pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
IMS at SemEval-2020 Task 1: How low can you go? Dimensionality in Lexical Semantic Change Detection
Authors: Jens Kaiser, Dominik Schlechtweg, Sean Papay, Sabine Schulte im Walde
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020
Tasks: Change Detection

We present the results of our system for SemEval-2020 Task 1 that exploits a commonly used lexical semantic change detection model based on Skip-Gram with Negative Sampling. Our system focuses on Vector Initialization (VI) alignment, compares VI to the currently top-ranking models for Subtask 2 and demonstrates that these can be outperformed if we optimize VI dimensionality. We demonstrate that differences in performance can largely be attributed to model-specific sources of noise, and we reveal a strong relationship between dimensionality and frequency-induced noise in VI alignment. Our results suggest that lexical semantic change models integrating vector space alignment should pay more attention to the role of the dimensionality parameter.
Image Transformation Network for Privacy-Preserving Deep Neural Networks and Its Security Evaluation
Authors: Hiroki Ito, Yuma Kinoshita, Hitoshi Kiya
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Privacy Preserving

We propose a transformation network for generating visually-protected images for privacy-preserving DNNs. The proposed transformation network is trained by using a plain image dataset so that plain images are transformed into visually protected ones. Conventional perceptual encryption methods have a weak visual-protection performance and some accuracy degradation in image classification. In contrast, the proposed network enables us not only to strongly protect visual information but also to maintain the image classification accuracy that using plain images achieves. In an image classification experiment, the proposed network is demonstrated to strongly protect visual information on plain images without any performance degradation under the use of CIFAR datasets. In addition, it is shown that the visually protected images are robust against a DNN-based attack, called inverse transformation network attack (ITN-Attack) in an experiment.
BAT.jl -- A Julia-based tool for Bayesian inference
Authors: Oliver Schulz, Frederik Beaujean, Allen Caldwell, Cornelius Grunwald, Vasyl Hafych, Kevin Kröninger, Salvatore La Cagnina, Lars Röhrig, Lolian Shtembari
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

We describe the development of a multi-purpose software for Bayesian statistical inference, BAT.jl, written in the Julia language. The major design considerations and implemented algorithms are summarized here, together with a test suite that ensures the proper functioning of the algorithms. We also give an extended example from the realm of physics that demonstrates the functionalities of BAT.jl.
Convolutional Complex Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Authors: Caglar Demir, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction

In this paper, we study the problem of learning continuous vector representations of knowledge graphs for predicting missing links. We present a new approach called ConEx, which infers missing links by leveraging the composition of a 2D convolution with a Hermitian inner product of complex-valued embedding vectors. We evaluate ConEx against state-of-the-art approaches on the WN18RR, FB15K-237, KINSHIP and UMLS benchmark datasets. Our experimental results show that ConEx achieves a performance superior to that of state-of-the-art approaches such as RotatE, QuatE and TuckER on the link prediction task on all datasets while requiring at least 8 times fewer parameters. We ensure the reproducibility of our results by providing an open-source implementation which includes the training, evaluation scripts along with pre-trained models at https://github.com/conex-kge/ConEx.
Revisiting Mid-Level Patterns for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Recognition
Authors: Yixiong Zou, Shanghang Zhang, JianPeng Yu, Yonghong Tian, José M. F. Moura
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, cross-domain few-shot learning, Few-Shot Learning

Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods usually assume base classes and novel classes are from the same domain (in-domain setting). However, in practice, it may be infeasible to collect sufficient training samples for some special domains to construct base classes. To solve this problem, cross-domain FSL (CDFSL) is proposed very recently to transfer knowledge from general-domain base classes to special-domain novel classes. Existing CDFSL works mostly focus on transferring between near domains, while rarely consider transferring between distant domains, which is in practical need as any novel classes could appear in real-world applications, and is even more challenging. In this paper, we study a challenging subset of CDFSL where the novel classes are in distant domains from base classes, by revisiting the mid-level features, which are more transferable yet under-explored in main stream FSL work. To boost the discriminability of mid-level features, we propose a residual-prediction task to encourage mid-level features to learn discriminative information of each sample. Notably, such mechanism also benefits the in-domain FSL and CDFSL in near domains. Therefore, we provide two types of features for both cross- and in-domain FSL respectively, under the same training framework. Experiments under both settings on six public datasets, including two challenging medical datasets, validate the our rationale and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released.
A Machine of Few Words -- Interactive Speaker Recognition with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mathieu Seurin, Florian Strub, Philippe Preux, Olivier Pietquin
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making, Speaker Recognition, Speech Synthesis

Speaker recognition is a well known and studied task in the speech processing domain. It has many applications, either for security or speaker adaptation of personal devices. In this paper, we present a new paradigm for automatic speaker recognition that we call Interactive Speaker Recognition (ISR). In this paradigm, the recognition system aims to incrementally build a representation of the speakers by requesting personalized utterances to be spoken in contrast to the standard text-dependent or text-independent schemes. To do so, we cast the speaker recognition task into a sequential decision-making problem that we solve with Reinforcement Learning. Using a standard dataset, we show that our method achieves excellent performance while using little speech signal amounts. This method could also be applied as an utterance selection mechanism for building speech synthesis systems.
Associative Partial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Youngeun Kim, Sungeun Hong, Seunghan Yang, Sungil Kang, Yunho Jeon, Jiwon Kim
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Partial Domain Adaptation

Partial Adaptation (PDA) addresses a practical scenario in which the target domain contains only a subset of classes in the source domain. While PDA should take into account both class-level and sample-level to mitigate negative transfer, current approaches mostly rely on only one of them. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to fully exploit multi-level associations that can arise in PDA. Our Associative Partial Domain Adaptation (APDA) utilizes intra-domain association to actively select out non-trivial anomaly samples in each source-private class that sample-level weighting cannot handle. Additionally, our method considers inter-domain association to encourage positive transfer by mapping between nearby target samples and source samples with high label-commonness. For this, we exploit feature propagation in a proposed label space consisting of source ground-truth labels and target probabilistic labels. We further propose a geometric guidance loss based on the label commonness of each source class to encourage positive transfer. Our APDA consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across public datasets.
A Technique for Determining Relevance Scores of Process Activities using Graph-based Neural Networks
Authors: Matthias Stierle, Sven Weinzierl, Maximilian Harl, Martin Matzner
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00

Process models generated through process mining depict the as-is state of a process. Through annotations with metrics such as the frequency or duration of activities, these models provide generic information to the process analyst. To improve business processes with respect to performance measures, process analysts require further guidance from the process model. In this study, we design Graph Relevance Miner (GRM), a technique based on graph neural networks, to determine the relevance scores for process activities with respect to performance measures. Annotating process models with such relevance scores facilitates a problem-focused analysis of the business process, placing these problems at the centre of the analysis. We quantitatively evaluate the predictive quality of our technique using four datasets from different domains, to demonstrate the faithfulness of the relevance scores. Furthermore, we present the results of a case study, which highlight the utility of the technique for organisations. Our work has important implications both for research and business applications, because process model-based analyses feature shortcomings that need to be urgently addressed to realise successful process mining at an enterprise level.
Privacy Guarantees for De-identifying Text Transformations
Authors: David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Ali Davody, Thomas Kleinbauer, Dietrich Klakow
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, De-identification, Dialog Act Classification, Intent Detection, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Natural Language Understanding

Machine Learning approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks benefit from a comprehensive collection of real-life user data. At the same time, there is a clear need for protecting the privacy of the users whose data is collected and processed. For text collections, such as, e.g., transcripts of voice interactions or patient records, replacing sensitive parts with benign alternatives can provide de-identification. However, how much privacy is actually guaranteed by such text transformations, and are the resulting texts still useful for machine learning? In this paper, we derive formal privacy guarantees for general text transformation-based de-identification methods on the basis of Differential Privacy. We also measure the effect that different ways of masking private information in dialog transcripts have on a subsequent machine learning task. To this end, we formulate different masking strategies and compare their privacy-utility trade-offs. In particular, we compare a simple redact approach with more sophisticated word-by-word replacement using deep learning models on multiple natural language understanding tasks like named entity recognition, intent detection, and dialog act classification. We find that only word-by-word replacement is robust against performance drops in various tasks.
Conflict Generalisation in ASP: Learning Correct and Effective Non-Ground Constraints
Authors: Richard Taupe, Antonius Weinzierl, Gerhard Friedrich
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00

Generalising and re-using knowledge learned while solving one problem instance has been neglected by state-of-the-art answer set solvers. We suggest a new approach that generalises learned nogoods for re-use to speed-up the solving of future problem instances. Our solution combines well-known ASP solving techniques with deductive logic-based machine learning. Solving performance can be improved by adding learned non-ground constraints to the original program. We demonstrate the effects of our method by means of realistic examples, showing that our approach requires low computational cost to learn constraints that yield significant performance benefits in our test cases. These benefits can be seen with ground-and-solve systems as well as lazy-grounding systems. However, ground-and-solve systems suffer from additional grounding overheads, induced by the additional constraints in some cases. By means of conflict minimization, non-minimal learned constraints can be reduced. This can result in significant reductions of grounding and solving efforts, as our experiments show. (Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.)
Incremental Text to Speech for Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Models using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Devang S Ram Mohan, Raphael Lenain, Lorenzo Foglianti, Tian Huey Teh, Marlene Staib, Alexandra Torresquintero, Jiameng Gao
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Generation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Modern approaches to text to speech require the entire input character sequence to be processed before any audio is synthesised. This latency limits the suitability of such models for time-sensitive tasks like simultaneous interpretation. Interleaving the action of reading a character with that of synthesising audio reduces this latency. However, the order of this sequence of interleaved actions varies across sentences, which raises the question of how the actions should be chosen. We propose a reinforcement learning based framework to train an agent to make this decision. We compare our performance against that of deterministic, rule-based systems. Our results demonstrate that our agent successfully balances the trade-off between the latency of audio generation and the quality of synthesised audio. More broadly, we show that neural sequence-to-sequence models can be adapted to run in an incremental manner.
Pretraining Techniques for Sequence-to-Sequence Voice Conversion
Authors: Wen-Chin Huang, Tomoki Hayashi, Yi-Chiao Wu, Hirokazu Kameoka, Tomoki Toda
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Conversion

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) voice conversion (VC) models are attractive owing to their ability to convert prosody. Nonetheless, without sufficient data, seq2seq VC models can suffer from unstable training and mispronunciation problems in the converted speech, thus far from practical. To tackle these shortcomings, we propose to transfer knowledge from other speech processing tasks where large-scale corpora are easily available, typically text-to-speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR). We argue that VC models initialized with such pretrained ASR or TTS model parameters can generate effective hidden representations for high-fidelity, highly intelligible converted speech. We apply such techniques to recurrent neural network (RNN)-based and Transformer based models, and through systematical experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the pretraining scheme and the superiority of Transformer based models over RNN-based models in terms of intelligibility, naturalness, and similarity.
Cascade Graph Neural Networks for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Ao Luo, Xin Li, Fan Yang, Zhicheng Jiao, Hong Cheng, Siwei Lyu
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

In this paper, we study the problem of salient object detection (SOD) for RGB-D images using both color and depth information.A major technical challenge in performing salient object detection fromRGB-D images is how to fully leverage the two complementary data sources. Current works either simply distill prior knowledge from the corresponding depth map for handling the RGB-image or blindly fuse color and geometric information to generate the coarse depth-aware representations, hindering the performance of RGB-D saliency detectors.In this work, we introduceCascade Graph Neural Networks(Cas-Gnn),a unified framework which is capable of comprehensively distilling and reasoning the mutual benefits between these two data sources through a set of cascade graphs, to learn powerful representations for RGB-D salient object detection. Cas-Gnn processes the two data sources individually and employs a novelCascade Graph Reasoning(CGR) module to learn powerful dense feature embeddings, from which the saliency map can be easily inferred. Contrast to the previous approaches, the explicitly modeling and reasoning of high-level relations between complementary data sources allows us to better overcome challenges such as occlusions and ambiguities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cas-Gnn achieves significantly better performance than all existing RGB-DSOD approaches on several widely-used benchmarks.
SimPatch: A Nearest Neighbor Similarity Match between Image Patches
Authors: Aritra Banerjee
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00

Measuring the similarity between patches in images is a fundamental building block in various tasks. Naturally, the patch-size has a major impact on the matching quality, and on the consequent application performance. We try to use large patches instead of relatively small patches so that each patch contains more information. We use different feature extraction mechanisms to extract the features of each individual image patches which forms a feature matrix and find out the nearest neighbor patches in the image. The nearest patches are calculated using two different nearest neighbor algorithms in this paper for a query patch for a given image and the results have been demonstrated in this paper.
Perception Score, A Learned Metric for Open-ended Text Generation Evaluation
Authors: Jing Gu, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Automatic evaluation for open-ended natural language generation tasks remains a challenge. Existing metrics such as BLEU show a low correlation with human judgment. We propose a novel and powerful learning-based evaluation metric: Perception Score. The method measures the overall quality of the generation and scores holistically instead of only focusing on one evaluation criteria, such as word overlapping. Moreover, it also shows the amount of uncertainty about its evaluation result. By connecting the uncertainty, Perception Score gives a more accurate evaluation for the generation system. Perception Score provides state-of-the-art results on two conditional generation tasks and two unconditional generation tasks.
Convolutional Ordinal Regression Forest for Image Ordinal Estimation
Authors: Haiping Zhu, Hongming Shan, Yuheng Zhang, Lingfu Che, Xiaoyang Xu, Junping Zhang, Jianbo Shi, Fei-Yue Wang
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Binary Classification, regression

Image ordinal estimation is to predict the ordinal label of a given image, which can be categorized as an ordinal regression problem. Recent methods formulate an ordinal regression problem as a series of binary classification problems. Such methods cannot ensure that the global ordinal relationship is preserved since the relationships among different binary classifiers are neglected. We propose a novel ordinal regression approach, termed Convolutional Ordinal Regression Forest or CORF, for image ordinal estimation, which can integrate ordinal regression and differentiable decision trees with a convolutional neural network for obtaining precise and stable global ordinal relationships. The advantages of the proposed CORF are twofold. First, instead of learning a series of binary classifiers \emph{independently}, the proposed method aims at learning an ordinal distribution for ordinal regression by optimizing those binary classifiers \emph{simultaneously}. Second, the differentiable decision trees in the proposed CORF can be trained together with the ordinal distribution in an end-to-end manner. The effectiveness of the proposed CORF is verified on two image ordinal estimation tasks, i.e. facial age estimation and image aesthetic assessment, showing significant improvements and better stability over the state-of-the-art ordinal regression methods.
Optimizing Information Loss Towards Robust Neural Networks
Authors: Philip Sperl, Konstantin Böttinger
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00

Neural Networks (NNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Such inputs differ only slightly from their benign counterparts yet provoke misclassifications of the attacked NNs. The required perturbations to craft the examples are often negligible and even human imperceptible. To protect deep learning-based systems from such attacks, several countermeasures have been proposed with adversarial training still being considered the most effective. Here, NNs are iteratively retrained using adversarial examples forming a computational expensive and time consuming process often leading to a performance decrease. To overcome the downsides of adversarial training while still providing a high level of security, we present a new training approach we call \textit{entropic retraining}. Based on an information-theoretic-inspired analysis, entropic retraining mimics the effects of adversarial training without the need of the laborious generation of adversarial examples. We empirically show that entropic retraining leads to a significant increase in NNs' security and robustness while only relying on the given original data. With our prototype implementation we validate and show the effectiveness of our approach for various NN architectures and data sets.
Oversampling Adversarial Network for Class-Imbalanced Fault Diagnosis
Authors: Masoumeh Zareapoor, Pourya Shamsolmoali, Jie Yang
Date: 2020-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, Fault Diagnosis, Generative Adversarial Network

The collected data from industrial machines are often imbalanced, which poses a negative effect on learning algorithms. However, this problem becomes more challenging for a mixed type of data or while there is overlapping between classes. Class-imbalance problem requires a robust learning system which can timely predict and classify the data. We propose a new adversarial network for simultaneous classification and fault detection. In particular, we restore the balance in the imbalanced dataset by generating faulty samples from the proposed mixture of data distribution. We designed the discriminator of our model to handle the generated faulty samples to prevent outlier and overfitting. We empirically demonstrate that; (i) the discriminator trained with a generator to generates samples from a mixture of normal and faulty data distribution which can be considered as a fault detector; (ii), the quality of the generated faulty samples outperforms the other synthetic resampling techniques. Experimental results show that the proposed model performs well when comparing to other fault diagnosis methods across several evaluation metrics; in particular, coalescing of generative adversarial network (GAN) and feature matching function is effective at recognizing faulty samples.