pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improved Goal Oriented Dialogue via Utterance Generation and Look Ahead
Authors: Eyal Ben-David, Boaz Carmeli, Ateret Anaby-Tavor
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems, Prediction

Goal oriented dialogue systems have become a prominent customer-care interaction channel for most businesses. However, not all interactions are smooth, and customer intent misunderstanding is a major cause of dialogue failure. We show that intent prediction can be improved by training a deep text-to-text neural model to generate successive user utterances from unlabeled dialogue data. For that, we define a multi-task training regime that utilizes successive user-utterance generation to improve the intent prediction. Our approach achieves the reported improvement due to two complementary factors: First, it uses a large amount of unlabeled dialogue data for an auxiliary generation task. Second, it uses the generated user utterance as an additional signal for the intent prediction model. Lastly, we present a novel look-ahead approach that uses user utterance generation to improve intent prediction in inference time. Specifically, we generate counterfactual successive user utterances for conversations with ambiguous predicted intents, and disambiguate the prediction by reassessing the concatenated sequence of available and generated utterances.
BINAS: Bilinear Interpretable Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Niv Nayman, Yonathan Aflalo, Asaf Noy, Rong Jin, Lihi Zelnik-Manor
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Practical use of neural networks often involves requirements on latency, energy and memory among others. A popular approach to find networks under such requirements is through constrained Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, previous methods use complicated predictors for the accuracy of the network. Those predictors are hard to interpret and sensitive to many hyperparameters to be tuned, hence, the resulting accuracy of the generated models is often harmed. In this work we resolve this by introducing Bilinear Interpretable Neural Architecture Search (BINAS), that is based on an accurate and simple bilinear formulation of both an accuracy estimator and the expected resource requirement, together with a scalable search method with theoretical guarantees. The simplicity of our proposed estimator together with the intuitive way it is constructed bring interpretability through many insights about the contribution of different design choices. For example, we find that in the examined search space, adding depth and width is more effective at deeper stages of the network and at the beginning of each resolution stage. Our experiments show that BINAS generates comparable to or better architectures than other state-of-the-art NAS methods within a reduced marginal search cost, while strictly satisfying the resource constraints.
Perceptual Consistency in Video Segmentation
Authors: Yizhe Zhang, Shubhankar Borse, Hong Cai, Ying Wang, Ning Bi, Xiaoyun Jiang, Fatih Porikli
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we present a novel perceptual consistency perspective on video semantic segmentation, which can capture both temporal consistency and pixel-wise correctness. Given two nearby video frames, perceptual consistency measures how much the segmentation decisions agree with the pixel correspondences obtained via matching general perceptual features. More specifically, for each pixel in one frame, we find the most perceptually correlated pixel in the other frame. Our intuition is that such a pair of pixels are highly likely to belong to the same class. Next, we assess how much the segmentation agrees with such perceptual correspondences, based on which we derive the perceptual consistency of the segmentation maps across these two frames. Utilizing perceptual consistency, we can evaluate the temporal consistency of video segmentation by measuring the perceptual consistency over consecutive pairs of segmentation maps in a video. Furthermore, given a sparsely labeled test video, perceptual consistency can be utilized to aid with predicting the pixel-wise correctness of the segmentation on an unlabeled frame. More specifically, by measuring the perceptual consistency between the predicted segmentation and the available ground truth on a nearby frame and combining it with the segmentation confidence, we can accurately assess the classification correctness on each pixel. Our experiments show that the proposed perceptual consistency can more accurately evaluate the temporal consistency of video segmentation as compared to flow-based measures. Furthermore, it can help more confidently predict segmentation accuracy on unlabeled test frames, as compared to using classification confidence alone. Finally, our proposed measure can be used as a regularizer during the training of segmentation models, which leads to more temporally consistent video segmentation while maintaining accuracy.
Neural Embeddings of Urban Big Data Reveal Emergent Structures in Cities
Authors: Chao Fan, Yang Yang, Ali Mostafavi
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

In this study, we propose using a neural embedding model-graph neural network (GNN)- that leverages the heterogeneous features of urban areas and their interactions captured by human mobility network to obtain vector representations of these areas. Using large-scale high-resolution mobility data sets from millions of aggregated and anonymized mobile phone users in 16 metropolitan counties in the United States, we demonstrate that our embeddings encode complex relationships among features related to urban components (such as distribution of facilities) and population attributes and activities. The spatial gradient in each direction from city center to suburbs is measured using clustered representations and the shared characteristics among urban areas in the same cluster. Furthermore, we show that embeddings generated by a model trained on a different county can capture 50% to 60% of the emergent spatial structure in another county, allowing us to make cross-county comparisons in a quantitative way. Our GNN-based framework overcomes the limitations of previous methods used for examining spatial structures and is highly scalable. The findings reveal non-linear relationships among urban components and anisotropic spatial gradients in cities. Since the identified spatial structures and gradients capture the combined effects of various mechanisms, such as segregation, disparate facility distribution, and human mobility, the findings could help identify the limitations of the current city structure to inform planning decisions and policies. Also, the model and findings set the stage for a variety of research in urban planning, engineering and social science through integrated understanding of how the complex interactions between urban components and population activities and attributes shape the spatial structures in cities.
AuxAdapt: Stable and Efficient Test-Time Adaptation for Temporally Consistent Video Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yizhe Zhang, Shubhankar Borse, Hong Cai, Fatih Porikli
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Test-time Adaptation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

In video segmentation, generating temporally consistent results across frames is as important as achieving frame-wise accuracy. Existing methods rely either on optical flow regularization or fine-tuning with test data to attain temporal consistency. However, optical flow is not always avail-able and reliable. Besides, it is expensive to compute. Fine-tuning the original model in test time is cost sensitive. This paper presents an efficient, intuitive, and unsupervised online adaptation method, AuxAdapt, for improving the temporal consistency of most neural network models. It does not require optical flow and only takes one pass of the video. Since inconsistency mainly arises from the model's uncertainty in its output, we propose an adaptation scheme where the model learns from its own segmentation decisions as it streams a video, which allows producing more confident and temporally consistent labeling for similarly-looking pixels across frames. For stability and efficiency, we leverage a small auxiliary segmentation network (AuxNet) to assist with this adaptation. More specifically, AuxNet readjusts the decision of the original segmentation network (Main-Net) by adding its own estimations to that of MainNet. At every frame, only AuxNet is updated via back-propagation while keeping MainNet fixed. We extensively evaluate our test-time adaptation approach on standard video benchmarks, including Cityscapes, CamVid, and KITTI. The results demonstrate that our approach provides label-wise accurate, temporally consistent, and computationally efficient adaptation (5+ folds overhead reduction comparing to state-of-the-art test-time adaptation methods).
CvT-ASSD: Convolutional vision-Transformer Based Attentive Single Shot MultiBox Detector
Authors: Weiqiang Jin, Hang Yu
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Novel Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Due to the success of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in natural language process (NLP), the multi-head attention transformer has been more and more prevalent in computer-vision researches (CV). However, it still remains a challenge for researchers to put forward complex tasks such as vision detection and semantic segmentation. Although multiple Transformer-Based architectures like DETR and ViT-FRCNN have been proposed to complete object detection task, they inevitably decreases discrimination accuracy and brings down computational efficiency caused by the enormous learning parameters and heavy computational complexity incurred by the traditional self-attention operation. In order to alleviate these issues, we present a novel object detection architecture, named Convolutional vision Transformer Based Attentive Single Shot MultiBox Detector (CvT-ASSD), that built on the top of Convolutional vision Transormer (CvT) with the efficient Attentive Single Shot MultiBox Detector (ASSD). We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that our model CvT-ASSD can leads to good system efficiency and performance while being pretrained on large-scale detection datasets such as PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. Code has been released on public github repository at https://github.com/albert-jin/CvT-ASSD.
DiffSRL: Learning Dynamical State Representation for Deformable Object Manipulation with Differentiable Simulator
Authors: Sirui Chen, Yunhao Liu, Jialong Li, Shang Wen Yao, Tingxiang Fan, Jia Pan
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Deformable Object Manipulation, Motion Planning, Representation Learning

Dynamic state representation learning is an important task in robot learning. Latent space that can capture dynamics related information has wide application in areas such as accelerating model free reinforcement learning, closing the simulation to reality gap, as well as reducing the motion planning complexity. However, current dynamic state representation learning methods scale poorly on complex dynamic systems such as deformable objects, and cannot directly embed well defined simulation function into the training pipeline. We propose DiffSRL, a dynamic state representation learning pipeline utilizing differentiable simulation that can embed complex dynamics models as part of the end-to-end training. We also integrate differentiable dynamic constraints as part of the pipeline which provide incentives for the latent state to be aware of dynamical constraints. We further establish a state representation learning benchmark on a soft-body simulation system, PlasticineLab, and our model demonstrates superior performance in terms of capturing long-term dynamics as well as reward prediction.
Think about it! Improving defeasible reasoning by first modeling the question scenario
Authors: Aman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Dheeraj Rajagopal, Peter Clark, Yiming Yang, Eduard Hovy
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00

Defeasible reasoning is the mode of reasoning where conclusions can be overturned by taking into account new evidence. Existing cognitive science literature on defeasible reasoning suggests that a person forms a mental model of the problem scenario before answering questions. Our research goal asks whether neural models can similarly benefit from envisioning the question scenario before answering a defeasible query. Our approach is, given a question, to have a model first create a graph of relevant influences, and then leverage that graph as an additional input when answering the question. Our system, CURIOUS, achieves a new state-of-the-art on three different defeasible reasoning datasets. This result is significant as it illustrates that performance can be improved by guiding a system to "think about" a question and explicitly model the scenario, rather than answering reflexively. Code, data, and pre-trained models are located at https://github.com/madaan/thinkaboutit.
Chinese Traditional Poetry Generating System Based on Deep Learning
Authors: Chenlei Bao, Lican Huang
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Deep Learning, Sentence

Chinese traditional poetry is an important intangible cultural heritage of China and an artistic carrier of thought, culture, spirit and emotion. However, due to the strict rules of ancient poetry, it is very difficult to write poetry by machine. This paper proposes an automatic generation method of Chinese traditional poetry based on deep learning technology, which extracts keywords from each poem and matches them with the previous text to make the poem conform to the theme, and when a user inputs a paragraph of text, the machine obtains the theme and generates poem sentence by sentence. Using the classic word2vec model as the preprocessing model, the Chinese characters which are not understood by the computer are transformed into matrix for processing. Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory is used as the neural network model to generate Chinese characters one by one and make the meaning of Chinese characters as accurate as possible. At the same time, TF-IDF and TextRank are used to extract keywords. Using the attention mechanism based encoding-decoding model, we can solve practical problems by transforming the model, and strengthen the important information of long-distance information, so as to grasp the key points without losing important information. In the aspect of emotion judgment, Long Short-Term Memory network is used. The final result shows that it can get good poetry outputs according to the user input text.
SOLVER: Scene-Object Interrelated Visual Emotion Reasoning Network
Authors: Jingyuan Yang, Xinbo Gao, Leida Li, Xiumei Wang, Jinshan Ding
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Object

Visual Emotion Analysis (VEA) aims at finding out how people feel emotionally towards different visual stimuli, which has attracted great attention recently with the prevalence of sharing images on social networks. Since human emotion involves a highly complex and abstract cognitive process, it is difficult to infer visual emotions directly from holistic or regional features in affective images. It has been demonstrated in psychology that visual emotions are evoked by the interactions between objects as well as the interactions between objects and scenes within an image. Inspired by this, we propose a novel Scene-Object interreLated Visual Emotion Reasoning network (SOLVER) to predict emotions from images. To mine the emotional relationships between distinct objects, we first build up an Emotion Graph based on semantic concepts and visual features. Then, we conduct reasoning on the Emotion Graph using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), yielding emotion-enhanced object features. We also design a Scene-Object Fusion Module to integrate scenes and objects, which exploits scene features to guide the fusion process of object features with the proposed scene-based attention mechanism. Extensive experiments and comparisons are conducted on eight public visual emotion datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed SOLVER consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Ablation studies verify the effectiveness of our method and visualizations prove its interpretability, which also bring new insight to explore the mysteries in VEA. Notably, we further discuss SOLVER on three other potential datasets with extended experiments, where we validate the robustness of our method and notice some limitations of it.
CoVA: Context-aware Visual Attention for Webpage Information Extraction
Authors: Anurendra Kumar, Keval Morabia, Jingjin Wang, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Alexander Schwing
Date: 2021-10-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECNLP (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Webpage Object Detection

Webpage information extraction (WIE) is an important step to create knowledge bases. For this, classical WIE methods leverage the Document Object Model (DOM) tree of a website. However, use of the DOM tree poses significant challenges as context and appearance are encoded in an abstract manner. To address this challenge we propose to reformulate WIE as a context-aware Webpage Object Detection task. Specifically, we develop a Context-aware Visual Attention-based (CoVA) detection pipeline which combines appearance features with syntactical structure from the DOM tree. To study the approach we collect a new large-scale dataset of e-commerce websites for which we manually annotate every web element with four labels: product price, product title, product image and background. On this dataset we show that the proposed CoVA approach is a new challenging baseline which improves upon prior state-of-the-art methods.
A Layer-wise Adversarial-aware Quantization Optimization for Improving Robustness
Authors: Chang Song, Riya Ranjan, Hai Li
Date: 2021-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Neural networks are getting better accuracy with higher energy and computational cost. After quantization, the cost can be greatly saved, and the quantized models are more hardware friendly with acceptable accuracy loss. On the other hand, recent research has found that neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, and the robustness of a neural network model can only be improved with defense methods, such as adversarial training. In this work, we find that adversarially-trained neural networks are more vulnerable to quantization loss than plain models. To minimize both the adversarial and the quantization losses simultaneously and to make the quantized model robust, we propose a layer-wise adversarial-aware quantization method, using the Lipschitz constant to choose the best quantization parameter settings for a neural network. We theoretically derive the losses and prove the consistency of our metric selection. The experiment results show that our method can effectively and efficiently improve the robustness of quantized adversarially-trained neural networks.
Map Induction: Compositional spatial submap learning for efficient exploration in novel environments
Authors: Sugandha Sharma, Aidan Curtis, Marta Kryven, Josh Tenenbaum, Ila Fiete
Date: 2021-10-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Program induction

Humans are expert explorers. Understanding the computational cognitive mechanisms that support this efficiency can advance the study of the human mind and enable more efficient exploration algorithms. We hypothesize that humans explore new environments efficiently by inferring the structure of unobserved spaces using spatial information collected from previously explored spaces. This cognitive process can be modeled computationally using program induction in a Hierarchical Bayesian framework that explicitly reasons about uncertainty with strong spatial priors. Using a new behavioral Map Induction Task, we demonstrate that this computational framework explains human exploration behavior better than non-inductive models and outperforms state-of-the-art planning algorithms when applied to a realistic spatial navigation domain.
SCHA-VAE: Hierarchical Context Aggregation for Few-Shot Generation
Authors: Giorgio Giannone, Ole Winther
Date: 2021-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

A few-shot generative model should be able to generate data from a novel distribution by only observing a limited set of examples. In few-shot learning the model is trained on data from many sets from distributions sharing some underlying properties such as sets of characters from different alphabets or objects from different categories. We extend current latent variable models for sets to a fully hierarchical approach with an attention-based point to set-level aggregation and call our method SCHA-VAE for Set-Context-Hierarchical-Aggregation Variational Autoencoder. We explore likelihood-based model comparison, iterative data sampling, and adaptation-free out-of-distribution generalization. Our results show that the hierarchical formulation better captures the intrinsic variability within the sets in the small data regime. This work generalizes deep latent variable approaches to few-shot learning, taking a step toward large-scale few-shot generation with a formulation that readily works with current state-of-the-art deep generative models.
Signal to Noise Ratio Loss Function
Authors: Ali Ghobadzadeh, Amir Lashkari
Date: 2021-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

This work proposes a new loss function targeting classification problems, utilizing a source of information overlooked by cross entropy loss. First, we derive a series of the tightest upper and lower bounds for the probability of a random variable in a given interval. Second, a lower bound is proposed for the probability of a true positive for a parametric classification problem, where the form of probability density function (pdf) of data is given. A closed form for finding the optimal function of unknowns is derived to maximize the probability of true positives. Finally, for the case that the pdf of data is unknown, we apply the proposed boundaries to find the lower bound of the probability of true positives and upper bound of the probability of false positives and optimize them using a loss function which is given by combining the boundaries. We demonstrate that the resultant loss function is a function of the signal to noise ratio both within and across logits. We empirically evaluate our proposals to show their benefit for classification problems.