digital Single Lens Reflex Camera(DSLR), giving salient region and aesthetic pleasure. Defocus blur Detection aims to separate the out-of-focus and depth-of-field areas in photos, which is an important work in computer vision. Current works for defocus blur detection mainly focus on the designing of networks, the optimizing of the loss function, and the application of multi-stream strategy, meanwhile, these works do not pay attention to the shortage of training data. In this work, to address the above data-shortage problem, we turn to rethink the relationship between two tasks: defocus blur detection and salient region detection. In an image with bokeh effect, it is obvious that the salient region and the depth-of-field area overlap in most cases. So we first train our network on the salient region detection tasks, then transfer the pre-trained model to the defocus blur detection tasks. Besides, we propose a novel network for defocus blur detection. Experiments show that our transfer strategy works well on many current models, and demonstrate the superiority of our network.
Multi-Modal Subjective Context Modelling and Recognition
Authors: Qiang Shen, Stefano Teso, Wanyi Zhang, Hao Xu, Fausto Giunchiglia
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00

Applications like personal assistants need to be aware ofthe user's context, e.g., where they are, what they are doing, and with whom. Context information is usually inferred from sensor data, like GPS sensors and accelerometers on the user's smartphone. This prediction task is known as context recognition. A well-defined context model is fundamental for successful recognition. Existing models, however, have two major limitations. First, they focus on few aspects, like location or activity, meaning that recognition methods based onthem can only compute and leverage few inter-aspect correlations. Second, existing models typically assume that context is objective, whereas in most applications context is best viewed from the user's perspective. Neglecting these factors limits the usefulness of the context model and hinders recognition. We present a novel ontological context model that captures five dimensions, namely time, location, activity, social relations and object. Moreover, our model defines three levels of description(objective context, machine context and subjective context) that naturally support subjective annotations and reasoning.An initial context recognition experiment on real-world data hints at the promise of our model.
Dense Label Encoding for Boundary Discontinuity Free Rotation Detection
Authors: Xue Yang, Liping Hou, Yue Zhou, Wentao Wang, Junchi Yan
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Object Detection In Aerial Images, regression

Rotation detection serves as a fundamental building block in many visual applications involving aerial image, scene text, and face etc. Differing from the dominant regression-based approaches for orientation estimation, this paper explores a relatively less-studied methodology based on classification. The hope is to inherently dismiss the boundary discontinuity issue as encountered by the regression-based detectors. We propose new techniques to push its frontier in two aspects: i) new encoding mechanism: the design of two Densely Coded Labels (DCL) for angle classification, to replace the Sparsely Coded Label (SCL) in existing classification-based detectors, leading to three times training speed increase as empirically observed across benchmarks, further with notable improvement in detection accuracy; ii) loss re-weighting: we propose Angle Distance and Aspect Ratio Sensitive Weighting (ADARSW), which improves the detection accuracy especially for square-like objects, by making DCL-based detectors sensitive to angular distance and object's aspect ratio. Extensive experiments and visual analysis on large-scale public datasets for aerial images i.e. DOTA, UCAS-AOD, HRSC2016, as well as scene text dataset ICDAR2015 and MLT, show the effectiveness of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/DCL_RetinaNet_Tensorflow and is also integrated in our open source rotation detection benchmark: https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.
Relation Extraction with Contextualized Relation Embedding (CRE)
Authors: Xiaoyu Chen, Rohan Badlani
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (DeeLIO) 2020 11
Tasks: Entity Embeddings, Relation, Relation Extraction

Relation extraction is the task of identifying relation instance between two entities given a corpus whereas Knowledge base modeling is the task of representing a knowledge base, in terms of relations between entities. This paper proposes an architecture for the relation extraction task that integrates semantic information with knowledge base modeling in a novel manner. Existing approaches for relation extraction either do not utilize knowledge base modelling or use separately trained KB models for the RE task. We present a model architecture that internalizes KB modeling in relation extraction. This model applies a novel approach to encode sentences into contextualized relation embeddings, which can then be used together with parameterized entity embeddings to score relation instances. The proposed CRE model achieves state of the art performance on datasets derived from The New York Times Annotated Corpus and FreeBase. The source code has been made available.
FedEval: A Holistic Evaluation Framework for Federated Learning
Authors: Di Chai, Leye Wang, Liu Yang, Junxue Zhang, Kai Chen, Qiang Yang
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated Learning (FL) has been widely accepted as the solution for privacy-preserving machine learning without collecting raw data. While new technologies proposed in the past few years do evolve the FL area, unfortunately, the evaluation results presented in these works fall short in integrity and are hardly comparable because of the inconsistent evaluation metrics and experimental settings. In this paper, we propose a holistic evaluation framework for FL called FedEval, and present a benchmarking study on seven state-of-the-art FL algorithms. Specifically, we first introduce the core evaluation taxonomy model, called FedEval-Core, which covers four essential evaluation aspects for FL: Privacy, Robustness, Effectiveness, and Efficiency, with various well-defined metrics and experimental settings. Based on the FedEval-Core, we further develop an FL evaluation platform with standardized evaluation settings and easy-to-use interfaces. We then provide an in-depth benchmarking study between the seven well-known FL algorithms, including FedSGD, FedAvg, FedProx, FedOpt, FedSTC, SecAgg, and HEAgg. We comprehensively analyze the advantages and disadvantages of these algorithms and further identify the suitable practical scenarios for different algorithms, which is rarely done by prior work. Lastly, we excavate a set of take-away insights and future research directions, which are very helpful for researchers in the FL area.
HMFlow: Hybrid Matching Optical Flow Network for Small and Fast-Moving Objects
Authors: Suihanjin Yu, Youmin Zhang, Chen Wang, Xiao Bai, Liang Zhang, Edwin R. Hancock
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

In optical flow estimation task, coarse-to-fine (C2F) warping strategy is widely used to deal with the large displacement problem and provides efficiency and speed. However, limited by the small search range between the first images and warped second images, current coarse-to-fine optical flow networks fail to capture small and fast-moving objects which disappear at coarse resolution levels. To address this problem, we introduce a lightweight but effective Global Matching Component (GMC) to grab global matching features. We propose a new Hybrid Matching Optical Flow Network (HMFlow) by integrating GMC into existing coarse-to-fine networks seamlessly. Besides keeping in high accuracy and small model size, our proposed HMFlow can apply global matching features to guide the network to discover the small and fast-moving objects mismatched by local matching features. We also build a new dataset, named Small and Fast-Moving Chairs (SFChairs), for evaluation. The experimental results show that our proposed network achieves considerable performance, especially at regions with small and fast-moving objects.
Finding the Homology of Decision Boundaries with Active Learning
Authors: Weizhi Li, Gautam Dasarathy, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Visar Berisha
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Active Learning, Meta-Learning, Model Selection, Topological Data Analysis

Accurately and efficiently characterizing the decision boundary of classifiers is important for problems related to model selection and meta-learning. Inspired by topological data analysis, the characterization of decision boundaries using their homology has recently emerged as a general and powerful tool. In this paper, we propose an active learning algorithm to recover the homology of decision boundaries. Our algorithm sequentially and adaptively selects which samples it requires the labels of. We theoretically analyze the proposed framework and show that the query complexity of our active learning algorithm depends naturally on the intrinsic complexity of the underlying manifold. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in selecting best-performing machine learning models for datasets just using their respective homological summaries. Experiments on several standard datasets show the sample complexity improvement in recovering the homology and demonstrate the practical utility of the framework for model selection. Source code for our algorithms and experimental results is available at https://github.com/wayne0908/Active-Learning-Homology.
RADAR-X: An Interactive Mixed Initiative Planning Interface Pairing Contrastive Explanations and Revised Plan Suggestions
Authors: Karthik Valmeekam, Sarath Sreedharan, Sailik Sengupta, Subbarao Kambhampati
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Decision support systems seek to enable informed decision-making. In the recent years, automated planning techniques have been leveraged to empower such systems to better aid the human-in-the-loop. The central idea for such decision support systems is to augment the capabilities of the human-in-the-loop with automated planning techniques and enhance the quality of decision-making. In addition to providing planning support, effective decision support systems must be able to provide intuitive explanations based on specific user queries for proposed decisions to its end users. Using this as motivation, we present our decision support system RADAR-X that showcases the ability to engage the user in an interactive explanatory dialogue by first enabling them to specify an alternative to a proposed decision (which we refer to as foils), and then providing contrastive explanations to these user-specified foils which helps the user understand why a specific plan was chosen over the alternative (or foil). Furthermore, the system uses this dialogue to elicit the user's latent preferences and provides revised plan suggestions through three different interaction strategies.
Node Similarity Preserving Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Wei Jin, Tyler Derr, Yiqi Wang, Yao Ma, Zitao Liu, Jiliang Tang
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in various real-world applications due to their strong ability in graph representation learning. GNNs explore the graph structure and node features by aggregating and transforming information within node neighborhoods. However, through theoretical and empirical analysis, we reveal that the aggregation process of GNNs tends to destroy node similarity in the original feature space. There are many scenarios where node similarity plays a crucial role. Thus, it has motivated the proposed framework SimP-GCN that can effectively and efficiently preserve node similarity while exploiting graph structure. Specifically, to balance information from graph structure and node features, we propose a feature similarity preserving aggregation which adaptively integrates graph structure and node features. Furthermore, we employ self-supervised learning to explicitly capture the complex feature similarity and dissimilarity relations between nodes. We validate the effectiveness of SimP-GCN on seven benchmark datasets including three assortative and four disassorative graphs. The results demonstrate that SimP-GCN outperforms representative baselines. Further probe shows various advantages of the proposed framework. The implementation of SimP-GCN is available at \url{https://github.com/ChandlerBang/SimP-GCN}.
Watch and Learn: Mapping Language and Noisy Real-world Videos with Self-supervision
Authors: Yujie Zhong, Linhai Xie, Sen Wang, Lucia Specia, Yishu Miao
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning

In this paper, we teach machines to understand visuals and natural language by learning the mapping between sentences and noisy video snippets without explicit annotations. Firstly, we define a self-supervised learning framework that captures the cross-modal information. A novel adversarial learning module is then introduced to explicitly handle the noises in the natural videos, where the subtitle sentences are not guaranteed to be strongly corresponded to the video snippets. For training and evaluation, we contribute a new dataset `ApartmenTour' that contains a large number of online videos and subtitles. We carry out experiments on the bidirectional retrieval tasks between sentences and videos, and the results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both retrieval tasks and exceeds several strong baselines. The dataset can be downloaded at https://github.com/zyj-13/WAL.
Exploring Text Specific and Blackbox Fairness Algorithms in Multimodal Clinical NLP
Authors: John Chen, Ian Berlot-Attwell, Safwan Hossain, Xindi Wang, Frank Rudzicz
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (ClinicalNLP) 2020 11
Tasks: Fairness, Word Embeddings

Clinical machine learning is increasingly multimodal, collected in both structured tabular formats and unstructured forms such as freetext. We propose a novel task of exploring fairness on a multimodal clinical dataset, adopting equalized odds for the downstream medical prediction tasks. To this end, we investigate a modality-agnostic fairness algorithm - equalized odds post processing - and compare it to a text-specific fairness algorithm: debiased clinical word embeddings. Despite the fact that debiased word embeddings do not explicitly address equalized odds of protected groups, we show that a text-specific approach to fairness may simultaneously achieve a good balance of performance and classical notions of fairness. We hope that our paper inspires future contributions at the critical intersection of clinical NLP and fairness. The full source code is available here: https://github.com/johntiger1/multimodal_fairness