pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On Distinctive Image Captioning via Comparing and Reweighting
Authors: Jiuniu Wang, Wenjia Xu, Qingzhong Wang, Antoni B. Chan
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Retrieval, Sentence

Recent image captioning models are achieving impressive results based on popular metrics, i.e., BLEU, CIDEr, and SPICE. However, focusing on the most popular metrics that only consider the overlap between the generated captions and human annotation could result in using common words and phrases, which lacks distinctiveness, i.e., many similar images have the same caption. In this paper, we aim to improve the distinctiveness of image captions via comparing and reweighting with a set of similar images. First, we propose a distinctiveness metric -- between-set CIDEr (CIDErBtw) to evaluate the distinctiveness of a caption with respect to those of similar images. Our metric reveals that the human annotations of each image in the MSCOCO dataset are not equivalent based on distinctiveness; however, previous works normally treat the human annotations equally during training, which could be a reason for generating less distinctive captions. In contrast, we reweight each ground-truth caption according to its distinctiveness during training. We further integrate a long-tailed weight strategy to highlight the rare words that contain more information, and captions from the similar image set are sampled as negative examples to encourage the generated sentence to be unique. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted, showing that our proposed approach significantly improves both distinctiveness (as measured by CIDErBtw and retrieval metrics) and accuracy (e.g., as measured by CIDEr) for a wide variety of image captioning baselines. These results are further confirmed through a user study.
HINNPerf: Hierarchical Interaction Neural Network for Performance Prediction of Configurable Systems
Authors: Jiezhu Cheng, Cuiyun Gao, Zibin Zheng
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Modern software systems are usually highly configurable, providing users with customized functionality through various configuration options. Understanding how system performance varies with different option combinations is important to determine optimal configurations that meet specific requirements. Due to the complex interactions among multiple options and the high cost of performance measurement under a huge configuration space, it is challenging to study how different configurations influence the system performance. To address these challenges, we propose HINNPerf, a novel hierarchical interaction neural network for performance prediction of configurable systems. HINNPerf employs the embedding method and hierarchic network blocks to model the complicated interplay between configuration options, which improves the prediction accuracy of the method. Besides, we devise a hierarchical regularization strategy to enhance the model robustness. Empirical results on 10 real-world configurable systems show that our method statistically significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by achieving average 22.67% improvement in prediction accuracy. In addition, combined with the Integrated Gradients method, the designed hierarchical architecture provides some insights about the interaction complexity and the significance of configuration options, which might help users and developers better understand how the configurable system works and efficiently identify significant options affecting the performance.
Optimizing Coordinative Schedules for Tanker Terminals: An Intelligent Large Spatial-Temporal Data-Driven Approach -- Part 1
Authors: Deqing Zhai, Xiuju Fu, Xiao Feng Yin, Haiyan Xu, Wanbing Zhang, Ning li
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

In this study, a novel coordinative scheduling optimization approach is proposed to enhance port efficiency by reducing average wait time and turnaround time. The proposed approach consists of enhanced particle swarm optimization (ePSO) as kernel and augmented firefly algorithm (AFA) as global optimal search. Two paradigm methods of the proposed approach are investigated, which are batch method and rolling horizon method. The experimental results show that both paradigm methods of proposed approach can effectively enhance port efficiency. The average wait time could be significantly reduced by 86.0% - 95.5%, and the average turnaround time could eventually save 38.2% - 42.4% with respect to historical benchmarks. Moreover, the paradigm method of rolling horizon could reduce to 20 mins on running time over 3-month datasets, rather than 4 hrs on batch method at corresponding maximum performance.
Picture Fuzzy Interactional Aggregation Operators via Strict Triangular Norms and Applications to Multi-Criteria Decision Making
Authors: X. Wu, Z. Zhu, G. Çaylı, P. Liu, X. Zhang, Z. Yang
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The picture fuzzy set, characterized by three membership degrees, is a helpful tool for multi-criteria decision making (MCDM). This paper investigates the structure of the closed operational laws in the picture fuzzy numbers (PFNs) and proposes efficient picture fuzzy MCDM methods. We first introduce an admissible order for PFNs and prove that all PFNs form a complete lattice under this order. Then, we give some specific examples to show the non-closeness of some existing picture fuzzy aggregation operators. To ensure the closeness of the operational laws in PFNs, we construct a new class of picture fuzzy operators based on strict triangular norms, which consider the interaction between the positive degrees (negative degrees) and the neutral degrees. Based on these new operators, we obtain the picture fuzzy interactional weighted average (PFIWA) operator and the picture fuzzy interactional weighted geometric (PFIWG) operator. They are proved to be monotonous, idempotent, bounded, shift-invariant, and homogeneous. We also establish a novel MCDM method under the picture fuzzy environment applying PFIWA and PFIWG operators. Furthermore, we present an illustrative example for a clear understanding of our method. We also give the comparative analysis among the operators induced by six classes of famous triangular norms.
PharmMT: A Neural Machine Translation Approach to Simplify Prescription Directions
Authors: Jiazhao Li, Corey Lester, Xinyan Zhao, Yuting Ding, Yun Jiang, V. G. Vinod Vydiswaran
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

The language used by physicians and health professionals in prescription directions includes medical jargon and implicit directives and causes much confusion among patients. Human intervention to simplify the language at the pharmacies may introduce additional errors that can lead to potentially severe health outcomes. We propose a novel machine translation-based approach, PharmMT, to automatically and reliably simplify prescription directions into patient-friendly language, thereby significantly reducing pharmacist workload. We evaluate the proposed approach over a dataset consisting of over 530K prescriptions obtained from a large mail-order pharmacy. The end-to-end system achieves a BLEU score of 60.27 against the reference directions generated by pharmacists, a 39.6% relative improvement over the rule-based normalization. Pharmacists judged 94.3% of the simplified directions as usable as-is or with minimal changes. This work demonstrates the feasibility of a machine translation-based tool for simplifying prescription directions in real-life.
Does the Market of Citations Reward Reproducible Work?
Authors: Edward Raff
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00

The field of bibliometrics, studying citations and behavior, is critical to the discussion of reproducibility. Citations are one of the primary incentive and reward systems for academic work, and so we desire to know if this incentive rewards reproducible work. Yet to the best of our knowledge, only one work has attempted to look at this combined space, concluding that non-reproducible work is more highly cited. We show that answering this question is more challenging than first proposed, and subtle issues can inhibit a robust conclusion. To make inferences with more robust behavior, we propose a hierarchical Bayesian model that incorporates the citation rate over time, rather than the total number of citations after a fixed amount of time. In doing so we show that, under current evidence the answer is more likely that certain fields of study such as Medicine and Machine Learning (ML) do correlate reproducible works with more citations, but other fields appear to have no relationship. Further, we find that making code available and thoroughly referencing prior works appear to also positively correlate with increased citations. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/EdwardRaff/ReproducibleCitations .
IA-GCN: Interactive Graph Convolutional Network for Recommendation
Authors: Yinan Zhang, Pei Wang, Congcong Liu, Xiwei Zhao, Hao Qi, Jie He, Junsheng Jin, Changping Peng, Zhangang Lin, Jingping Shao
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

Recently, Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has become a novel state-of-art for Collaborative Filtering (CF) based Recommender Systems (RS). It is a common practice to learn informative user and item representations by performing embedding propagation on a user-item bipartite graph, and then provide the users with personalized item suggestions based on the representations. Despite effectiveness, existing algorithms neglect precious interactive features between user-item pairs in the embedding process. When predicting a user's preference for different items, they still aggregate the user tree in the same way, without emphasizing target-related information in the user neighborhood. Such a uniform aggregation scheme easily leads to suboptimal user and item representations, limiting the model expressiveness to some extent. In this work, we address this problem by building bilateral interactive guidance between each user-item pair and proposing a new model named IA-GCN (short for InterActive GCN). Specifically, when learning the user representation from its neighborhood, we assign higher attention weights to those neighbors similar to the target item. Correspondingly, when learning the item representation, we pay more attention to those neighbors resembling the target user. This leads to interactive and interpretable features, effectively distilling target-specific information through each graph convolutional operation. Our model is built on top of LightGCN, a state-of-the-art GCN model for CF, and can be combined with various GCN-based CF architectures in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of IA-GCN.
End-of-Life of Software How is it Defined and Managed?
Authors: Zena Assaad, Mina Henein
Date: 2022-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The rapid development of new software and algorithms, fueled by the immense amount of data available, has made the shelf life of software products a lot shorter. With a rough estimate of more than 40,000 new software projects developed every day, it is becoming quicker and cheaper to abandon old software and acquire new software that meets rapidly changing needs and demands. What happens to software that is abandoned and what consequences may arise from 'throwaway' culture (Cooper, 2005) are still open questions. This paper will explore the systems engineering concept of end-of-life for software, it will highlight the gaps in existing software engineering practices, it will bring forward examples of software that has been abandoned in an attempt to decommission and it will explore the repercussions of abandoned software artefacts. A proposed way forward for addressing the identified research gaps is also detailed.
TorMentor: Deterministic dynamic-path, data augmentations with fractals
Authors: Anguelos Nicolaou, Vincent Christlein, Edgar Riba, Jian Shi, Georg Vogeler, Mathias Seuret
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition In Videos, Binarization, Data Augmentation, GPU, Image Augmentation, Image Segmentation, No real Data Binarization, Semantic Segmentation, Synthetic Data Binarization, Synthetic Data Generation

We propose the use of fractals as a means of efficient data augmentation. Specifically, we employ plasma fractals for adapting global image augmentation transformations into continuous local transforms. We formulate the diamond square algorithm as a cascade of simple convolution operations allowing efficient computation of plasma fractals on the GPU. We present the TorMentor image augmentation framework that is totally modular and deterministic across images and point-clouds. All image augmentation operations can be combined through pipelining and random branching to form flow networks of arbitrary width and depth. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach with experiments on document image segmentation (binarization) with the DIBCO datasets. The proposed approach demonstrates superior performance to traditional image augmentation techniques. Finally, we use extended synthetic binary text images in a self-supervision regiment and outperform the same model when trained with limited data and simple extensions.
Automated Isovist Computation for Minecraft
Authors: Jean-Baptiste Hervé, Christoph Salge
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Minecraft

Procedural content generation for games is a growing trend in both research and industry, even though there is no consensus of how good content looks, nor how to automatically evaluate it. A number of metrics have been developed in the past, usually focused on the artifact as a whole, and mostly lacking grounding in human experience. In this study we develop a new set of automated metrics, motivated by ideas from architecture, namely isovists and space syntax, which have a track record of capturing human experience of space. These metrics can be computed for a specific game state, from the player's perspective, and take into account their embodiment in the game world. We show how to apply those metrics to the 3d blockworld of Minecraft. We use a dataset of generated settlements from the GDMC Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft and establish several rank-based correlations between the isovist properties and the rating human judges gave those settelements. We also produce a range of heat maps that demonstrate the location based applicability of the approach, which allows for development of those metrics as measures for a game experience at a specific time and space.
T4PdM: a Deep Neural Network based on the Transformer Architecture for Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery
Authors: Erick Giovani Sperandio Nascimento, Julian Santana Liang, Ilan Sousa Figueiredo, Lilian Lefol Nani Guarieiro
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Fault Diagnosis, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

Deep learning and big data algorithms have become widely used in industrial applications to optimize several tasks in many complex systems. Particularly, deep learning model for diagnosing and prognosing machinery health has leveraged predictive maintenance (PdM) to be more accurate and reliable in decision making, in this way avoiding unnecessary interventions, machinery accidents, and environment catastrophes. Recently, Transformer Neural Networks have gained notoriety and have been increasingly the favorite choice for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Thus, given their recent major achievements in NLP, this paper proposes the development of an automatic fault classifier model for predictive maintenance based on a modified version of the Transformer architecture, namely T4PdM, to identify multiple types of faults in rotating machinery. Experimental results are developed and presented for the MaFaulDa and CWRU databases. T4PdM was able to achieve an overall accuracy of 99.98% and 98% for both datasets, respectively. In addition, the performance of the proposed model is compared to other previously published works. It has demonstrated the superiority of the model in detecting and classifying faults in rotating industrial machinery. Therefore, the proposed Transformer-based model can improve the performance of machinery fault analysis and diagnostic processes and leverage companies to a new era of the Industry 4.0. In addition, this methodology can be adapted to any other task of time series classification.
Predicting Solar Flares Using CNN and LSTM on Two Solar Cycles of Active Region Data
Authors: Zeyu Sun, Monica G. Bobra, Xiantong Wang, Yu Wang, Hu Sun, Tamas Gombosi, Yang Chen, Alfred Hero
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

We consider the flare prediction problem that distinguishes flare-imminent active regions that produce an M- or X-class flare in the future 24 hours, from quiet active regions that do not produce any flare within $\pm 24$ hours. Using line-of-sight magnetograms and parameters of active regions in two data products covering Solar Cycle 23 and 24, we train and evaluate two deep learning algorithms -- CNN and LSTM -- and their stacking ensembles. The decisions of CNN are explained using visual attribution methods. We have the following three main findings. (1) LSTM trained on data from two solar cycles achieves significantly higher True Skill Scores (TSS) than that trained on data from a single solar cycle with a confidence level of at least 0.95. (2) On data from Solar Cycle 23, a stacking ensemble that combines predictions from LSTM and CNN using the TSS criterion achieves significantly higher TSS than the "select-best" strategy with a confidence level of at least 0.95. (3) A visual attribution method called Integrated Gradients is able to attribute the CNN's predictions of flares to the emerging magnetic flux in the active region. It also reveals a limitation of CNN as a flare prediction method using line-of-sight magnetograms: it treats the polarity artifact of line-of-sight magnetograms as positive evidence of flares.
DAD-3DHeads: A Large-scale Dense, Accurate and Diverse Dataset for 3D Head Alignment from a Single Image
Authors: Tetiana Martyniuk, Orest Kupyn, Yana Kurlyak, Igor Krashenyi, Jiři Matas, Viktoriia Sharmanska
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Diversity, Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

We present DAD-3DHeads, a dense and diverse large-scale dataset, and a robust model for 3D Dense Head Alignment in the wild. It contains annotations of over 3.5K landmarks that accurately represent 3D head shape compared to the ground-truth scans. The data-driven model, DAD-3DNet, trained on our dataset, learns shape, expression, and pose parameters, and performs 3D reconstruction of a FLAME mesh. The model also incorporates a landmark prediction branch to take advantage of rich supervision and co-training of multiple related tasks. Experimentally, DAD-3DNet outperforms or is comparable to the state-of-the-art models in (i) 3D Head Pose Estimation on AFLW2000-3D and BIWI, (ii) 3D Face Shape Reconstruction on NoW and Feng, and (iii) 3D Dense Head Alignment and 3D Landmarks Estimation on DAD-3DHeads dataset. Finally, the diversity of DAD-3DHeads in camera angles, facial expressions, and occlusions enables a benchmark to study in-the-wild generalization and robustness to distribution shifts. The dataset webpage is https://p.farm/research/dad-3dheads.
Measuring AI Systems Beyond Accuracy
Authors: Violet Turri, Rachel Dzombak, Eric Heim, Nathan VanHoudnos, Jay Palat, Anusha Sinha
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00

Current test and evaluation (T&E) methods for assessing machine learning (ML) system performance often rely on incomplete metrics. Testing is additionally often siloed from the other phases of the ML system lifecycle. Research investigating cross-domain approaches to ML T&E is needed to drive the state of the art forward and to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineering discipline. This paper advocates for a robust, integrated approach to testing by outlining six key questions for guiding a holistic T&E strategy.
Learning to Walk Autonomously via Reset-Free Quality-Diversity
Authors: Bryan Lim, Alexander Reichenbach, Antoine Cully
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms can discover large and complex behavioural repertoires consisting of both diverse and high-performing skills. However, the generation of behavioural repertoires has mainly been limited to simulation environments instead of real-world learning. This is because existing QD algorithms need large numbers of evaluations as well as episodic resets, which require manual human supervision and interventions. This paper proposes Reset-Free Quality-Diversity optimization (RF-QD) as a step towards autonomous learning for robotics in open-ended environments. We build on Dynamics-Aware Quality-Diversity (DA-QD) and introduce a behaviour selection policy that leverages the diversity of the imagined repertoire and environmental information to intelligently select of behaviours that can act as automatic resets. We demonstrate this through a task of learning to walk within defined training zones with obstacles. Our experiments show that we can learn full repertoires of legged locomotion controllers autonomously without manual resets with high sample efficiency in spite of harsh safety constraints. Finally, using an ablation of different target objectives, we show that it is important for RF-QD to have diverse types solutions available for the behaviour selection policy over solutions optimised with a specific objective. Videos and code available at https://sites.google.com/view/rf-qd.
Transfer Attacks Revisited: A Large-Scale Empirical Study in Real Computer Vision Settings
Authors: Yuhao Mao, Chong Fu, Saizhuo Wang, Shouling Ji, Xuhong Zhang, Zhenguang Liu, Jun Zhou, Alex X. Liu, Raheem Beyah, Ting Wang
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00

One intriguing property of adversarial attacks is their "transferability" -- an adversarial example crafted with respect to one deep neural network (DNN) model is often found effective against other DNNs as well. Intensive research has been conducted on this phenomenon under simplistic controlled conditions. Yet, thus far, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding about transferability-based attacks ("transfer attacks") in real-world environments. To bridge this critical gap, we conduct the first large-scale systematic empirical study of transfer attacks against major cloud-based MLaaS platforms, taking the components of a real transfer attack into account. The study leads to a number of interesting findings which are inconsistent to the existing ones, including: (1) Simple surrogates do not necessarily improve real transfer attacks. (2) No dominant surrogate architecture is found in real transfer attacks. (3) It is the gap between posterior (output of the softmax layer) rather than the gap between logit (so-called $\kappa$ value) that increases transferability. Moreover, by comparing with prior works, we demonstrate that transfer attacks possess many previously unknown properties in real-world environments, such as (1) Model similarity is not a well-defined concept. (2) $L_2$ norm of perturbation can generate high transferability without usage of gradient and is a more powerful source than $L_\infty$ norm. We believe this work sheds light on the vulnerabilities of popular MLaaS platforms and points to a few promising research directions.