pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sustainable AI: Environmental Implications, Challenges and Opportunities
Authors: Carole-Jean Wu, Ramya Raghavendra, Udit Gupta, Bilge Acun, Newsha Ardalani, Kiwan Maeng, Gloria Chang, Fiona Aga Behram, James Huang, Charles Bai, Michael Gschwind, Anurag Gupta, Myle Ott, Anastasia Melnikov, Salvatore Candido, David Brooks, Geeta Chauhan, Benjamin Lee, Hsien-Hsin S. Lee, Bugra Akyildiz, Maximilian Balandat, Joe Spisak, Ravi Jain, Mike Rabbat, Kim Hazelwood
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00

This paper explores the environmental impact of the super-linear growth trends for AI from a holistic perspective, spanning Data, Algorithms, and System Hardware. We characterize the carbon footprint of AI computing by examining the model development cycle across industry-scale machine learning use cases and, at the same time, considering the life cycle of system hardware. Taking a step further, we capture the operational and manufacturing carbon footprint of AI computing and present an end-to-end analysis for what and how hardware-software design and at-scale optimization can help reduce the overall carbon footprint of AI. Based on the industry experience and lessons learned, we share the key challenges and chart out important development directions across the many dimensions of AI. We hope the key messages and insights presented in this paper can inspire the community to advance the field of AI in an environmentally-responsible manner.
A Survey on the Robustness of Feature Importance and Counterfactual Explanations
Authors: Saumitra Mishra, Sanghamitra Dutta, Jason Long, Daniele Magazzeni
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Feature Importance, Survey

There exist several methods that aim to address the crucial task of understanding the behaviour of AI/ML models. Arguably, the most popular among them are local explanations that focus on investigating model behaviour for individual instances. Several methods have been proposed for local analysis, but relatively lesser effort has gone into understanding if the explanations are robust and accurately reflect the behaviour of underlying models. In this work, we present a survey of the works that analysed the robustness of two classes of local explanations (feature importance and counterfactual explanations) that are popularly used in analysing AI/ML models in finance. The survey aims to unify existing definitions of robustness, introduces a taxonomy to classify different robustness approaches, and discusses some interesting results. Finally, the survey introduces some pointers about extending current robustness analysis approaches so as to identify reliable explainability methods.
Causal Discovery in Linear Structural Causal Models with Deterministic Relations
Authors: Yuqin Yang, Mohamed Nafea, AmirEmad Ghassami, Negar Kiyavash
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Causal Inference

Linear structural causal models (SCMs)-- in which each observed variable is generated by a subset of the other observed variables as well as a subset of the exogenous sources-- are pervasive in causal inference and casual discovery. However, for the task of causal discovery, existing work almost exclusively focus on the submodel where each observed variable is associated with a distinct source with non-zero variance. This results in the restriction that no observed variable can deterministically depend on other observed variables or latent confounders. In this paper, we extend the results on structure learning by focusing on a subclass of linear SCMs which do not have this property, i.e., models in which observed variables can be causally affected by any subset of the sources, and are allowed to be a deterministic function of other observed variables or latent confounders. This allows for a more realistic modeling of influence or information propagation in systems. We focus on the task of causal discovery form observational data generated from a member of this subclass. We derive a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for unique identifiability of the causal structure. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that gives identifiability results for causal discovery under both latent confounding and deterministic relationships. Further, we propose an algorithm for recovering the underlying causal structure when the aforementioned conditions are satisfied. We validate our theoretical results both on synthetic and real datasets.
Speaker conditioning of acoustic models using affine transformation for multi-speaker speech recognition
Authors: Midia Yousefi, John H. L. Hanse
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This study addresses the problem of single-channel Automatic Speech Recognition of a target speaker within an overlap speech scenario. In the proposed method, the hidden representations in the acoustic model are modulated by speaker auxiliary information to recognize only the desired speaker. Affine transformation layers are inserted into the acoustic model network to integrate speaker information with the acoustic features. The speaker conditioning process allows the acoustic model to perform computation in the context of target-speaker auxiliary information. The proposed speaker conditioning method is a general approach and can be applied to any acoustic model architecture. Here, we employ speaker conditioning on a ResNet acoustic model. Experiments on the WSJ corpus show that the proposed speaker conditioning method is an effective solution to fuse speaker auxiliary information with acoustic features for multi-speaker speech recognition, achieving +9% and +20% relative WER reduction for clean and overlap speech scenarios, respectively, compared to the original ResNet acoustic model baseline.
3DP3: 3D Scene Perception via Probabilistic Programming
Authors: Nishad Gothoskar, Marco Cusumano-Towner, Ben Zinberg, Matin Ghavamizadeh, Falk Pollok, Austin Garrett, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Dan Gutfreund, Vikash K. Mansinghka
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation, Probabilistic Programming, Scene Understanding

We present 3DP3, a framework for inverse graphics that uses inference in a structured generative model of objects, scenes, and images. 3DP3 uses (i) voxel models to represent the 3D shape of objects, (ii) hierarchical scene graphs to decompose scenes into objects and the contacts between them, and (iii) depth image likelihoods based on real-time graphics. Given an observed RGB-D image, 3DP3's inference algorithm infers the underlying latent 3D scene, including the object poses and a parsimonious joint parametrization of these poses, using fast bottom-up pose proposals, novel involutive MCMC updates of the scene graph structure, and, optionally, neural object detectors and pose estimators. We show that 3DP3 enables scene understanding that is aware of 3D shape, occlusion, and contact structure. Our results demonstrate that 3DP3 is more accurate at 6DoF object pose estimation from real images than deep learning baselines and shows better generalization to challenging scenes with novel viewpoints, contact, and partial observability.
EmpBot: A T5-based Empathetic Chatbot focusing on Sentiments
Authors: Emmanouil Zaranis, Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Athanasios Katsamanis, Alexandros Potamianos
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In this paper, we introduce EmpBot: an end-to-end empathetic chatbot. Empathetic conversational agents should not only understand what is being discussed, but also acknowledge the implied feelings of the conversation partner and respond appropriately. To this end, we propose a method based on a transformer pretrained language model (T5). Specifically, during finetuning we propose to use three objectives: response language modeling, sentiment understanding, and empathy forcing. The first objective is crucial for generating relevant and coherent responses, while the next ones are significant for acknowledging the sentimental state of the conversational partner and for favoring empathetic responses. We evaluate our model on the EmpatheticDialogues dataset using both automated metrics and human evaluation. The inclusion of the sentiment understanding and empathy forcing auxiliary losses favor empathetic responses, as human evaluation results indicate, comparing with the current state-of-the-art.
TargetUM: Targeted High-Utility Itemset Querying
Authors: Jinbao Miao, Shicheng Wan, Wensheng Gan, Jiayi Sun, Jiahui Chen
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Traditional high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) aims to determine all high-utility itemsets (HUIs) that satisfy the minimum utility threshold (\textit{minUtil}) in transaction databases. However, in most applications, not all HUIs are interesting because only specific parts are required. Thus, targeted mining based on user preferences is more important than traditional mining tasks. This paper is the first to propose a target-based HUIM problem and to provide a clear formulation of the targeted utility mining task in a quantitative transaction database. A tree-based algorithm known as Target-based high-Utility iteMset querying using (TargetUM) is proposed. The algorithm uses a lexicographic querying tree and three effective pruning strategies to improve the mining efficiency. We implemented experimental validation on several real and synthetic databases, and the results demonstrate that the performance of \textbf{TargetUM} is satisfactory, complete, and correct. Finally, owing to the lexicographic querying tree, the database no longer needs to be scanned repeatedly for multiple queries.
Long-Range Route-planning for Autonomous Vehicles in the Polar Oceans
Authors: Maria Fox, Michael Meredith, J. Alexander Brearley, Dan Jones, Derek Long
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

There is an increasing demand for piloted autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to operate in polar ice conditions. At present, AUVs are deployed from ships and directly human-piloted in these regions, entailing a high carbon cost and limiting the scope of operations. A key requirement for long-term autonomous missions is a long-range route planning capability that is aware of the changing ice conditions. In this paper we address the problem of automating long-range route-planning for AUVs operating in the Southern Ocean. We present the route-planning method and results showing that efficient, ice-avoiding, long-distance traverses can be planned.
Intrusion Prevention through Optimal Stopping
Authors: Kim Hammar, Rolf Stadler
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We study automated intrusion prevention using reinforcement learning. Following a novel approach, we formulate the problem of intrusion prevention as an (optimal) multiple stopping problem. This formulation gives us insight into the structure of optimal policies, which we show to have threshold properties. For most practical cases, it is not feasible to obtain an optimal defender policy using dynamic programming. We therefore develop a reinforcement learning approach to approximate an optimal threshold policy. We introduce T-SPSA, an efficient reinforcement learning algorithm that learns threshold policies through stochastic approximation. We show that T-SPSA outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms for our use case. Our overall method for learning and validating policies includes two systems: a simulation system where defender policies are incrementally learned and an emulation system where statistics are produced that drive simulation runs and where learned policies are evaluated. We show that this approach can produce effective defender policies for a practical IT infrastructure.
A Decentralized Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Passage of Emergency Vehicles
Authors: Haoran Su, Yaofeng Desmond Zhong, Biswadip Dey, Amit Chakraborty
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traffic Signal Control

Emergency vehicles (EMVs) play a critical role in a city's response to time-critical events such as medical emergencies and fire outbreaks. The existing approaches to reduce EMV travel time employ route optimization and traffic signal pre-emption without accounting for the coupling between route these two subproblems. As a result, the planned route often becomes suboptimal. In addition, these approaches also do not focus on minimizing disruption to the overall traffic flow. To address these issues, we introduce EMVLight in this paper. This is a decentralized reinforcement learning (RL) framework for simultaneous dynamic routing and traffic signal control. EMVLight extends Dijkstra's algorithm to efficiently update the optimal route for an EMV in real-time as it travels through the traffic network. Consequently, the decentralized RL agents learn network-level cooperative traffic signal phase strategies that reduce EMV travel time and the average travel time of non-EMVs in the network. We have carried out comprehensive experiments with synthetic and real-world maps to demonstrate this benefit. Our results show that EMVLight outperforms benchmark transportation engineering techniques as well as existing RL-based traffic signal control methods.
On Joint Learning for Solving Placement and Routing in Chip Design
Authors: Ruoyu Cheng, Junchi Yan
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: GPU, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

For its advantage in GPU acceleration and less dependency on human experts, machine learning has been an emerging tool for solving the placement and routing problems, as two critical steps in modern chip design flow. Being still in its early stage, there are fundamental issues: scalability, reward design, and end-to-end learning paradigm etc. To achieve end-to-end placement learning, we first propose a joint learning method termed by DeepPlace for the placement of macros and standard cells, by the integration of reinforcement learning with a gradient based optimization scheme. To further bridge the placement with the subsequent routing task, we also develop a joint learning approach via reinforcement learning to fulfill both macro placement and routing, which is called DeepPR. One key design in our (reinforcement) learning paradigm involves a multi-view embedding model to encode both global graph level and local node level information of the input macros. Moreover, the random network distillation is devised to encourage exploration. Experiments on public chip design benchmarks show that our method can effectively learn from experience and also provides intermediate placement for the post standard cell placement, within few hours for training.
Mastering Atari Games with Limited Data
Authors: Weirui Ye, Shaohuai Liu, Thanard Kurutach, Pieter Abbeel, Yang Gao
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Atari Games, Atari Games 100k

Reinforcement learning has achieved great success in many applications. However, sample efficiency remains a key challenge, with prominent methods requiring millions (or even billions) of environment steps to train. Recently, there has been significant progress in sample efficient image-based RL algorithms; however, consistent human-level performance on the Atari game benchmark remains an elusive goal. We propose a sample efficient model-based visual RL algorithm built on MuZero, which we name EfficientZero. Our method achieves 194.3% mean human performance and 109.0% median performance on the Atari 100k benchmark with only two hours of real-time game experience and outperforms the state SAC in some tasks on the DMControl 100k benchmark. This is the first time an algorithm achieves super-human performance on Atari games with such little data. EfficientZero's performance is also close to DQN's performance at 200 million frames while we consume 500 times less data. EfficientZero's low sample complexity and high performance can bring RL closer to real-world applicability. We implement our algorithm in an easy-to-understand manner and it is available at https://github.com/YeWR/EfficientZero. We hope it will accelerate the research of MCTS-based RL algorithms in the wider community.
One Step at a Time: Pros and Cons of Multi-Step Meta-Gradient Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Clément Bonnet, Paul Caron, Thomas Barrett, Ian Davies, Alexandre Laterre
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00

Self-tuning algorithms that adapt the learning process online encourage more effective and robust learning. Among all the methods available, meta-gradients have emerged as a promising approach. They leverage the differentiability of the learning rule with respect to some hyper-parameters to adapt them in an online fashion. Although meta-gradients can be accumulated over multiple learning steps to avoid myopic updates, this is rarely used in practice. In this work, we demonstrate that whilst multi-step meta-gradients do provide a better learning signal in expectation, this comes at the cost of a significant increase in variance, hindering performance. In the light of this analysis, we introduce a novel method mixing multiple inner steps that enjoys a more accurate and robust meta-gradient signal, essentially trading off bias and variance in meta-gradient estimation. When applied to the Snake game, the mixing meta-gradient algorithm can cut the variance by a factor of 3 while achieving similar or higher performance.
A Comparative Review of Recent Few-Shot Object Detection Algorithms
Authors: Leng Jiaxu, Chen Taiyue, Gao Xinbo, Yu Yongtao, Wang Ye, Gao Feng, Wang Yue
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Few-shot object detection, learning to adapt to the novel classes with a few labeled data, is an imperative and long-lasting problem due to the inherent long-tail distribution of real-world data and the urgent demands to cut costs of data collection and annotation. Recently, some studies have explored how to use implicit cues in extra datasets without target-domain supervision to help few-shot detectors refine robust task notions. This survey provides a comprehensive overview from current classic and latest achievements for few-shot object detection to future research expectations from manifold perspectives. In particular, we first propose a data-based taxonomy of the training data and the form of corresponding supervision which are accessed during the training stage. Following this taxonomy, we present a significant review of the formal definition, main challenges, benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and learning strategies. In addition, we present a detailed investigation of how to interplay the object detection methods to develop this issue systematically. Finally, we conclude with the current status of few-shot object detection, along with potential research directions for this field.
AutoDrone: Shortest Optimized Obstacle-Free Path Planning for Autonomous Drones
Authors: Prithwish Jana, Debasish Jana
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00

With technological advancement, drone has emerged as unmanned aerial vehicle that can be controlled by humans to fly or reach a destination. This may be autonomous as well, where the drone itself is intelligent enough to find a shortest obstacle-free path to reach the destination from a designated source. Be it a planned smart city or even a wreckage site affected by natural calamity, we may imagine the buildings, any surface-erected structure or other blockage as obstacles for the drone to fly in a straight line-of-sight path. To address such path-planning of drones, the bird's eye-view of the whole landscape is first transformed to a graph of grid-cells, where some are occupied to indicate the obstacles and some are free to indicate the free path. We propose a method to find out the shortest obstacle-free path in the coordinate system guided by GPS. The autonomous drone (AutoDrone) will thus be able to move from one place to another along the shortest path, without colliding into hindrances, while traveling in a two-dimensional space. Heuristics to extend this to long journeys and 3D space are also elaborated. Our approach can be especially beneficial in rescue operations and fast delivery or pick-up in an energy-efficient way, where our algorithm will help in finding out the shortest path and angle along which it should fly. Experiments are done on different scenarios of map layouts and obstacle positions to understand the shortest feasible route, computed by the autonomous drone.
How should human translation coexist with NMT? Efficient tool for building high quality parallel corpus
Authors: Chanjun Park, Seolhwa Lee, Hyeonseok Moon, Sugyeong Eo, Jaehyung Seo, Heuiseok Lim
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

This paper proposes a tool for efficiently constructing high-quality parallel corpora with minimizing human labor and making this tool publicly available. Our proposed construction process is based on neural machine translation (NMT) to allow for it to not only coexist with human translation, but also improve its efficiency by combining data quality control with human translation in a data-centric approach.
Convergence and Optimality of Policy Gradient Methods in Weakly Smooth Settings
Authors: Matthew S. Zhang, Murat A. Erdogdu, Animesh Garg
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Policy Gradient Methods, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In particular, existing rates are achieved in limited settings, under strict regularity conditions. In this work, we establish explicit convergence rates of policy gradient methods, extending the convergence regime to weakly smooth policy classes with $L_2$ integrable gradient. We provide intuitive examples to illustrate the insight behind these new conditions. Notably, our analysis also shows that convergence rates are achievable for both the standard policy gradient and the natural policy gradient algorithms under these assumptions. Lastly we provide performance guarantees for the converged policies.
Hierarchical Heterogeneous Graph Representation Learning for Short Text Classification
Authors: Yaqing Wang, Song Wang, Quanming Yao, Dejing Dou
Date: 2021-10-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Classification, Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Short text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing. It is hard due to the lack of context information and labeled data in practice. In this paper, we propose a new method called SHINE, which is based on graph neural network (GNN), for short text classification. First, we model the short text dataset as a hierarchical heterogeneous graph consisting of word-level component graphs which introduce more semantic and syntactic information. Then, we dynamically learn a short document graph that facilitates effective label propagation among similar short texts. Thus, compared with existing GNN-based methods, SHINE can better exploit interactions between nodes of the same types and capture similarities between short texts. Extensive experiments on various benchmark short text datasets show that SHINE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially with fewer labels.