pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learnable MFCCs for Speaker Verification
Authors: Xuechen Liu, Md Sahidullah, Tomi Kinnunen
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Verification

We propose a learnable mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) frontend architecture for deep neural network (DNN) based automatic speaker verification. Our architecture retains the simplicity and interpretability of MFCC-based features while allowing the model to be adapted to data flexibly. In practice, we formulate data-driven versions of the four linear transforms of a standard MFCC extractor -- windowing, discrete Fourier transform (DFT), mel filterbank and discrete cosine transform (DCT). Results reported reach up to 6.7\% (VoxCeleb1) and 9.7\% (SITW) relative improvement in term of equal error rate (EER) from static MFCCs, without additional tuning effort.
EXTRA: Explanation Ranking Datasets for Explainable Recommendation
Authors: Lei LI, Yongfeng Zhang, Li Chen
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Models, Explainable Recommendation, Recommendation Systems, Triplet

Recently, research on explainable recommender systems has drawn much attention from both academia and industry, resulting in a variety of explainable models. As a consequence, their evaluation approaches vary from model to model, which makes it quite difficult to compare the explainability of different models. To achieve a standard way of evaluating recommendation explanations, we provide three benchmark datasets for EXplanaTion RAnking (denoted as EXTRA), on which explainability can be measured by ranking-oriented metrics. Constructing such datasets, however, poses great challenges. First, user-item-explanation triplet interactions are rare in existing recommender systems, so how to find alternatives becomes a challenge. Our solution is to identify nearly identical sentences from user reviews. This idea then leads to the second challenge, i.e., how to efficiently categorize the sentences in a dataset into different groups, since it has quadratic runtime complexity to estimate the similarity between any two sentences. To mitigate this issue, we provide a more efficient method based on Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) that can detect near-duplicates in sub-linear time for a given query. Moreover, we make our code publicly available to allow researchers in the community to create their own datasets.
Large-width functional asymptotics for deep Gaussian neural networks
Authors: Daniele Bracale, Stefano Favaro, Sandra Fortini, Stefano Peluchetti
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Gaussian Processes

In this paper, we consider fully connected feed-forward deep neural networks where weights and biases are independent and identically distributed according to Gaussian distributions. Extending previous results (Matthews et al., 2018a;b; Yang, 2019) we adopt a function-space perspective, i.e. we look at neural networks as infinite-dimensional random elements on the input space $\mathbb{R}^I$. Under suitable assumptions on the activation function we show that: i) a network defines a continuous Gaussian process on the input space $\mathbb{R}^I$; ii) a network with re-scaled weights converges weakly to a continuous Gaussian process in the large-width limit; iii) the limiting Gaussian process has almost surely locally $\gamma$-H\"older continuous paths, for $0 < \gamma <1$. Our results contribute to recent theoretical studies on the interplay between infinitely wide deep neural networks and Gaussian processes by establishing weak convergence in function-space with respect to a stronger metric.
End-to-end neural network approach to 3D reservoir simulation and adaptation
Authors: E. Illarionov, P. Temirchev, D. Voloskov, R. Kostoev, M. Simonov, D. Pissarenko, D. Orlov, D. Koroteev
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00

Reservoir simulation and adaptation (also known as history matching) are typically considered as separate problems. While a set of models are aimed at the solution of the forward simulation problem assuming all initial geological parameters are known, the other set of models adjust geological parameters under the fixed forward simulation model to fit production data. This results in many difficulties for both reservoir engineers and developers of new efficient computation schemes. We present a unified approach to reservoir simulation and adaptation problems. A single neural network model allows a forward pass from initial geological parameters of the 3D reservoir model through dynamic state variables to well's production rates and backward gradient propagation to any model inputs and variables. The model fitting and geological parameters adaptation both become the optimization problem over specific parts of the same neural network model. Standard gradient-based optimization schemes can be used to find the optimal solution. Using real-world oilfield model and historical production rates we demonstrate that the suggested approach allows reservoir simulation and history matching with a benefit of several orders of magnitude simulation speed-up. Finally, to propagate this research we open-source a Python-based framework DeepField that allows standard processing of reservoir models and reproducing the approach presented in this paper.
Towards Building A Group-based Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement Framework
Authors: Tao Yang, Xuanchi Ren, Yuwang Wang, Wenjun Zeng, Nanning Zheng
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Disentanglement, Representation Learning

Disentangled representation learning is one of the major goals of deep learning, and is a key step for achieving explainable and generalizable models. A well-defined theoretical guarantee still lacks for the VAE-based unsupervised methods, which are a set of popular methods to achieve unsupervised disentanglement. The Group Theory based definition of representation disentanglement mathematically connects the data transformations to the representations using the formalism of group. In this paper, built on the group-based definition and inspired by the n-th dihedral group, we first propose a theoretical framework towards achieving unsupervised representation disentanglement. We then propose a model, based on existing VAE-based methods, to tackle the unsupervised learning problem of the framework. In the theoretical framework, we prove three sufficient conditions on model, group structure, and data respectively in an effort to achieve, in an unsupervised way, disentangled representation per group-based definition. With the first two of the conditions satisfied and a necessary condition derived for the third one, we offer additional constraints, from the perspective of the group-based definition, for the existing VAE-based models. Experimentally, we train 1800 models covering the most prominent VAE-based methods on five datasets to verify the effectiveness of our theoretical framework. Compared to the original VAE-based methods, these Groupified VAEs consistently achieve better mean performance with smaller variances.
Towards Accurate and Compact Architectures via Neural Architecture Transformer
Authors: Yong Guo, Yin Zheng, Mingkui Tan, Qi Chen, Zhipeng Li, Jian Chen, Peilin Zhao, Junzhou Huang
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, valid

Designing effective architectures is one of the key factors behind the success of deep neural networks. Existing deep architectures are either manually designed or automatically searched by some Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods. However, even a well-designed/searched architecture may still contain many nonsignificant or redundant modules/operations. Thus, it is necessary to optimize the operations inside an architecture to improve the performance without introducing extra computational cost. To this end, we have proposed a Neural Architecture Transformer (NAT) method which casts the optimization problem into a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and seeks to replace the redundant operations with more efficient operations, such as skip or null connection. Note that NAT only considers a small number of possible transitions and thus comes with a limited search/transition space. As a result, such a small search space may hamper the performance of architecture optimization. To address this issue, we propose a Neural Architecture Transformer++ (NAT++) method which further enlarges the set of candidate transitions to improve the performance of architecture optimization. Specifically, we present a two-level transition rule to obtain valid transitions, i.e., allowing operations to have more efficient types (e.g., convolution->separable convolution) or smaller kernel sizes (e.g., 5x5->3x3). Note that different operations may have different valid transitions. We further propose a Binary-Masked Softmax (BMSoftmax) layer to omit the possible invalid transitions. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show that the transformed architecture significantly outperforms both its original counterpart and the architectures optimized by existing methods.
Versatile and Robust Transient Stability Assessment via Instance Transfer Learning
Authors: Seyedali Meghdadi, Guido Tack, Ariel Liebman, Nicolas Langrené, Christoph Bergmeir
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

To support N-1 pre-fault transient stability assessment, this paper introduces a new data collection method in a data-driven algorithm incorporating the knowledge of power system dynamics. The domain knowledge on how the disturbance effect will propagate from the fault location to the rest of the network is leveraged to recognise the dominant conditions that determine the stability of a system. Accordingly, we introduce a new concept called Fault-Affected Area, which provides crucial information regarding the unstable region of operation. This information is embedded in an augmented dataset to train an ensemble model using an instance transfer learning framework. The test results on the IEEE 39-bus system verify that this model can accurately predict the stability of previously unseen operational scenarios while reducing the risk of false prediction of unstable instances compared to standard approaches.
Discussion Tracker: Supporting Teacher Learning about Students' Collaborative Argumentation in High School Classrooms
Authors: Luca Lugini, Christopher Olshefski, Ravneet Singh, Diane Litman, Amanda Godley
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Specificity

Teaching collaborative argumentation is an advanced skill that many K-12 teachers struggle to develop. To address this, we have developed Discussion Tracker, a classroom discussion analytics system based on novel algorithms for classifying argument moves, specificity, and collaboration. Results from a classroom deployment indicate that teachers found the analytics useful, and that the underlying classifiers perform with moderate to substantial agreement with humans.
Contextual Argument Component Classification for Class Discussions
Authors: Luca Lugini, Diane Litman
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Argument Mining, Classification, Component Classification, General Classification, Position, Relation Extraction

Argument mining systems often consider contextual information, i.e. information outside of an argumentative discourse unit, when trained to accomplish tasks such as argument component identification, classification, and relation extraction. However, prior work has not carefully analyzed the utility of different contextual properties in context-aware models. In this work, we show how two different types of contextual information, local discourse context and speaker context, can be incorporated into a computational model for classifying argument components in multi-party classroom discussions. We find that both context types can improve performance, although the improvements are dependent on context size and position.
Deep Structured Feature Networks for Table Detection and Tabular Data Extraction from Scanned Financial Document Images
Authors: Siwen Luo, Mengting Wu, Yiwen Gong, Wanying Zhou, Josiah Poon
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Table Detection

Automatic table detection in PDF documents has achieved a great success but tabular data extraction are still challenging due to the integrity and noise issues in detected table areas. The accurate data extraction is extremely crucial in finance area. Inspired by this, the aim of this research is proposing an automated table detection and tabular data extraction from financial PDF documents. We proposed a method that consists of three main processes, which are detecting table areas with a Faster R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Network) model with Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) on each page image, extracting contents and structures by a compounded layout segmentation technique based on optical character recognition (OCR) and formulating regular expression rules for table header separation. The tabular data extraction feature is embedded with rule-based filtering and restructuring functions that are highly scalable. We annotate a new Financial Documents dataset with table regions for the experiment. The excellent table detection performance of the detection model is obtained from our customized dataset. The main contributions of this paper are proposing the Financial Documents dataset with table-area annotations, the superior detection model and the rule-based layout segmentation technique for the tabular data extraction from PDF files.
Artificial Intelligence Enhanced Rapid and Efficient Diagnosis of Mycoplasma Pneumoniae Pneumonia in Children Patients
Authors: Chenglin Pan, Kuan Yan, Xiao Liu, Yanjie Chen, Yanyan Luo, Xiaoming Li, Zhenguo Nie, Xinjun Liu
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Management

Artificial intelligence methods have been increasingly turning into a potentially powerful tool in the diagnosis and management of diseases. In this study, we utilized logistic regression (LR), decision tree (DT), gradient boosted decision tree (GBDT), support vector machine (SVM), and multilayer perceptron (MLP) as machine learning models to rapidly diagnose the mycoplasma pneumoniae pneumonia (MPP) in children patients. The classification task was carried out after applying the preprocessing procedure to the MPP dataset. The most efficient results are obtained by GBDT. It provides the best performance with an accuracy of 93.7%. In contrast to standard raw feature weighting, the feature importance takes the underlying correlation structure of the features into account. The most crucial feature of GBDT is the "pulmonary infiltrates range" with a score of 0.5925, followed by "cough" (0.0953) and "pleural effusion" (0.0492). We publicly share our full implementation with the dataset and trained models at https://github.com/zhenguonie/2021_AI4MPP.
An Attention Ensemble Approach for Efficient Text Classification of Indian Languages
Authors: Atharva Kulkarni, Amey Hengle, Rutuja Udyawar
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICON 2020 12
Tasks: General Classification, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

The recent surge of complex attention-based deep learning architectures has led to extraordinary results in various downstream NLP tasks in the English language. However, such research for resource-constrained and morphologically rich Indian vernacular languages has been relatively limited. This paper proffers team SPPU\_AKAH's solution for the TechDOfication 2020 subtask-1f: which focuses on the coarse-grained technical domain identification of short text documents in Marathi, a Devanagari script-based Indian language. Availing the large dataset at hand, a hybrid CNN-BiLSTM attention ensemble model is proposed that competently combines the intermediate sentence representations generated by the convolutional neural network and the bidirectional long short-term memory, leading to efficient text classification. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms various baseline machine learning and deep learning models in the given task, giving the best validation accuracy of 89.57\% and f1-score of 0.8875. Furthermore, the solution resulted in the best system submission for this subtask, giving a test accuracy of 64.26\% and f1-score of 0.6157, transcending the performances of other teams as well as the baseline system given by the organizers of the shared task.
Concealed Object Detection
Authors: Deng-Ping Fan, Ge-Peng Ji, Ming-Ming Cheng, Ling Shao
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Camouflaged Object Segmentation, Dichotomous Image Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

We present the first systematic study on concealed object detection (COD), which aims to identify objects that are "perfectly" embedded in their background. The high intrinsic similarities between the concealed objects and their background make COD far more challenging than traditional object detection/segmentation. To better understand this task, we collect a large-scale dataset, called COD10K, which consists of 10,000 images covering concealed objects in diverse real-world scenarios from 78 object categories. Further, we provide rich annotations including object categories, object boundaries, challenging attributes, object-level labels, and instance-level annotations. Our COD10K is the largest COD dataset to date, with the richest annotations, which enables comprehensive concealed object understanding and can even be used to help progress several other vision tasks, such as detection, segmentation, classification, etc. Motivated by how animals hunt in the wild, we also design a simple but strong baseline for COD, termed the Search Identification Network (SINet). Without any bells and whistles, SINet outperforms 12 cutting-edge baselines on all datasets tested, making them robust, general architectures that could serve as catalysts for future research in COD. Finally, we provide some interesting findings and highlight several potential applications and future directions. To spark research in this new field, our code, dataset, and online demo are available on our project page: http://mmcheng.net/cod.
Meta-Learning Dynamics Forecasting Using Task Inference
Authors: Rui Wang, Robin Walters, Rose Yu
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Current deep learning models for dynamics forecasting struggle with generalization. They can only forecast in a specific domain and fail when applied to systems with different parameters, external forces, or boundary conditions. We propose a model-based meta-learning method called DyAd which can generalize across heterogeneous domains by partitioning them into different tasks. DyAd has two parts: an encoder which infers the time-invariant hidden features of the task with weak supervision, and a forecaster which learns the shared dynamics of the entire domain. The encoder adapts and controls the forecaster during inference using adaptive instance normalization and adaptive padding. Theoretically, we prove that the generalization error of such procedure is related to the task relatedness in the source domain, as well as the domain differences between source and target. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both turbulent flow and real-world ocean data forecasting tasks.
On Proximal Policy Optimization's Heavy-tailed Gradients
Authors: Saurabh Garg, Joshua Zhanson, Emilio Parisotto, Adarsh Prasad, J. Zico Kolter, Zachary C. Lipton, Sivaraman Balakrishnan, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Pradeep Ravikumar
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, MuJoCo

Modern policy gradient algorithms such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) rely on an arsenal of heuristics, including loss clipping and gradient clipping, to ensure successful learning. These heuristics are reminiscent of techniques from robust statistics, commonly used for estimation in outlier-rich (``heavy-tailed'') regimes. In this paper, we present a detailed empirical study to characterize the heavy-tailed nature of the gradients of the PPO surrogate reward function. We demonstrate that the gradients, especially for the actor network, exhibit pronounced heavy-tailedness and that it increases as the agent's policy diverges from the behavioral policy (i.e., as the agent goes further off policy). Further examination implicates the likelihood ratios and advantages in the surrogate reward as the main sources of the observed heavy-tailedness. We then highlight issues arising due to the heavy-tailed nature of the gradients. In this light, we study the effects of the standard PPO clipping heuristics, demonstrating that these tricks primarily serve to offset heavy-tailedness in gradients. Thus motivated, we propose incorporating GMOM, a high-dimensional robust estimator, into PPO as a substitute for three clipping tricks. Despite requiring less hyperparameter tuning, our method matches the performance of PPO (with all heuristics enabled) on a battery of MuJoCo continuous control tasks.
Inducing a hierarchy for multi-class classification problems
Authors: Hayden S. Helm, Weiwei Yang, Sujeeth Bharadwaj, Kate Lytvynets, Oriana Riva, Christopher White, Ali Geisa, Carey E. Priebe
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, General Classification, Multi-class Classification

In applications where categorical labels follow a natural hierarchy, classification methods that exploit the label structure often outperform those that do not. Un-fortunately, the majority of classification datasets do not come pre-equipped with a hierarchical structure and classical flat classifiers must be employed. In this paper, we investigate a class of methods that induce a hierarchy that can similarly improve classification performance over flat classifiers. The class of methods follows the structure of first clustering the conditional distributions and subsequently using a hierarchical classifier with the induced hierarchy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the class of methods both for discovering a latent hierarchy and for improving accuracy in principled simulation settings and three real data applications.
Link Prediction with Persistent Homology: An Interactive View
Authors: Zuoyu Yan, Tengfei Ma, Liangcai Gao, Zhi Tang, Chao Chen
Date: 2021-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network, Link Prediction, Prediction

Link prediction is an important learning task for graph-structured data. In this paper, we propose a novel topological approach to characterize interactions between two nodes. Our topological feature, based on the extended persistent homology, encodes rich structural information regarding the multi-hop paths connecting nodes. Based on this feature, we propose a graph neural network method that outperforms state-of-the-arts on different benchmarks. As another contribution, we propose a novel algorithm to more efficiently compute the extended persistence diagrams for graphs. This algorithm can be generally applied to accelerate many other topological methods for graph learning tasks.