pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pagsusuri ng RNN-based Transfer Learning Technique sa Low-Resource Language
Authors: Dan John Velasco
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Transfer Learning

Low-resource languages such as Filipino suffer from data scarcity which makes it challenging to develop NLP applications for Filipino language. The use of Transfer Learning (TL) techniques alleviates this problem in low-resource setting. In recent years, transformer-based models are proven to be effective in low-resource tasks but faces challenges in accessibility due to its high compute and memory requirements. For this reason, there's a need for a cheaper but effective alternative. This paper has three contributions. First, release a pre-trained AWD-LSTM language model for Filipino language. Second, benchmark AWD-LSTM in the Hate Speech classification task and show that it performs on par with transformer-based models. Third, analyze the the performance of AWD-LSTM in low-resource setting using degradation test and compare it with transformer-based models. ----- Ang mga low-resource languages tulad ng Filipino ay gipit sa accessible na datos kaya't mahirap gumawa ng mga applications sa wikang ito. Ang mga Transfer Learning (TL) techniques ay malaking tulong para sa low-resource setting o mga pagkakataong gipit sa datos. Sa mga nagdaang taon, nanaig ang mga transformer-based TL techniques pagdating sa low-resource tasks ngunit ito ay mataas na compute and memory requirements kaya nangangailangan ng mas mura pero epektibong alternatibo. Ang papel na ito ay may tatlong kontribusyon. Una, maglabas ng pre-trained AWD-LSTM language model sa wikang Filipino upang maging tuntungan sa pagbuo ng mga NLP applications sa wikang Filipino. Pangalawa, mag benchmark ng AWD-LSTM sa Hate Speech classification task at ipakita na kayang nitong makipagsabayan sa mga transformer-based models. Pangatlo, suriin ang performance ng AWD-LSTM sa low-resource setting gamit ang degradation test at ikumpara ito sa mga transformer-based models.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Optimization of Pumps in Water Distribution Systems
Authors: Gergely Hajgató, György Paál, Bálint Gyires-Tóth
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Real-time control of pumps can be an infeasible task in water distribution systems (WDSs) because the calculation to find the optimal pump speeds is resource-intensive. The computational need cannot be lowered even with the capabilities of smart water networks when conventional optimization techniques are used. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is presented here as a controller of pumps in two WDSs. An agent based on a dueling deep q-network is trained to maintain the pump speeds based on instantaneous nodal pressure data. General optimization techniques (e.g., Nelder-Mead method, differential evolution) serve as baselines. The total efficiency achieved by the DRL agent compared to the best performing baseline is above 0.98, whereas the speedup is around 2x compared to that. The main contribution of the presented approach is that the agent can run the pumps in real-time because it depends only on measurement data. If the WDS is replaced with a hydraulic simulation, the agent still outperforms conventional techniques in search speed.
Reversible Jump Probabilistic Programming
Authors: David A. Roberts, Marcus Gallagher, Thomas Taimre
Date: 2019-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Code Generation, Probabilistic Programming

In this paper we present a method for automatically deriving a Reversible Jump Markov chain Monte Carlo sampler from probabilistic programs that specify the target and proposal distributions. The main challenge in automatically deriving such an inference procedure, in comparison to deriving a generic Metropolis-Hastings sampler, is in calculating the Jacobian adjustment to the proposal acceptance ratio. To achieve this, our approach relies on the interaction of several different components, including automatic differentiation, transformation inversion, and optimised code generation. We also present Stochaskell, a new probabilistic programming language embedded in Haskell, which provides an implementation of our method.
Gaussianizing the Earth: Multidimensional Information Measures for Earth Data Analysis
Authors: J. Emmanuel Johnson, Valero Laparra, Maria Piles, Gustau Camps-Valls
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

Information theory is an excellent framework for analyzing Earth system data because it allows us to characterize uncertainty and redundancy, and is universally interpretable. However, accurately estimating information content is challenging because spatio-temporal data is high-dimensional, heterogeneous and has non-linear characteristics. In this paper, we apply multivariate Gaussianization for probability density estimation which is robust to dimensionality, comes with statistical guarantees, and is easy to apply. In addition, this methodology allows us to estimate information-theoretic measures to characterize multivariate densities: information, entropy, total correlation, and mutual information. We demonstrate how information theory measures can be applied in various Earth system data analysis problems. First we show how the method can be used to jointly Gaussianize radar backscattering intensities, synthesize hyperspectral data, and quantify of information content in aerial optical images. We also quantify the information content of several variables describing the soil-vegetation status in agro-ecosystems, and investigate the temporal scales that maximize their shared information under extreme events such as droughts. Finally, we measure the relative information content of space and time dimensions in remote sensing products and model simulations involving long records of key variables such as precipitation, sensible heat and evaporation. Results confirm the validity of the method, for which we anticipate a wide use and adoption. Code and demos of the implemented algorithms and information-theory measures are provided.
Coarse and fine-grained automatic cropping deep convolutional neural network
Authors: Jingfei Chang
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning

The existing convolutional neural network pruning algorithms can be divided into two categories: coarse-grained clipping and fine-grained clipping. This paper proposes a coarse and fine-grained automatic pruning algorithm, which can achieve more efficient and accurate compression acceleration for convolutional neural networks. First, cluster the intermediate feature maps of the convolutional neural network to obtain the network structure after coarse-grained clipping, and then use the particle swarm optimization algorithm to iteratively search and optimize the structure. Finally, the optimal network tailoring substructure is obtained.
Modeling the Music Genre Perception across Language-Bound Cultures
Authors: Elena V. Epure, Guillaume Salha, Manuel Moussallam, Romain Hennequin
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval

The music genre perception expressed through human annotations of artists or albums varies significantly across language-bound cultures. These variations cannot be modeled as mere translations since we also need to account for cultural differences in the music genre perception. In this work, we study the feasibility of obtaining relevant cross-lingual, culture-specific music genre annotations based only on language-specific semantic representations, namely distributed concept embeddings and ontologies. Our study, focused on six languages, shows that unsupervised cross-lingual music genre annotation is feasible with high accuracy, especially when combining both types of representations. This approach of studying music genres is the most extensive to date and has many implications in musicology and music information retrieval. Besides, we introduce a new, domain-dependent cross-lingual corpus to benchmark state of the art multilingual pre-trained embedding models.
Artist-driven layering and user's behaviour impact on recommendations in a playlist continuation scenario
Authors: Sebastiano Antenucci, Simone Boglio, Emanuele Chioso, Ervin Dervishaj, Shuwen Kang, Tommaso Scarlatti, Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00

In this paper we provide an overview of the approach we used as team Creamy Fireflies for the ACM RecSys Challenge 2018. The competition, organized by Spotify, focuses on the problem of playlist continuation, that is suggesting which tracks the user may add to an existing playlist. The challenge addresses this issue in many use cases, from playlist cold start to playlists already composed by up to a hundred tracks. Our team proposes a solution based on a few well known models both content based and collaborative, whose predictions are aggregated via an ensembling step. Moreover by analyzing the underlying structure of the data, we propose a series of boosts to be applied on top of the final predictions and improve the recommendation quality. The proposed approach leverages well-known algorithms and is able to offer a high recommendation quality while requiring a limited amount of computational resources.
Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning by Representation Fusion
Authors: Thomas Adler, Johannes Brandstetter, Michael Widrich, Andreas Mayr, David Kreil, Michael Kopp, Günter Klambauer, Sepp Hochreiter
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, cross-domain few-shot learning, Drug Discovery, Few-Shot Learning

In order to quickly adapt to new data, few-shot learning aims at learning from few examples, often by using already acquired knowledge. The new data often differs from the previously seen data due to a domain shift, that is, a change of the input-target distribution. While several methods perform well on small domain shifts like new target classes with similar inputs, larger domain shifts are still challenging. Large domain shifts may result in high-level concepts that are not shared between the original and the new domain, whereas low-level concepts like edges in images might still be shared and useful. For cross-domain few-shot learning, we suggest representation fusion to unify different abstraction levels of a deep neural network into one representation. We propose Cross-domain Hebbian Ensemble Few-shot learning (CHEF), which achieves representation fusion by an ensemble of Hebbian learners acting on different layers of a deep neural network. Ablation studies show that representation fusion is a decisive factor to boost cross-domain few-shot learning. On the few-shot datasets miniImagenet and tieredImagenet with small domain shifts, CHEF is competitive with state-of-the-art methods. On cross-domain few-shot benchmark challenges with larger domain shifts, CHEF establishes novel state-of-the-art results in all categories. We further apply CHEF on a real-world cross-domain application in drug discovery. We consider a domain shift from bioactive molecules to environmental chemicals and drugs with twelve associated toxicity prediction tasks. On these tasks, that are highly relevant for computational drug discovery, CHEF significantly outperforms all its competitors. Github: https://github.com/ml-jku/chef
A standardized framework for risk-based assessment of treatment effect heterogeneity in observational healthcare databases
Authors: Alexandros Rekkas, David van Klaveren, Patrick B. Ryan, Ewout W. Steyerberg, David M. Kent, Peter R. Rijnbeek
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00

The Predictive Approaches to Treatment Effect Heterogeneity statement focused on baseline risk as a robust predictor of treatment effect and provided guidance on risk-based assessment of treatment effect heterogeneity in the RCT setting. The aim of this study was to extend this approach to the observational setting using a standardized scalable framework. The proposed framework consists of five steps: 1) definition of the research aim, i.e., the population, the treatment, the comparator and the outcome(s) of interest; 2) identification of relevant databases; 3) development of a prediction model for the outcome(s) of interest; 4) estimation of relative and absolute treatment effect within strata of predicted risk, after adjusting for observed confounding; 5) presentation of the results. We demonstrate our framework by evaluating heterogeneity of the effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors versus beta blockers on three efficacy and six safety outcomes across three observational databases. The proposed framework can supplement any comparative effectiveness study. We provide a publicly available R software package for applying this framework to any database mapped to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model. In our demonstration, patients at low risk of acute myocardial infarction received negligible absolute benefits for all three efficacy outcomes, though they were more pronounced in the highest risk quarter, especially for hospitalization with heart failure. However, failing diagnostics showed evidence of residual imbalances even after adjustment for observed confounding. Our framework allows for the evaluation of differential treatment effects across risk strata, which offers the opportunity to consider the benefit-harm trade-off between alternative treatments.
Controlling the Interaction Between Generation and Inference in Semi-Supervised Variational Autoencoders Using Importance Weighting
Authors: Ghazi Felhi, Joseph Leroux, Djamé Seddah
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Topic Classification

Even though Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are widely used for semi-supervised learning, the reason why they work remains unclear. In fact, the addition of the unsupervised objective is most often vaguely described as a regularization. The strength of this regularization is controlled by down-weighting the objective on the unlabeled part of the training set. Through an analysis of the objective of semi-supervised VAEs, we observe that they use the posterior of the learned generative model to guide the inference model in learning the partially observed latent variable. We show that given this observation, it is possible to gain finer control on the effect of the unsupervised objective on the training procedure. Using importance weighting, we derive two novel objectives that prioritize either one of the partially observed latent variable, or the unobserved latent variable. Experiments on the IMDB english sentiment analysis dataset and on the AG News topic classification dataset show the improvements brought by our prioritization mechanism and exhibit a behavior that is inline with our description of the inner working of Semi-Supervised VAEs.
Bias-Aware Inference in Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Designs
Authors: Claudia Noack, Christoph Rothe
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, valid

We propose new confidence sets (CSs) for the regression discontinuity parameter in fuzzy designs. Our CSs are based on local linear regression, and are bias-aware, in the sense that they take possible bias explicitly into account. Their construction shares similarities with that of Anderson-Rubin CSs in exactly identified instrumental variable models, and thereby avoids issues with "delta method" approximations that underlie most commonly used existing inference methods for fuzzy regression discontinuity analysis. Our CSs are asymptotically equivalent to existing procedures in canonical settings with strong identification and a continuous running variable. However, due to their particular construction they are also valid under a wide range of empirically relevant conditions in which existing methods can fail, such as setups with discrete running variables, donut designs, and weak identification.
Three-Dimensional Lip Motion Network for Text-Independent Speaker Recognition
Authors: Jianrong Wang, Tong Wu, Shanyu Wang, Mei Yu, Qiang Fang, Ju Zhang, Li Liu
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Speaker Recognition, Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

Lip motion reflects behavior characteristics of speakers, and thus can be used as a new kind of biometrics in speaker recognition. In the literature, lots of works used two-dimensional (2D) lip images to recognize speaker in a textdependent context. However, 2D lip easily suffers from various face orientations. To this end, in this work, we present a novel end-to-end 3D lip motion Network (3LMNet) by utilizing the sentence-level 3D lip motion (S3DLM) to recognize speakers in both the text-independent and text-dependent contexts. A new regional feedback module (RFM) is proposed to obtain attentions in different lip regions. Besides, prior knowledge of lip motion is investigated to complement RFM, where landmark-level and frame-level features are merged to form a better feature representation. Moreover, we present two methods, i.e., coordinate transformation and face posture correction to pre-process the LSD-AV dataset, which contains 68 speakers and 146 sentences per speaker. The evaluation results on this dataset demonstrate that our proposed 3LMNet is superior to the baseline models, i.e., LSTM, VGG-16 and ResNet-34, and outperforms the state-of-the-art using 2D lip image as well as the 3D face. The code of this work is released at https://github.com/wutong18/Three-Dimensional-Lip- Motion-Network-for-Text-Independent-Speaker-Recognition.
An AI based talent acquisition and benchmarking for job
Authors: Rudresh Mishra, Ricardo Rodriguez, Valentin Portillo
Date: 2020-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In a recruitment industry, selecting a best CV from a particular job post within a pile of thousand CV's is quite challenging. Finding a perfect candidate for an organization who can be fit to work within organizational culture is a difficult task. In order to help the recruiters to fill these gaps we leverage the help of AI. We propose a methodology to solve these problems by matching the skill graph generated from CV and Job Post. In this report our approach is to perform the business understanding in order to justify why such problems arise and how we intend to solve these problems using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. We limit our project only to solve the problem in the domain of the computer science industry.
COVID-CT-Mask-Net: Prediction of COVID-19 from CT Scans Using Regional Features
Authors: Aram Ter-Sarkisov
Date: 2020-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis, COVID-19 Image Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Sensitivity

We present COVID-CT-Mask-Net model that predicts COVID-19 from CT scans. The model works in two stages: first, it detects the instances of ground glass opacity and consolidation in CT scans, then predicts the condition from the ranked bounding box detections. To develop the solution for the three-class problem (COVID, common pneumonia and control), we used the COVIDx-CT dataset derived from the dataset of CT scans collected by China National Center for Bioinformation. We use about 5% of the training split of COVIDx-CT to train the model, and without any complicated data normalization, balancing and regularization, and training only a small fraction of the model's parameters, we achieve a 90.80% COVID sensitivity, 91.62% common pneumonia sensitivity and 92.10% normal sensitivity, and an overall accuracy of 91.66% on the test data (21182 images), bringing the ratio of test/train data to 7.06, which implies a very high capacity of the model to generalize to new data.  We also establish an important result, that ranked regional predictions (bounding boxes with scores) in Mask R-CNN can be used to make accurate predictions of the image class. The full source code, models and pretrained weights are available on https://github.com/AlexTS1980/COVID-CT-Mask-Net.
Stochastic Geometry-based Modelling of Mobile UAV Relay Networks under Realistic Fading
Authors: Francois De Saint Moulin, Charles Wiame, Claude Oestges, Luc Vandendorpe
Date: 2020-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Processes, Position

We consider a relay network based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Terrestrial Base Stations (TBS) and UAV Relay Nodes (RN) are modelled using two Homogeneous Poisson Point Processes (HPPP). UAVs can hover at a fixed position or move following specific displacement schemes. The Coverage Probability (CP) of a typical user equipment (UE) is derived, either when it communicates via a direct link (from the TBS to the UE) or via a relay link (from the TBS to the UE through a UAV RN). Every link can be in Line-of-Sight (LoS) or Non Line-of-Sight (NLoS), and suffers from Rician fading with distance-dependent parameters. This coverage is calculated by means of both stochastic geometry (SG) and Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations. The benefits of the use of UAV as RNs are analysed depending on their altitude, density, and mobility scheme.
Design and Fabrication of Novel Digital Transcranial Electrical Stimulator for Medical and Psychiatry Applications
Authors: HoseinAli Jafari, Mohammad Bagher Heydari, Niloofar Jafari, Hamid Mirhosseini
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00

In this article, we design a novel Transcranial Electrical Stimulator for medical applications, which is very cheap and can produce the desired signals very accurately. Our fabricated stimulator generates all current signals related to Transcranial Electrical Stimulation (TES) methods, i.e. Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), Transcranial Pulsed Current Stimulation (tPCS), Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation (CES), and Microcurrent Electrical Therapy (MET). The proposed device has been constructed of an advanced digital controller which makes it tunable. One of the major advantages of the device is its ability to generate Burst pulses.
PhD dissertation to infer multiple networks from microbial data
Authors: Sahar Tavakoli
Date: 2020-10-12 00:00:00

The interactions among the constituent members of a microbial community play a major role in determining the overall behavior of the community and the abundance levels of its members. These interactions can be modeled using a network whose nodes represent microbial taxa and edges represent pairwise interactions. A microbial network is a weighted graph that is constructed from a sample-taxa count matrix, and can be used to model co-occurrences and/or interactions of the constituent members of a microbial community. The nodes in this graph represent microbial taxa and the edges represent pairwise associations amongst these taxa. A microbial network is typically constructed from a sample-taxa count matrix that is obtained by sequencing multiple biological samples and identifying taxa counts. From large-scale microbiome studies, it is evident that microbial community compositions and interactions are impacted by environmental and/or host factors. Thus, it is not unreasonable to expect that a sample-taxa matrix generated as part of a large study involving multiple environmental or clinical parameters can be associated with more than one microbial network. However, to our knowledge, microbial network inference methods proposed thus far assume that the sample-taxa matrix is associated with a single network.