pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spatial State-Action Features for General Games
Authors: Dennis J. N. J. Soemers, Éric Piette, Matthew Stephenson, Cameron Browne
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Board Games, Game of Go

In many board games and other abstract games, patterns have been used as features that can guide automated game-playing agents. Such patterns or features often represent particular configurations of pieces, empty positions, etc., which may be relevant for a game's strategies. Their use has been particularly prevalent in the game of Go, but also many other games used as benchmarks for AI research. In this paper, we formulate a design and efficient implementation of spatial state-action features for general games. These are patterns that can be trained to incentivise or disincentivise actions based on whether or not they match variables of the state in a local area around action variables. We provide extensive details on several design and implementation choices, with a primary focus on achieving a high degree of generality to support a wide variety of different games using different board geometries or other graphs. Secondly, we propose an efficient approach for evaluating active features for any given set of features. In this approach, we take inspiration from heuristics used in problems such as SAT to optimise the order in which parts of patterns are matched and prune unnecessary evaluations. This approach is defined for a highly general and abstract description of the problem -- phrased as optimising the order in which propositions of formulas in disjunctive normal form are evaluated -- and may therefore also be of interest to other types of problems than board games. An empirical evaluation on 33 distinct games in the Ludii general game system demonstrates the efficiency of this approach in comparison to a naive baseline, as well as a baseline based on prefix trees, and demonstrates that the additional efficiency significantly improves the playing strength of agents using the features to guide search.
Efficient Data-Plane Memory Scheduling for In-Network Aggregation
Authors: Hao Wang, Yuxuan Qin, ChonLam Lao, Yanfang Le, Wenfei Wu, Kai Chen
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

As the scale of distributed training grows, communication becomes a bottleneck. To accelerate the communication, recent works introduce In-Network Aggregation (INA), which moves the gradients summation into network middle-boxes, e.g., programmable switches to reduce the traffic volume. However, switch memory is scarce compared to the volume of gradients transmitted in distributed training. Although literature applies methods like pool-based streaming or dynamic sharing to tackle the mismatch, switch memory is still a potential performance bottleneck. Furthermore, we observe the under-utilization of switch memory due to the synchronization requirement for aggregator deallocation in recent works. To improve the switch memory utilization, we propose ESA, an $\underline{E}$fficient Switch Memory $\underline{S}$cheduler for In-Network $\underline{A}$ggregation. At its cores, ESA enforces the preemptive aggregator allocation primitive and introduces priority scheduling at the data-plane, which improves the switch memory utilization and average job completion time (JCT). Experiments show that ESA can improve the average JCT by up to $1.35\times$.
Visual Identification of Problematic Bias in Large Label Spaces
Authors: Alex Bäuerle, Aybuke Gul Turker, Ken Burke, Osman Aka, Timo Ropinski, Christina Greer, Mani Varadarajan
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

While the need for well-trained, fair ML systems is increasing ever more, measuring fairness for modern models and datasets is becoming increasingly difficult as they grow at an unprecedented pace. One key challenge in scaling common fairness metrics to such models and datasets is the requirement of exhaustive ground truth labeling, which cannot always be done. Indeed, this often rules out the application of traditional analysis metrics and systems. At the same time, ML-fairness assessments cannot be made algorithmically, as fairness is a highly subjective matter. Thus, domain experts need to be able to extract and reason about bias throughout models and datasets to make informed decisions. While visual analysis tools are of great help when investigating potential bias in DL models, none of the existing approaches have been designed for the specific tasks and challenges that arise in large label spaces. Addressing the lack of visualization work in this area, we propose guidelines for designing visualizations for such large label spaces, considering both technical and ethical issues. Our proposed visualization approach can be integrated into classical model and data pipelines, and we provide an implementation of our techniques open-sourced as a TensorBoard plug-in. With our approach, different models and datasets for large label spaces can be systematically and visually analyzed and compared to make informed fairness assessments tackling problematic bias.
Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection by Self-Distillation and Negative Sampling
Authors: Nima Rafiee, Rahil Gholamipoorfard, Nikolas Adaloglou, Simon Jaxy, Julius Ramakers, Markus Kollmann
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection, Supervised Anomaly Detection

Detecting whether examples belong to a given in-distribution or are Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) requires identifying features specific to the in-distribution. In the absence of labels, these features can be learned by self-supervised techniques under the generic assumption that the most abstract features are those which are statistically most over-represented in comparison to other distributions from the same domain. In this work, we show that self-distillation of the in-distribution training set together with contrasting against negative examples derived from shifting transformation of auxiliary data strongly improves OOD detection. We find that this improvement depends on how the negative samples are generated. In particular, we observe that by leveraging negative samples, which keep the statistics of low-level features while changing the high-level semantics, higher average detection performance is obtained. Furthermore, good negative sampling strategies can be identified from the sensitivity of the OOD detection score. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated across a diverse range of OOD detection problems, setting new benchmarks for unsupervised OOD detection in the visual domain.
Chatbot System Architecture
Authors: Moataz Mohammed, Mostafa M. Aref
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

The conversational agents is one of the most interested topics in computer science field in the recent decade. Which can be composite from more than one subject in this field, which you need to apply Natural Language Processing Concepts and some Artificial Intelligence Techniques such as Deep Learning methods to make decision about how should be the response. This paper is dedicated to discuss the system architecture for the conversational agent and explain each component in details.
Fair Group-Shared Representations with Normalizing Flows
Authors: Mattia Cerrato, Marius Köppel, Alexander Segner, Stefan Kramer
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness, Representation Learning

The issue of fairness in machine learning stems from the fact that historical data often displays biases against specific groups of people which have been underprivileged in the recent past, or still are. In this context, one of the possible approaches is to employ fair representation learning algorithms which are able to remove biases from data, making groups statistically indistinguishable. In this paper, we instead develop a fair representation learning algorithm which is able to map individuals belonging to different groups in a single group. This is made possible by training a pair of Normalizing Flow models and constraining them to not remove information about the ground truth by training a ranking or classification model on top of them. The overall, ``chained'' model is invertible and has a tractable Jacobian, which allows to relate together the probability densities for different groups and ``translate'' individuals from one group to another. We show experimentally that our methodology is competitive with other fair representation learning algorithms. Furthermore, our algorithm achieves stronger invariance w.r.t. the sensitive attribute.
Landscape of Neural Architecture Search across sensors: how much do they differ ?
Authors: Kalifou René Traoré, Andrés Camero, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search

With the rapid rise of neural architecture search, the ability to understand its complexity from the perspective of a search algorithm is desirable. Recently, Traor\'e et al. have proposed the framework of Fitness Landscape Footprint to help describe and compare neural architecture search problems. It attempts at describing why a search strategy might be successful, struggle or fail on a target task. Our study leverages this methodology in the context of searching across sensors, including sensor data fusion. In particular, we apply the Fitness Landscape Footprint to the real-world image classification problem of So2Sat LCZ42, in order to identify the most beneficial sensor to our neural network hyper-parameter optimization problem. From the perspective of distributions of fitness, our findings indicate a similar behaviour of the search space for all sensors: the longer the training time, the larger the overall fitness, and more flatness in the landscapes (less ruggedness and deviation). Regarding sensors, the better the fitness they enable (Sentinel-2), the better the search trajectories (smoother, higher persistence). Results also indicate very similar search behaviour for sensors that can be decently fitted by the search space (Sentinel-2 and fusion).
Language Model-Based Paired Variational Autoencoders for Robotic Language Learning
Authors: Ozan Özdemir, Matthias Kerzel, Cornelius Weber, Jae Hee Lee, Stefan Wermter
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Human infants learn language while interacting with their environment in which their caregivers may describe the objects and actions they perform. Similar to human infants, artificial agents can learn language while interacting with their environment. In this work, first, we present a neural model that bidirectionally binds robot actions and their language descriptions in a simple object manipulation scenario. Building on our previous Paired Variational Autoencoders (PVAE) model, we demonstrate the superiority of the variational autoencoder over standard autoencoders by experimenting with cubes of different colours, and by enabling the production of alternative vocabularies. Additional experiments show that the model's channel-separated visual feature extraction module can cope with objects of different shapes. Next, we introduce PVAE-BERT, which equips the model with a pretrained large-scale language model, i.e., Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), enabling the model to go beyond comprehending only the predefined descriptions that the network has been trained on; the recognition of action descriptions generalises to unconstrained natural language as the model becomes capable of understanding unlimited variations of the same descriptions. Our experiments suggest that using a pretrained language model as the language encoder allows our approach to scale up for real-world scenarios with instructions from human users.
The CLEAR Benchmark: Continual LEArning on Real-World Imagery
Authors: Zhiqiu Lin, Jia Shi, Deepak Pathak, Deva Ramanan
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Permuted-MNIST, Unsupervised Pre-training

Continual learning (CL) is widely regarded as crucial challenge for lifelong AI. However, existing CL benchmarks, e.g. Permuted-MNIST and Split-CIFAR, make use of artificial temporal variation and do not align with or generalize to the real-world. In this paper, we introduce CLEAR, the first continual image classification benchmark dataset with a natural temporal evolution of visual concepts in the real world that spans a decade (2004-2014). We build CLEAR from existing large-scale image collections (YFCC100M) through a novel and scalable low-cost approach to visio-linguistic dataset curation. Our pipeline makes use of pretrained vision-language models (e.g. CLIP) to interactively build labeled datasets, which are further validated with crowd-sourcing to remove errors and even inappropriate images (hidden in original YFCC100M). The major strength of CLEAR over prior CL benchmarks is the smooth temporal evolution of visual concepts with real-world imagery, including both high-quality labeled data along with abundant unlabeled samples per time period for continual semi-supervised learning. We find that a simple unsupervised pre-training step can already boost state-of-the-art CL algorithms that only utilize fully-supervised data. Our analysis also reveals that mainstream CL evaluation protocols that train and test on iid data artificially inflate performance of CL system. To address this, we propose novel "streaming" protocols for CL that always test on the (near) future. Interestingly, streaming protocols (a) can simplify dataset curation since today's testset can be repurposed for tomorrow's trainset and (b) can produce more generalizable models with more accurate estimates of performance since all labeled data from each time-period is used for both training and testing (unlike classic iid train-test splits).
MuLVE, A Multi-Language Vocabulary Evaluation Data Set
Authors: Anik Jacobsen, Salar Mohtaj, Sebastian Möller
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6

Vocabulary learning is vital to foreign language learning. Correct and adequate feedback is essential to successful and satisfying vocabulary training. However, many vocabulary and language evaluation systems perform on simple rules and do not account for real-life user learning data. This work introduces Multi-Language Vocabulary Evaluation Data Set (MuLVE), a data set consisting of vocabulary cards and real-life user answers, labeled indicating whether the user answer is correct or incorrect. The data source is user learning data from the Phase6 vocabulary trainer. The data set contains vocabulary questions in German and English, Spanish, and French as target language and is available in four different variations regarding pre-processing and deduplication. We experiment to fine-tune pre-trained BERT language models on the downstream task of vocabulary evaluation with the proposed MuLVE data set. The results provide outstanding results of > 95.5 accuracy and F2-score. The data set is available on the European Language Grid.
Railway Operation Rescheduling System via Dynamic Simulation and Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Shumpei Kubosawa, Takashi Onishi, Makoto Sakahara, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

The number of railway service disruptions has been increasing owing to intensification of natural disasters. In addition, abrupt changes in social situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic require railway companies to modify the traffic schedule frequently. Therefore, automatic support for optimal scheduling is anticipated. In this study, an automatic railway scheduling system is presented. The system leverages reinforcement learning and a dynamic simulator that can simulate the railway traffic and passenger flow of a whole line. The proposed system enables rapid generation of the traffic schedule of a whole line because the optimization process is conducted in advance as the training. The system is evaluated using an interruption scenario, and the results demonstrate that the system can generate optimized schedules of the whole line in a few minutes.
Continual Transformers: Redundancy-Free Attention for Online Inference
Authors: Lukas Hedegaard, Arian Bakhtiarnia, Alexandros Iosifidis
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Audio Classification, Classification, Online Action Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Transformers in their common form are inherently limited to operate on whole token sequences rather than on one token at a time. Consequently, their use during online inference on time-series data entails considerable redundancy due to the overlap in successive token sequences. In this work, we propose novel formulations of the Scaled Dot-Product Attention, which enable Transformers to perform efficient online token-by-token inference on a continual input stream. Importantly, our modifications are purely to the order of computations, while the outputs and learned weights are identical to those of the original Transformer Encoder. We validate our Continual Transformer Encoder with experiments on the THUMOS14, TVSeries and GTZAN datasets with remarkable results: Our Continual one- and two-block architectures reduce the floating point operations per prediction by up to 63x and 2.6x, respectively, while retaining predictive performance.
Exploit Customer Life-time Value with Memoryless Experiments
Authors: Zizhao Zhang, Yifei Zhao, Guangda Huzhang
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00

As a measure of the long-term contribution produced by customers in a service or product relationship, life-time value, or LTV, can more comprehensively find the optimal strategy for service delivery. However, it is challenging to accurately abstract the LTV scene, model it reasonably, and find the optimal solution. The current theories either cannot precisely express LTV because of the single modeling structure, or there is no efficient solution. We propose a general LTV modeling method, which solves the problem that customers' long-term contribution is difficult to quantify while existing methods, such as modeling the click-through rate, only pursue the short-term contribution. At the same time, we also propose a fast dynamic programming solution based on a mutated bisection method and the memoryless repeated experiments assumption. The model and method can be applied to different service scenarios, such as the recommendation system. Experiments on real-world datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model and optimization method. In addition, this whole LTV structure was deployed at a large E-commerce mobile phone application, where it managed to select optimal push message sending time and achieved a 10\% LTV improvement.
Using Machine Learning Based Models for Personality Recognition
Authors: Fatemeh Mohades Deilami, Hossein Sadr, Mojdeh Nazari
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Personality can be defined as the combination of behavior, emotion, motivation, and thoughts that aim at describing various aspects of human behavior based on a few stable and measurable characteristics. Considering the fact that our personality has a remarkable influence in our daily life, automatic recognition of a person's personality attributes can provide many essential practical applications in various aspects of cognitive science. deep learning based method for the task of personality recognition from text is proposed in this paper. Among various deep neural networks, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have demonstrated profound efficiency in natural language processing and especially personality detection. Owing to the fact that various filter sizes in CNN may influence its performance, we decided to combine CNN with AdaBoost, a classical ensemble algorithm, to consider the possibility of using the contribution of various filter lengths and gasp their potential in the final classification via combining various classifiers with respective filter size using AdaBoost. Our proposed method was validated on the Essay dataset by conducting a series of experiments and the empirical results demonstrated the superiority of our proposed method compared to both machine learning and deep learning methods for the task of personality recognition.
Generalizable Neuro-symbolic Systems for Commonsense Question Answering
Authors: Alessandro Oltramari, Jonathan Francis, Filip Ilievski, Kaixin Ma, Roshanak Mirzaee
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering

This chapter illustrates how suitable neuro-symbolic models for language understanding can enable domain generalizability and robustness in downstream tasks. Different methods for integrating neural language models and knowledge graphs are discussed. The situations in which this combination is most appropriate are characterized, including quantitative evaluation and qualitative error analysis on a variety of commonsense question answering benchmark datasets.
Egeria: Efficient DNN Training with Knowledge-Guided Layer Freezing
Authors: Yiding Wang, Decang Sun, Kai Chen, Fan Lai, Mosharaf Chowdhury
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) is time-consuming. While most existing solutions try to overlap/schedule computation and communication for efficient training, this paper goes one step further by skipping computing and communication through DNN layer freezing. Our key insight is that the training progress of internal DNN layers differs significantly, and front layers often become well-trained much earlier than deep layers. To explore this, we first introduce the notion of training plasticity to quantify the training progress of internal DNN layers. Then we design Egeria, a knowledge-guided DNN training system that employs semantic knowledge from a reference model to accurately evaluate individual layers' training plasticity and safely freeze the converged ones, saving their corresponding backward computation and communication. Our reference model is generated on the fly using quantization techniques and runs forward operations asynchronously on available CPUs to minimize the overhead. In addition, Egeria caches the intermediate outputs of the frozen layers with prefetching to further skip the forward computation. Our implementation and testbed experiments with popular vision and language models show that Egeria achieves 19%-43% training speedup w.r.t. the state-of-the-art without sacrificing accuracy.
Interactive Contrastive Learning for Self-supervised Entity Alignment
Authors: Kaisheng Zeng, Zhenhao Dong, Lei Hou, Yixin Cao, Minghao Hu, Jifan Yu, Xin Lv, Juanzi Li, Ling Feng
Date: 2022-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Entity Alignment, Knowledge Graphs

Self-supervised entity alignment (EA) aims to link equivalent entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) without seed alignments. The current SOTA self-supervised EA method draws inspiration from contrastive learning, originally designed in computer vision based on instance discrimination and contrastive loss, and suffers from two shortcomings. Firstly, it puts unidirectional emphasis on pushing sampled negative entities far away rather than pulling positively aligned pairs close, as is done in the well-established supervised EA. Secondly, KGs contain rich side information (e.g., entity description), and how to effectively leverage those information has not been adequately investigated in self-supervised EA. In this paper, we propose an interactive contrastive learning model for self-supervised EA. The model encodes not only structures and semantics of entities (including entity name, entity description, and entity neighborhood), but also conducts cross-KG contrastive learning by building pseudo-aligned entity pairs. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms previous best self-supervised results by a large margin (over 9% average improvement) and performs on par with previous SOTA supervised counterparts, demonstrating the effectiveness of the interactive contrastive learning for self-supervised EA.