pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
C3VQG: Category Consistent Cyclic Visual Question Generation
Authors: Shagun Uppal, Anish Madan, Sarthak Bhagat, Yi Yu, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Questions, Question Generation, Question-Generation

Visual Question Generation (VQG) is the task of generating natural questions based on an image. Popular methods in the past have explored image-to-sequence architectures trained with maximum likelihood which have demonstrated meaningful generated questions given an image and its associated ground-truth answer. VQG becomes more challenging if the image contains rich contextual information describing its different semantic categories. In this paper, we try to exploit the different visual cues and concepts in an image to generate questions using a variational autoencoder (VAE) without ground-truth answers. Our approach solves two major shortcomings of existing VQG systems: (i) minimize the level of supervision and (ii) replace generic questions with category relevant generations. Most importantly, by eliminating expensive answer annotations, the required supervision is weakened. Using different categories enables us to exploit different concepts as the inference requires only the image and the category. Mutual information is maximized between the image, question, and answer category in the latent space of our VAE. A novel category consistent cyclic loss is proposed to enable the model to generate consistent predictions with respect to the answer category, reducing redundancies and irregularities. Additionally, we also impose supplementary constraints on the latent space of our generative model to provide structure based on categories and enhance generalization by encapsulating decorrelated features within each dimension. Through extensive experiments, the proposed model, C3VQG outperforms state-of-the-art VQG methods with weak supervision.
"I have vxxx bxx connexxxn!": Facing Packet Loss in Deep Speech Emotion Recognition
Authors: Mostafa M. Mohamed, Björn W. Schuller
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

In applications that use emotion recognition via speech, frame-loss can be a severe issue given manifold applications, where the audio stream loses some data frames, for a variety of reasons like low bandwidth. In this contribution, we investigate for the first time the effects of frame-loss on the performance of emotion recognition via speech. Reproducible extensive experiments are reported on the popular RECOLA corpus using a state-of-the-art end-to-end deep neural network, which mainly consists of convolution blocks and recurrent layers. A simple environment based on a Markov Chain model is used to model the loss mechanism based on two main parameters. We explore matched, mismatched, and multi-condition training settings. As one expects, the matched setting yields the best performance, while the mismatched yields the lowest. Furthermore, frame-loss as a data augmentation technique is introduced as a general-purpose strategy to overcome the effects of frame-loss. It can be used during training, and we observed it to produce models that are more robust against frame-loss in run-time environments.
Momentum with Variance Reduction for Nonconvex Composition Optimization
Authors: Ziyi Chen, Yi Zhou
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00

Composition optimization is widely-applied in nonconvex machine learning. Various advanced stochastic algorithms that adopt momentum and variance reduction techniques have been developed for composition optimization. However, these algorithms do not fully exploit both techniques to accelerate the convergence and are lack of convergence guarantee in nonconvex optimization. This paper complements the existing literature by developing various momentum schemes with SPIDER-based variance reduction for non-convex composition optimization. In particular, our momentum design requires less number of proximal mapping evaluations per-iteration than that required by the existing Katyusha momentum. Furthermore, our algorithm achieves near-optimal sample complexity results in both non-convex finite-sum and online composition optimization and achieves a linear convergence rate under the gradient dominant condition. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm converges significantly faster than existing algorithms in nonconvex composition optimization.
Generative Adversarial Networks for photo to Hayao Miyazaki style cartoons
Authors: Filip Andersson, Simon Arvidsson
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

This paper takes on the problem of transferring the style of cartoon images to real-life photographic images by implementing previous work done by CartoonGAN. We trained a Generative Adversial Network(GAN) on over 60 000 images from works by Hayao Miyazaki at Studio Ghibli. To evaluate our results, we conducted a qualitative survey comparing our results with two state-of-the-art methods. 117 survey results indicated that our model on average outranked state-of-the-art methods on cartoon-likeness.
A Scientific Information Extraction Dataset for Nature Inspired Engineering
Authors: Ruben Kruiper, Julian F. V. Vincent, Jessica Chen-Burger, Marc P. Y. Desmulliez, Ioannis Konstas
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Relation Extraction

Nature has inspired various ground-breaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific biology texts is a time-consuming and hard task that requires domain-specific knowledge. Improving access for outsiders can help interdisciplinary research like Nature Inspired Engineering. This paper describes a dataset of 1,500 manually-annotated sentences that express domain-independent relations between central concepts in a scientific biology text, such as trade-offs and correlations. The arguments of these relations can be Multi Word Expressions and have been annotated with modifying phrases to form non-projective graphs. The dataset allows for training and evaluating Relation Extraction algorithms that aim for coarse-grained typing of scientific biological documents, enabling a high-level filter for engineers.
In Layman's Terms: Semi-Open Relation Extraction from Scientific Texts
Authors: Ruben Kruiper, Julian F. V. Vincent, Jessica Chen-Burger, Marc P. Y. Desmulliez, Ioannis Konstas
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction

Information Extraction (IE) from scientific texts can be used to guide readers to the central information in scientific documents. But narrow IE systems extract only a fraction of the information captured, and Open IE systems do not perform well on the long and complex sentences encountered in scientific texts. In this work we combine the output of both types of systems to achieve Semi-Open Relation Extraction, a new task that we explore in the Biology domain. First, we present the Focused Open Biological Information Extraction (FOBIE) dataset and use FOBIE to train a state-of-the-art narrow scientific IE system to extract trade-off relations and arguments that are central to biology texts. We then run both the narrow IE system and a state-of-the-art Open IE system on a corpus of 10k open-access scientific biological texts. We show that a significant amount (65%) of erroneous and uninformative Open IE extractions can be filtered using narrow IE extractions. Furthermore, we show that the retained extractions are significantly more often informative to a reader.
Uncovering Gender Bias in Media Coverage of Politicians with Machine Learning
Authors: Susan Leavy
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This paper presents research uncovering systematic gender bias in the representation of political leaders in the media, using artificial intelligence. Newspaper coverage of Irish ministers over a fifteen year period was gathered and analysed with natural language processing techniques and machine learning. Findings demonstrate evidence of gender bias in the portrayal of female politicians, the kind of policies they were associated with and how they were evaluated in terms of their performance as political leaders. This paper also sets out a methodology whereby media content may be analysed on a large scale utilising techniques from artificial intelligence within a theoretical framework founded in gender theory and feminist linguistics.
Enabling Seamless Device Association with DevLoc using Light Bulb Networks for Indoor IoT Environments
Authors: Michael Haus, Jörg Ott, Aaron Yi Ding
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00

To enable serendipitous interaction for indoor IoT environments, spontaneous device associations are of particular interest so that users set up a connection in an ad-hoc manner. Based on the similarity of light signals, our system named DevLoc takes advantage of ubiquitous light sources around us to perform continuous and seamless device grouping. We provide a configuration framework to control the spatial granularity of user's proximity by managing the lighting infrastructure through customized visible light communication. To realize either proximity-based or location-based services, we support two modes of device associations between different entities: device-to-device and device-to-area. Regarding the best performing method for device grouping, machine learning-based signal similarity performs in general best compared to distance and correlation metrics. Furthermore, we analyze patterns of device associations to improve the data privacy by recognizing semantic device groups, such as personal and stranger's devices, allowing automated data sharing policies.
Face Identity Disentanglement via Latent Space Mapping
Authors: Yotam Nitzan, Amit Bermano, Yangyan Li, Daniel Cohen-Or
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: De-identification, Disentanglement

Learning disentangled representations of data is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence. Specifically, disentangled latent representations allow generative models to control and compose the disentangled factors in the synthesis process. Current methods, however, require extensive supervision and training, or instead, noticeably compromise quality. In this paper, we present a method that learns how to represent data in a disentangled way, with minimal supervision, manifested solely using available pre-trained networks. Our key insight is to decouple the processes of disentanglement and synthesis, by employing a leading pre-trained unconditional image generator, such as StyleGAN. By learning to map into its latent space, we leverage both its state-of-the-art quality, and its rich and expressive latent space, without the burden of training it. We demonstrate our approach on the complex and high dimensional domain of human heads. We evaluate our method qualitatively and quantitatively, and exhibit its success with de-identification operations and with temporal identity coherency in image sequences. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our method successfully disentangles identity from other facial attributes, surpassing existing methods, even though they require more training and supervision.
Semantic Photo Manipulation with a Generative Image Prior
Authors: David Bau, Hendrik Strobelt, William Peebles, Jonas Wulff, Bolei Zhou, Jun-Yan Zhu, Antonio Torralba
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00

Despite the recent success of GANs in synthesizing images conditioned on inputs such as a user sketch, text, or semantic labels, manipulating the high-level attributes of an existing natural photograph with GANs is challenging for two reasons. First, it is hard for GANs to precisely reproduce an input image. Second, after manipulation, the newly synthesized pixels often do not fit the original image. In this paper, we address these issues by adapting the image prior learned by GANs to image statistics of an individual image. Our method can accurately reconstruct the input image and synthesize new content, consistent with the appearance of the input image. We demonstrate our interactive system on several semantic image editing tasks, including synthesizing new objects consistent with background, removing unwanted objects, and changing the appearance of an object. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons against several existing methods demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Learning the gravitational force law and other analytic functions
Authors: Atish Agarwala, Abhimanyu Das, Rina Panigrahy, Qiuyi Zhang
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00

Large neural network models have been successful in learning functions of importance in many branches of science, including physics, chemistry and biology. Recent theoretical work has shown explicit learning bounds for wide networks and kernel methods on some simple classes of functions, but not on more complex functions which arise in practice. We extend these techniques to provide learning bounds for analytic functions on the sphere for any kernel method or equivalent infinitely-wide network with the corresponding activation function trained with SGD. We show that a wide, one-hidden layer ReLU network can learn analytic functions with a number of samples proportional to the derivative of a related function. Many functions important in the sciences are therefore efficiently learnable. As an example, we prove explicit bounds on learning the many-body gravitational force function given by Newton's law of gravitation. Our theoretical bounds suggest that very wide ReLU networks (and the corresponding NTK kernel) are better at learning analytic functions as compared to kernel learning with Gaussian kernels. We present experimental evidence that the many-body gravitational force function is easier to learn with ReLU networks as compared to networks with exponential activations.
A Novel Fusion of Attention and Sequence to Sequence Autoencoders to Predict Sleepiness From Speech
Authors: Shahin Amiriparian, Pawel Winokurow, Vincent Karas, Sandra Ottl, Maurice Gerczuk, Björn W. Schuller
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Representation Learning

Motivated by the attention mechanism of the human visual system and recent developments in the field of machine translation, we introduce our attention-based and recurrent sequence to sequence autoencoders for fully unsupervised representation learning from audio files. In particular, we test the efficacy of our novel approach on the task of speech-based sleepiness recognition. We evaluate the learnt representations from both autoencoders, and then conduct an early fusion to ascertain possible complementarity between them. In our frameworks, we first extract Mel-spectrograms from raw audio files. Second, we train recurrent autoencoders on these spectrograms which are considered as time-dependent frequency vectors. Afterwards, we extract the activations of specific fully connected layers of the autoencoders which represent the learnt features of spectrograms for the corresponding audio instances. Finally, we train support vector regressors on these representations to obtain the predictions. On the development partition of the data, we achieve Spearman's correlation coefficients of .324, .283, and .320 with the targets on the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale by utilising attention and non-attention autoencoders, and the fusion of both autoencoders' representations, respectively. In the same order, we achieve .311, .359, and .367 Spearman's correlation coefficients on the test data, indicating the suitability of our proposed fusion strategy.
Assessment of Unconsciousness for Memory Consolidation Using EEG Signals
Authors: Gi-Hwan Shin, Minji Lee, Seong-Whan Lee
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

The assessment of consciousness and unconsciousness is a challenging issue in modern neuroscience. Consciousness is closely related to memory consolidation in that memory is a critical component of conscious experience. So far, many studies have been reported on memory consolidation during consciousness, but there is little research on memory consolidation during unconsciousness. Therefore, we aim to assess the unconsciousness in terms of memory consolidation using electroencephalogram signals. In particular, we used unconscious state during a nap; because sleep is the only state in which consciousness disappears under normal physiological conditions. Seven participants performed two memory tasks (word-pairs and visuo-spatial) before and after the nap to assess the memory consolidation during unconsciousness. As a result, spindle power in central, parietal, occipital regions during unconsciousness was positively correlated with the performance of location memory. With the memory performance, there was also a negative correlation between delta connectivity and word-pairs memory, alpha connectivity and location memory, and spindle connectivity and word-pairs memory. We additionally observed the significant relationship between unconsciousness and brain changes during memory recall before and after the nap. These findings could help present new insights into the assessment of unconsciousness by exploring the relationship with memory consolidation.
Decoding of Intuitive Visual Motion Imagery Using Convolutional Neural Network under 3D-BCI Training Environment
Authors: Byoung-Hee Kwon, Ji-Hoon Jeong, Jeong-Hyun Cho, Seong-Whan Lee
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, Functional Connectivity, General Classification

In this study, we adopted visual motion imagery, which is a more intuitive brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm, for decoding the intuitive user intention. We developed a 3-dimensional BCI training platform and applied it to assist the user in performing more intuitive imagination in the visual motion imagery experiment. The experimental tasks were selected based on the movements that we commonly used in daily life, such as picking up a phone, opening a door, eating food, and pouring water. Nine subjects participated in our experiment. We presented statistical evidence that visual motion imagery has a high correlation from the prefrontal and occipital lobes. In addition, we selected the most appropriate electroencephalography channels using a functional connectivity approach for visual motion imagery decoding and proposed a convolutional neural network architecture for classification. As a result, the averaged classification performance of the proposed architecture for 4 classes from 16 channels was 67.50 % across all subjects. This result is encouraging, and it shows the possibility of developing a BCI-based device control system for practical applications such as neuroprosthesis and a robotic arm.
Spatio-Temporal Point Processes with Attention for Traffic Congestion Event Modeling
Authors: Shixiang Zhu, Ruyi Ding, Minghe Zhang, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Yao Xie
Date: 2020-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Processes

We present a novel framework for modeling traffic congestion events over road networks. Using multi-modal data by combining count data from traffic sensors with police reports that report traffic incidents, we aim to capture two types of triggering effect for congestion events. Current traffic congestion at one location may cause future congestion over the road network, and traffic incidents may cause spread traffic congestion. To model the non-homogeneous temporal dependence of the event on the past, we use a novel attention-based mechanism based on neural networks embedding for point processes. To incorporate the directional spatial dependence induced by the road network, we adapt the "tail-up" model from the context of spatial statistics to the traffic network setting. We demonstrate our approach's superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods for both synthetic and real data.
Constraining the Reionization History using Bayesian Normalizing Flows
Authors: Héctor J. Hortúa, Luigi Malago, Riccardo Volpi
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00

The next generation 21 cm surveys open a new window onto the early stages of cosmic structure formation and provide new insights about the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). However, the non-Gaussian nature of the 21 cm signal along with the huge amount of data generated from these surveys will require more advanced techniques capable to efficiently extract the necessary information to constrain the Reionization History of the Universe. In this paper we present the use of Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) to predict the posterior distribution for four astrophysical and cosmological parameters. Besides achieving state-of-the-art prediction performances, the proposed methods provide accurate estimation of parameters uncertainties and infer correlations among them. Additionally, we demonstrate the advantages of Normalizing Flows (NF) combined with BNNs, being able to model more complex output distributions and thus capture key information as non-Gaussianities in the parameter conditional density distribution for astrophysical and cosmological dataset. Finally, we propose novel calibration methods employing Normalizing Flows after training, to produce reliable predictions, and we demonstrate the advantages of this approach both in terms of computational cost and prediction performances.
A Weighted Mutual k-Nearest Neighbour for Classification Mining
Authors: Joydip Dhar, Ashaya Shukla, Mukul Kumar, Prashant Gupta
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Classification, General Classification

kNN is a very effective Instance based learning method, and it is easy to implement. Due to heterogeneous nature of data, noises from different possible sources are also widespread in nature especially in case of large-scale databases. For noise elimination and effect of pseudo neighbours, in this paper, we propose a new learning algorithm which performs the task of anomaly detection and removal of pseudo neighbours from the dataset so as to provide comparative better results. This algorithm also tries to minimize effect of those neighbours which are distant. A concept of certainty measure is also introduced for experimental results. The advantage of using concept of mutual neighbours and distance-weighted voting is that, dataset will be refined after removal of anomaly and weightage concept compels to take into account more consideration of those neighbours, which are closer. Consequently, finally the performance of proposed algorithm is calculated.