pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Time Series Forecasting Models for Estimation of PM2.5 Levels in Air
Authors: Satvik Garg, Himanshu Jindal
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Air contamination in urban areas has risen consistently over the past few years. Due to expanding industrialization and increasing concentration of toxic gases in the climate, the air is getting more poisonous step by step at an alarming rate. Since the arrival of the Coronavirus pandemic, it is getting more critical to lessen air contamination to reduce its impact. The specialists and environmentalists are making a valiant effort to gauge air contamination levels. However, its genuinely unpredictable to mimic subatomic communication in the air, which brings about off base outcomes. There has been an ascent in using machine learning and deep learning models to foresee the results on time series data. This study adopts ARIMA, FBProphet, and deep learning models such as LSTM, 1D CNN, to estimate the concentration of PM2.5 in the environment. Our predicted results convey that all adopted methods give comparative outcomes in terms of average root mean squared error. However, the LSTM outperforms all other models with reference to mean absolute percentage error.
The Use of Video Captioning for Fostering Physical Activity
Authors: Soheyla Amirian, Abolfazl Farahani, Hamid R. Arabnia, Khaled Rasheed, Thiab R. Taha
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Video Captioning

Video Captioning is considered to be one of the most challenging problems in the field of computer vision. Video Captioning involves the combination of different deep learning models to perform object detection, action detection, and localization by processing a sequence of image frames. It is crucial to consider the sequence of actions in a video in order to generate a meaningful description of the overall action event. A reliable, accurate, and real-time video captioning method can be used in many applications. However, this paper focuses on one application: video captioning for fostering and facilitating physical activities. In broad terms, the work can be considered to be assistive technology. Lack of physical activity appears to be increasingly widespread in many nations due to many factors, the most important being the convenience that technology has provided in workplaces. The adopted sedentary lifestyle is becoming a significant public health issue. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate more physical movements into our daily lives. Tracking one's daily physical activities would offer a base for comparison with activities performed in subsequent days. With the above in mind, this paper proposes a video captioning framework that aims to describe the activities in a video and estimate a person's daily physical activity level. This framework could potentially help people trace their daily movements to reduce an inactive lifestyle's health risks. The work presented in this paper is still in its infancy. The initial steps of the application are outlined in this paper. Based on our preliminary research, this project has great merit.
Analysis of Twitter Users' Lifestyle Choices using Joint Embedding Model
Authors: Tunazzina Islam, Dan Goldwasser
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Multiview representation learning of data can help construct coherent and contextualized users' representations on social media. This paper suggests a joint embedding model, incorporating users' social and textual information to learn contextualized user representations used for understanding their lifestyle choices. We apply our model to tweets related to two lifestyle activities, `Yoga' and `Keto diet' and use it to analyze users' activity type and motivation. We explain the data collection and annotation process in detail and provide an in-depth analysis of users from different classes based on their Twitter content. Our experiments show that our model results in performance improvements in both domains.
Empowering Prosumer Communities in Smart Grid with Wireless Communications and Federated Edge Learning
Authors: Afaf Taik, Boubakr Nour, Soumaya Cherkaoui
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, energy trading, Federated Learning

The exponential growth of distributed energy resources is enabling the transformation of traditional consumers in the smart grid into prosumers. Such transition presents a promising opportunity for sustainable energy trading. Yet, the integration of prosumers in the energy market imposes new considerations in designing unified and sustainable frameworks for efficient use of the power and communication infrastructure. Furthermore, several issues need to be tackled to adequately promote the adoption of decentralized renewable-oriented systems, such as communication overhead, data privacy, scalability, and sustainability. In this article, we present the different aspects and challenges to be addressed for building efficient energy trading markets in relation to communication and smart decision-making. Accordingly, we propose a multi-level pro-decision framework for prosumer communities to achieve collective goals. Since the individual decisions of prosumers are mainly driven by individual self-sufficiency goals, the framework prioritizes the individual prosumers' decisions and relies on the 5G wireless network for fast coordination among community members. In fact, each prosumer predicts energy production and consumption to make proactive trading decisions as a response to collective-level requests. Moreover, the collaboration of the community is further extended by including the collaborative training of prediction models using Federated Learning, assisted by edge servers and prosumer home-area equipment. In addition to preserving prosumers' privacy, we show through evaluations that training prediction models using Federated Learning yields high accuracy for different energy resources while reducing the communication overhead.
Improving Robustness of Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents: Environment Attack based on the Critic Network
Authors: Lucas Schott, Hatem Hajri, Sylvain Lamprier
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

To improve policy robustness of deep reinforcement learning agents, a line of recent works focus on producing disturbances of the environment. Existing approaches of the literature to generate meaningful disturbances of the environment are adversarial reinforcement learning methods. These methods set the problem as a two-player game between the protagonist agent, which learns to perform a task in an environment, and the adversary agent, which learns to disturb the protagonist via modifications of the considered environment. Both protagonist and adversary are trained with deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Alternatively, we propose in this paper to build on gradient-based adversarial attacks, usually used for classification tasks for instance, that we apply on the critic network of the protagonist to identify efficient disturbances of the environment. Rather than learning an attacker policy, which usually reveals as very complex and unstable, we leverage the knowledge of the critic network of the protagonist, to dynamically complexify the task at each step of the learning process. We show that our method, while being faster and lighter, leads to significantly better improvements in policy robustness than existing methods of the literature.
AI perspectives in Smart Cities and Communities to enable road vehicle automation and smart traffic control
Authors: Cristofer Englund, Eren Erdal Aksoy, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Martin Daniel Cooney, Sepideh Pashami, Bjorn Astrand
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00

Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) constitute a new paradigm in urban development. SCC ideates on a data-centered society aiming at improving efficiency by automating and optimizing activities and utilities. Information and communication technology along with internet of things enables data collection and with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) situation awareness can be obtained to feed the SCC actors with enriched knowledge. This paper describes AI perspectives in SCC and gives an overview of AI-based technologies used in traffic to enable road vehicle automation and smart traffic control. Perception, Smart Traffic Control and Driver Modelling are described along with open research challenges and standardization to help introduce advanced driver assistance systems and automated vehicle functionality in traffic. To fully realize the potential of SCC, to create a holistic view on a city level, the availability of data from different stakeholders is need. Further, though AI technologies provide accurate predictions and classifications there is an ambiguity regarding the correctness of their outputs. This can make it difficult for the human operator to trust the system. Today there are no methods that can be used to match function requirements with the level of detail in data annotation in order to train an accurate model. Another challenge related to trust is explainability, while the models have difficulties explaining how they come to a certain conclusion it is difficult for humans to trust it.
Beyond Question-Based Biases: Assessing Multimodal Shortcut Learning in Visual Question Answering
Authors: Corentin Dancette, Remi Cadene, Damien Teney, Matthieu Cord
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

We introduce an evaluation methodology for visual question answering (VQA) to better diagnose cases of shortcut learning. These cases happen when a model exploits spurious statistical regularities to produce correct answers but does not actually deploy the desired behavior. There is a need to identify possible shortcuts in a dataset and assess their use before deploying a model in the real world. The research community in VQA has focused exclusively on question-based shortcuts, where a model might, for example, answer "What is the color of the sky" with "blue" by relying mostly on the question-conditional training prior and give little weight to visual evidence. We go a step further and consider multimodal shortcuts that involve both questions and images. We first identify potential shortcuts in the popular VQA v2 training set by mining trivial predictive rules such as co-occurrences of words and visual elements. We then introduce VQA-CounterExamples (VQA-CE), an evaluation protocol based on our subset of CounterExamples i.e. image-question-answer triplets where our rules lead to incorrect answers. We use this new evaluation in a large-scale study of existing approaches for VQA. We demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models perform poorly and that existing techniques to reduce biases are largely ineffective in this context. Our findings suggest that past work on question-based biases in VQA has only addressed one facet of a complex issue. The code for our method is available at https://github.com/cdancette/detect-shortcuts.
Risk-Conditioned Distributional Soft Actor-Critic for Risk-Sensitive Navigation
Authors: Jinyoung Choi, Christopher R. Dance, Jung-eun Kim, Seulbin Hwang, Kyung-sik Park
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Modern navigation algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning (RL) show promising efficiency and robustness. However, most deep RL algorithms operate in a risk-neutral manner, making no special attempt to shield users from relatively rare but serious outcomes, even if such shielding might cause little loss of performance. Furthermore, such algorithms typically make no provisions to ensure safety in the presence of inaccuracies in the models on which they were trained, beyond adding a cost-of-collision and some domain randomization while training, in spite of the formidable complexity of the environments in which they operate. In this paper, we present a novel distributional RL algorithm that not only learns an uncertainty-aware policy, but can also change its risk measure without expensive fine-tuning or retraining. Our method shows superior performance and safety over baselines in partially-observed navigation tasks. We also demonstrate that agents trained using our method can adapt their policies to a wide range of risk measures at run-time.
HumAID: Human-Annotated Disaster Incidents Data from Twitter with Deep Learning Benchmarks
Authors: Firoj Alam, Umair Qazi, Muhammad Imran, Ferda Ofli
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Social networks are widely used for information consumption and dissemination, especially during time-critical events such as natural disasters. Despite its significantly large volume, social media content is often too noisy for direct use in any application. Therefore, it is important to filter, categorize, and concisely summarize the available content to facilitate effective consumption and decision-making. To address such issues automatic classification systems have been developed using supervised modeling approaches, thanks to the earlier efforts on creating labeled datasets. However, existing datasets are limited in different aspects (e.g., size, contains duplicates) and less suitable to support more advanced and data-hungry deep learning models. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset with ~77K human-labeled tweets, sampled from a pool of ~24 million tweets across 19 disaster events that happened between 2016 and 2019. Moreover, we propose a data collection and sampling pipeline, which is important for social media data sampling for human annotation. We report multiclass classification results using classic and deep learning (fastText and transformer) based models to set the ground for future studies. The dataset and associated resources are publicly available. https://crisisnlp.qcri.org/humaid_dataset.html
Differentiable Patch Selection for Image Recognition
Authors: Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier, Aravindh Mahendran, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Dirk Weissenborn, Jakob Uszkoreit, Thomas Unterthiner
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Traffic Sign Recognition

Neural Networks require large amounts of memory and compute to process high resolution images, even when only a small part of the image is actually informative for the task at hand. We propose a method based on a differentiable Top-K operator to select the most relevant parts of the input to efficiently process high resolution images. Our method may be interfaced with any downstream neural network, is able to aggregate information from different patches in a flexible way, and allows the whole model to be trained end-to-end using backpropagation. We show results for traffic sign recognition, inter-patch relationship reasoning, and fine-grained recognition without using object/part bounding box annotations during training.
Few-Shot Incremental Learning with Continually Evolved Classifiers
Authors: Chi Zhang, Nan Song, Guosheng Lin, Yun Zheng, Pan Pan, Yinghui Xu
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to design machine learning algorithms that can continually learn new concepts from a few data points, without forgetting knowledge of old classes. The difficulty lies in that limited data from new classes not only lead to significant overfitting issues but also exacerbate the notorious catastrophic forgetting problems. Moreover, as training data come in sequence in FSCIL, the learned classifier can only provide discriminative information in individual sessions, while FSCIL requires all classes to be involved for evaluation. In this paper, we address the FSCIL problem from two aspects. First, we adopt a simple but effective decoupled learning strategy of representations and classifiers that only the classifiers are updated in each incremental session, which avoids knowledge forgetting in the representations. By doing so, we demonstrate that a pre-trained backbone plus a non-parametric class mean classifier can beat state-of-the-art methods. Second, to make the classifiers learned on individual sessions applicable to all classes, we propose a Continually Evolved Classifier (CEC) that employs a graph model to propagate context information between classifiers for adaptation. To enable the learning of CEC, we design a pseudo incremental learning paradigm that episodically constructs a pseudo incremental learning task to optimize the graph parameters by sampling data from the base dataset. Experiments on three popular benchmark datasets, including CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and Caltech-USCD Birds-200-2011 (CUB200), show that our method significantly outperforms the baselines and sets new state-of-the-art results with remarkable advantages.
On-device Federated Learning with Flower
Authors: Akhil Mathur, Daniel J. Beutel, Pedro Porto Buarque de Gusmão, Javier Fernandez-Marques, Taner Topal, Xinchi Qiu, Titouan Parcollet, Yan Gao, Nicholas D. Lane
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) allows edge devices to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping their training data on the device, thereby decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store data in the cloud. Despite the algorithmic advancements in FL, the support for on-device training of FL algorithms on edge devices remains poor. In this paper, we present an exploration of on-device FL on various smartphones and embedded devices using the Flower framework. We also evaluate the system costs of on-device FL and discuss how this quantification could be used to design more efficient FL algorithms.
Librispeech Transducer Model with Internal Language Model Prior Correction
Authors: Albert Zeyer, André Merboldt, Wilfried Michel, Ralf Schlüter, Hermann Ney
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Sentence, Speech Recognition

We present our transducer model on Librispeech. We study variants to include an external language model (LM) with shallow fusion and subtract an estimated internal LM. This is justified by a Bayesian interpretation where the transducer model prior is given by the estimated internal LM. The subtraction of the internal LM gives us over 14% relative improvement over normal shallow fusion. Our transducer has a separate probability distribution for the non-blank labels which allows for easier combination with the external LM, and easier estimation of the internal LM. We additionally take care of including the end-of-sentence (EOS) probability of the external LM in the last blank probability which further improves the performance. All our code and setups are published.
On the Power of Refined Skat Selection
Authors: Stefan Edelkamp
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Board Games

Skat is a fascinating combinatorial card game, show-casing many of the intrinsic challenges for modern AI systems such as cooperative and adversarial behaviors (among the players), randomness (in the deal), and partial knowledge (due to hidden cards). Given the larger number of tricks and higher degree of uncertainty, reinforcement learning is less effective compared to classical board games like Chess and Go. As within the game of Bridge, in Skat we have a bidding and trick-taking stage. Prior to the trick-taking and as part of the bidding process, one phase in the game is to select two skat cards, whose quality may influence subsequent playing performance drastically. This paper looks into different skat selection strategies. Besides predicting the probability of winning and other hand strength functions we propose hard expert-rules and a scoring functions based on refined skat evaluation features. Experiments emphasize the impact of the refined skat putting algorithm on the playing performance of the bots, especially for AI bidding and AI game selection.
Theoretically Improving Graph Neural Networks via Anonymous Walk Graph Kernels
Authors: Qingqing Long, Yilun Jin, Yi Wu, Guojie Song
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Mining

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in graph mining. However, the inability of GNNs to model substructures in graphs remains a significant drawback. Specifically, message-passing GNNs (MPGNNs), as the prevailing type of GNNs, have been theoretically shown unable to distinguish, detect or count many graph substructures. While efforts have been paid to complement the inability, existing works either rely on pre-defined substructure sets, thus being less flexible, or are lacking in theoretical insights. In this paper, we propose GSKN, a GNN model with a theoretically stronger ability to distinguish graph structures. Specifically, we design GSKN based on anonymous walks (AWs), flexible substructure units, and derive it upon feature mappings of graph kernels (GKs). We theoretically show that GSKN provably extends the 1-WL test, and hence the maximally powerful MPGNNs from both graph-level and node-level viewpoints. Correspondingly, various experiments are leveraged to evaluate GSKN, where GSKN outperforms a wide range of baselines, endorsing the analysis.
Synthetic training data generation for deep learning based quality inspection
Authors: Pierre Gutierrez, Maria Luschkova, Antoine Cordier, Mustafa Shukor, Mona Schappert, Tim Dahmen
Date: 2021-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Defect Detection, Domain Adaptation

Deep learning is now the gold standard in computer vision-based quality inspection systems. In order to detect defects, supervised learning is often utilized, but necessitates a large amount of annotated images, which can be costly: collecting, cleaning, and annotating the data is tedious and limits the speed at which a system can be deployed as everything the system must detect needs to be observed first. This can impede the inspection of rare defects, since very few samples can be collected by the manufacturer. In this work, we focus on simulations to solve this issue. We first present a generic simulation pipeline to render images of defective or healthy (non defective) parts. As metallic parts can be highly textured with small defects like holes, we design a texture scanning and generation method. We assess the quality of the generated images by training deep learning networks and by testing them on real data from a manufacturer. We demonstrate that we can achieve encouraging results on real defect detection using purely simulated data. Additionally, we are able to improve global performances by concatenating simulated and real data, showing that simulations can complement real images to boost performances. Lastly, using domain adaptation techniques helps improving slightly our final results.