pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Quantifying Uncertainty in Risk Assessment using Fuzzy Theory
Authors: Hengameh Fakhravar
Date: 2020-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Management

Risk specialists are trying to understand risk better and use complex models for risk assessment, while many risks are not yet well understood. The lack of empirical data and complex causal and outcome relationships make it difficult to estimate the degree to which certain risk types are exposed. Traditional risk models are based on classical set theory. In comparison, fuzzy logic models are built on fuzzy set theory and are useful for analyzing risks with insufficient knowledge or inaccurate data. Fuzzy logic systems help to make large-scale risk management frameworks more simple. For risks that do not have an appropriate probability model, a fuzzy logic system can help model the cause and effect relationships, assess the level of risk exposure, rank key risks in a consistent way, and consider available data and experts'opinions. Besides, in fuzzy logic systems, some rules explicitly explain the connection, dependence, and relationships between model factors. This can help identify risk mitigation solutions. Resources can be used to mitigate risks with very high levels of exposure and relatively low hedging costs. Fuzzy set and fuzzy logic models can be used with Bayesian and other types of method recognition and decision models, including artificial neural networks and decision tree models. These developed models have the potential to solve difficult risk assessment problems. This research paper explores areas in which fuzzy logic models can be used to improve risk assessment and risk decision making. We will discuss the methodology, framework, and process of using fuzzy logic systems in risk assessment.
Factorized Deep Generative Models for Trajectory Generation with Spatiotemporal-Validity Constraints
Authors: Liming Zhang, Liang Zhao, Dieter Pfoser
Date: 2020-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

Trajectory data generation is an important domain that characterizes the generative process of mobility data. Traditional methods heavily rely on predefined heuristics and distributions and are weak in learning unknown mechanisms. Inspired by the success of deep generative neural networks for images and texts, a fast-developing research topic is deep generative models for trajectory data which can learn expressively explanatory models for sophisticated latent patterns. This is a nascent yet promising domain for many applications. We first propose novel deep generative models factorizing time-variant and time-invariant latent variables that characterize global and local semantics, respectively. We then develop new inference strategies based on variational inference and constrained optimization to encapsulate the spatiotemporal validity. New deep neural network architectures have been developed to implement the inference and generation models with newly-generalized latent variable priors. The proposed methods achieved significant improvements in quantitative and qualitative evaluations in extensive experiments.
UniNet: Next Term Course Recommendation using Deep Learning
Authors: Nicolas Araque, Germano Rojas, Maria Vitali
Date: 2020-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Deep Learning, Recommendation Systems

Course enrollment recommendation is a relevant task that helps university students decide what is the best combination of courses to enroll in the next term. In particular, recommender system techniques like matrix factorization and collaborative filtering have been developed to try to solve this problem. As these techniques fail to represent the time-dependent nature of academic performance datasets we propose a deep learning approach using recurrent neural networks that aims to better represent how chronological order of course grades affects the probability of success. We have shown that it is possible to obtain a performance of 81.10% on AUC metric using only grade information and that it is possible to develop a recommender system with academic student performance prediction. This is shown to be meaningful across different student GPA levels and course difficulties
Learning a Lie Algebra from Unlabeled Data Pairs
Authors: Christopher Ick, Vincent Lostanlen
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Deep convolutional networks (convnets) show a remarkable ability to learn disentangled representations. In recent years, the generalization of deep learning to Lie groups beyond rigid motion in $\mathbb{R}^n$ has allowed to build convnets over datasets with non-trivial symmetries, such as patterns over the surface of a sphere. However, one limitation of this approach is the need to explicitly define the Lie group underlying the desired invariance property before training the convnet. Whereas rotations on the sphere have a well-known symmetry group ($\mathrm{SO}(3)$), the same cannot be said of many real-world factors of variability. For example, the disentanglement of pitch, intensity dynamics, and playing technique remains a challenging task in music information retrieval. This article proposes a machine learning method to discover a nonlinear transformation of the space $\mathbb{R}^n$ which maps a collection of $n$-dimensional vectors $(\boldsymbol{x}_i)_i$ onto a collection of target vectors $(\boldsymbol{y}_i)_i$. The key idea is to approximate every target $\boldsymbol{y}_i$ by a matrix--vector product of the form $\boldsymbol{\widetilde{y}}_i = \boldsymbol{\phi}(t_i) \boldsymbol{x}_i$, where the matrix $\boldsymbol{\phi}(t_i)$ belongs to a one-parameter subgroup of $\mathrm{GL}_n (\mathbb{R})$. Crucially, the value of the parameter $t_i \in \mathbb{R}$ may change between data pairs $(\boldsymbol{x}_i, \boldsymbol{y}_i)$ and does not need to be known in advance.
High-Resolution Augmentation for Automatic Template-Based Matching of Human Models
Authors: Riccardo Marin, Simone Melzi, Emanuele Rodolà, Umberto Castellani
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We propose a new approach for 3D shape matching of deformable human shapes. Our approach is based on the joint adoption of three different tools: an intrinsic spectral matching pipeline, a morphable model, and an extrinsic details refinement. By operating in conjunction, these tools allow us to greatly improve the quality of the matching while at the same time resolving the key issues exhibited by each tool individually. In this paper we present an innovative High-Resolution Augmentation (HRA) strategy that enables highly accurate correspondence even in the presence of significant mesh resolution mismatch between the input shapes. This augmentation provides an effective workaround for the resolution limitations imposed by the adopted morphable model. The HRA in its global and localized versions represents a novel refinement strategy for surface subdivision methods. We demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed pipeline on multiple challenging benchmarks, and showcase its effectiveness in surface registration and texture transfer.
Towards Computational Linguistics in Minangkabau Language: Studies on Sentiment Analysis and Machine Translation
Authors: Fajri Koto, Ikhwan Koto
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: PACLIC 2020 10
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, Translation, Word Translation

Although some linguists (Rusmali et al., 1985; Crouch, 2009) have fairly attempted to define the morphology and syntax of Minangkabau, information processing in this language is still absent due to the scarcity of the annotated resource. In this work, we release two Minangkabau corpora: sentiment analysis and machine translation that are harvested and constructed from Twitter and Wikipedia. We conduct the first computational linguistics in Minangkabau language employing classic machine learning and sequence-to-sequence models such as LSTM and Transformer. Our first experiments show that the classification performance over Minangkabau text significantly drops when tested with the model trained in Indonesian. Whereas, in the machine translation experiment, a simple word-to-word translation using a bilingual dictionary outperforms LSTM and Transformer model in terms of BLEU score.
What is the Best Grid-Map for Self-Driving Cars Localization? An Evaluation under Diverse Types of Illumination, Traffic, and Environment
Authors: Filipe Mutz, Thiago Oliveira-Santos, Avelino Forechi, Karin S. Komati, Claudine Badue, Felipe M. G. França, Alberto F. de Souza
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Driving Cars

The localization of self-driving cars is needed for several tasks such as keeping maps updated, tracking objects, and planning. Localization algorithms often take advantage of maps for estimating the car pose. Since maintaining and using several maps is computationally expensive, it is important to analyze which type of map is more adequate for each application. In this work, we provide data for such analysis by comparing the accuracy of a particle filter localization when using occupancy, reflectivity, color, or semantic grid maps. To the best of our knowledge, such evaluation is missing in the literature. For building semantic and colour grid maps, point clouds from a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor are fused with images captured by a front-facing camera. Semantic information is extracted from images with a deep neural network. Experiments are performed in varied environments, under diverse conditions of illumination and traffic. Results show that occupancy grid maps lead to more accurate localization, followed by reflectivity grid maps. In most scenarios, the localization with semantic grid maps kept the position tracking without catastrophic losses, but with errors from 2 to 3 times bigger than the previous. Colour grid maps led to inaccurate and unstable localization even using a robust metric, the entropy correlation coefficient, for comparing online data and the map.
Suboptimality of Constrained Least Squares and Improvements via Non-Linear Predictors
Authors: Tomas Vaškevičius, Nikita Zhivotovskiy
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00

We study the problem of predicting as well as the best linear predictor in a bounded Euclidean ball with respect to the squared loss. When only boundedness of the data generating distribution is assumed, we establish that the least squares estimator constrained to a bounded Euclidean ball does not attain the classical $O(d/n)$ excess risk rate, where $d$ is the dimension of the covariates and $n$ is the number of samples. In particular, we construct a bounded distribution such that the constrained least squares estimator incurs an excess risk of order $\Omega(d^{3/2}/n)$ hence refuting a recent conjecture of Ohad Shamir [JMLR 2015]. In contrast, we observe that non-linear predictors can achieve the optimal rate $O(d/n)$ with no assumptions on the distribution of the covariates. We discuss additional distributional assumptions sufficient to guarantee an $O(d/n)$ excess risk rate for the least squares estimator. Among them are certain moment equivalence assumptions often used in the robust statistics literature. While such assumptions are central in the analysis of unbounded and heavy-tailed settings, our work indicates that in some cases, they also rule out unfavorable bounded distributions.
Features based Mammogram Image Classification using Weighted Feature Support Vector Machine
Authors: S. Kavitha, K. K. Thyagharajan
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In the existing research of mammogram image classification, either clinical data or image features of a specific type is considered along with the supervised classifiers such as Neural Network (NN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). This paper considers automated classification of breast tissue type as benign or malignant using Weighted Feature Support Vector Machine (WFSVM) through constructing the precomputed kernel function by assigning more weight to relevant features using the principle of maximizing deviations. Initially, MIAS dataset of mammogram images is divided into training and test set, then the preprocessing techniques such as noise removal and background removal are applied to the input images and the Region of Interest (ROI) is identified. The statistical features and texture features are extracted from the ROI and the clinical features are obtained directly from the dataset. The extracted features of the training dataset are used to construct the weighted features and precomputed linear kernel for training the WFSVM, from which the training model file is created. Using this model file the kernel matrix of test samples is classified as benign or malignant. This analysis shows that the texture features have resulted in better accuracy than the other features with WFSVM and SVM. However, the number of support vectors created in WFSVM is less than the SVM classifier.
Enabling Resource-Aware Mapping of Spiking Neural Networks via Spatial Decomposition
Authors: Adarsha Balaji, Shihao Song, Anup Das, Jeffrey Krichmar, Nikil Dutt, James Shackleford, Nagarajan Kandasamy, Francky Catthoor
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Rolling Shutter Correction

With growing model complexity, mapping Spiking Neural Network (SNN)-based applications to tile-based neuromorphic hardware is becoming increasingly challenging. This is because the synaptic storage resources on a tile, viz. a crossbar, can accommodate only a fixed number of pre-synaptic connections per post-synaptic neuron. For complex SNN models that have many pre-synaptic connections per neuron, some connections may need to be pruned after training to fit onto the tile resources, leading to a loss in model quality, e.g., accuracy. In this work, we propose a novel unrolling technique that decomposes a neuron function with many pre-synaptic connections into a sequence of homogeneous neural units, where each neural unit is a function computation node, with two pre-synaptic connections. This spatial decomposition technique significantly improves crossbar utilization and retains all pre-synaptic connections, resulting in no loss of the model quality derived from connection pruning. We integrate the proposed technique within an existing SNN mapping framework and evaluate it using machine learning applications on the DYNAP-SE state-of-the-art neuromorphic hardware. Our results demonstrate an average 60% lower crossbar requirement, 9x higher synapse utilization, 62% lower wasted energy on the hardware, and between 0.8% and 4.6% increase in model quality.
Can questions summarize a corpus? Using question generation for characterizing COVID-19 research
Authors: Gabriela Surita, Rodrigo Nogueira, Roberto Lotufo
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

What are the latent questions on some textual data? In this work, we investigate using question generation models for exploring a collection of documents. Our method, dubbed corpus2question, consists of applying a pre-trained question generation model over a corpus and aggregating the resulting questions by frequency and time. This technique is an alternative to methods such as topic modelling and word cloud for summarizing large amounts of textual data. Results show that applying corpus2question on a corpus of scientific articles related to COVID-19 yields relevant questions about the topic. The most frequent questions are "what is covid 19" and "what is the treatment for covid". Among the 1000 most frequent questions are "what is the threshold for herd immunity" and "what is the role of ace2 in viral entry". We show that the proposed method generated similar questions for 13 of the 27 expert-made questions from the CovidQA question answering dataset. The code to reproduce our experiments and the generated questions are available at: https://github.com/unicamp-dl/corpus2question
Adversarial Consistent Learning on Partial Domain Adaptation of PlantCLEF 2020 Challenge
Authors: Youshan Zhang, Brian D. Davison
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, domain classification, Partial Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation is one of the most crucial techniques to mitigate the domain shift problem, which exists when transferring knowledge from an abundant labeled sourced domain to a target domain with few or no labels. Partial domain adaptation addresses the scenario when target categories are only a subset of source categories. In this paper, to enable the efficient representation of cross-domain plant images, we first extract deep features from pre-trained models and then develop adversarial consistent learning ($ACL$) in a unified deep architecture for partial domain adaptation. It consists of source domain classification loss, adversarial learning loss, and feature consistency loss. Adversarial learning loss can maintain domain-invariant features between the source and target domains. Moreover, feature consistency loss can preserve the fine-grained feature transition between two domains. We also find the shared categories of two domains via down-weighting the irrelevant categories in the source domain. Experimental results demonstrate that training features from NASNetLarge model with proposed $ACL$ architecture yields promising results on the PlantCLEF 2020 Challenge.
On combinatorial optimization for dominating sets (literature survey, new models)
Authors: Mark Sh. Levin
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Survey

The paper focuses on some versions of connected dominating set problems: basic problems and multicriteria problems. A literature survey on basic problem formulations and solving approaches is presented. The basic connected dominating set problems are illustrated by simplifyed numerical examples. New integer programming formulations of dominating set problems (with multiset estimates) are suggested.
Modeling Online Behavior in Recommender Systems: The Importance of Temporal Context
Authors: Milena Filipovic, Blagoj Mitrevski, Diego Antognini, Emma Lejal Glaude, Boi Faltings, Claudiu Musat
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems research tends to evaluate model performance offline and on randomly sampled targets, yet the same systems are later used to predict user behavior sequentially from a fixed point in time. Simulating online recommender system performance is notoriously difficult and the discrepancy between online and offline behaviors is typically not accounted for in offline evaluations. This disparity permits weaknesses to go unnoticed until the model is deployed in a production setting. In this paper, we first demonstrate how omitting temporal context when evaluating recommender system performance leads to false confidence. To overcome this, we postulate that offline evaluation protocols can only model real-life use-cases if they account for temporal context. Next, we propose a training procedure to further embed the temporal context in existing models. We use a multi-objective approach to introduce temporal context into traditionally time-unaware recommender systems and confirm its advantage via the proposed evaluation protocol. Finally, we validate that the Pareto Fronts obtained with the added objective dominate those produced by state-of-the-art models that are only optimized for accuracy on three real-world publicly available datasets. The results show that including our temporal objective can improve recall@20 by up to 20%.
On Multi-Session Website Fingerprinting over TLS Handshake
Authors: Aida Ramezani, Amirhossein Khajehpour, Mahdi Jafari Siavoshani
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Recommendation Systems

Analyzing users' Internet traffic data and activities has a certain impact on users' experiences in different ways, from maintaining the quality of service on the Internet and providing users with high-quality recommendation systems to anomaly detection and secure connection. Considering that the Internet is a complex network, we cannot disintegrate the packets for each activity. Therefore we have to have a model that can identify all the activities an Internet user does in a given period of time. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to generate a multi-label classifier that can predict the websites visited by a user in a certain period. This model works by extracting the server names appearing in chronological order in the TLSv1.2 and TLSv1.3 Client Hello packets. We compare the results on the test data with a simple fully-connected neural network developed for the same purpose to prove that using the time-sequential information improves the performance. For further evaluations, we test the model on a human-made dataset and a modified dataset to check the model's accuracy under different circumstances. Finally, our proposed model achieved an accuracy of 95% on the test dataset and above 90% on both the modified dataset and the human-made dataset.
Subverting Privacy-Preserving GANs: Hiding Secrets in Sanitized Images
Authors: Kang Liu, Benjamin Tan, Siddharth Garg
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Privacy Preserving

Unprecedented data collection and sharing have exacerbated privacy concerns and led to increasing interest in privacy-preserving tools that remove sensitive attributes from images while maintaining useful information for other tasks. Currently, state-of-the-art approaches use privacy-preserving generative adversarial networks (PP-GANs) for this purpose, for instance, to enable reliable facial expression recognition without leaking users' identity. However, PP-GANs do not offer formal proofs of privacy and instead rely on experimentally measuring information leakage using classification accuracy on the sensitive attributes of deep learning (DL)-based discriminators. In this work, we question the rigor of such checks by subverting existing privacy-preserving GANs for facial expression recognition. We show that it is possible to hide the sensitive identification data in the sanitized output images of such PP-GANs for later extraction, which can even allow for reconstruction of the entire input images, while satisfying privacy checks. We demonstrate our approach via a PP-GAN-based architecture and provide qualitative and quantitative evaluations using two public datasets. Our experimental results raise fundamental questions about the need for more rigorous privacy checks of PP-GANs, and we provide insights into the social impact of these.
Reducing false-positive biopsies with deep neural networks that utilize local and global information in screening mammograms
Authors: Nan Wu, Zhe Huang, Yiqiu Shen, Jungkyu Park, Jason Phang, Taro Makino, S. Gene Kim, Kyunghyun Cho, Laura Heacock, Linda Moy, Krzysztof J. Geras
Date: 2020-09-19 00:00:00

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, and hundreds of thousands of unnecessary biopsies are done around the world at a tremendous cost. It is crucial to reduce the rate of biopsies that turn out to be benign tissue. In this study, we build deep neural networks (DNNs) to classify biopsied lesions as being either malignant or benign, with the goal of using these networks as second readers serving radiologists to further reduce the number of false positive findings. We enhance the performance of DNNs that are trained to learn from small image patches by integrating global context provided in the form of saliency maps learned from the entire image into their reasoning, similar to how radiologists consider global context when evaluating areas of interest. Our experiments are conducted on a dataset of 229,426 screening mammography exams from 141,473 patients. We achieve an AUC of 0.8 on a test set consisting of 464 benign and 136 malignant lesions.