pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Graph Fusion Networks for Urban Region Embedding
Authors: Shangbin Wu, Xu Yan, Xiaoliang Fan, Shirui Pan, Shichao Zhu, Chuanpan Zheng, Ming Cheng, Cheng Wang
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Crime Prediction

Learning the embeddings for urban regions from human mobility data can reveal the functionality of regions, and then enables the correlated but distinct tasks such as crime prediction. Human mobility data contains rich but abundant information, which yields to the comprehensive region embeddings for cross domain tasks. In this paper, we propose multi-graph fusion networks (MGFN) to enable the cross domain prediction tasks. First, we integrate the graphs with spatio-temporal similarity as mobility patterns through a mobility graph fusion module. Then, in the mobility pattern joint learning module, we design the multi-level cross-attention mechanism to learn the comprehensive embeddings from multiple mobility patterns based on intra-pattern and inter-pattern messages. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world urban datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed MGFN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by up to 12.35% improvement.
Online AutoML: An adaptive AutoML framework for online learning
Authors: Bilge Celik, Prabhant Singh, Joaquin Vanschoren
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, BIG-bench Machine Learning

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) has been used successfully in settings where the learning task is assumed to be static. In many real-world scenarios, however, the data distribution will evolve over time, and it is yet to be shown whether AutoML techniques can effectively design online pipelines in dynamic environments. This study aims to automate pipeline design for online learning while continuously adapting to data drift. For this purpose, we design an adaptive Online Automated Machine Learning (OAML) system, searching the complete pipeline configuration space of online learners, including preprocessing algorithms and ensembling techniques. This system combines the inherent adaptation capabilities of online learners with the fast automated pipeline (re)optimization capabilities of AutoML. Focusing on optimization techniques that can adapt to evolving objectives, we evaluate asynchronous genetic programming and asynchronous successive halving to optimize these pipelines continually. We experiment on real and artificial data streams with varying types of concept drift to test the performance and adaptation capabilities of the proposed system. The results confirm the utility of OAML over popular online learning algorithms and underscore the benefits of continuous pipeline redesign in the presence of data drift.
Towards Collaborative Question Answering: A Preliminary Study
Authors: Xiangkun Hu, Hang Yan, Qipeng Guo, Xipeng Qiu, Weinan Zhang, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Knowledge and expertise in the real-world can be disjointedly owned. To solve a complex question, collaboration among experts is often called for. In this paper, we propose CollabQA, a novel QA task in which several expert agents coordinated by a moderator work together to answer questions that cannot be answered with any single agent alone. We make a synthetic dataset of a large knowledge graph that can be distributed to experts. We define the process to form a complex question from ground truth reasoning path, neural network agent models that can learn to solve the task, and evaluation metrics to check the performance. We show that the problem can be challenging without introducing prior of the collaboration structure, unless experts are perfect and uniform. Based on this experience, we elaborate extensions needed to approach collaboration tasks in real-world settings.
Feature transforms for image data augmentation
Authors: Loris Nanni, Michelangelo Paci, Sheryl Brahnam, Alessandra Lumini
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Manipulation

A problem with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is that they require large datasets to obtain adequate robustness; on small datasets, they are prone to overfitting. Many methods have been proposed to overcome this shortcoming with CNNs. In cases where additional samples cannot easily be collected, a common approach is to generate more data points from existing data using an augmentation technique. In image classification, many augmentation approaches utilize simple image manipulation algorithms. In this work, we build ensembles on the data level by adding images generated by combining fourteen augmentation approaches, three of which are proposed here for the first time. These novel methods are based on the Fourier Transform (FT), the Radon Transform (RT) and the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Pretrained ResNet50 networks are finetuned on training sets that include images derived from each augmentation method. These networks and several fusions are evaluated and compared across eleven benchmarks. Results show that building ensembles on the data level by combining different data augmentation methods produce classifiers that not only compete competitively against the state-of-the-art but often surpass the best approaches reported in the literature.
EASY: Ensemble Augmented-Shot Y-shaped Learning: State-Of-The-Art Few-Shot Classification with Simple Ingredients
Authors: Yassir Bendou, Yuqing Hu, Raphael Lafargue, Giulia Lioi, Bastien Pasdeloup, Stéphane Pateux, Vincent Gripon
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot learning aims at leveraging knowledge learned by one or more deep learning models, in order to obtain good classification performance on new problems, where only a few labeled samples per class are available. Recent years have seen a fair number of works in the field, introducing methods with numerous ingredients. A frequent problem, though, is the use of suboptimally trained models to extract knowledge, leading to interrogations on whether proposed approaches bring gains compared to using better initial models without the introduced ingredients. In this work, we propose a simple methodology, that reaches or even beats state of the art performance on multiple standardized benchmarks of the field, while adding almost no hyperparameters or parameters to those used for training the initial deep learning models on the generic dataset. This methodology offers a new baseline on which to propose (and fairly compare) new techniques or adapt existing ones.
Graph Neural Diffusion Networks for Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Wei Ye, Zexi Huang, Yunqi Hong, Ambuj Singh
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) is a pioneering model for graph-based semi-supervised learning. However, GCN does not perform well on sparsely-labeled graphs. Its two-layer version cannot effectively propagate the label information to the whole graph structure (i.e., the under-smoothing problem) while its deep version over-smoothens and is hard to train (i.e., the over-smoothing problem). To solve these two issues, we propose a new graph neural network called GND-Nets (for Graph Neural Diffusion Networks) that exploits the local and global neighborhood information of a vertex in a single layer. Exploiting the shallow network mitigates the over-smoothing problem while exploiting the local and global neighborhood information mitigates the under-smoothing problem. The utilization of the local and global neighborhood information of a vertex is achieved by a new graph diffusion method called neural diffusions, which integrate neural networks into the conventional linear and nonlinear graph diffusions. The adoption of neural networks makes neural diffusions adaptable to different datasets. Extensive experiments on various sparsely-labeled graphs verify the effectiveness and efficiency of GND-Nets compared to state-of-the-art approaches.
Unified Question Generation with Continual Lifelong Learning
Authors: Wei Yuan, Hongzhi Yin, Tieke He, Tong Chen, Qiufeng Wang, Lizhen Cui
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

Question Generation (QG), as a challenging Natural Language Processing task, aims at generating questions based on given answers and context. Existing QG methods mainly focus on building or training models for specific QG datasets. These works are subject to two major limitations: (1) They are dedicated to specific QG formats (e.g., answer-extraction or multi-choice QG), therefore, if we want to address a new format of QG, a re-design of the QG model is required. (2) Optimal performance is only achieved on the dataset they were just trained on. As a result, we have to train and keep various QG models for different QG datasets, which is resource-intensive and ungeneralizable. To solve the problems, we propose a model named Unified-QG based on lifelong learning techniques, which can continually learn QG tasks across different datasets and formats. Specifically, we first build a format-convert encoding to transform different kinds of QG formats into a unified representation. Then, a method named \emph{STRIDER} (\emph{S}imilari\emph{T}y \emph{R}egular\emph{I}zed \emph{D}ifficult \emph{E}xample \emph{R}eplay) is built to alleviate catastrophic forgetting in continual QG learning. Extensive experiments were conducted on $8$ QG datasets across $4$ QG formats (answer-extraction, answer-abstraction, multi-choice, and boolean QG) to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results demonstrate that our Unified-QG can effectively and continually adapt to QG tasks when datasets and formats vary. In addition, we verify the ability of a single trained Unified-QG model in improving $8$ Question Answering (QA) systems' performance through generating synthetic QA data.
Scaling Up Knowledge Graph Creation to Large and Heterogeneous Data Sources
Authors: Enrique Iglesias, Samaneh Jozashoori, Maria-Esther Vidal
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Management, Scheduling

RDF knowledge graphs (KG) are powerful data structures to represent factual statements created from heterogeneous data sources. KG creation is laborious and demands data management techniques to be executed efficiently. This paper tackles the problem of the automatic generation of KG creation processes declaratively specified; it proposes techniques for planning and transforming heterogeneous data into RDF triples following mapping assertions specified in the RDF Mapping Language (RML). Given a set of mapping assertions, the planner provides an optimized execution plan by partitioning and scheduling the execution of the assertions. First, the planner assesses an optimized number of partitions considering the number of data sources, type of mapping assertions, and the associations between different assertions. After providing a list of partitions and assertions that belong to each partition, the planner determines their execution order. A greedy algorithm is implemented to generate the partitions' bushy tree execution plan. Bushy tree plans are translated into operating system commands that guide the execution of the partitions of the mapping assertions in the order indicated by the bushy tree. The proposed optimization approach is evaluated over state-of-the-art RML-compliant engines, and existing benchmarks of data sources and RML triples maps. Our experimental results suggest that the performance of the studied engines can be considerably improved, particularly in a complex setting with numerous triples maps and large data sources. As a result, engines that time out in complex cases are enabled to produce at least a portion of the KG applying the planner.
Which Style Makes Me Attractive? Interpretable Control Discovery and Counterfactual Explanation on StyleGAN
Authors: Bo Li, Qiulin Wang, JiQuan Pei, Yu Yang, Xiangyang Ji
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Disentanglement, Face Generation, Image Generation, Image Manipulation

The semantically disentangled latent subspace in GAN provides rich interpretable controls in image generation. This paper includes two contributions on semantic latent subspace analysis in the scenario of face generation using StyleGAN2. First, we propose a novel approach to disentangle latent subspace semantics by exploiting existing face analysis models, e.g., face parsers and face landmark detectors. These models provide the flexibility to construct various criterions with very concrete and interpretable semantic meanings (e.g., change face shape or change skin color) to restrict latent subspace disentanglement. Rich latent space controls unknown previously can be discovered using the constructed criterions. Second, we propose a new perspective to explain the behavior of a CNN classifier by generating counterfactuals in the interpretable latent subspaces we discovered. This explanation helps reveal whether the classifier learns semantics as intended. Experiments on various disentanglement criterions demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We believe this approach contributes to both areas of image manipulation and counterfactual explainability of CNNs. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/prclibo/ice}.
Relational Memory Augmented Language Models
Authors: Qi Liu, Dani Yogatama, Phil Blunsom
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

We present a memory-augmented approach to condition an autoregressive language model on a knowledge graph. We represent the graph as a collection of relation triples and retrieve relevant relations for a given context to improve text generation. Experiments on WikiText-103, WMT19, and enwik8 English datasets demonstrate that our approach produces a better language model in terms of perplexity and bits per character. We also show that relational memory improves coherence, is complementary to token-based memory, and enables causal interventions. Our model provides a simple yet effective way to combine an autoregressive language model with a knowledge graph for a more coherent and logical generation.
The Paradox of Choice: Using Attention in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Andrei Nica, Khimya Khetarpal, Doina Precup
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Decision-making AI agents are often faced with two important challenges: the depth of the planning horizon, and the branching factor due to having many choices. Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods aim to solve the first problem, by providing shortcuts that skip over multiple time steps. To cope with the breadth, it is desirable to restrict the agent's attention at each step to a reasonable number of possible choices. The concept of affordances (Gibson, 1977) suggests that only certain actions are feasible in certain states. In this work, we model "affordances" through an attention mechanism that limits the available choices of temporally extended options. We present an online, model-free algorithm to learn affordances that can be used to further learn subgoal options. We investigate the role of hard versus soft attention in training data collection, abstract value learning in long-horizon tasks, and handling a growing number of choices. We identify and empirically illustrate the settings in which the paradox of choice arises, i.e. when having fewer but more meaningful choices improves the learning speed and performance of a reinforcement learning agent.
What You See is Not What the Network Infers: Detecting Adversarial Examples Based on Semantic Contradiction
Authors: Yijun Yang, Ruiyuan Gao, Yu Li, Qiuxia Lai, Qiang Xu
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Metric Learning

Adversarial examples (AEs) pose severe threats to the applications of deep neural networks (DNNs) to safety-critical domains, e.g., autonomous driving. While there has been a vast body of AE defense solutions, to the best of our knowledge, they all suffer from some weaknesses, e.g., defending against only a subset of AEs or causing a relatively high accuracy loss for legitimate inputs. Moreover, most existing solutions cannot defend against adaptive attacks, wherein attackers are knowledgeable about the defense mechanisms and craft AEs accordingly. In this paper, we propose a novel AE detection framework based on the very nature of AEs, i.e., their semantic information is inconsistent with the discriminative features extracted by the target DNN model. To be specific, the proposed solution, namely ContraNet, models such contradiction by first taking both the input and the inference result to a generator to obtain a synthetic output and then comparing it against the original input. For legitimate inputs that are correctly inferred, the synthetic output tries to reconstruct the input. On the contrary, for AEs, instead of reconstructing the input, the synthetic output would be created to conform to the wrong label whenever possible. Consequently, by measuring the distance between the input and the synthetic output with metric learning, we can differentiate AEs from legitimate inputs. We perform comprehensive evaluations under various AE attack scenarios, and experimental results show that ContraNet outperforms existing solutions by a large margin, especially under adaptive attacks. Moreover, our analysis shows that successful AEs that can bypass ContraNet tend to have much-weakened adversarial semantics. We have also shown that ContraNet can be easily combined with adversarial training techniques to achieve further improved AE defense capabilities.
DrugOOD: Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Dataset Curator and Benchmark for AI-aided Drug Discovery -- A Focus on Affinity Prediction Problems with Noise Annotations
Authors: Yuanfeng Ji, Lu Zhang, Jiaxiang Wu, Bingzhe Wu, Long-Kai Huang, Tingyang Xu, Yu Rong, Lanqing Li, Jie Ren, Ding Xue, Houtim Lai, Shaoyong Xu, Jing Feng, Wei Liu, Ping Luo, Shuigeng Zhou, Junzhou Huang, Peilin Zhao, Yatao Bian
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Drug Discovery, Graph Neural Network, Protein Folding

AI-aided drug discovery (AIDD) is gaining increasing popularity due to its promise of making the search for new pharmaceuticals quicker, cheaper and more efficient. In spite of its extensive use in many fields, such as ADMET prediction, virtual screening, protein folding and generative chemistry, little has been explored in terms of the out-of-distribution (OOD) learning problem with \emph{noise}, which is inevitable in real world AIDD applications. In this work, we present DrugOOD, a systematic OOD dataset curator and benchmark for AI-aided drug discovery, which comes with an open-source Python package that fully automates the data curation and OOD benchmarking processes. We focus on one of the most crucial problems in AIDD: drug target binding affinity prediction, which involves both macromolecule (protein target) and small-molecule (drug compound). In contrast to only providing fixed datasets, DrugOOD offers automated dataset curator with user-friendly customization scripts, rich domain annotations aligned with biochemistry knowledge, realistic noise annotations and rigorous benchmarking of state-of-the-art OOD algorithms. Since the molecular data is often modeled as irregular graphs using graph neural network (GNN) backbones, DrugOOD also serves as a valuable testbed for \emph{graph OOD learning} problems. Extensive empirical studies have shown a significant performance gap between in-distribution and out-of-distribution experiments, which highlights the need to develop better schemes that can allow for OOD generalization under noise for AIDD.
Reasoning about Human-Friendly Strategies in Repeated Keyword Auctions
Authors: Francesco Belardinelli, Wojtek Jamroga, Vadim Malvone, Munyque Mittelmann, Aniello Murano, Laurent Perrussel
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00

In online advertising, search engines sell ad placements for keywords continuously through auctions. This problem can be seen as an infinitely repeated game since the auction is executed whenever a user performs a query with the keyword. As advertisers may frequently change their bids, the game will have a large set of equilibria with potentially complex strategies. In this paper, we propose the use of natural strategies for reasoning in such setting as they are processable by artificial agents with limited memory and/or computational power as well as understandable by human users. To reach this goal, we introduce a quantitative version of Strategy Logic with natural strategies in the setting of imperfect information. In a first step, we show how to model strategies for repeated keyword auctions and take advantage of the model for proving properties evaluating this game. In a second step, we study the logic in relation to the distinguishing power, expressivity, and model-checking complexity for strategies with and without recall.
Towards a Real-time Measure of the Perception of Anthropomorphism in Human-robot Interaction
Authors: Maria Tsfasman, Avinash Saravanan, Dekel Viner, Daan Goslinga, Sarah de Wolf, Chirag Raman, Catholijn M. Jonker, Catharine Oertel
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis

How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement and emotions. Prosodically, this can be achieved through (dis)entrainment. While speech-synthesis has been a limiting factor for many years, restrictions in this regard are increasingly mitigated. These advancements now emphasise the importance of studying the effect of robot embodiment on human entrainment. In this study, we conducted a between-subjects online human-robot interaction experiment in an educational use-case scenario where a tutor was either embodied through a human or a robot face. 43 English-speaking participants took part in the study for whom we analysed the degree of acoustic-prosodic entrainment to the human or robot face, respectively. We found that the degree of subjective and objective perception of anthropomorphism positively correlates with acoustic-prosodic entrainment.
Unsupervised Music Source Separation Using Differentiable Parametric Source Models
Authors: Kilian Schulze-Forster, Gaël Richard, Liam Kelley, Clement S. J. Doire, Roland Badeau
Date: 2022-01-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Source Separation, Deep Learning, Music Source Separation, Vocal ensemble separation

Supervised deep learning approaches to underdetermined audio source separation achieve state-of-the-art performance but require a dataset of mixtures along with their corresponding isolated source signals. Such datasets can be extremely costly to obtain for musical mixtures. This raises a need for unsupervised methods. We propose a novel unsupervised model-based deep learning approach to musical source separation. Each source is modelled with a differentiable parametric source-filter model. A neural network is trained to reconstruct the observed mixture as a sum of the sources by estimating the source models' parameters given their fundamental frequencies. At test time, soft masks are obtained from the synthesized source signals. The experimental evaluation on a vocal ensemble separation task shows that the proposed method outperforms learning-free methods based on nonnegative matrix factorization and a supervised deep learning baseline. Integrating domain knowledge in the form of source models into a data-driven method leads to high data efficiency: the proposed approach achieves good separation quality even when trained on less than three minutes of audio. This work makes powerful deep learning based separation usable in scenarios where training data with ground truth is expensive or nonexistent.