pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CSI Feedback with Model-Driven Deep Learning of Massive MIMO Systems
Authors: J. Guo, L. Wang, F. Li, J. Xue
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In order to achieve reliable communication with a high data rate of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in frequency division duplex (FDD) mode, the estimated channel state information (CSI) at the receiver needs to be fed back to the transmitter. However, the feedback overhead becomes exorbitant with the increasing number of antennas. In this paper, a two stages low rank (TSLR) CSI feedback scheme for millimeter wave (mmWave) massive MIMO systems is proposed to reduce the feedback overhead based on model-driven deep learning. Besides, we design a deep iterative neural network, named FISTA-Net, by unfolding the fast iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (FISTA) to achieve more efficient CSI feedback. Moreover, a shrinkage thresholding network (ST-Net) is designed in FISTA-Net based on the attention mechanism, which can choose the threshold adaptively. Simulation results show that the proposed TSLR CSI feedback scheme and FISTA-Net outperform the existing algorithms in various scenarios.
N-Cloth: Predicting 3D Cloth Deformation with Mesh-Based Networks
Authors: Yudi Li, Min Tang, Yun Yang, Zi Huang, Ruofeng Tong, Shuangcai Yang, Yao Li, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

We present a novel mesh-based learning approach (N-Cloth) for plausible 3D cloth deformation prediction. Our approach is general and can handle cloth or obstacles represented by triangle meshes with arbitrary topologies. We use graph convolution to transform the cloth and object meshes into a latent space to reduce the non-linearity in the mesh space. Our network can predict the target 3D cloth mesh deformation based on the initial state of the cloth mesh template and the target obstacle mesh. Our approach can handle complex cloth meshes with up to 100K triangles and scenes with various objects corresponding to SMPL humans, non-SMPL humans or rigid bodies. In practice, our approach can be used to generate plausible cloth simulation at 30-45 fps on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU. We highlight its benefits over prior learning-based methods and physically-based cloth simulators.
WOOD: Wasserstein-based Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Yinan Wang, Wenbo Sun, Jionghua "Judy" Jin, Zhenyu "James" Kong, Xiaowei Yue
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

The training and test data for deep-neural-network-based classifiers are usually assumed to be sampled from the same distribution. When part of the test samples are drawn from a distribution that is sufficiently far away from that of the training samples (a.k.a. out-of-distribution (OOD) samples), the trained neural network has a tendency to make high confidence predictions for these OOD samples. Detection of the OOD samples is critical when training a neural network used for image classification, object detection, etc. It can enhance the classifier's robustness to irrelevant inputs, and improve the system resilience and security under different forms of attacks. Detection of OOD samples has three main challenges: (i) the proposed OOD detection method should be compatible with various architectures of classifiers (e.g., DenseNet, ResNet), without significantly increasing the model complexity and requirements on computational resources; (ii) the OOD samples may come from multiple distributions, whose class labels are commonly unavailable; (iii) a score function needs to be defined to effectively separate OOD samples from in-distribution (InD) samples. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Wasserstein-based out-of-distribution detection (WOOD) method. The basic idea is to define a Wasserstein-distance-based score that evaluates the dissimilarity between a test sample and the distribution of InD samples. An optimization problem is then formulated and solved based on the proposed score function. The statistical learning bound of the proposed method is investigated to guarantee that the loss value achieved by the empirical optimizer approximates the global optimum. The comparison study results demonstrate that the proposed WOOD consistently outperforms other existing OOD detection methods.
Robust Voting Rules from Algorithmic Robust Statistics
Authors: Allen Liu, Ankur Moitra
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00

Maximum likelihood estimation furnishes powerful insights into voting theory, and the design of voting rules. However the MLE can usually be badly corrupted by a single outlying sample. This means that a single voter or a group of colluding voters can vote strategically and drastically affect the outcome. Motivated by recent progress in algorithmic robust statistics, we revisit the fundamental problem of estimating the central ranking in a Mallows model, but ask for an estimator that is provably robust, unlike the MLE. Our main result is an efficiently computable estimator that achieves nearly optimal robustness guarantees. In particular the robustness guarantees are dimension-independent in the sense that our overall accuracy does not depend on the number of alternatives being ranked. As an immediate consequence, we show that while the landmark Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem tells us a strong impossiblity result about designing strategy-proof voting rules, there are quantitatively strong ways to protect against large coalitions if we assume that the remaining voters voters are honest and their preferences are sampled from a Mallows model. Our work also makes technical contributions to algorithmic robust statistics by designing new spectral filtering techniques that can exploit the intricate combinatorial dependencies in the Mallows model.
Surfer100: Generating Surveys From Web Resources, Wikipedia-style
Authors: Irene Li, Alexander Fabbri, Rina Kawamura, Yixin Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jaesung Tae, Chang Shen, Sally Ma, Tomoe Mizutani, Dragomir Radev
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Fast-developing fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) often outpace the efforts of encyclopedic sources such as Wikipedia, which either do not completely cover recently-introduced topics or lack such content entirely. As a result, methods for automatically producing content are valuable tools to address this information overload. We show that recent advances in pretrained language modeling can be combined for a two-stage extractive and abstractive approach for Wikipedia lead paragraph generation. We extend this approach to generate longer Wikipedia-style summaries with sections and examine how such methods struggle in this application through detailed studies with 100 reference human-collected surveys. This is the first study on utilizing web resources for long Wikipedia-style summaries to the best of our knowledge.
Risk and optimal policies in bandit experiments
Authors: Karun Adusumilli
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Thompson Sampling

We provide a decision theoretic analysis of bandit experiments. Working within the framework of diffusion asymptotics, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for these experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distributions of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and thereby suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The PDEs characterizing minimal Bayes risk can be solved efficiently using sparse matrix routines. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from their numerical solutions. These optimal policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling and UCB, often by a factor of two. The framework also covers time discounting and pure exploration.
Scheduling Servers with Stochastic Bilinear Rewards
Authors: Jung-hun Kim, Milan Vojnovic
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

We address a control system optimization problem that arises in multi-class, multi-server queueing system scheduling with uncertainty. In this scenario, jobs incur holding costs while awaiting completion, and job-server assignments yield observable stochastic rewards with unknown mean values. The rewards for job-server assignments are assumed to follow a bilinear model with respect to features characterizing jobs and servers. Our objective is regret minimization, aiming to maximize the cumulative reward of job-server assignments over a time horizon while maintaining a bounded total job holding cost, thus ensuring queueing system stability. This problem is motivated by applications in computing services and online platforms. To address this problem, we propose a scheduling algorithm based on weighted proportional fair allocation criteria augmented with marginal costs for reward maximization, incorporating a bandit strategy. Our algorithm achieves sub-linear regret and sub-linear mean holding cost (and queue length bound) with respect to the time horizon, thus guaranteeing queueing system stability. Additionally, we establish stability conditions for distributed iterative algorithms for computing allocations, which are relevant to large-scale system applications. Finally, we validate the efficiency of our algorithm through numerical experiments.
Recalibrating probabilistic forecasts of epidemics
Authors: Aaron Rumack, Ryan J. Tibshirani, Roni Rosenfeld
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00

Distributional forecasts are important for a wide variety of applications, including forecasting epidemics. Often, forecasts are miscalibrated, or unreliable in assigning uncertainty to future events. We present a recalibration method that can be applied to a black-box forecaster given retrospective forecasts and observations, as well as an extension to make this method more effective in recalibrating epidemic forecasts. This method is guaranteed to improve calibration and log score performance when trained and measured in-sample. We also prove that the increase in expected log score of a recalibrated forecaster is equal to the entropy of the PIT distribution. We apply this recalibration method to the 27 influenza forecasters in the FluSight Network and show that recalibration reliably improves forecast accuracy and calibration. This method is effective, robust, and easy to use as a post-processing tool to improve epidemic forecasts.
Fairness for Robust Learning to Rank
Authors: Omid Memarrast, Ashkan Rezaei, Rizal Fathony, Brian Ziebart
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Learning-To-Rank

While conventional ranking systems focus solely on maximizing the utility of the ranked items to users, fairness-aware ranking systems additionally try to balance the exposure for different protected attributes such as gender or race. To achieve this type of group fairness for ranking, we derive a new ranking system based on the first principles of distributional robustness. We formulate a minimax game between a player choosing a distribution over rankings to maximize utility while satisfying fairness constraints against an adversary seeking to minimize utility while matching statistics of the training data. We show that our approach provides better utility for highly fair rankings than existing baseline methods.
Identifying bias in cluster quality metrics
Authors: Martí Renedo-Mirambell, Argimiro Arratia
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00

We study potential biases of popular cluster quality metrics, such as conductance or modularity. We propose a method that uses both stochastic and preferential attachment block models construction to generate networks with preset community structures, to which quality metrics will be applied. These models also allow us to generate multi-level structures of varying strength, which will show if metrics favour partitions into a larger or smaller number of clusters. Additionally, we propose another quality metric, the density ratio. We observed that most of the studied metrics tend to favour partitions into a smaller number of big clusters, even when their relative internal and external connectivity are the same. The metrics found to be less biased are modularity and density ratio.
Bayesian Persuasion for Algorithmic Recourse
Authors: Keegan Harris, Valerie Chen, Joon Sik Kim, Ameet Talwalkar, Hoda Heidari, Zhiwei Steven Wu
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

When subjected to automated decision-making, decision subjects may strategically modify their observable features in ways they believe will maximize their chances of receiving a favorable decision. In many practical situations, the underlying assessment rule is deliberately kept secret to avoid gaming and maintain competitive advantage. The resulting opacity forces the decision subjects to rely on incomplete information when making strategic feature modifications. We capture such settings as a game of Bayesian persuasion, in which the decision maker offers a form of recourse to the decision subject by providing them with an action recommendation (or signal) to incentivize them to modify their features in desirable ways. We show that when using persuasion, the decision maker and decision subject are never worse off in expectation, while the decision maker can be significantly better off. While the decision maker's problem of finding the optimal Bayesian incentive-compatible (BIC) signaling policy takes the form of optimization over infinitely-many variables, we show that this optimization can be cast as a linear program over finitely-many regions of the space of possible assessment rules. While this reformulation simplifies the problem dramatically, solving the linear program requires reasoning about exponentially-many variables, even in relatively simple cases. Motivated by this observation, we provide a polynomial-time approximation scheme that recovers a near-optimal signaling policy. Finally, our numerical simulations on semi-synthetic data empirically demonstrate the benefits of using persuasion in the algorithmic recourse setting.
Quantifying and Understanding Adversarial Examples in Discrete Input Spaces
Authors: Volodymyr Kuleshov, Evgenii Nikishin, Shantanu Thakoor, Tingfung Lau, Stefano Ermon
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Sentiment Analysis

Modern classification algorithms are susceptible to adversarial examples--perturbations to inputs that cause the algorithm to produce undesirable behavior. In this work, we seek to understand and extend adversarial examples across domains in which inputs are discrete, particularly across new domains, such as computational biology. As a step towards this goal, we formalize a notion of synonymous adversarial examples that applies in any discrete setting and describe a simple domain-agnostic algorithm to construct such examples. We apply this algorithm across multiple domains--including sentiment analysis and DNA sequence classification--and find that it consistently uncovers adversarial examples. We seek to understand their prevalence theoretically and we attribute their existence to spurious token correlations, a statistical phenomenon that is specific to discrete spaces. Our work is a step towards a domain-agnostic treatment of discrete adversarial examples analogous to that of continuous inputs.
A Machine Learning Analysis of Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Alcohol Consumption Habit Changes Among Healthcare Workers in the U.S
Authors: Mostafa Rezapour
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00

In this paper, we discuss the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on alcohol consumption habit changes among healthcare workers in the United States. We utilize multiple supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods and models such as Decision Trees, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes classifier, k-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, Multilayer perceptron, XGBoost, CatBoost, LightGBM, Chi-Squared Test and mutual information method on a mental health survey data obtained from the University of Michigan Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research to find out relationships between COVID-19 related negative effects and alcohol consumption habit changes among healthcare workers. Our findings suggest that COVID-19-related school closures, COVID-19-related work schedule changes and COVID-related news exposure may lead to an increase in alcohol use among healthcare workers in the United States.
Learning with Subset Stacking
Authors: S. İlker Birbil, Sinan Yildirim, Kaya Gökalp, M. Hakan Akyüz
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00

We propose a new regression algorithm that learns from a set of input-output pairs. Our algorithm is designed for populations where the relation between the input variables and the output variable exhibits a heterogeneous behavior across the predictor space. The algorithm starts with generating subsets that are concentrated around random points in the input space. This is followed by training a local predictor for each subset. Those predictors are then combined in a novel way to yield an overall predictor. We call this algorithm ``LEarning with Subset Stacking'' or LESS, due to its resemblance to the method of stacking regressors. We compare the testing performance of LESS with state-of-the-art methods on several datasets. Our comparison shows that LESS is a competitive supervised learning method. Moreover, we observe that LESS is also efficient in terms of computation time and it allows a straightforward parallel implementation.
SHGNN: Structure-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network
Authors: Wentao Xu, Yingce Xia, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian, Jian Yin, Tie-Yan Liu
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Graph Neural Network, Node Classification

Many real-world graphs (networks) are heterogeneous with different types of nodes and edges. Heterogeneous graph embedding, aiming at learning the low-dimensional node representations of a heterogeneous graph, is vital for various downstream applications. Many meta-path based embedding methods have been proposed to learn the semantic information of heterogeneous graphs in recent years. However, most of the existing techniques overlook the graph structure information when learning the heterogeneous graph embeddings. This paper proposes a novel Structure-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (SHGNN) to address the above limitations. In detail, we first utilize a feature propagation module to capture the local structure information of intermediate nodes in the meta-path. Next, we use a tree-attention aggregator to incorporate the graph structure information into the aggregation module on the meta-path. Finally, we leverage a meta-path aggregator to fuse the information aggregated from different meta-paths. We conducted experiments on node classification and clustering tasks and achieved state-of-the-art results on the benchmark datasets, which shows the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Approximation algorithms for confidence bands for time series
Authors: Nikolaj Tatti
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Confidence intervals are a standard technique for analyzing data. When applied to time series, confidence intervals are computed for each time point separately. Alternatively, we can compute confidence bands, where we are required to find the smallest area enveloping $k$ time series, where $k$ is a user parameter. Confidence bands can be then used to detect abnormal time series, not just individual observations within the time series. We will show that despite being an NP-hard problem it is possible to find optimal confidence band for some $k$. We do this by considering a different problem: discovering regularized bands, where we minimize the envelope area minus the number of included time series weighted by a parameter $\alpha$. Unlike normal confidence bands we can solve the problem exactly by using a minimum cut. By varying $\alpha$ we can obtain solutions for various $k$. If we have a constraint $k$ for which we cannot find appropriate $\alpha$, we demonstrate a simple algorithm that yields $O(\sqrt{n})$ approximation guarantee by connecting the problem to a minimum $k$-union problem. This connection also implies that we cannot approximate the problem better than $O(n^{1/4})$ under some (mild) assumptions. Finally, we consider a variant where instead of minimizing the area we minimize the maximum width. Here, we demonstrate a simple 2-approximation algorithm and show that we cannot achieve better approximation guarantee.
Visualising and Explaining Deep Learning Models for Speech Quality Prediction
Authors: H. Tilkorn, G. Mittag, S. Möller
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Estimating quality of transmitted speech is known to be a non-trivial task. While traditionally, test participants are asked to rate the quality of samples; nowadays, automated methods are available. These methods can be divided into: 1) intrusive models, which use both, the original and the degraded signals, and 2) non-intrusive models, which only require the degraded signal. Recently, non-intrusive models based on neural networks showed to outperform signal processing based models. However, the advantages of deep learning based models come with the cost of being more challenging to interpret. To get more insight into the prediction models the non-intrusive speech quality prediction model NISQA is analyzed in this paper. NISQA is composed of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a recurrent neural network (RNN). The task of the CNN is to compute relevant features for the speech quality prediction on a frame level, while the RNN models time-dependencies between the individual speech frames. Different explanation algorithms are used to understand the automatically learned features of the CNN. In this way, several interpretable features could be identified, such as the sensitivity to noise or strong interruptions. On the other hand, it was found that multiple features carry redundant information.
Quantum kernels for real-world predictions based on electronic health records
Authors: Zoran Krunic, Frederik F. Flöther, George Seegan, Nathan Earnest-Noble, Omar Shehab
Date: 2021-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Quantum Machine Learning

In recent years, research on near-term quantum machine learning has explored how classical machine learning algorithms endowed with access to quantum kernels (similarity measures) can outperform their purely classical counterparts. Although theoretical work has shown provable advantage on synthetic data sets, no work done to date has studied empirically whether quantum advantage is attainable and with what kind of data set. In this paper, we report the first systematic investigation of empirical quantum advantage (EQA) in healthcare and life sciences and propose an end-to-end framework to study EQA. We selected electronic health records (EHRs) data subsets and created a configuration space of 5-20 features and 200-300 training samples. For each configuration coordinate, we trained classical support vector machine (SVM) models based on radial basis function (RBF) kernels and quantum models with custom kernels using an IBM quantum computer, making this one of the largest quantum machine learning experiments to date. We empirically identified regimes where quantum kernels could provide advantage on a particular data set and introduced a terrain ruggedness index, a metric to help quantitatively estimate how the accuracy of a given model will perform as a function of the number of features and sample size. The generalizable framework introduced here represents a key step towards a priori identification of data sets where quantum advantage could exist.