pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Velocity continuation with Fourier neural operators for accelerated uncertainty quantification
Authors: Ali Siahkoohi, Mathias Louboutin, Felix J. Herrmann
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Seismic Imaging, Uncertainty Quantification

Seismic imaging is an ill-posed inverse problem that is challenged by noisy data and modeling inaccuracies -- due to errors in the background squared-slowness model. Uncertainty quantification is essential for determining how variability in the background models affects seismic imaging. Due to the costs associated with the forward Born modeling operator as well as the high dimensionality of seismic images, quantification of uncertainty is computationally expensive. As such, the main contribution of this work is a survey-specific Fourier neural operator surrogate to velocity continuation that maps seismic images associated with one background model to another virtually for free. While being trained with only 200 background and seismic image pairs, this surrogate is able to accurately predict seismic images associated with new background models, thus accelerating seismic imaging uncertainty quantification. We support our method with a realistic data example in which we quantify seismic imaging uncertainties using a Fourier neural operator surrogate, illustrating how variations in background models affect the position of reflectors in a seismic image.
Continual learning: a feature extraction formalization, an efficient algorithm, and fundamental obstructions
Authors: Binghui Peng, Andrej Risteski
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Continual learning is an emerging paradigm in machine learning, wherein a model is exposed in an online fashion to data from multiple different distributions (i.e. environments), and is expected to adapt to the distribution change. Precisely, the goal is to perform well in the new environment, while simultaneously retaining the performance on the previous environments (i.e. avoid "catastrophic forgetting") -- without increasing the size of the model. While this setup has enjoyed a lot of attention in the applied community, there hasn't be theoretical work that even formalizes the desired guarantees. In this paper, we propose a framework for continual learning through the framework of feature extraction -- namely, one in which features, as well as a classifier, are being trained with each environment. When the features are linear, we design an efficient gradient-based algorithm $\mathsf{DPGD}$, that is guaranteed to perform well on the current environment, as well as avoid catastrophic forgetting. In the general case, when the features are non-linear, we show such an algorithm cannot exist, whether efficient or not.
piRank: A Probabilistic Intent Based Ranking Framework for Facebook Search
Authors: Zhen Liao
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

While numerous studies have been conducted in the literature exploring different types of machine learning approaches for search ranking, most of them are focused on specific pre-defined problems but only a few of them have studied the ranking framework which can be applied in a commercial search engine in a scalable way. In the meantime, existing ranking models are often optimized for normalized discounted cumulative gains (NDCG) or online click-through rate (CTR), and both types of machine learning models are built based on the assumption that high-quality training data can be easily obtained and well applied to unseen cases. In practice at Facebook search, we observed that our training data for ML models have certain issues. First, tail query intents are hardly covered in our human rating dataset. Second, search click logs are often noisy and hard to clean up due to various reasons. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a probabilistic intent based ranking framework (short for piRank), which can: 1) provide a scalable framework to address various ranking issues for different query intents in a divide-and-conquer way; 2) improve system development agility including iteration speed and system debuggability; 3) combine both machine learning and empirical-based algorithmic methods in a systematic way. We conducted extensive experiments and studies on top of Facebook search engine system and validated the effectiveness of this new ranking architecture.
Physics Guided Deep Learning for Generative Design of Crystal Materials with Symmetry Constraints
Authors: Yong Zhao, Edirisuriya M. Dilanga Siriwardane, Zhenyao Wu, Nihang Fu, Mohammed Al-Fahdi, Ming Hu, Jianjun Hu
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Formation Energy

Discovering new materials is a challenging task in materials science crucial to the progress of human society. Conventional approaches based on experiments and simulations are labor-intensive or costly with success heavily depending on experts' heuristic knowledge. Here, we propose a deep learning based Physics Guided Crystal Generative Model (PGCGM) for efficient crystal material design with high structural diversity and symmetry. Our model increases the generation validity by more than 700\% compared to FTCP, one of the latest structure generators and by more than 45\% compared to our previous CubicGAN model. Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations are used to validate the generated structures with 1,869 materials out of 2,000 are successfully optimized and deposited into the Carolina Materials Database \url{www.carolinamatdb.org}, of which 39.6\% have negative formation energy and 5.3\% have energy-above-hull less than 0.25 eV/atom, indicating their thermodynamic stability and potential synthesizability.
Diagonal State Spaces are as Effective as Structured State Spaces
Authors: Ankit Gupta, Albert Gu, Jonathan Berant
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-range modeling

Modeling long range dependencies in sequential data is a fundamental step towards attaining human-level performance in many modalities such as text, vision, audio and video. While attention-based models are a popular and effective choice in modeling short-range interactions, their performance on tasks requiring long range reasoning has been largely inadequate. In an exciting result, Gu et al. (ICLR 2022) proposed the $\textit{Structured State Space}$ (S4) architecture delivering large gains over state-of-the-art models on several long-range tasks across various modalities. The core proposition of S4 is the parameterization of state matrices via a diagonal plus low rank structure, allowing efficient computation. In this work, we show that one can match the performance of S4 even without the low rank correction and thus assuming the state matrices to be diagonal. Our $\textit{Diagonal State Space}$ (DSS) model matches the performance of S4 on Long Range Arena tasks, speech classification on Speech Commands dataset, while being conceptually simpler and straightforward to implement.
Distributed Link Sparsification for Scalable Scheduling Using Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zhongyuan Zhao, Ananthram Swami, Santiago Segarra
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Distributed scheduling algorithms for throughput or utility maximization in dense wireless multi-hop networks can have overwhelmingly high overhead, causing increased congestion, energy consumption, radio footprint, and security vulnerability. For wireless networks with dense connectivity, we propose a distributed scheme for link sparsification with graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which can reduce the scheduling overhead while keeping most of the network capacity. In a nutshell, a trainable GCN module generates node embeddings as topology-aware and reusable parameters for a local decision mechanism, based on which a link can withdraw itself from the scheduling contention if it is not likely to win. In medium-sized wireless networks, our proposed sparse scheduler beats classical threshold-based sparsification policies by retaining almost $70\%$ of the total capacity achieved by a distributed greedy max-weight scheduler with $0.4\%$ of the point-to-point message complexity and $2.6\%$ of the average number of interfering neighbors per link.
LibMTL: A Python Library for Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Baijiong Lin, Yu Zhang
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

This paper presents LibMTL, an open-source Python library built on PyTorch, which provides a unified, comprehensive, reproducible, and extensible implementation framework for Multi-Task Learning (MTL). LibMTL considers different settings and approaches in MTL, and it supports a large number of state-of-the-art MTL methods, including 12 loss weighting strategies, 7 architectures, and 84 combinations of different architectures and loss weighting methods. Moreover, the modular design in LibMTL makes it easy-to-use and well extensible, thus users can easily and fast develop new MTL methods, compare with existing MTL methods fairly, or apply MTL algorithms to real-world applications with the support of LibMTL. The source code and detailed documentations of LibMTL are available at https://github.com/median-research-group/LibMTL and https://libmtl.readthedocs.io, respectively.
On the Neural Tangent Kernel Analysis of Randomly Pruned Neural Networks
Authors: Hongru Yang, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification

Motivated by both theory and practice, we study how random pruning of the weights affects a neural network's neural tangent kernel (NTK). In particular, this work establishes an equivalence of the NTKs between a fully-connected neural network and its randomly pruned version. The equivalence is established under two cases. The first main result studies the infinite-width asymptotic. It is shown that given a pruning probability, for fully-connected neural networks with the weights randomly pruned at the initialization, as the width of each layer grows to infinity sequentially, the NTK of the pruned neural network converges to the limiting NTK of the original network with some extra scaling. If the network weights are rescaled appropriately after pruning, this extra scaling can be removed. The second main result considers the finite-width case. It is shown that to ensure the NTK's closeness to the limit, the dependence of width on the sparsity parameter is asymptotically linear, as the NTK's gap to its limit goes down to zero. Moreover, if the pruning probability is set to zero (i.e., no pruning), the bound on the required width matches the bound for fully-connected neural networks in previous works up to logarithmic factors. The proof of this result requires developing a novel analysis of a network structure which we called \textit{mask-induced pseudo-networks}. Experiments are provided to evaluate our results.
Blind Source Separation for Mixture of Sinusoids with Near-Linear Computational Complexity
Authors: Kaan Gokcesu, Hakan Gokcesu
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: blind source separation

We propose a multi-tone decomposition algorithm that can find the frequencies, amplitudes and phases of the fundamental sinusoids in a noisy observation sequence. Under independent identically distributed Gaussian noise, our method utilizes a maximum likelihood approach to estimate the relevant tone parameters from the contaminated observations. When estimating $M$ number of sinusoidal sources, our algorithm successively estimates their frequencies and jointly optimizes their amplitudes and phases. Our method can also be implemented as a blind source separator in the absence of the information about $M$. The computational complexity of our algorithm is near-linear, i.e., $\tilde{O}(N)$.
DeepDPM: Deep Clustering With an Unknown Number of Clusters
Authors: Meitar Ronen, Shahaf E. Finder, Oren Freifeld
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering, Deep Nonparametric Clustering, Model Selection, Nonparametric Clustering, Unsupervised Image Classification

Deep Learning (DL) has shown great promise in the unsupervised task of clustering. That said, while in classical (i.e., non-deep) clustering the benefits of the nonparametric approach are well known, most deep-clustering methods are parametric: namely, they require a predefined and fixed number of clusters, denoted by K. When K is unknown, however, using model-selection criteria to choose its optimal value might become computationally expensive, especially in DL as the training process would have to be repeated numerous times. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing an effective deep-clustering method that does not require knowing the value of K as it infers it during the learning. Using a split/merge framework, a dynamic architecture that adapts to the changing K, and a novel loss, our proposed method outperforms existing nonparametric methods (both classical and deep ones). While the very few existing deep nonparametric methods lack scalability, we demonstrate ours by being the first to report the performance of such a method on ImageNet. We also demonstrate the importance of inferring K by showing how methods that fix it deteriorate in performance when their assumed K value gets further from the ground-truth one, especially on imbalanced datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/BGU-CS-VIL/DeepDPM.
Adversarial Representation Sharing: A Quantitative and Secure Collaborative Learning Framework
Authors: Jikun Chen, Feng Qiang, Na Ruan
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Attribute Extraction, Federated Learning, Representation Learning, valid

The performance of deep learning models highly depends on the amount of training data. It is common practice for today's data holders to merge their datasets and train models collaboratively, which yet poses a threat to data privacy. Different from existing methods such as secure multi-party computation (MPC) and federated learning (FL), we find representation learning has unique advantages in collaborative learning due to the lower communication overhead and task-independency. However, data representations face the threat of model inversion attacks. In this article, we formally define the collaborative learning scenario, and quantify data utility and privacy. Then we present ARS, a collaborative learning framework wherein users share representations of data to train models, and add imperceptible adversarial noise to data representations against reconstruction or attribute extraction attacks. By evaluating ARS in different contexts, we demonstrate that our mechanism is effective against model inversion attacks, and achieves a balance between privacy and utility. The ARS framework has wide applicability. First, ARS is valid for various data types, not limited to images. Second, data representations shared by users can be utilized in different tasks. Third, the framework can be easily extended to the vertical data partitioning scenario.
Optimizing Airborne Wind Energy with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: N. Orzan, C. Leone, A. Mazzolini, J. Oyero, A. Celani
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Airborne Wind Energy is a lightweight technology that allows power extraction from the wind using airborne devices such as kites and gliders, where the airfoil orientation can be dynamically controlled in order to maximize performance. The dynamical complexity of turbulent aerodynamics makes this optimization problem unapproachable by conventional methods such as classical control theory, which rely on accurate and tractable analytical models of the dynamical system at hand. Here we propose to attack this problem through Reinforcement Learning, a technique that -- by repeated trial-and-error interactions with the environment -- learns to associate observations with profitable actions without requiring prior knowledge of the system. We show that in a simulated environment Reinforcement Learning finds an efficient way to control a kite so that it can tow a vehicle for long distances. The algorithm we use is based on a small set of intuitive observations and its physically transparent interpretation allows to describe the approximately optimal strategy as a simple list of manoeuvring instructions.
A Unified Study of Machine Learning Explanation Evaluation Metrics
Authors: Yipei Wang, Xiaoqian Wang
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, BIG-bench Machine Learning

The growing need for trustworthy machine learning has led to the blossom of interpretability research. Numerous explanation methods have been developed to serve this purpose. However, these methods are deficiently and inappropriately evaluated. Many existing metrics for explanations are introduced by researchers as by-products of their proposed explanation techniques to demonstrate the advantages of their methods. Although widely used, they are more or less accused of problems. We claim that the lack of acknowledged and justified metrics results in chaos in benchmarking these explanation methods -- Do we really have good/bad explanation when a metric gives a high/low score? We split existing metrics into two categories and demonstrate that they are insufficient to properly evaluate explanations for multiple reasons. We propose guidelines in dealing with the problems in evaluating machine learning explanation and encourage researchers to carefully deal with these problems when developing explanation techniques and metrics.
A General Survey on Attention Mechanisms in Deep Learning
Authors: Gianni Brauwers, Flavius Frasincar
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Survey

Attention is an important mechanism that can be employed for a variety of deep learning models across many different domains and tasks. This survey provides an overview of the most important attention mechanisms proposed in the literature. The various attention mechanisms are explained by means of a framework consisting of a general attention model, uniform notation, and a comprehensive taxonomy of attention mechanisms. Furthermore, the various measures for evaluating attention models are reviewed, and methods to characterize the structure of attention models based on the proposed framework are discussed. Last, future work in the field of attention models is considered.
OneLabeler: A Flexible System for Building Data Labeling Tools
Authors: Yu Zhang, Yun Wang, Haidong Zhang, Bin Zhu, Siming Chen, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00

Labeled datasets are essential for supervised machine learning. Various data labeling tools have been built to collect labels in different usage scenarios. However, developing labeling tools is time-consuming, costly, and expertise-demanding on software development. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework for data labeling and OneLabeler based on the conceptual framework to support easy building of labeling tools for diverse usage scenarios. The framework consists of common modules and states in labeling tools summarized through coding of existing tools. OneLabeler supports configuration and composition of common software modules through visual programming to build data labeling tools. A module can be a human, machine, or mixed computation procedure in data labeling. We demonstrate the expressiveness and utility of the system through ten example labeling tools built with OneLabeler. A user study with developers provides evidence that OneLabeler supports efficient building of diverse data labeling tools.
Denoising Likelihood Score Matching for Conditional Score-based Data Generation
Authors: Chen-Hao Chao, Wei-Fang Sun, Bo-Wun Cheng, Yi-Chen Lo, Chia-Che Chang, Yu-Lun Liu, Yu-Lin Chang, Chia-Ping Chen, Chun-Yi Lee
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Image Generation

Many existing conditional score-based data generation methods utilize Bayes' theorem to decompose the gradients of a log posterior density into a mixture of scores. These methods facilitate the training procedure of conditional score models, as a mixture of scores can be separately estimated using a score model and a classifier. However, our analysis indicates that the training objectives for the classifier in these methods may lead to a serious score mismatch issue, which corresponds to the situation that the estimated scores deviate from the true ones. Such an issue causes the samples to be misled by the deviated scores during the diffusion process, resulting in a degraded sampling quality. To resolve it, we formulate a novel training objective, called Denoising Likelihood Score Matching (DLSM) loss, for the classifier to match the gradients of the true log likelihood density. Our experimental evidence shows that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods on both Cifar-10 and Cifar-100 benchmarks noticeably in terms of several key evaluation metrics. We thus conclude that, by adopting DLSM, the conditional scores can be accurately modeled, and the effect of the score mismatch issue is alleviated.
Interpretable Machine Learning Models for Modal Split Prediction in Transportation Systems
Authors: Aron Brenner, Manxi Wu, Saurabh Amin
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Interpretable Machine Learning, Prediction, Variable Selection

Modal split prediction in transportation networks has the potential to support network operators in managing traffic congestion and improving transit service reliability. We focus on the problem of hourly prediction of the fraction of travelers choosing one mode of transportation over another using high-dimensional travel time data. We use logistic regression as base model and employ various regularization techniques for variable selection to prevent overfitting and resolve multicollinearity issues. Importantly, we interpret the prediction accuracy results with respect to the inherent variability of modal splits and travelers' aggregate responsiveness to changes in travel time. By visualizing model parameters, we conclude that the subset of segments found important for predictive accuracy changes from hour-to-hour and include segments that are topologically central and/or highly congested. We apply our approach to the San Francisco Bay Area freeway and rapid transit network and demonstrate superior prediction accuracy and interpretability of our method compared to pre-specified variable selection methods.
mdx: A Cloud Platform for Supporting Data Science and Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaborations
Authors: Toyotaro Suzumura, Akiyoshi Sugiki, Hiroyuki Takizawa, Akira Imakura, Hiroshi Nakamura, Kenjiro Taura, Tomohiro Kudoh, Toshihiro Hanawa, Yuji Sekiya, Hiroki Kobayashi, Shin Matsushima, Yohei Kuga, Ryo Nakamura, Renhe Jiang, Junya Kawase, Masatoshi Hanai, Hiroshi Miyazaki, Tsutomu Ishizaki, Daisuke Shimotoku, Daisuke Miyamoto, Kento Aida, Atsuko Takefusa, Takashi Kurimoto, Koji Sasayama, Naoya Kitagawa, Ikki Fujiwara, Yusuke Tanimura, Takayuki Aoki, Toshio Endo, Satoshi Ohshima, Keiichiro Fukazawa, Susumu Date, Toshihiro Uchibayashi
Date: 2022-03-27 00:00:00

The growing amount of data and advances in data science have created a need for a new kind of cloud platform that provides users with flexibility, strong security, and the ability to couple with supercomputers and edge devices through high-performance networks. We have built such a nation-wide cloud platform, called "mdx" to meet this need. The mdx platform's virtualization service, jointly operated by 9 national universities and 2 national research institutes in Japan, launched in 2021, and more features are in development. Currently mdx is used by researchers in a wide variety of domains, including materials informatics, geo-spatial information science, life science, astronomical science, economics, social science, and computer science. This paper provides an the overview of the mdx platform, details the motivation for its development, reports its current status, and outlines its future plans.