pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pose Recognition in the Wild: Animal pose estimation using Agglomerative Clustering and Contrastive Learning
Authors: Samayan Bhattacharya, Sk Shahnawaz
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Animal Pose Estimation, Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Edge Detection, Pose Estimation

Animal pose estimation has recently come into the limelight due to its application in biology, zoology, and aquaculture. Deep learning methods have effectively been applied to human pose estimation. However, the major bottleneck to the application of these methods to animal pose estimation is the unavailability of sufficient quantities of labeled data. Though there are ample quantities of unlabelled data publicly available, it is economically impractical to label large quantities of data for each animal. In addition, due to the wide variety of body shapes in the animal kingdom, the transfer of knowledge across domains is ineffective. Given the fact that the human brain is able to recognize animal pose without requiring large amounts of labeled data, it is only reasonable that we exploit unsupervised learning to tackle the problem of animal pose recognition from the available, unlabelled data. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture that is able to recognize the pose of multiple animals fromunlabelled data. We do this by (1) removing background information from each image and employing an edge detection algorithm on the body of the animal, (2) Tracking motion of the edge pixels and performing agglomerative clustering to segment body parts, (3) employing contrastive learning to discourage grouping of distant body parts together. Hence we are able to distinguish between body parts of the animal, based on their visual behavior, instead of the underlying anatomy. Thus, we are able to achieve a more effective classification of the data than their human-labeled counterparts. We test our model on the TigDog and WLD (WildLife Documentary) datasets, where we outperform state-of-the-art approaches by a significant margin. We also study the performance of our model on other public data to demonstrate the generalization ability of our model.
Self-encoding Barnacle Mating Optimizer Algorithm for Manpower Scheduling in Flow Shop
Authors: Shuyun Luo, Wushuang Wang, Mengyuan Fang, Weiqiang Xu
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Flow Shop Scheduling (FSS) has been widely researched due to its application in many types of fields, while the human participant brings great challenges to this problem. Manpower scheduling captures attention for assigning workers with diverse proficiency to the appropriate stages, which is of great significance to production efficiency. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm called Self-encoding Barnacle Mating Optimizer (SBMO), which solves the FSS problem considering worker proficiency, defined as a new problem, Flow Shop Manpower Scheduling Problem (FSMSP). The highlight of the SBMO algorithm is the combination with the encoding method, crossover and mutation operators. Moreover, in order to solve the local optimum problem, we design a neighborhood search scheme. Finally, the extensive comparison simulations are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SBMO. The results indicate the effectiveness of SBMO in approximate ratio, powerful stability, and execution time, compared with the classic and popular counterparts.
Online Self-Evolving Anomaly Detection in Cloud Computing Environments
Authors: Haili Wang, Jingda Guo, Xu Ma, Song Fu, Qing Yang, Yunzhong Xu
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Cloud Computing, Management, Specificity

Modern cloud computing systems contain hundreds to thousands of computing and storage servers. Such a scale, combined with ever-growing system complexity, is causing a key challenge to failure and resource management for dependable cloud computing. Autonomic failure detection is a crucial technique for understanding emergent, cloud-wide phenomena and self-managing cloud resources for system-level dependability assurance. To detect failures, we need to monitor the cloud execution and collect runtime performance data. These data are usually unlabeled, and thus a prior failure history is not always available in production clouds. In this paper, we present a \emph{self-evolving anomaly detection} (SEAD) framework for cloud dependability assurance. Our framework self-evolves by recursively exploring newly verified anomaly records and continuously updating the anomaly detector online. As a distinct advantage of our framework, cloud system administrators only need to check a small number of detected anomalies, and their decisions are leveraged to update the detector. Thus, the detector evolves following the upgrade of system hardware, update of the software stack, and change of user workloads. Moreover, we design two types of detectors, one for general anomaly detection and the other for type-specific anomaly detection. With the help of self-evolving techniques, our detectors can achieve 88.94\% in sensitivity and 94.60\% in specificity on average, which makes them suitable for real-world deployment.
Will We Trust What We Don't Understand? Impact of Model Interpretability and Outcome Feedback on Trust in AI
Authors: Daehwan Ahn, Abdullah Almaatouq, Monisha Gulabani, Kartik Hosanagar
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00

Despite AI's superhuman performance in a variety of domains, humans are often unwilling to adopt AI systems. The lack of interpretability inherent in many modern AI techniques is believed to be hurting their adoption, as users may not trust systems whose decision processes they do not understand. We investigate this proposition with a novel experiment in which we use an interactive prediction task to analyze the impact of interpretability and outcome feedback on trust in AI and on human performance in AI-assisted prediction tasks. We find that interpretability led to no robust improvements in trust, while outcome feedback had a significantly greater and more reliable effect. However, both factors had modest effects on participants' task performance. Our findings suggest that (1) factors receiving significant attention, such as interpretability, may be less effective at increasing trust than factors like outcome feedback, and (2) augmenting human performance via AI systems may not be a simple matter of increasing trust in AI, as increased trust is not always associated with equally sizable improvements in performance. These findings invite the research community to focus not only on methods for generating interpretations but also on techniques for ensuring that interpretations impact trust and performance in practice.
JMSNAS: Joint Model Split and Neural Architecture Search for Learning over Mobile Edge Networks
Authors: Yuqing Tian, Zhaoyang Zhang, Zhaohui Yang, Qianqian Yang
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

The main challenge to deploy deep neural network (DNN) over a mobile edge network is how to split the DNN model so as to match the network architecture as well as all the nodes' computation and communication capacity. This essentially involves two highly coupled procedures: model generating and model splitting. In this paper, a joint model split and neural architecture search (JMSNAS) framework is proposed to automatically generate and deploy a DNN model over a mobile edge network. Considering both the computing and communication resource constraints, a computational graph search problem is formulated to find the multi-split points of the DNN model, and then the model is trained to meet some accuracy requirements. Moreover, the trade-off between model accuracy and completion latency is achieved through the proper design of the objective function. The experiment results confirm the superiority of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art split machine learning design methods.
Solving Linear Algebra by Program Synthesis
Authors: Iddo Drori, Nakul Verma
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Program Synthesis, Zero-Shot Learning

We solve MIT's Linear Algebra 18.06 course and Columbia University's Computational Linear Algebra COMS3251 courses with perfect accuracy by interactive program synthesis. This surprisingly strong result is achieved by turning the course questions into programming tasks and then running the programs to produce the correct answers. We use OpenAI Codex with zero-shot learning, without providing any examples in the prompts, to synthesize code from questions. We quantify the difference between the original question text and the transformed question text that yields a correct answer. Since all COMS3251 questions are not available online the model is not overfitting. We go beyond just generating code for questions with numerical answers by interactively generating code that also results visually pleasing plots as output. Finally, we automatically generate new questions given a few sample questions which may be used as new course content. This work is a significant step forward in solving quantitative math problems and opens the door for solving many university level STEM courses by machine.
Improving Learning from Demonstrations by Learning from Experience
Authors: Haofeng Liu, YiWen Chen, Jiayi Tan, Marcelo H Ang Jr
Date: 2021-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

How to make imitation learning more general when demonstrations are relatively limited has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Poor demonstrations lead to narrow and biased date distribution, non-Markovian human expert demonstration makes it difficult for the agent to learn, and over-reliance on sub-optimal trajectories can make it hard for the agent to improve its performance. To solve these problems we propose a new algorithm named TD3fG that can smoothly transition from learning from experts to learning from experience. Our algorithm achieves good performance in the MUJOCO environment with limited and sub-optimal demonstrations. We use behavior cloning to train the network as a reference action generator and utilize it in terms of both loss function and exploration noise. This innovation can help agents extract a priori knowledge from demonstrations while reducing the detrimental effects of the poor Markovian properties of the demonstrations. It has a better performance compared to the BC+ fine-tuning and DDPGfD approach, especially when the demonstrations are relatively limited. We call our method TD3fG meaning TD3 from a generator.
Physics-informed neural networks via stochastic Hamiltonian dynamics learning
Authors: Chandrajit Bajaj, Minh Nguyen
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

In this paper, we propose novel learning frameworks to tackle optimal control problems by applying the Pontryagin maximum principle and then solving for a Hamiltonian dynamical system. Applying the Pontryagin maximum principle to the original optimal control problem shifts the learning focus to reduced Hamiltonian dynamics and corresponding adjoint variables. Then, the reduced Hamiltonian networks can be learned by going backwards in time and then minimizing loss function deduced from the Pontryagin maximum principle's conditions. The learning process is further improved by progressively learning a posterior distribution of the reduced Hamiltonians. This is achieved through utilizing a variational autoencoder which leads to more effective path exploration process. We apply our learning frameworks called NeuralPMP to various control tasks and obtain competitive results.
The Partially Observable History Process
Authors: Dustin Morrill, Amy R. Greenwald, Michael Bowling
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We introduce the partially observable history process (POHP) formalism for reinforcement learning. POHP centers around the actions and observations of a single agent and abstracts away the presence of other players without reducing them to stochastic processes. Our formalism provides a streamlined interface for designing algorithms that defy categorization as exclusively single or multi-agent, and for developing theory that applies across these domains. We show how the POHP formalism unifies traditional models including the Markov decision process, the Markov game, the extensive-form game, and their partially observable extensions, without introducing burdensome technical machinery or violating the philosophical underpinnings of reinforcement learning. We illustrate the utility of our formalism by concisely exploring observable sequential rationality, examining some theoretical properties of general immediate regret minimization, and generalizing the extensive-form regret minimization (EFR) algorithm.
VisualEnv: visual Gym environments with Blender
Authors: Andrea Scorsoglio, Roberto Furfaro
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: OpenAI Gym, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper VisualEnv, a new tool for creating visual environment for reinforcement learning is introduced. It is the product of an integration of an open-source modelling and rendering software, Blender, and a python module used to generate environment model for simulation, OpenAI Gym. VisualEnv allows the user to create custom environments with photorealistic rendering capabilities and full integration with python. The framework is described and tested on a series of example problems that showcase its features for training reinforcement learning agents.
Learning Graph Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Saswati Ray, Sana Lakdawala, Mononito Goswami, Chufan Gao
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection

In this work, we propose GLUE (Graph Deviation Network with Local Uncertainty Estimation), building on the recently proposed Graph Deviation Network (GDN). GLUE not only automatically learns complex dependencies between variables and uses them to better identify anomalous behavior, but also quantifies its predictive uncertainty, allowing us to account for the variation in the data as well to have more interpretable anomaly detection thresholds. Results on two real world datasets tell us that optimizing the negative Gaussian log likelihood is reasonable because GLUE's forecasting results are at par with GDN and in fact better than the vector autoregressor baseline, which is significant given that GDN directly optimizes the MSE loss. In summary, our experiments demonstrate that GLUE is competitive with GDN at anomaly detection, with the added benefit of uncertainty estimations. We also show that GLUE learns meaningful sensor embeddings which clusters similar sensors together.
Learning Robust Scheduling with Search and Attention
Authors: David Sandberg, Tor Kvernvik, Francesco Davide Calabrese
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Scheduling

Allocating physical layer resources to users based on channel quality, buffer size, requirements and constraints represents one of the central optimization problems in the management of radio resources. The solution space grows combinatorially with the cardinality of each dimension making it hard to find optimal solutions using an exhaustive search or even classical optimization algorithms given the stringent time requirements. This problem is even more pronounced in MU-MIMO scheduling where the scheduler can assign multiple users to the same time-frequency physical resources. Traditional approaches thus resort to designing heuristics that trade optimality in favor of feasibility of execution. In this work we treat the MU-MIMO scheduling problem as a tree-structured combinatorial problem and, borrowing from the recent successes of AlphaGo Zero, we investigate the feasibility of searching for the best performing solutions using a combination of Monte Carlo Tree Search and Reinforcement Learning. To cater to the nature of the problem at hand, like the lack of an intrinsic ordering of the users as well as the importance of dependencies between combinations of users, we make fundamental modifications to the neural network architecture by introducing the self-attention mechanism. We then demonstrate that the resulting approach is not only feasible but vastly outperforms state-of-the-art heuristic-based scheduling approaches in the presence of measurement uncertainties and finite buffers.
Abductive Inference and C. S. Peirce: 150 Years Later
Authors: Deep Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Econometrics

This paper is about two things: (i) Charles Sanders Peirce (1837-1914) -- an iconoclastic philosopher and polymath who is among the greatest of American minds. (ii) Abductive inference -- a term coined by C. S. Peirce, which he defined as "the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea." Abductive inference and quantitative economics: Abductive inference plays a fundamental role in empirical scientific research as a tool for discovery and data analysis. Heckman and Singer (2017) strongly advocated "Economists should abduct." Arnold Zellner (2007) stressed that "much greater emphasis on reductive [abductive] inference in teaching econometrics, statistics, and economics would be desirable." But currently, there are no established theory or practical tools that can allow an empirical analyst to abduct. This paper attempts to fill this gap by introducing new principles and concrete procedures to the Economics and Statistics community. I termed the proposed approach as Abductive Inference Machine (AIM). The historical Peirce's experiment: In 1872, Peirce conducted a series of experiments to determine the distribution of response times to an auditory stimulus, which is widely regarded as one of the most significant statistical investigations in the history of nineteenth-century American mathematical research (Stigler, 1978). On the 150th anniversary of this historical experiment, we look back at the Peircean-style abductive inference through a modern statistical lens. Using Peirce's data, it is shown how empirical analysts can abduct in a systematic and automated manner using AIM.
Modular Networks Prevent Catastrophic Interference in Model-Based Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Robin Schiewer, Laurenz Wiskott
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In a multi-task reinforcement learning setting, the learner commonly benefits from training on multiple related tasks by exploiting similarities among them. At the same time, the trained agent is able to solve a wider range of different problems. While this effect is well documented for model-free multi-task methods, we demonstrate a detrimental effect when using a single learned dynamics model for multiple tasks. Thus, we address the fundamental question of whether model-based multi-task reinforcement learning benefits from shared dynamics models in a similar way model-free methods do from shared policy networks. Using a single dynamics model, we see clear evidence of task confusion and reduced performance. As a remedy, enforcing an internal structure for the learned dynamics model by training isolated sub-networks for each task notably improves performance while using the same amount of parameters. We illustrate our findings by comparing both methods on a simple gridworld and a more complex vizdoom multi-task experiment.
Patent Data for Engineering Design: A Critical Review and Future Directions
Authors: Shuo Jiang, Serhad Sarica, Binyang Song, Jie Hu, Jianxi Luo
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00

Patent data have long been used for engineering design research because of its large and expanding size, and widely varying massive amount of design information contained in patents. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science present unprecedented opportunities to develop data-driven design methods and tools, as well as advance design science, using the patent database. Herein, we survey and categorize the patent-for-design literature based on its contributions to design theories, methods, tools, and strategies, as well as the types of patent data and data-driven methods used in respective studies. Our review highlights promising future research directions in patent data-driven design research and practice.
Human-error-potential Estimation based on Wearable Biometric Sensors
Authors: Hiroki Ohashi, Hiroto Nagayoshi
Date: 2021-11-15 00:00:00

This study tackles on a new problem of estimating human-error potential on a shop floor on the basis of wearable sensors. Unlike existing studies that utilize biometric sensing technology to estimate people's internal state such as fatigue and mental stress, we attempt to estimate the human-error potential in a situation where a target person does not stay calm, which is much more difficult as sensor noise significantly increases. We propose a novel formulation, in which the human-error-potential estimation problem is reduced to a classification problem, and introduce a new method that can be used for solving the classification problem even with noisy sensing data. The key ideas are to model the process of calculating biometric indices probabilistically so that the prior knowledge on the biometric indices can be integrated, and to utilize the features that represent the movement of target persons in combination with biometric features. The experimental analysis showed that our method effectively estimates the human-error potential.
A layer-stress learning framework universally augments deep neural network tasks
Authors: Shihao Shao, Yong liu, Qinghua Cui
Date: 2021-11-14 00:00:00

Deep neural networks (DNN) such as Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) represent one of the most established deep learning algorithms. Given the tremendous effects of the number of hidden layers on network architecture and performance, it is very important to choose the number of hidden layers but still a serious challenge. More importantly, the current network architectures can only process the information from the last layer of the feature extractor, which greatly limited us to further improve its performance. Here we presented a layer-stress deep learning framework (x-NN) which implemented automatic and wise depth decision on shallow or deep feature map in a deep network through firstly designing enough number of layers and then trading off them by Multi-Head Attention Block. The x-NN can make use of features from various depth layers through attention allocation and then help to make final decision as well. As a result, x-NN showed outstanding prediction ability in the Alzheimer's Disease Classification Technique Challenge PRCV 2021, in which it won the top laurel and outperformed all other AI models. Moreover, the performance of x-NN was verified by one more AD neuroimaging dataset and other AI tasks.