pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Episodic Linear Quadratic Regulators with Low-rank Transitions
Authors: Tianyu Wang, Lin F. Yang
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00

Linear Quadratic Regulators (LQR) achieve enormous successful real-world applications. Very recently, people have been focusing on efficient learning algorithms for LQRs when their dynamics are unknown. Existing results effectively learn to control the unknown system using number of episodes depending polynomially on the system parameters, including the ambient dimension of the states. These traditional approaches, however, become inefficient in common scenarios, e.g., when the states are high-resolution images. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that utilizes the intrinsic system low-rank structure for efficient learning. For problems of rank-$m$, our algorithm achieves a $K$-episode regret bound of order $\widetilde{O}(m^{3/2} K^{1/2})$. Consequently, the sample complexity of our algorithm only depends on the rank, $m$, rather than the ambient dimension, $d$, which can be orders-of-magnitude larger.
Cross-Media Keyphrase Prediction: A Unified Framework with Multi-Modality Multi-Head Attention and Image Wordings
Authors: Yue Wang, Jing Li, Michael R. Lyu, Irwin King
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11

Social media produces large amounts of contents every day. To help users quickly capture what they need, keyphrase prediction is receiving a growing attention. Nevertheless, most prior efforts focus on text modeling, largely ignoring the rich features embedded in the matching images. In this work, we explore the joint effects of texts and images in predicting the keyphrases for a multimedia post. To better align social media style texts and images, we propose: (1) a novel Multi-Modality Multi-Head Attention (M3H-Att) to capture the intricate cross-media interactions; (2) image wordings, in forms of optical characters and image attributes, to bridge the two modalities. Moreover, we design a unified framework to leverage the outputs of keyphrase classification and generation and couple their advantages. Extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset newly collected from Twitter show that our model significantly outperforms the previous state of the art based on traditional attention networks. Further analyses show that our multi-head attention is able to attend information from various aspects and boost classification or generation in diverse scenarios.
CooGAN: A Memory-Efficient Framework for High-Resolution Facial Attribute Editing
Authors: Xuanhong Chen, Bingbing Ni, Naiyuan Liu, Ziang Liu, Yiliu Jiang, Loc Truong, Qi Tian
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Attribute, Image Generation, Translation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In contrast to great success of memory-consuming face editing methods at a low resolution, to manipulate high-resolution (HR) facial images, i.e., typically larger than 7682 pixels, with very limited memory is still challenging. This is due to the reasons of 1) intractable huge demand of memory; 2) inefficient multi-scale features fusion. To address these issues, we propose a NOVEL pixel translation framework called Cooperative GAN(CooGAN) for HR facial image editing. This framework features a local path for fine-grained local facial patch generation (i.e., patch-level HR, LOW memory) and a global path for global lowresolution (LR) facial structure monitoring (i.e., image-level LR, LOW memory), which largely reduce memory requirements. Both paths work in a cooperative manner under a local-to-global consistency objective (i.e., for smooth stitching). In addition, we propose a lighter selective transfer unit for more efficient multi-scale features fusion, yielding higher fidelity facial attributes manipulation. Extensive experiments on CelebAHQ well demonstrate the memory efficiency as well as the high image generation quality of the proposed framework.
StyleMelGAN: An Efficient High-Fidelity Adversarial Vocoder with Temporal Adaptive Normalization
Authors: Ahmed Mustafa, Nicola Pia, Guillaume Fuchs
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Spectral Reconstruction, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In recent years, neural vocoders have surpassed classical speech generation approaches in naturalness and perceptual quality of the synthesized speech. Computationally heavy models like WaveNet and WaveGlow achieve best results, while lightweight GAN models, e.g. MelGAN and Parallel WaveGAN, remain inferior in terms of perceptual quality. We therefore propose StyleMelGAN, a lightweight neural vocoder allowing synthesis of high-fidelity speech with low computational complexity. StyleMelGAN employs temporal adaptive normalization to style a low-dimensional noise vector with the acoustic features of the target speech. For efficient training, multiple random-window discriminators adversarially evaluate the speech signal analyzed by a filter bank, with regularization provided by a multi-scale spectral reconstruction loss. The highly parallelizable speech generation is several times faster than real-time on CPUs and GPUs. MUSHRA and P.800 listening tests show that StyleMelGAN outperforms prior neural vocoders in copy-synthesis and Text-to-Speech scenarios.
DAGA: Data Augmentation with a Generation Approach for Low-resource Tagging Tasks
Authors: Bosheng Ding, Linlin Liu, Lidong Bing, Canasai Kruengkrai, Thien Hai Nguyen, Shafiq Joty, Luo Si, Chunyan Miao
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Data Augmentation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging, Sentiment Analysis

Data augmentation techniques have been widely used to improve machine learning performance as they enhance the generalization capability of models. In this work, to generate high quality synthetic data for low-resource tagging tasks, we propose a novel augmentation method with language models trained on the linearized labeled sentences. Our method is applicable to both supervised and semi-supervised settings. For the supervised settings, we conduct extensive experiments on named entity recognition (NER), part of speech (POS) tagging and end-to-end target based sentiment analysis (E2E-TBSA) tasks. For the semi-supervised settings, we evaluate our method on the NER task under the conditions of given unlabeled data only and unlabeled data plus a knowledge base. The results show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines, particularly when the given gold training data are less.
Recent Advances in Understanding Adversarial Robustness of Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Tao Bai, Jinqi Luo, Jun Zhao
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Adversarial examples are inevitable on the road of pervasive applications of deep neural networks (DNN). Imperceptible perturbations applied on natural samples can lead DNN-based classifiers to output wrong prediction with fair confidence score. It is increasingly important to obtain models with high robustness that are resistant to adversarial examples. In this paper, we survey recent advances in how to understand such intriguing property, i.e. adversarial robustness, from different perspectives. We give preliminary definitions on what adversarial attacks and robustness are. After that, we study frequently-used benchmarks and mention theoretically-proved bounds for adversarial robustness. We then provide an overview on analyzing correlations among adversarial robustness and other critical indicators of DNN models. Lastly, we introduce recent arguments on potential costs of adversarial training which have attracted wide attention from the research community.
ShaneRun System Description to VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2020
Authors: Shen Chen
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Recognition

In this report, we describe the submission of ShaneRun's team to the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC) 2020. We use ResNet-34 as encoder to extract the speaker embeddings, which is referenced from the open-source voxceleb-trainer. We also provide a simple method to implement optimum fusion using t-SNE normalized distance of testing utterance pairs instead of original negative Euclidean distance from the encoder. The final submitted system got 0.3098 minDCF and 5.076 % ERR for Fixed data track, which outperformed the baseline by 1.3 % minDCF and 2.2 % ERR respectively.
Quadratic Metric Elicitation for Fairness and Beyond
Authors: Gaurush Hiranandani, Jatin Mathur, Harikrishna Narasimhan, Oluwasanmi Koyejo
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Metric elicitation is a recent framework for eliciting classification performance metrics that best reflect implicit user preferences based on the task and context. However, available elicitation strategies have been limited to linear (or quasi-linear) functions of predictive rates, which can be practically restrictive for many applications including fairness. This paper develops a strategy for eliciting more flexible multiclass metrics defined by quadratic functions of rates, designed to reflect human preferences better. We show its application in eliciting quadratic violation-based group-fair metrics. Our strategy requires only relative preference feedback, is robust to noise, and achieves near-optimal query complexity. We further extend this strategy to eliciting polynomial metrics -- thus broadening the use cases for metric elicitation.
CharBERT: Character-aware Pre-trained Language Model
Authors: Wentao Ma, Yiming Cui, Chenglei Si, Ting Liu, Shijin Wang, Guoping Hu
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Question Answering, Representation Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Most pre-trained language models (PLMs) construct word representations at subword level with Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) or its variations, by which OOV (out-of-vocab) words are almost avoidable. However, those methods split a word into subword units and make the representation incomplete and fragile. In this paper, we propose a character-aware pre-trained language model named CharBERT improving on the previous methods (such as BERT, RoBERTa) to tackle these problems. We first construct the contextual word embedding for each token from the sequential character representations, then fuse the representations of characters and the subword representations by a novel heterogeneous interaction module. We also propose a new pre-training task named NLM (Noisy LM) for unsupervised character representation learning. We evaluate our method on question answering, sequence labeling, and text classification tasks, both on the original datasets and adversarial misspelling test sets. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the performance and robustness of PLMs simultaneously. Pretrained models, evaluation sets, and code are available at https://github.com/wtma/CharBERT
Embedding Node Structural Role Identity into Hyperbolic Space
Authors: Lili Wang, Ying Lu, Chenghan Huang, Soroush Vosoughi
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Embedding

Recently, there has been an interest in embedding networks in hyperbolic space, since hyperbolic space has been shown to work well in capturing graph/network structure as it can naturally reflect some properties of complex networks. However, the work on network embedding in hyperbolic space has been focused on microscopic node embedding. In this work, we are the first to present a framework to embed the structural roles of nodes into hyperbolic space. Our framework extends struct2vec, a well-known structural role preserving embedding method, by moving it to a hyperboloid model. We evaluated our method on four real-world and one synthetic network. Our results show that hyperbolic space is more effective than euclidean space in learning latent representations for the structural role of nodes.
VEGA: Towards an End-to-End Configurable AutoML Pipeline
Authors: Bochao Wang, Hang Xu, Jiajin Zhang, Chen Chen, Xiaozhi Fang, Yixing Xu, Ning Kang, Lanqing Hong, Chenhan Jiang, Xinyue Cai, Jiawei Li, Fengwei Zhou, Yong Li, Zhicheng Liu, Xinghao Chen, Kai Han, Han Shu, Dehua Song, Yunhe Wang, Wei zhang, Chunjing Xu, Zhenguo Li, Wenzhi Liu, Tong Zhang
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Data Augmentation, Diversity, Hyperparameter Optimization, Model Compression, Neural Architecture Search

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is an important industrial solution for automatic discovery and deployment of the machine learning models. However, designing an integrated AutoML system faces four great challenges of configurability, scalability, integrability, and platform diversity. In this work, we present VEGA, an efficient and comprehensive AutoML framework that is compatible and optimized for multiple hardware platforms. a) The VEGA pipeline integrates various modules of AutoML, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS), Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO), Auto Data Augmentation, Model Compression, and Fully Train. b) To support a variety of search algorithms and tasks, we design a novel fine-grained search space and its description language to enable easy adaptation to different search algorithms and tasks. c) We abstract the common components of deep learning frameworks into a unified interface. VEGA can be executed with multiple back-ends and hardwares. Extensive benchmark experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate that VEGA can improve the existing AutoML algorithms and discover new high-performance models against SOTA methods, e.g. the searched DNet model zoo for Ascend 10x faster than EfficientNet-B5 and 9.2x faster than RegNetX-32GF on ImageNet. VEGA is open-sourced at https://github.com/huawei-noah/vega.
MAIRE -- A Model-Agnostic Interpretable Rule Extraction Procedure for Explaining Classifiers
Authors: Rajat Sharma, Nikhil Reddy, Vidhya Kamakshi, Narayanan C Krishnan, Shweta Jain
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00

The paper introduces a novel framework for extracting model-agnostic human interpretable rules to explain a classifier's output. The human interpretable rule is defined as an axis-aligned hyper-cuboid containing the instance for which the classification decision has to be explained. The proposed procedure finds the largest (high \textit{coverage}) axis-aligned hyper-cuboid such that a high percentage of the instances in the hyper-cuboid have the same class label as the instance being explained (high \textit{precision}). Novel approximations to the coverage and precision measures in terms of the parameters of the hyper-cuboid are defined. They are maximized using gradient-based optimizers. The quality of the approximations is rigorously analyzed theoretically and experimentally. Heuristics for simplifying the generated explanations for achieving better interpretability and a greedy selection algorithm that combines the local explanations for creating global explanations for the model covering a large part of the instance space are also proposed. The framework is model agnostic, can be applied to any arbitrary classifier, and all types of attributes (including continuous, ordered, and unordered discrete). The wide-scale applicability of the framework is validated on a variety of synthetic and real-world datasets from different domains (tabular, text, and image).
BioNerFlair: biomedical named entity recognition using flair embedding and sequence tagger
Authors: Harsh Patel
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Information Retrieval, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Retrieval

Motivation: The proliferation of Biomedical research articles has made the task of information retrieval more important than ever. Scientists and Researchers are having difficulty in finding articles that contain information relevant to them. Proper extraction of biomedical entities like Disease, Drug/chem, Species, Gene/protein, can considerably improve the filtering of articles resulting in better extraction of relevant information. Performance on BioNer benchmarks has progressively improved because of progression in transformers-based models like BERT, XLNet, OpenAI, GPT2, etc. These models give excellent results; however, they are computationally expensive and we can achieve better scores for domain-specific tasks using other contextual string-based models and LSTM-CRF based sequence tagger. Results: We introduce BioNerFlair, a method to train models for biomedical named entity recognition using Flair plus GloVe embeddings and Bidirectional LSTM-CRF based sequence tagger. With almost the same generic architecture widely used for named entity recognition, BioNerFlair outperforms previous state-of-the-art models. I performed experiments on 8 benchmarks datasets for biomedical named entity recognition. Compared to current state-of-the-art models, BioNerFlair achieves the best F1-score of 90.17 beyond 84.72 on the BioCreative II gene mention (BC2GM) corpus, best F1-score of 94.03 beyond 92.36 on the BioCreative IV chemical and drug (BC4CHEMD) corpus, best F1-score of 88.73 beyond 78.58 on the JNLPBA corpus, best F1-score of 91.1 beyond 89.71 on the NCBI disease corpus, best F1-score of 85.48 beyond 78.98 on the Species-800 corpus, while near best results was observed on BC5CDR-chem, BC3CDR-disease, and LINNAEUS corpus.
Wheat Crop Yield Prediction Using Deep LSTM Model
Authors: Sagarika Sharma, Sujit Rai, Narayanan C. Krishnan
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Crop Yield Prediction, Dimensionality Reduction, model, Prediction

An in-season early crop yield forecast before harvest can benefit the farmers to improve the production and enable various agencies to devise plans accordingly. We introduce a reliable and inexpensive method to predict crop yields from publicly available satellite imagery. The proposed method works directly on raw satellite imagery without the need to extract any hand-crafted features or perform dimensionality reduction on the images. The approach implicitly models the relevance of the different steps in the growing season and the various bands in the satellite imagery. We evaluate the proposed approach on tehsil (block) level wheat predictions across several states in India and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods by over 50\%. We also show that incorporating additional contextual information such as the location of farmlands, water bodies, and urban areas helps in improving the yield estimates.
On Computing Stable Extensions of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks
Authors: Samer Nofal, Amani Abu Jabal, Abdullah Alfarrarjeh, Ismail Hababeh
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Argumentation

An \textit{abstract argumentation framework} ({\sc af} for short) is a directed graph $(A,R)$ where $A$ is a set of \textit{abstract arguments} and $R\subseteq A \times A$ is the \textit{attack} relation. Let $H=(A,R)$ be an {\sc af}, $S \subseteq A$ be a set of arguments and $S^+ = \{y \mid \exists x\in S \text{ with }(x,y)\in R\}$. Then, $S$ is a \textit{stable extension} in $H$ if and only if $S^+ = A\setminus S$. In this paper, we present a thorough, formal validation of a known backtracking algorithm for listing all stable extensions in a given {\sc af}.
Multi-armed Bandits with Cost Subsidy
Authors: Deeksha Sinha, Karthik Abinav Sankararama, Abbas Kazerouni, Vashist Avadhanula
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits, Thompson Sampling

In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing cumulative costs and rewards. We present two applications, intelligent SMS routing problem and ad audience optimization problem faced by several businesses (especially online platforms), and show how our problem uniquely captures key features of these applications. We show that naive generalizations of existing MAB algorithms like Upper Confidence Bound and Thompson Sampling do not perform well for this problem. We then establish a fundamental lower bound on the performance of any online learning algorithm for this problem, highlighting the hardness of our problem in comparison to the classical MAB problem. We also present a simple variant of explore-then-commit and establish near-optimal regret bounds for this algorithm. Lastly, we perform extensive numerical simulations to understand the behavior of a suite of algorithms for various instances and recommend a practical guide to employ different algorithms.
Layer-Wise Multi-View Learning for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Qiang Wang, Changliang Li, Yue Zhang, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, MULTI-VIEW LEARNING, Sentence, Translation

Traditional neural machine translation is limited to the topmost encoder layer's context representation and cannot directly perceive the lower encoder layers. Existing solutions usually rely on the adjustment of network architecture, making the calculation more complicated or introducing additional structural restrictions. In this work, we propose layer-wise multi-view learning to solve this problem, circumventing the necessity to change the model structure. We regard each encoder layer's off-the-shelf output, a by-product in layer-by-layer encoding, as the redundant view for the input sentence. In this way, in addition to the topmost encoder layer (referred to as the primary view), we also incorporate an intermediate encoder layer as the auxiliary view. We feed the two views to a partially shared decoder to maintain independent prediction. Consistency regularization based on KL divergence is used to encourage the two views to learn from each other. Extensive experimental results on five translation tasks show that our approach yields stable improvements over multiple strong baselines. As another bonus, our method is agnostic to network architectures and can maintain the same inference speed as the original model.
Convergence of Graph Laplacian with kNN Self-tuned Kernels
Authors: Xiuyuan Cheng, Hau-Tieng Wu
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00

Kernelized Gram matrix $W$ constructed from data points $\{x_i\}_{i=1}^N$ as $W_{ij}= k_0( \frac{ \| x_i - x_j \|^2} {\sigma^2} )$ is widely used in graph-based geometric data analysis and unsupervised learning. An important question is how to choose the kernel bandwidth $\sigma$, and a common practice called self-tuned kernel adaptively sets a $\sigma_i$ at each point $x_i$ by the $k$-nearest neighbor (kNN) distance. When $x_i$'s are sampled from a $d$-dimensional manifold embedded in a possibly high-dimensional space, unlike with fixed-bandwidth kernels, theoretical results of graph Laplacian convergence with self-tuned kernels have been incomplete. This paper proves the convergence of graph Laplacian operator $L_N$ to manifold (weighted-)Laplacian for a new family of kNN self-tuned kernels $W^{(\alpha)}_{ij} = k_0( \frac{ \| x_i - x_j \|^2}{ \epsilon \hat{\rho}(x_i) \hat{\rho}(x_j)})/\hat{\rho}(x_i)^\alpha \hat{\rho}(x_j)^\alpha$, where $\hat{\rho}$ is the estimated bandwidth function {by kNN}, and the limiting operator is also parametrized by $\alpha$. When $\alpha = 1$, the limiting operator is the weighted manifold Laplacian $\Delta_p$. Specifically, we prove the point-wise convergence of $L_N f $ and convergence of the graph Dirichlet form with rates. Our analysis is based on first establishing a $C^0$ consistency for $\hat{\rho}$ which bounds the relative estimation error $|\hat{\rho} - \bar{\rho}|/\bar{\rho}$ uniformly with high probability, where $\bar{\rho} = p^{-1/d}$, and $p$ is the data density function. Our theoretical results reveal the advantage of self-tuned kernel over fixed-bandwidth kernel via smaller variance error in low-density regions. In the algorithm, no prior knowledge of $d$ or data density is needed. The theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments on simulated data and hand-written digit image data.