pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Interactive Portrait Harmonization
Authors: Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, He Zhang, Jianming Zhang, Yilin Wang, Zhe Lin, Jose Echevarria, Yinglan Ma, Zijun Wei, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Harmonization

Current image harmonization methods consider the entire background as the guidance for harmonization. However, this may limit the capability for user to choose any specific object/person in the background to guide the harmonization. To enable flexible interaction between user and harmonization, we introduce interactive harmonization, a new setting where the harmonization is performed with respect to a selected \emph{region} in the reference image instead of the entire background. A new flexible framework that allows users to pick certain regions of the background image and use it to guide the harmonization is proposed. Inspired by professional portrait harmonization users, we also introduce a new luminance matching loss to optimally match the color/luminance conditions between the composite foreground and select reference region. This framework provides more control to the image harmonization pipeline achieving visually pleasing portrait edits. Furthermore, we also introduce a new dataset carefully curated for validating portrait harmonization. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach is efficient and robust compared to previous harmonization baselines, especially for portraits. Project Webpage at \href{https://jeya-maria-jose.github.io/IPH-web/}{https://jeya-maria-jose.github.io/IPH-web/}
Driving Anomaly Detection Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Network
Authors: Yuning Qiu, Teruhisa Misu, Carlos Busso
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Generative Adversarial Network

Anomaly driving detection is an important problem in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). It is important to identify potential hazard scenarios as early as possible to avoid potential accidents. This study proposes an unsupervised method to quantify driving anomalies using a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN). The approach predicts upcoming driving scenarios by conditioning the models on the previously observed signals. The system uses the difference of the output from the discriminator between the predicted and actual signals as a metric to quantify the anomaly degree of a driving segment. We take a driver-centric approach, considering physiological signals from the driver and controller area network-Bus (CAN-Bus) signals from the vehicle. The approach is implemented with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract discriminative feature representations, and with long short-term memory (LSTM) cells to capture temporal information. The study is implemented and evaluated with the driving anomaly dataset (DAD), which includes 250 hours of naturalistic recordings manually annotated with driving events. The experimental results reveal that recordings annotated with events that are likely to be anomalous, such as avoiding on-road pedestrians and traffic rule violations, have higher anomaly scores than recordings without any event annotation. The results are validated with perceptual evaluations, where annotators are asked to assess the risk and familiarity of the videos detected with high anomaly scores. The results indicate that the driving segments with higher anomaly scores are more risky and less regularly seen on the road than other driving segments, validating the proposed unsupervised approach.
WeakM3D: Towards Weakly Supervised Monocular 3D Object Detection
Authors: Liang Peng, Senbo Yan, Boxi Wu, Zheng Yang, Xiaofei He, Deng Cai
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Monocular 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Understanding, Weakly Supervised 3D Detection

Monocular 3D object detection is one of the most challenging tasks in 3D scene understanding. Due to the ill-posed nature of monocular imagery, existing monocular 3D detection methods highly rely on training with the manually annotated 3D box labels on the LiDAR point clouds. This annotation process is very laborious and expensive. To dispense with the reliance on 3D box labels, in this paper we explore the weakly supervised monocular 3D detection. Specifically, we first detect 2D boxes on the image. Then, we adopt the generated 2D boxes to select corresponding RoI LiDAR points as the weak supervision. Eventually, we adopt a network to predict 3D boxes which can tightly align with associated RoI LiDAR points. This network is learned by minimizing our newly-proposed 3D alignment loss between the 3D box estimates and the corresponding RoI LiDAR points. We will illustrate the potential challenges of the above learning problem and resolve these challenges by introducing several effective designs into our method. Codes will be available at https://github.com/SPengLiang/WeakM3D.
Represent, Compare, and Learn: A Similarity-Aware Framework for Class-Agnostic Counting
Authors: Min Shi, Hao Lu, Chen Feng, Chengxin Liu, Zhiguo Cao
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Object Counting

Class-agnostic counting (CAC) aims to count all instances in a query image given few exemplars. A standard pipeline is to extract visual features from exemplars and match them with query images to infer object counts. Two essential components in this pipeline are feature representation and similarity metric. Existing methods either adopt a pretrained network to represent features or learn a new one, while applying a naive similarity metric with fixed inner product. We find this paradigm leads to noisy similarity matching and hence harms counting performance. In this work, we propose a similarity-aware CAC framework that jointly learns representation and similarity metric. We first instantiate our framework with a naive baseline called Bilinear Matching Network (BMNet), whose key component is a learnable bilinear similarity metric. To further embody the core of our framework, we extend BMNet to BMNet+ that models similarity from three aspects: 1) representing the instances via their self-similarity to enhance feature robustness against intra-class variations; 2) comparing the similarity dynamically to focus on the key patterns of each exemplar; 3) learning from a supervision signal to impose explicit constraints on matching results. Extensive experiments on a recent CAC dataset FSC147 show that our models significantly outperform state-of-the-art CAC approaches. In addition, we also validate the cross-dataset generality of BMNet and BMNet+ on a car counting dataset CARPK. Code is at tiny.one/BMNet
The Design and Implementation of a Broadly Applicable Algorithm for Optimizing Intra-Day Surgical Scheduling
Authors: Jin Xie, Teng Zhang, Jose Blanchet, Peter Glynn, Matthew Randolph, David Scheinker
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Surgical scheduling optimization is an active area of research. However, few algorithms to optimize surgical scheduling are implemented and see sustained use. An algorithm is more likely to be implemented, if it allows for surgeon autonomy, i.e., requires only limited scheduling centralization, and functions in the limited technical infrastructure of widely used electronic medical records (EMRs). In order for an algorithm to see sustained use, it must be compatible with changes to hospital capacity, patient volumes, and scheduling practices. To meet these objectives, we developed the BEDS (better elective day of surgery) algorithm, a greedy heuristic for smoothing unit-specific surgical admissions across days. We implemented BEDS in the EMR of a large pediatric academic medical center. The use of BEDS was associated with a reduction in the variability in the number of admissions. BEDS is freely available as a dashboard in Tableau, a commercial software used by numerous hospitals. BEDS is readily implementable with the limited tools available to most hospitals, does not require reductions to surgeon autonomy or centralized scheduling, and is compatible with changes to hospital capacity or patient volumes. We present a general algorithmic framework from which BEDS is derived based on a particular choice of objectives and constraints. We argue that algorithms generated by this framework retain many of the desirable characteristics of BEDS while being compatible with a wide range of objectives and constraints.
YAKE! Keyword extraction from single documents using multiple local features
Authors: Ricardo Campos, Vítor Mangaravite, Arian Pasquali, A. Jorge, C. Nunes, A. Jatowt
Date: 2018-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECIR 2018 2018 3
Tasks: Keyword Extraction, Natural Language Understanding

In this paper, we present YAKE!, a novel feature-based system for
multi-lingual keyword extraction from single documents, which supports texts
of different sizes, domains or languages. Unlike most systems, YAKE! does not
rely on dictionaries or thesauri, neither it is trained against any corpora. Instead,
we follow an unsupervised approach which builds upon features extracted from
the text, making it thus applicable to documents written in many different languages without the need for external knowledge. This can be beneficial for a large number of tasks and a plethora of situations where the access to training
corpora is either limited or restricted. In this demo, we offer an easy to use,
interactive session, where users from both academia and industry can try our
system, either by using a sample document or by introducing their own text. As
an add-on, we compare our extracted keywords against the output produced by
the IBM Natural Language Understanding (IBM NLU) and Rake system.
YAKE! demo is available at http://bit.ly/YakeDemoECIR2018. A python
implementation of YAKE! is also available at PyPi repository (https://pypi.
python.org/pypi/yake/).
Biasing Like Human: A Cognitive Bias Framework for Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Xiaoguang Chang, Teng Wang, Changyin Sun, Wenzhe Cai
Date: 2022-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Predicate Classification, Relation, Scene Graph Generation

Scene graph generation is a sophisticated task because there is no specific recognition pattern (e.g., "looking at" and "near" have no conspicuous difference concerning vision, whereas "near" could occur between entities with different morphology). Thus some scene graph generation methods are trapped into most frequent relation predictions caused by capricious visual features and trivial dataset annotations. Therefore, recent works emphasized the "unbiased" approaches to balance predictions for a more informative scene graph. However, human's quick and accurate judgments over relations between numerous objects should be attributed to "bias" (i.e., experience and linguistic knowledge) rather than pure vision. To enhance the model capability, inspired by the "cognitive bias" mechanism, we propose a novel 3-paradigms framework that simulates how humans incorporate the label linguistic features as guidance of vision-based representations to better mine hidden relation patterns and alleviate noisy visual propagation. Our framework is model-agnostic to any scene graph model. Comprehensive experiments prove our framework outperforms baseline modules in several metrics with minimum parameters increment and achieves new SOTA performance on Visual Genome dataset.
Pre-Trained Multilingual Sequence-to-Sequence Models: A Hope for Low-Resource Language Translation?
Authors: En-Shiun Annie Lee, Sarubi Thillainathan, Shravan Nayak, Surangika Ranathunga, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Ruisi Su, Arya D. McCarthy
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

What can pre-trained multilingual sequence-to-sequence models like mBART contribute to translating low-resource languages? We conduct a thorough empirical experiment in 10 languages to ascertain this, considering five factors: (1) the amount of fine-tuning data, (2) the noise in the fine-tuning data, (3) the amount of pre-training data in the model, (4) the impact of domain mismatch, and (5) language typology. In addition to yielding several heuristics, the experiments form a framework for evaluating the data sensitivities of machine translation systems. While mBART is robust to domain differences, its translations for unseen and typologically distant languages remain below 3.0 BLEU. In answer to our title's question, mBART is not a low-resource panacea; we therefore encourage shifting the emphasis from new models to new data.
Morphological Processing of Low-Resource Languages: Where We Are and What's Next
Authors: Adam Wiemerslage, Miikka Silfverberg, Changbing Yang, Arya D. McCarthy, Garrett Nicolai, Eliana Colunga, Katharina Kann
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00

Automatic morphological processing can aid downstream natural language processing applications, especially for low-resource languages, and assist language documentation efforts for endangered languages. Having long been multilingual, the field of computational morphology is increasingly moving towards approaches suitable for languages with minimal or no annotated resources. First, we survey recent developments in computational morphology with a focus on low-resource languages. Second, we argue that the field is ready to tackle the logical next challenge: understanding a language's morphology from raw text alone. We perform an empirical study on a truly unsupervised version of the paradigm completion task and show that, while existing state-of-the-art models bridged by two newly proposed models we devise perform reasonably, there is still much room for improvement. The stakes are high: solving this task will increase the language coverage of morphological resources by a number of magnitudes.
Synthetic Question Value Estimation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering
Authors: Xiang Yue, Ziyu Yao, Huan Sun
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Question Answering

Synthesizing QA pairs with a question generator (QG) on the target domain has become a popular approach for domain adaptation of question answering (QA) models. Since synthetic questions are often noisy in practice, existing work adapts scores from a pretrained QA (or QG) model as criteria to select high-quality questions. However, these scores do not directly serve the ultimate goal of improving QA performance on the target domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel idea of training a question value estimator (QVE) that directly estimates the usefulness of synthetic questions for improving the target-domain QA performance. By conducting comprehensive experiments, we show that the synthetic questions selected by QVE can help achieve better target-domain QA performance, in comparison with existing techniques. We additionally show that by using such questions and only around 15% of the human annotations on the target domain, we can achieve comparable performance to the fully-supervised baselines.
C-MORE: Pretraining to Answer Open-Domain Questions by Consulting Millions of References
Authors: Xiang Yue, Xiaoman Pan, Wenlin Yao, Dian Yu, Dong Yu, Jianshu Chen
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering

We consider the problem of pretraining a two-stage open-domain question answering (QA) system (retriever + reader) with strong transfer capabilities. The key challenge is how to construct a large amount of high-quality question-answer-context triplets without task-specific annotations. Specifically, the triplets should align well with downstream tasks by: (i) covering a wide range of domains (for open-domain applications), (ii) linking a question to its semantically relevant context with supporting evidence (for training the retriever), and (iii) identifying the correct answer in the context (for training the reader). Previous pretraining approaches generally fall short of one or more of these requirements. In this work, we automatically construct a large-scale corpus that meets all three criteria by consulting millions of references cited within Wikipedia. The well-aligned pretraining signals benefit both the retriever and the reader significantly. Our pretrained retriever leads to 2%-10% absolute gains in top-20 accuracy. And with our pretrained reader, the entire system improves by up to 4% in exact match.
An Analysis of Negation in Natural Language Understanding Corpora
Authors: Md Mosharaf Hossain, Dhivya Chinnappa, Eduardo Blanco
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Negation

This paper analyzes negation in eight popular corpora spanning six natural language understanding tasks. We show that these corpora have few negations compared to general-purpose English, and that the few negations in them are often unimportant. Indeed, one can often ignore negations and still make the right predictions. Additionally, experimental results show that state-of-the-art transformers trained with these corpora obtain substantially worse results with instances that contain negation, especially if the negations are important. We conclude that new corpora accounting for negation are needed to solve natural language understanding tasks when negation is present.
Creating Multimedia Summaries Using Tweets and Videos
Authors: Anietie Andy, Siyi Liu, Daphne Ippolito, Reno Kriz, Chris Callison-Burch, Derry Wijaya
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00

While popular televised events such as presidential debates or TV shows are airing, people provide commentary on them in real-time. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to combine social media commentary and videos to create a multimedia summary of televised events. Our approach identifies scenes from these events based on spikes of mentions of people involved in the event and automatically selects tweets and frames from the videos that occur during the time period of the spike that talk about and show the people being discussed.
BPE vs. Morphological Segmentation: A Case Study on Machine Translation of Four Polysynthetic Languages
Authors: Manuel Mager, Arturo Oncevay, Elisabeth Mager, Katharina Kann, Ngoc Thang Vu
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Segmentation, Translation

Morphologically-rich polysynthetic languages present a challenge for NLP systems due to data sparsity, and a common strategy to handle this issue is to apply subword segmentation. We investigate a wide variety of supervised and unsupervised morphological segmentation methods for four polysynthetic languages: Nahuatl, Raramuri, Shipibo-Konibo, and Wixarika. Then, we compare the morphologically inspired segmentation methods against Byte-Pair Encodings (BPEs) as inputs for machine translation (MT) when translating to and from Spanish. We show that for all language pairs except for Nahuatl, an unsupervised morphological segmentation algorithm outperforms BPEs consistently and that, although supervised methods achieve better segmentation scores, they under-perform in MT challenges. Finally, we contribute two new morphological segmentation datasets for Raramuri and Shipibo-Konibo, and a parallel corpus for Raramuri--Spanish.
Speaker Information Can Guide Models to Better Inductive Biases: A Case Study On Predicting Code-Switching
Authors: Alissa Ostapenko, Shuly Wintner, Melinda Fricke, Yulia Tsvetkov
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Natural language processing (NLP) models trained on people-generated data can be unreliable because, without any constraints, they can learn from spurious correlations that are not relevant to the task. We hypothesize that enriching models with speaker information in a controlled, educated way can guide them to pick up on relevant inductive biases. For the speaker-driven task of predicting code-switching points in English--Spanish bilingual dialogues, we show that adding sociolinguistically-grounded speaker features as prepended prompts significantly improves accuracy. We find that by adding influential phrases to the input, speaker-informed models learn useful and explainable linguistic information. To our knowledge, we are the first to incorporate speaker characteristics in a neural model for code-switching, and more generally, take a step towards developing transparent, personalized models that use speaker information in a controlled way.
Label Semantics for Few Shot Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Jie Ma, Miguel Ballesteros, Srikanth Doss, Rishita Anubhai, Sunil Mallya, Yaser Al-Onaizan, Dan Roth
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Few-shot NER, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

We study the problem of few shot learning for named entity recognition. Specifically, we leverage the semantic information in the names of the labels as a way of giving the model additional signal and enriched priors. We propose a neural architecture that consists of two BERT encoders, one to encode the document and its tokens and another one to encode each of the labels in natural language format. Our model learns to match the representations of named entities computed by the first encoder with label representations computed by the second encoder. The label semantics signal is shown to support improved state-of-the-art results in multiple few shot NER benchmarks and on-par performance in standard benchmarks. Our model is especially effective in low resource settings.
AdapLeR: Speeding up Inference by Adaptive Length Reduction
Authors: Ali Modarressi, Hosein Mohebbi, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5

Pre-trained language models have shown stellar performance in various downstream tasks. But, this usually comes at the cost of high latency and computation, hindering their usage in resource-limited settings. In this work, we propose a novel approach for reducing the computational cost of BERT with minimal loss in downstream performance. Our method dynamically eliminates less contributing tokens through layers, resulting in shorter lengths and consequently lower computational cost. To determine the importance of each token representation, we train a Contribution Predictor for each layer using a gradient-based saliency method. Our experiments on several diverse classification tasks show speedups up to 22x during inference time without much sacrifice in performance. We also validate the quality of the selected tokens in our method using human annotations in the ERASER benchmark. In comparison to other widely used strategies for selecting important tokens, such as saliency and attention, our proposed method has a significantly lower false positive rate in generating rationales. Our code is freely available at https://github.com/amodaresi/AdapLeR .
AdaLoGN: Adaptive Logic Graph Network for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Xiao Li, Gong Cheng, Ziheng Chen, Yawei Sun, Yuzhong Qu
Date: 2022-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Machine Reading Comprehension, Multiple-choice, Reading Comprehension

Recent machine reading comprehension datasets such as ReClor and LogiQA require performing logical reasoning over text. Conventional neural models are insufficient for logical reasoning, while symbolic reasoners cannot directly apply to text. To meet the challenge, we present a neural-symbolic approach which, to predict an answer, passes messages over a graph representing logical relations between text units. It incorporates an adaptive logic graph network (AdaLoGN) which adaptively infers logical relations to extend the graph and, essentially, realizes mutual and iterative reinforcement between neural and symbolic reasoning. We also implement a novel subgraph-to-node message passing mechanism to enhance context-option interaction for answering multiple-choice questions. Our approach shows promising results on ReClor and LogiQA.