pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Peril of Popular Deep Learning Uncertainty Estimation Methods
Authors: Yehao Liu, Matteo Pagliardini, Tatjana Chavdarova, Sebastian U. Stich
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Uncertainty estimation (UE) techniques -- such as the Gaussian process (GP), Bayesian neural networks (BNN), Monte Carlo dropout (MCDropout) -- aim to improve the interpretability of machine learning models by assigning an estimated uncertainty value to each of their prediction outputs. However, since too high uncertainty estimates can have fatal consequences in practice, this paper analyzes the above techniques. Firstly, we show that GP methods always yield high uncertainty estimates on out of distribution (OOD) data. Secondly, we show on a 2D toy example that both BNNs and MCDropout do not give high uncertainty estimates on OOD samples. Finally, we show empirically that this pitfall of BNNs and MCDropout holds on real world datasets as well. Our insights (i) raise awareness for the more cautious use of currently popular UE methods in Deep Learning, (ii) encourage the development of UE methods that approximate GP-based methods -- instead of BNNs and MCDropout, and (iii) our empirical setups can be used for verifying the OOD performances of any other UE method. The source code is available at https://github.com/epfml/uncertainity-estimation.
A fully-differentiable compressible high-order computational fluid dynamics solver
Authors: Deniz A. Bezgin, Aaron B. Buhendwa, Nikolaus A. Adams
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Fluid flows are omnipresent in nature and engineering disciplines. The reliable computation of fluids has been a long-lasting challenge due to nonlinear interactions over multiple spatio-temporal scales. The compressible Navier-Stokes equations govern compressible flows and allow for complex phenomena like turbulence and shocks. Despite tremendous progress in hardware and software, capturing the smallest length-scales in fluid flows still introduces prohibitive computational cost for real-life applications. We are currently witnessing a paradigm shift towards machine learning supported design of numerical schemes as a means to tackle aforementioned problem. While prior work has explored differentiable algorithms for one- or two-dimensional incompressible fluid flows, we present a fully-differentiable three-dimensional framework for the computation of compressible fluid flows using high-order state-of-the-art numerical methods. Firstly, we demonstrate the efficiency of our solver by computing classical two- and three-dimensional test cases, including strong shocks and transition to turbulence. Secondly, and more importantly, our framework allows for end-to-end optimization to improve existing numerical schemes inside computational fluid dynamics algorithms. In particular, we are using neural networks to substitute a conventional numerical flux function.
Bringing Atomistic Deep Learning to Prime Time
Authors: Nathan C. Frey, Siddharth Samsi, Bharath Ramsundar, Connor W. Coley, Vijay Gadepally
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop AI4Scien 2021 12
Tasks: Deep Learning

Artificial intelligence has not yet revolutionized the design of materials and molecules. In this perspective, we identify four barriers preventing the integration of atomistic deep learning, molecular science, and high-performance computing. We outline focused research efforts to address the opportunities presented by these challenges.
Model-Agnostic Hybrid Numerical Weather Prediction and Machine Learning Paradigm for Solar Forecasting in the Tropics
Authors: Nigel Yuan Yun Ng, Harish Gopalan, Venugopalan S. G. Raghavan, Chin Chun Ooi
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) and machine learning (ML) methods are popular for solar forecasting. However, NWP models have multiple possible physical parameterizations, which requires site-specific NWP optimization. This is further complicated when regional NWP models are used with global climate models with different possible parameterizations. In this study, an alternative approach is proposed and evaluated for four radiation models. Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is run in both global and regional mode to provide an estimate for solar irradiance. This estimate is then post-processed using ML to provide a final prediction. Normalized root-mean-square error from WRF is reduced by up to 40-50% with this ML error correction model. Results obtained using CAM, GFDL, New Goddard and RRTMG radiation models were comparable after this correction, negating the need for WRF parameterization tuning. Other models incorporating nearby locations and sensor data are also evaluated, with the latter being particularly promising.
Guardian of the Ensembles: Introducing Pairwise Adversarially Robust Loss for Resisting Adversarial Attacks in DNN Ensembles
Authors: Shubhi Shukla, Subhadeep Dalui, Manaar Alam, Shubhajit Datta, Arijit Mondal, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, Partha Pratim Chakrabarti
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Classification

Adversarial attacks rely on transferability, where an adversarial example (AE) crafted on a surrogate classifier tends to mislead a target classifier. Recent ensemble methods demonstrate that AEs are less likely to mislead multiple classifiers in an ensemble. This paper proposes a new ensemble training using a Pairwise Adversarially Robust Loss (PARL) that by construction produces an ensemble of classifiers with diverse decision boundaries. PARL utilizes outputs and gradients of each layer with respect to network parameters in every classifier within the ensemble simultaneously. PARL is demonstrated to achieve higher robustness against black-box transfer attacks than previous ensemble methods as well as adversarial training without adversely affecting clean example accuracy. Extensive experiments using standard Resnet20, WideResnet28-10 classifiers demonstrate the robustness of PARL against state-of-the-art adversarial attacks. While maintaining similar clean accuracy and lesser training time, the proposed architecture has a 24.8% increase in robust accuracy ($\epsilon$ = 0.07) from the state-of-the art method.
Automated Side Channel Analysis of Media Software with Manifold Learning
Authors: Yuanyuan Yuan, Qi Pang, Shuai Wang
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Representation Learning, Side Channel Analysis

The prosperous development of cloud computing and machine learning as a service has led to the widespread use of media software to process confidential media data. This paper explores an adversary's ability to launch side channel analyses (SCA) against media software to reconstruct confidential media inputs. Recent advances in representation learning and perceptual learning inspired us to consider the reconstruction of media inputs from side channel traces as a cross-modality manifold learning task that can be addressed in a unified manner with an autoencoder framework trained to learn the mapping between media inputs and side channel observations. We further enhance the autoencoder with attention to localize the program points that make the primary contribution to SCA, thus automatically pinpointing information-leakage points in media software. We also propose a novel and highly effective defensive technique called perception blinding that can perturb media inputs with perception masks and mitigate manifold learning-based SCA. Our evaluation exploits three popular media software to reconstruct inputs in image, audio, and text formats. We analyze three common side channels - cache bank, cache line, and page tables - and userspace-only cache set accesses logged by standard Prime+Probe. Our framework successfully reconstructs high-quality confidential inputs from the assessed media software and automatically pinpoint their vulnerable program points, many of which are unknown to the public. We further show that perception blinding can mitigate manifold learning-based SCA with negligible extra cost.
A Training Framework for Stereo-Aware Speech Enhancement using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Bahareh Tolooshams, Kazuhito Koishida
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Speech Enhancement

Deep learning-based speech enhancement has shown unprecedented performance in recent years. The most popular mono speech enhancement frameworks are end-to-end networks mapping the noisy mixture into an estimate of the clean speech. With growing computational power and availability of multichannel microphone recordings, prior works have aimed to incorporate spatial statistics along with spectral information to boost up performance. Despite an improvement in enhancement performance of mono output, the spatial image preservation and subjective evaluations have not gained much attention in the literature. This paper proposes a novel stereo-aware framework for speech enhancement, i.e., a training loss for deep learning-based speech enhancement to preserve the spatial image while enhancing the stereo mixture. The proposed framework is model independent, hence it can be applied to any deep learning based architecture. We provide an extensive objective and subjective evaluation of the trained models through a listening test. We show that by regularizing for an image preservation loss, the overall performance is improved, and the stereo aspect of the speech is better preserved.
Measuring Wind Turbine Health Using Drifting Concepts
Authors: Agnieszka Jastrzebska, Alejandro Morales-Hernández, Gonzalo Nápoles, Yamisleydi Salgueiro, Koen Vanhoof
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Time series processing is an essential aspect of wind turbine health monitoring. Despite the progress in this field, there is still room for new methods to improve modeling quality. In this paper, we propose two new approaches for the analysis of wind turbine health. Both approaches are based on abstract concepts, implemented using fuzzy sets, which summarize and aggregate the underlying raw data. By observing the change in concepts, we infer about the change in the turbine's health. Analyzes are carried out separately for different external conditions (wind speed and temperature). We extract concepts that represent relative low, moderate, and high power production. The first method aims at evaluating the decrease or increase in relatively high and low power production. This task is performed using a regression-like model. The second method evaluates the overall drift of the extracted concepts. Large drift indicates that the power production process undergoes fluctuations in time. Concepts are labeled using linguistic labels, thus equipping our model with improved interpretability features. We applied the proposed approach to process publicly available data describing four wind turbines. The simulation results have shown that the aging process is not homogeneous in all wind turbines.
A More Stable Accelerated Gradient Method Inspired by Continuous-Time Perspective
Authors: Yasong Feng, Weiguo Gao
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Matrix Completion

Nesterov's accelerated gradient method (NAG) is widely used in problems with machine learning background including deep learning, and is corresponding to a continuous-time differential equation. From this connection, the property of the differential equation and its numerical approximation can be investigated to improve the accelerated gradient method. In this work we present a new improvement of NAG in terms of stability inspired by numerical analysis. We give the precise order of NAG as a numerical approximation of its continuous-time limit and then present a new method with higher order. We show theoretically that our new method is more stable than NAG for large step size. Experiments of matrix completion and handwriting digit recognition demonstrate that the stability of our new method is better. Furthermore, better stability leads to higher computational speed in experiments.
Forecast Evaluation in Large Cross-Sections of Realized Volatility
Authors: Christis Katsouris
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

In this paper, we consider the forecast evaluation of realized volatility measures under cross-section dependence using equal predictive accuracy testing procedures. We evaluate the predictive accuracy of the model based on the augmented cross-section when forecasting Realized Volatility. Under the null hypothesis of equal predictive accuracy the benchmark model employed is a standard HAR model while under the alternative of non-equal predictive accuracy the forecast model is an augmented HAR model estimated via the LASSO shrinkage. We study the sensitivity of forecasts to the model specification by incorporating a measurement error correction as well as cross-sectional jump component measures. The out-of-sample forecast evaluation of the models is assessed with numerical implementations.
A New Measure of Model Redundancy for Compressed Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Feiqing Huang, Yuefeng Si, Yao Zheng, Guodong Li
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Tensor Decomposition

While recently many designs have been proposed to improve the model efficiency of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on a fixed resource budget, theoretical understanding of these designs is still conspicuously lacking. This paper aims to provide a new framework for answering the question: Is there still any remaining model redundancy in a compressed CNN? We begin by developing a general statistical formulation of CNNs and compressed CNNs via the tensor decomposition, such that the weights across layers can be summarized into a single tensor. Then, through a rigorous sample complexity analysis, we reveal an important discrepancy between the derived sample complexity and the naive parameter counting, which serves as a direct indicator of the model redundancy. Motivated by this finding, we introduce a new model redundancy measure for compressed CNNs, called the $K/R$ ratio, which further allows for nonlinear activations. The usefulness of this new measure is supported by ablation studies on popular block designs and datasets.
Avoiding C-hacking when evaluating survival distribution predictions with discrimination measures
Authors: Raphael Sonabend, Andreas Bender, Sebastian Vollmer
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

In this paper we consider how to evaluate survival distribution predictions with measures of discrimination. This is a non-trivial problem as discrimination measures are the most commonly used in survival analysis and yet there is no clear method to derive a risk prediction from a distribution prediction. We survey methods proposed in literature and software and consider their respective advantages and disadvantages. Whilst distributions are frequently evaluated by discrimination measures, we find that the method for doing so is rarely described in the literature and often leads to unfair comparisons. We find that the most robust method of reducing a distribution to a risk is to sum over the predicted cumulative hazard. We recommend that machine learning survival analysis software implements clear transformations between distribution and risk predictions in order to allow more transparent and accessible model evaluation. The code used in the final experiment is available at https://github.com/RaphaelS1/distribution_discrimination.
Multimodal Pre-Training Model for Sequence-based Prediction of Protein-Protein Interaction
Authors: Yang Xue, Zijing Liu, Xiaomin Fang, Fan Wang
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are essentials for many biological processes where two or more proteins physically bind together to achieve their functions. Modeling PPIs is useful for many biomedical applications, such as vaccine design, antibody therapeutics, and peptide drug discovery. Pre-training a protein model to learn effective representation is critical for PPIs. Most pre-training models for PPIs are sequence-based, which naively adopt the language models used in natural language processing to amino acid sequences. More advanced works utilize the structure-aware pre-training technique, taking advantage of the contact maps of known protein structures. However, neither sequences nor contact maps can fully characterize structures and functions of the proteins, which are closely related to the PPI problem. Inspired by this insight, we propose a multimodal protein pre-training model with three modalities: sequence, structure, and function (S2F). Notably, instead of using contact maps to learn the amino acid-level rigid structures, we encode the structure feature with the topology complex of point clouds of heavy atoms. It allows our model to learn structural information about not only the backbones but also the side chains. Moreover, our model incorporates the knowledge from the functional description of proteins extracted from literature or manual annotations. Our experiments show that the S2F learns protein embeddings that achieve good performances on a variety of PPIs tasks, including cross-species PPI, antibody-antigen affinity prediction, antibody neutralization prediction for SARS-CoV-2, and mutation-driven binding affinity change prediction.
Next Steps: Learning a Disentangled Gait Representation for Versatile Quadruped Locomotion
Authors: Alexander L. Mitchell, Wolfgang Merkt, Mathieu Geisert, Siddhant Gangapurwala, Martin Engelcke, Oiwi Parker Jones, Ioannis Havoutis, Ingmar Posner
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

Quadruped locomotion is rapidly maturing to a degree where robots now routinely traverse a variety of unstructured terrains. However, while gaits can be varied typically by selecting from a range of pre-computed styles, current planners are unable to vary key gait parameters continuously while the robot is in motion. The synthesis, on-the-fly, of gaits with unexpected operational characteristics or even the blending of dynamic manoeuvres lies beyond the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art. In this work we address this limitation by learning a latent space capturing the key stance phases of a particular gait, via a generative model trained on a single trot style. This encourages disentanglement such that application of a drive signal to a single dimension of the latent state induces holistic plans synthesising a continuous variety of trot styles. In fact properties of this drive signal map directly to gait parameters such as cadence, footstep height and full stance duration. The use of a generative model facilitates the detection and mitigation of disturbances to provide a versatile and robust planning framework. We evaluate our approach on a real ANYmal quadruped robot and demonstrate that our method achieves a continuous blend of dynamic trot styles whilst being robust and reactive to external perturbations.
Effective dimension of machine learning models
Authors: Amira Abbas, David Sutter, Alessio Figalli, Stefan Woerner
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Making statements about the performance of trained models on tasks involving new data is one of the primary goals of machine learning, i.e., to understand the generalization power of a model. Various capacity measures try to capture this ability, but usually fall short in explaining important characteristics of models that we observe in practice. In this study, we propose the local effective dimension as a capacity measure which seems to correlate well with generalization error on standard data sets. Importantly, we prove that the local effective dimension bounds the generalization error and discuss the aptness of this capacity measure for machine learning models.
Combining Textual Features for the Detection of Hateful and Offensive Language
Authors: Sherzod Hakimov, Ralph Ewerth
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

The detection of offensive, hateful and profane language has become a critical challenge since many users in social networks are exposed to cyberbullying activities on a daily basis. In this paper, we present an analysis of combining different textual features for the detection of hateful or offensive posts on Twitter. We provide a detailed experimental evaluation to understand the impact of each building block in a neural network architecture. The proposed architecture is evaluated on the English Subtask 1A: Identifying Hate, offensive and profane content from the post datasets of HASOC-2021 dataset under the team name TIB-VA. We compared different variants of the contextual word embeddings combined with the character level embeddings and the encoding of collected hate terms.
GPU backed Data Mining on Android Devices
Authors: Robert Fritze, Claudia Plant
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Choosing an appropriate programming paradigm for high-performance computing on low-power devices can be useful to speed up calculations. Many Android devices have an integrated GPU and - although not officially supported - the OpenCL framework can be used on Android devices for addressing these GPUs. OpenCL supports thread and data parallelism. Applications that use the GPU must account for the fact that they can be suspended by the user or the Android operating system at any moment. We have created a wrapper library that allows to use OpenCL on Android devices. Already written OpenCL programs can be executed with almost no modification. We have used this library to compare the performance of the DBSCAN and Kmeans algorithms on an integrated GPU of an Arm-v7 tablet with other single and multithreaded implementations on the same device. We have investigated which programming paradigm and language allows the best tradeoff between execution speed and energy consumption. Using the GPU for HPC on Android devices can help to carry out computationally intensive machine learning or data mining tasks in remote areas, under harsh environmental conditions and in areas where energy supply is an issue.
Detecting potentially harmful and protective suicide-related content on twitter: A machine learning approach
Authors: Hannah Metzler, Hubert Baginski, Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, David Garcia
Date: 2021-12-09 00:00:00

Research shows that exposure to suicide-related news media content is associated with suicide rates, with some content characteristics likely having harmful and others potentially protective effects. Although good evidence exists for a few selected characteristics, systematic large scale investigations are missing in general, and in particular for social media data. We apply machine learning methods to classify large quantities of Twitter data according to a novel annotation scheme that distinguishes 12 categories of suicide-related tweets. We then trained a benchmark of machine learning models including a majority classifier, an approach based on word frequency (TF-IDF with a linear SVM) and two state-of-the-art deep learning models (BERT, XLNet). The two deep learning models achieved the best performance in two classification tasks: In the first task, we classified six main content categories, including personal stories about either suicidal ideation and attempts or coping, calls for action intending to spread either problem awareness or prevention-related information, reporting of suicide cases, and other tweets irrelevant to these categories. The deep learning models reached accuracy scores above 73% on average across the six categories, and F1-scores in between 0.70 and 0.85 for all but the suicidal ideation and attempts category (0.51-0.55). In the second task, separating tweets referring to actual suicide from off-topic tweets, they correctly labeled around 88% of tweets, with BERT achieving F1-scores of 0.93 and 0.74 for the two categories, respectively. These classification performances are comparable to the state-of-the-art on similar tasks. By making data labeling more efficient, this work has enabled large-scale investigations on harmful and protective associations of social media content with suicide rates and help-seeking behavior.