pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Debiasing Sentence Representations
Authors: Paul Pu Liang, Irene Mengze Li, Emily Zheng, Yao Chong Lim, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Linguistic Acceptability, Natural Language Understanding, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis, Word Embeddings

As natural language processing methods are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios such as healthcare, legal systems, and social science, it becomes necessary to recognize the role they potentially play in shaping social biases and stereotypes. Previous work has revealed the presence of social biases in widely used word embeddings involving gender, race, religion, and other social constructs. While some methods were proposed to debias these word-level embeddings, there is a need to perform debiasing at the sentence-level given the recent shift towards new contextualized sentence representations such as ELMo and BERT. In this paper, we investigate the presence of social biases in sentence-level representations and propose a new method, Sent-Debias, to reduce these biases. We show that Sent-Debias is effective in removing biases, and at the same time, preserves performance on sentence-level downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis, linguistic acceptability, and natural language understanding. We hope that our work will inspire future research on characterizing and removing social biases from widely adopted sentence representations for fairer NLP.
TrashCan: A Semantically-Segmented Dataset towards Visual Detection of Marine Debris
Authors: Jungseok Hong, Michael Fulton, Junaed Sattar
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents TrashCan, a large dataset comprised of images of underwater trash collected from a variety of sources, annotated both using bounding boxes and segmentation labels, for development of robust detectors of marine debris. The dataset has two versions, TrashCan-Material and TrashCan-Instance, corresponding to different object class configurations. The eventual goal is to develop efficient and accurate trash detection methods suitable for onboard robot deployment. Along with information about the construction and sourcing of the TrashCan dataset, we present initial results of instance segmentation from Mask R-CNN and object detection from Faster R-CNN. These do not represent the best possible detection results but provides an initial baseline for future work in instance segmentation and object detection on the TrashCan dataset.
Synthesize, Execute and Debug: Learning to Repair for Neural Program Synthesis
Authors: Kavi Gupta, Peter Ebert Christensen, Xinyun Chen, Dawn Song
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Program Synthesis

The use of deep learning techniques has achieved significant progress for program synthesis from input-output examples. However, when the program semantics become more complex, it still remains a challenge to synthesize programs that are consistent with the specification. In this work, we propose SED, a neural program generation framework that incorporates synthesis, execution, and debugging stages. Instead of purely relying on the neural program synthesizer to generate the final program, SED first produces initial programs using the neural program synthesizer component, then utilizes a neural program debugger to iteratively repair the generated programs. The integration of the debugger component enables SED to modify the programs based on the execution results and specification, which resembles the coding process of human programmers. On Karel, a challenging input-output program synthesis benchmark, SED reduces the error rate of the neural program synthesizer itself by a considerable margin, and outperforms the standard beam search for decoding.
Data-driven effective model shows a liquid-like deep learning
Authors: Wenxuan Zou, Haiping Huang
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The geometric structure of an optimization landscape is argued to be fundamentally important to support the success of deep neural network learning. A direct computation of the landscape beyond two layers is hard. Therefore, to capture the global view of the landscape, an interpretable model of the network-parameter (or weight) space must be established. However, the model is lacking so far. Furthermore, it remains unknown what the landscape looks like for deep networks of binary synapses, which plays a key role in robust and energy efficient neuromorphic computation. Here, we propose a statistical mechanics framework by directly building a least structured model of the high-dimensional weight space, considering realistic structured data, stochastic gradient descent training, and the computational depth of neural networks. We also consider whether the number of network parameters outnumbers the number of supplied training data, namely, over- or under-parametrization. Our least structured model reveals that the weight spaces of the under-parametrization and over-parameterization cases belong to the same class, in the sense that these weight spaces are well-connected without any hierarchical clustering structure. In contrast, the shallow-network has a broken weight space, characterized by a discontinuous phase transition, thereby clarifying the benefit of depth in deep learning from the angle of high dimensional geometry. Our effective model also reveals that inside a deep network, there exists a liquid-like central part of the architecture in the sense that the weights in this part behave as randomly as possible, providing algorithmic implications. Our data-driven model thus provides a statistical mechanics insight about why deep learning is unreasonably effective in terms of the high-dimensional weight space, and how deep networks are different from shallow ones.
Using LSTM and SARIMA Models to Forecast Cluster CPU Usage
Authors: Langston Nashold, Rayan Krishnan
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, CPU

As large scale cloud computing centers become more popular than individual servers, predicting future resource demand need has become an important problem. Forecasting resource need allows public cloud providers to proactively allocate or deallocate resources for cloud services. This work seeks to predict one resource, CPU usage, over both a short term and long term time scale. To gain insight into the model characteristics that best support specific tasks, we consider two vastly different architectures: the historically relevant SARIMA model and the more modern neural network, LSTM model. We apply these models to Azure data resampled to 20 minutes per data point with the goal of predicting usage over the next hour for the short-term task and for the next three days for the long-term task. The SARIMA model outperformed the LSTM for the long term prediction task, but performed poorer on the short term task. Furthermore, the LSTM model was more robust, whereas the SARIMA model relied on the data meeting certain assumptions about seasonality.
EfficientHRNet: Efficient Scaling for Lightweight High-Resolution Multi-Person Pose Estimation
Authors: Christopher Neff, Aneri Sheth, Steven Furgurson, Hamed Tabkhi
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Human Pose Estimation, Multi-Person Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

There is an increasing demand for lightweight multi-person pose estimation for many emerging smart IoT applications. However, the existing algorithms tend to have large model sizes and intense computational requirements, making them ill-suited for real-time applications and deployment on resource-constrained hardware. Lightweight and real-time approaches are exceedingly rare and come at the cost of inferior accuracy. In this paper, we present EfficientHRNet, a family of lightweight multi-person human pose estimators that are able to perform in real-time on resource-constrained devices. By unifying recent advances in model scaling with high-resolution feature representations, EfficientHRNet creates highly accurate models while reducing computation enough to achieve real-time performance. The largest model is able to come within 4.4% accuracy of the current state-of-the-art, while having 1/3 the model size and 1/6 the computation, achieving 23 FPS on Nvidia Jetson Xavier. Compared to the top real-time approach, EfficientHRNet increases accuracy by 22% while achieving similar FPS with 1/3 the power. At every level, EfficientHRNet proves to be more computationally efficient than other bottom-up 2D human pose estimation approaches, while achieving highly competitive accuracy.
Starting with data: advancing spatial data science by building and sharing high-quality datasets
Authors: Yingjie Hu
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Spatial data science has emerged in recent years as an interdisciplinary field. This position paper discusses the importance of building and sharing high-quality datasets for spatial data science.
Distributed Reinforcement Learning of Targeted Grasping with Active Vision for Mobile Manipulators
Authors: Yasuhiro Fujita, Kota Uenishi, Avinash Ummadisingu, Prabhat Nagarajan, Shimpei Masuda, Mario Ynocente Castro
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, GPU, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robotic Grasping

Developing personal robots that can perform a diverse range of manipulation tasks in unstructured environments necessitates solving several challenges for robotic grasping systems. We take a step towards this broader goal by presenting the first RL-based system, to our knowledge, for a mobile manipulator that can (a) achieve targeted grasping generalizing to unseen target objects, (b) learn complex grasping strategies for cluttered scenes with occluded objects, and (c) perform active vision through its movable wrist camera to better locate objects. The system is informed of the desired target object in the form of a single, arbitrary-pose RGB image of that object, enabling the system to generalize to unseen objects without retraining. To achieve such a system, we combine several advances in deep reinforcement learning and present a large-scale distributed training system using synchronous SGD that seamlessly scales to multi-node, multi-GPU infrastructure to make rapid prototyping easier. We train and evaluate our system in a simulated environment, identify key components for improving performance, analyze its behaviors, and transfer to a real-world setup.
HyperTune: Dynamic Hyperparameter Tuning For Efficient Distribution of DNN Training Over Heterogeneous Systems
Authors: Ali HeydariGorji, Siavash Rezaei, Mahdi Torabzadehkashi, Hossein Bobarshad, Vladimir Alves, Pai H. Chou
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Distributed training is a novel approach to accelerate Deep Neural Networks (DNN) training, but common training libraries fall short of addressing the distributed cases with heterogeneous processors or the cases where the processing nodes get interrupted by other workloads. This paper describes distributed training of DNN on computational storage devices (CSD), which are NAND flash-based, high capacity data storage with internal processing engines. A CSD-based distributed architecture incorporates the advantages of federated learning in terms of performance scalability, resiliency, and data privacy by eliminating the unnecessary data movement between the storage device and the host processor. The paper also describes Stannis, a DNN training framework that improves on the shortcomings of existing distributed training frameworks by dynamically tuning the training hyperparameters in heterogeneous systems to maintain the maximum overall processing speed in term of processed images per second and energy efficiency. Experimental results on image classification training benchmarks show up to 3.1x improvement in performance and 2.45x reduction in energy consumption when using Stannis plus CSD compare to the generic systems.
Memory based fusion for multi-modal deep learning
Authors: Darshana Priyasad, Tharindu Fernando, Simon Denman, Sridha Sridharan, Clinton Fookes
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The use of multi-modal data for deep machine learning has shown promise when compared to uni-modal approaches with fusion of multi-modal features resulting in improved performance in several applications. However, most state-of-the-art methods use naive fusion which processes feature streams independently, ignoring possible long-term dependencies within the data during fusion. In this paper, we present a novel Memory based Attentive Fusion layer, which fuses modes by incorporating both the current features and longterm dependencies in the data, thus allowing the model to understand the relative importance of modes over time. We introduce an explicit memory block within the fusion layer which stores features containing long-term dependencies of the fused data. The feature inputs from uni-modal encoders are fused through attentive composition and transformation followed by naive fusion of the resultant memory derived features with layer inputs. Following state-of-the-art methods, we have evaluated the performance and the generalizability of the proposed fusion approach on two different datasets with different modalities. In our experiments, we replace the naive fusion layer in benchmark networks with our proposed layer to enable a fair comparison. Experimental results indicate that the MBAF layer can generalise across different modalities and networks to enhance fusion and improve performance.
Suppress and Balance: A Simple Gated Network for Salient Object Detection
Authors: Xiaoqi Zhao, Youwei Pang, Lihe Zhang, Huchuan Lu, Lei Zhang
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Decoder, Dichotomous Image Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Most salient object detection approaches use U-Net or feature pyramid networks (FPN) as their basic structures. These methods ignore two key problems when the encoder exchanges information with the decoder: one is the lack of interference control between them, the other is without considering the disparity of the contributions of different encoder blocks. In this work, we propose a simple gated network (GateNet) to solve both issues at once. With the help of multilevel gate units, the valuable context information from the encoder can be optimally transmitted to the decoder. We design a novel gated dual branch structure to build the cooperation among different levels of features and improve the discriminability of the whole network. Through the dual branch design, more details of the saliency map can be further restored. In addition, we adopt the atrous spatial pyramid pooling based on the proposed "Fold" operation (Fold-ASPP) to accurately localize salient objects of various scales. Extensive experiments on five challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed model performs favorably against most state-of-the-art methods under different evaluation metrics.
Unseen Object Instance Segmentation for Robotic Environments
Authors: Christopher Xie, Yu Xiang, Arsalan Mousavian, Dieter Fox
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unseen Object Instance Segmentation

In order to function in unstructured environments, robots need the ability to recognize unseen objects. We take a step in this direction by tackling the problem of segmenting unseen object instances in tabletop environments. However, the type of large-scale real-world dataset required for this task typically does not exist for most robotic settings, which motivates the use of synthetic data. Our proposed method, UOIS-Net, separately leverages synthetic RGB and synthetic depth for unseen object instance segmentation. UOIS-Net is comprised of two stages: first, it operates only on depth to produce object instance center votes in 2D or 3D and assembles them into rough initial masks. Secondly, these initial masks are refined using RGB. Surprisingly, our framework is able to learn from synthetic RGB-D data where the RGB is non-photorealistic. To train our method, we introduce a large-scale synthetic dataset of random objects on tabletops. We show that our method can produce sharp and accurate segmentation masks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on unseen object instance segmentation. We also show that our method can segment unseen objects for robot grasping.
Learning End-to-End Action Interaction by Paired-Embedding Data Augmentation
Authors: Ziyang Song, Zejian yuan, Chong Zhang, Wanchao Chi, Yonggen Ling, Shenghao Zhang
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Data Augmentation, Translation

In recognition-based action interaction, robots' responses to human actions are often pre-designed according to recognized categories and thus stiff. In this paper, we specify a new Interactive Action Translation (IAT) task which aims to learn end-to-end action interaction from unlabeled interactive pairs, removing explicit action recognition. To enable learning on small-scale data, we propose a Paired-Embedding (PE) method for effective and reliable data augmentation. Specifically, our method first utilizes paired relationships to cluster individual actions in an embedding space. Then two actions originally paired can be replaced with other actions in their respective neighborhood, assembling into new pairs. An Act2Act network based on conditional GAN follows to learn from augmented data. Besides, IAT-test and IAT-train scores are specifically proposed for evaluating methods on our task. Experimental results on two datasets show impressive effects and broad application prospects of our method.
A fast noise filtering algorithm for time series prediction using recurrent neural networks
Authors: Boris Rubinstein
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Recent research demonstrate that prediction of time series by recurrent neural networks (RNNs) based on the noisy input generates a smooth anticipated trajectory. We examine the internal dynamics of RNNs and establish a set of conditions required for such behavior. Based on this analysis we propose a new approximate algorithm and show that it significantly speeds up the predictive process without loss of accuracy.
Fast Distributed Bandits for Online Recommendation Systems
Authors: Kanak Mahadik, Qingyun Wu, Shuai Li, Amit Sabne
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Recommendation Systems

Contextual bandit algorithms are commonly used in recommender systems, where content popularity can change rapidly. These algorithms continuously learn latent mappings between users and items, based on contexts associated with them both. Recent recommendation algorithms that learn clustering or social structures between users have exhibited higher recommendation accuracy. However, as the number of users and items in the environment increases, the time required to generate recommendations deteriorates significantly. As a result, these cannot be deployed in practice. The state-of-the-art distributed bandit algorithm - DCCB - relies on a peer-to-peer net-work to share information among distributed workers. However, this approach does not scale well with the increasing number of users. Furthermore, it suffers from slow discovery of clusters, resulting in accuracy degradation. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a novel distributed bandit-based algorithm called DistCLUB. This algorithm lazily creates clusters in a distributed manner, and dramatically reduces the network data sharing requirement, achieving high scalability. Additionally, DistCLUB finds clusters much faster, achieving better accuracy than the state-of-the-art algorithm. Evaluation over both real-world benchmarks and synthetic datasets shows that DistCLUB is on average 8.87x faster than DCCB, and achieves 14.5% higher normalized prediction performance.
GRADE: Graph Dynamic Embedding
Authors: Simeon Spasov, Alessandro Di Stefano, Pietro Lio, Jian Tang
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Dynamic Community Detection, Dynamic Link Prediction, Link Prediction, Representation Learning, Variational Inference

Representation learning of static and more recently dynamically evolving graphs has gained noticeable attention. Existing approaches for modelling graph dynamics focus extensively on the evolution of individual nodes independently of the evolution of mesoscale community structures. As a result, current methods do not provide useful tools to study and cannot explicitly capture temporal community dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose GRADE - a probabilistic model that learns to generate evolving node and community representations by imposing a random walk prior over their trajectories. Our model also learns node community membership which is updated between time steps via a transition matrix. At each time step link generation is performed by first assigning node membership from a distribution over the communities, and then sampling a neighbor from a distribution over the nodes for the assigned community. We parametrize the node and community distributions with neural networks and learn their parameters via variational inference. Experiments demonstrate GRADE outperforms baselines in dynamic link prediction, shows favourable performance on dynamic community detection, and identifies coherent and interpretable evolving communities.
Inductive Link Prediction for Nodes Having Only Attribute Information
Authors: Yu Hao, Xin Cao, Yixiang Fang, Xike Xie, Sibo Wang
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Inductive Link Prediction, Link Prediction, Prediction

Predicting the link between two nodes is a fundamental problem for graph data analytics. In attributed graphs, both the structure and attribute information can be utilized for link prediction. Most existing studies focus on transductive link prediction where both nodes are already in the graph. However, many real-world applications require inductive prediction for new nodes having only attribute information. It is more challenging since the new nodes do not have structure information and cannot be seen during the model training. To solve this problem, we propose a model called DEAL, which consists of three components: two node embedding encoders and one alignment mechanism. The two encoders aim to output the attribute-oriented node embedding and the structure-oriented node embedding, and the alignment mechanism aligns the two types of embeddings to build the connections between the attributes and links. Our model DEAL is versatile in the sense that it works for both inductive and transductive link prediction. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing inductive link prediction methods, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on transductive link prediction.
Translate Reverberated Speech to Anechoic Ones: Speech Dereverberation with BERT
Authors: Yang Jiao
Date: 2020-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Dereverberation

Single channel speech dereverberation is considered in this work. Inspired by the recent success of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model in the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we investigate its applicability as backbone sequence model to enhance reverberated speech signal. We present a variation of the basic BERT model: a pre-sequence network, which extracts local spectral-temporal information and/or provides order information, before the backbone sequence model. In addition, we use pre-trained neural vocoder for implicit phase reconstruction. To evaluate our method, we used the data from the 3rd CHiME challenge, and compare our results with other methods. Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms traditional method WPE, and achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art BLSTM-based sequence models.