pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Lexical Acquisition of Relative Spatial Concepts Using Spoken User Utterances
Authors: Rikunari Sagara, Ryo Taguchi, Akira Taniguchi, Tadahiro Taniguchi, Koosuke Hattori, Masahiro Hoguro, Taizo Umezaki
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

This paper proposes methods for unsupervised lexical acquisition for relative spatial concepts using spoken user utterances. A robot with a flexible spoken dialog system must be able to acquire linguistic representation and its meaning specific to an environment through interactions with humans as children do. Specifically, relative spatial concepts (e.g., front and right) are widely used in our daily lives, however, it is not obvious which object is a reference object when a robot learns relative spatial concepts. Therefore, we propose methods by which a robot without prior knowledge of words can learn relative spatial concepts. The methods are formulated using a probabilistic model to estimate the proper reference objects and distributions representing concepts simultaneously. The experimental results show that relative spatial concepts and a phoneme sequence representing each concept can be learned under the condition that the robot does not know which located object is the reference object. Additionally, we show that two processes in the proposed method improve the estimation accuracy of the concepts: generating candidate word sequences by class n-gram and selecting word sequences using location information. Furthermore, we show that clues to reference objects improve accuracy even though the number of candidate reference objects increases.
Curriculum generation using Autoencoder based continuous optimization
Authors: Dipankar Sarkar, Mukur Gupta
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Research in Curriculum Learning has shown better performance on the task by optimizing the sequence of the training data. Recent works have focused on using complex reinforcement learning techniques to find the optimal data ordering strategy to maximize learning for a given network. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient technique based on continuous optimization trained with auto-encoding procedure. We call this new approach Training Sequence Optimization (TSO). With a usual encoder-decoder setup we try to learn the latent space continuous representation of the training strategy and a predictor network is used on the continuous representation to predict the accuracy of the strategy on the fixed network architecture. The performance predictor and encoder enable us to perform gradient-based optimization by gradually moving towards the latent space representation of training data ordering with potentially better accuracy. We show an empirical gain of 2AP with our generated optimal curriculum strategy over the random strategy using the CIFAR-100 and CIFAR-10 datasets and have better boosts than the existing state-of-the-art CL algorithms.
Adaptive Visibility Graph Neural Network and It's Application in Modulation Classification
Authors: Qi Xuan, Kunfeng Qiu, Jinchao Zhou, Zhuangzhi Chen, Dongwei Xu, Shilian Zheng, Xiaoniu Yang
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Avg, Graph Neural Network, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Our digital world is full of time series and graphs which capture the various aspects of many complex systems. Traditionally, there are respective methods in processing these two different types of data, e.g., Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Graph Neural Network (GNN), while in recent years, time series could be mapped to graphs by using the techniques such as Visibility Graph (VG), so that researchers can use graph algorithms to mine the knowledge in time series. Such mapping methods establish a bridge between time series and graphs, and have high potential to facilitate the analysis of various real-world time series. However, the VG method and its variants are just based on fixed rules and thus lack of flexibility, largely limiting their application in reality. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Visibility Graph (AVG) algorithm that can adaptively map time series into graphs, based on which we further establish an end-to-end classification framework AVGNet, by utilizing GNN model DiffPool as the classifier. We then adopt AVGNet for radio signal modulation classification which is an important task in the field of wireless communication. The simulations validate that AVGNet outperforms a series of advanced deep learning methods, achieving the state-of-the-art performance in this task.
Coreference-Aware Dialogue Summarization
Authors: Zhengyuan Liu, Ke Shi, Nancy F. Chen
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: SIGDIAL (ACL) 2021 7
Tasks: Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

Summarizing conversations via neural approaches has been gaining research traction lately, yet it is still challenging to obtain practical solutions. Examples of such challenges include unstructured information exchange in dialogues, informal interactions between speakers, and dynamic role changes of speakers as the dialogue evolves. Many of such challenges result in complex coreference links. Therefore, in this work, we investigate different approaches to explicitly incorporate coreference information in neural abstractive dialogue summarization models to tackle the aforementioned challenges. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches achieve state-of-the-art performance, implying it is useful to utilize coreference information in dialogue summarization. Evaluation results on factual correctness suggest such coreference-aware models are better at tracing the information flow among interlocutors and associating accurate status/actions with the corresponding interlocutors and person mentions.
ECKPN: Explicit Class Knowledge Propagation Network for Transductive Few-shot Learning
Authors: Chaofan Chen, Xiaoshan Yang, Changsheng Xu, Xuhui Huang, Zhe Ma
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Recently, the transductive graph-based methods have achieved great success in the few-shot classification task. However, most existing methods ignore exploring the class-level knowledge that can be easily learned by humans from just a handful of samples. In this paper, we propose an Explicit Class Knowledge Propagation Network (ECKPN), which is composed of the comparison, squeeze and calibration modules, to address this problem. Specifically, we first employ the comparison module to explore the pairwise sample relations to learn rich sample representations in the instance-level graph. Then, we squeeze the instance-level graph to generate the class-level graph, which can help obtain the class-level visual knowledge and facilitate modeling the relations of different classes. Next, the calibration module is adopted to characterize the relations of the classes explicitly to obtain the more discriminative class-level knowledge representations. Finally, we combine the class-level knowledge with the instance-level sample representations to guide the inference of the query samples. We conduct extensive experiments on four few-shot classification benchmarks, and the experimental results show that the proposed ECKPN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Optimizing Graph Transformer Networks with Graph-based Techniques
Authors: Loc Hoang, Udit Agarwal, Gurbinder Gill, Roshan Dathathri, Abhik Seal, Brian Martin, Keshav Pingali
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00

Graph transformer networks (GTN) are a variant of graph convolutional networks (GCN) that are targeted to heterogeneous graphs in which nodes and edges have associated type information that can be exploited to improve inference accuracy. GTNs learn important metapaths in the graph, create weighted edges for these metapaths, and use the resulting graph in a GCN. Currently, the only available implementation of GTNs uses dense matrix multiplication to find metapaths. Unfortunately, the space overhead of this approach can be large, so in practice it is used only for small graphs. In addition, the matrix-based implementation is not fine-grained enough to use random-walk based methods to optimize metapath finding. In this paper, we present a graph-based formulation and implementation of the GTN metapath finding problem. This graph-based formulation has two advantages over the matrix-based approach. First, it is more space efficient than the original GTN implementation and more compute-efficient for metapath sizes of practical interest. Second, it permits us to implement a sampling method that reduces the number of metapaths that must be enumerated, allowing the implementation to be used for larger graphs and larger metapath sizes. Experimental results show that our implementation is $6.5\times$ faster than the original GTN implementation on average for a metapath length of 4, and our sampling implementation is $155\times$ faster on average than this implementation without compromising on the accuracy of the GTN.
ICDAR 2021 Competition on Components Segmentation Task of Document Photos
Authors: Celso A. M. Lopes Junior, Ricardo B. das Neves Junior, Byron L. D. Bezerra, Alejandro H. Toselli, Donato Impedovo
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Segmentation

This paper describes the short-term competition on the Components Segmentation Task of Document Photos that was prepared in the context of the 16th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2021). This competition aims to bring together researchers working in the field of identification document image processing and provides them a suitable benchmark to compare their techniques on the component segmentation task of document images. Three challenge tasks were proposed entailing different segmentation assignments to be performed on a provided dataset. The collected data are from several types of Brazilian ID documents, whose personal information was conveniently replaced. There were 16 participants whose results obtained for some or all the three tasks show different rates for the adopted metrics, like Dice Similarity Coefficient ranging from 0.06 to 0.99. Different Deep Learning models were applied by the entrants with diverse strategies to achieve the best results in each of the tasks. Obtained results show that the currently applied methods for solving one of the proposed tasks (document boundary detection) are already well established. However, for the other two challenge tasks (text zone and handwritten sign detection) research and development of more robust approaches are still required to achieve acceptable results.
Lorenz System State Stability Identification using Neural Networks
Authors: Megha Subramanian, Ramakrishna Tipireddy, Samrat Chatterjee
Date: 2021-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

Nonlinear dynamical systems such as Lorenz63 equations are known to be chaotic in nature and sensitive to initial conditions. As a result, a small perturbation in the initial conditions results in deviation in state trajectory after a few time steps. The algorithms and computational resources needed to accurately identify the system states vary depending on whether the solution is in transition region or not. We refer to the transition and non-transition regions as unstable and stable regions respectively. We label a system state to be stable if it's immediate past and future states reside in the same regime. However, at a given time step we don't have the prior knowledge about whether system is in stable or unstable region. In this paper, we develop and train a feed forward (multi-layer perceptron) Neural Network to classify the system states of a Lorenz system as stable and unstable. We pose this task as a supervised learning problem where we train the neural network on Lorenz system which have states labeled as stable or unstable. We then test the ability of the neural network models to identify the stable and unstable states on a different Lorenz system that is generated using different initial conditions. We also evaluate the classification performance in the mismatched case i.e., when the initial conditions for training and validation data are sampled from different intervals. We show that certain normalization schemes can greatly improve the performance of neural networks in especially these mismatched scenarios. The classification framework developed in the paper can be a preprocessor for a larger context of sequential decision making framework where the decision making is performed based on observed stable or unstable states.
Minimizing Communication while Maximizing Performance in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Varun Kumar Vijay, Hassam Sheikh, Somdeb Majumdar, Mariano Phielipp
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Task Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Inter-agent communication can significantly increase performance in multi-agent tasks that require co-ordination to achieve a shared goal. Prior work has shown that it is possible to learn inter-agent communication protocols using multi-agent reinforcement learning and message-passing network architectures. However, these models use an unconstrained broadcast communication model, in which an agent communicates with all other agents at every step, even when the task does not require it. In real-world applications, where communication may be limited by system constraints like bandwidth, power and network capacity, one might need to reduce the number of messages that are sent. In this work, we explore a simple method of minimizing communication while maximizing performance in multi-task learning: simultaneously optimizing a task-specific objective and a communication penalty. We show that the objectives can be optimized using Reinforce and the Gumbel-Softmax reparameterization. We introduce two techniques to stabilize training: 50% training and message forwarding. Training with the communication penalty on only 50% of the episodes prevents our models from turning off their outgoing messages. Second, repeating messages received previously helps models retain information, and further improves performance. With these techniques, we show that we can reduce communication by 75% with no loss of performance.
Enabling AI and Robotic Coaches for Physical Rehabilitation Therapy: Iterative Design and Evaluation with Therapists and Post-Stroke Survivors
Authors: Min Hun Lee, Daniel P. Siewiorek, Asim Smailagic, Alexandre Bernardino, Sergi Bermúdez i Badia
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic coaches promise the improved engagement of patients on rehabilitation exercises through social interaction. While previous work explored the potential of automatically monitoring exercises for AI and robotic coaches, the deployment of these systems remains a challenge. Previous work described the lack of involving stakeholders to design such functionalities as one of the major causes. In this paper, we present our efforts on eliciting the detailed design specifications on how AI and robotic coaches could interact with and guide patient's exercises in an effective and acceptable way with four therapists and five post-stroke survivors. Through iterative questionnaires and interviews, we found that both post-stroke survivors and therapists appreciated the potential benefits of AI and robotic coaches to achieve more systematic management and improve their self-efficacy and motivation on rehabilitation therapy. In addition, our evaluation sheds light on several practical concerns (e.g. a possible difficulty with the interaction for people with cognitive impairment, system failures, etc.). We discuss the value of early involvement of stakeholders and interactive techniques that complement system failures, but also support a personalized therapy session for the better deployment of AI and robotic exercise coaches.
Faster than LASER -- Towards Stream Reasoning with Deep Neural Networks
Authors: João Ferreira, Diogo Lavado, Ricardo Gonçalves, Matthias Knorr, Ludwig Krippahl, João Leite
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

With the constant increase of available data in various domains, such as the Internet of Things, Social Networks or Smart Cities, it has become fundamental that agents are able to process and reason with such data in real time. Whereas reasoning over time-annotated data with background knowledge may be challenging, due to the volume and velocity in which such data is being produced, such complex reasoning is necessary in scenarios where agents need to discover potential problems and this cannot be done with simple stream processing techniques. Stream Reasoners aim at bridging this gap between reasoning and stream processing and LASER is such a stream reasoner designed to analyse and perform complex reasoning over streams of data. It is based on LARS, a rule-based logical language extending Answer Set Programming, and it has shown better runtime results than other state-of-the-art stream reasoning systems. Nevertheless, for high levels of data throughput even LASER may be unable to compute answers in a timely fashion. In this paper, we study whether Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks, which have shown to be particularly well-suited for time series forecasting and classification, can be trained to approximate reasoning with LASER, so that agents can benefit from their high processing speed.
Deep Neural Networks for Approximating Stream Reasoning with C-SPARQL
Authors: Ricardo Ferreira, Carolina Lopes, Ricardo Gonçalves, Matthias Knorr, Ludwig Krippahl, João Leite
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification, Time Series Forecasting

The amount of information produced, whether by newspapers, blogs and social networks, or by monitoring systems, is increasing rapidly. Processing all this data in real-time, while taking into consideration advanced knowledge about the problem domain, is challenging, but required in scenarios where assessing potential risks in a timely fashion is critical. C-SPARQL, a language for continuous queries over streams of RDF data, is one of the more prominent approaches in stream reasoning that provides such continuous inference capabilities over dynamic data that go beyond mere stream processing. However, it has been shown that, in the presence of huge amounts of data, C-SPARQL may not be able to answer queries in time, in particular when the frequency of incoming data is higher than the time required for reasoning with that data. In this paper, we investigate whether reasoning with C-SPARQL can be approximated using Recurrent Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks, two neural network architectures that have been shown to be well-suited for time series forecasting and time series classification, to leverage on their higher processing speed once the network has been trained. We consider a variety of different kinds of queries and obtain overall positive results with high accuracies while improving processing time often by several orders of magnitude.
Machine learning-based analysis of hyperspectral images for automated sepsis diagnosis
Authors: Maximilian Dietrich, Silvia Seidlitz, Nicholas Schreck, Manuel Wiesenfarth, Patrick Godau, Minu Tizabi, Jan Sellner, Sebastian Marx, Samuel Knödler, Michael M. Allers, Leonardo Ayala, Karsten Schmidt, Thorsten Brenner, Alexander Studier-Fischer, Felix Nickel, Beat P. Müller-Stich, Annette Kopp-Schneider, Markus A. Weigand, Lena Maier-Hein
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Sepsis is a leading cause of mortality and critical illness worldwide. While robust biomarkers for early diagnosis are still missing, recent work indicates that hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has the potential to overcome this bottleneck by monitoring microcirculatory alterations. Automated machine learning-based diagnosis of sepsis based on HSI data, however, has not been explored to date. Given this gap in the literature, we leveraged an existing data set to (1) investigate whether HSI-based automated diagnosis of sepsis is possible and (2) put forth a list of possible confounders relevant for HSI-based tissue classification. While we were able to classify sepsis with an accuracy of over $98\,\%$ using the existing data, our research also revealed several subject-, therapy- and imaging-related confounders that may lead to an overestimation of algorithm performance when not balanced across the patient groups. We conclude that further prospective studies, carefully designed with respect to these confounders, are necessary to confirm the preliminary results obtained in this study.
Code to Comment Translation: A Comparative Study on Model Effectiveness & Errors
Authors: Junayed Mahmud, Fahim Faisal, Raihan Islam Arnob, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Kevin Moran
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL (NLP4Prog) 2021 8
Tasks: Code Summarization, Machine Translation, Source Code Summarization, Translation

Automated source code summarization is a popular software engineering research topic wherein machine translation models are employed to "translate" code snippets into relevant natural language descriptions. Most evaluations of such models are conducted using automatic reference-based metrics. However, given the relatively large semantic gap between programming languages and natural language, we argue that this line of research would benefit from a qualitative investigation into the various error modes of current state-of-the-art models. Therefore, in this work, we perform both a quantitative and qualitative comparison of three recently proposed source code summarization models. In our quantitative evaluation, we compare the models based on the smoothed BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L machine translation metrics, and in our qualitative evaluation, we perform a manual open-coding of the most common errors committed by the models when compared to ground truth captions. Our investigation reveals new insights into the relationship between metric-based performance and model prediction errors grounded in an empirically derived error taxonomy that can be used to drive future research efforts
On the Sample Complexity and Metastability of Heavy-tailed Policy Search in Continuous Control
Authors: Amrit Singh Bedi, Anjaly Parayil, Junyu Zhang, Mengdi Wang, Alec Koppel
Date: 2021-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Decision Making

Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one iteratively improves a parameterized policy with stochastic policy gradient (PG) updates. In tabular Markov Decision Problems (MDPs), under persistent exploration and suitable parameterization, global optimality may be obtained. By contrast, in continuous space, the non-convexity poses a pathological challenge as evidenced by existing convergence results being mostly limited to stationarity or arbitrary local extrema. To close this gap, we step towards persistent exploration in continuous space through policy parameterizations defined by distributions of heavier tails defined by tail-index parameter alpha, which increases the likelihood of jumping in state space. Doing so invalidates smoothness conditions of the score function common to PG. Thus, we establish how the convergence rate to stationarity depends on the policy's tail index alpha, a Holder continuity parameter, integrability conditions, and an exploration tolerance parameter introduced here for the first time. Further, we characterize the dependence of the set of local maxima on the tail index through an exit and transition time analysis of a suitably defined Markov chain, identifying that policies associated with Levy Processes of a heavier tail converge to wider peaks. This phenomenon yields improved stability to perturbations in supervised learning, which we corroborate also manifests in improved performance of policy search, especially when myopic and farsighted incentives are misaligned.