pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Classifying Autism from Crowdsourced Semi-Structured Speech Recordings: A Machine Learning Approach
Authors: Nathan A. Chi, Peter Washington, Aaron Kline, Arman Husic, Cathy Hou, Chloe He, Kaitlyn Dunlap, Dennis Wall
Date: 2022-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder which results in altered behavior, social development, and communication patterns. In past years, autism prevalence has tripled, with 1 in 54 children now affected. Given that traditional diagnosis is a lengthy, labor-intensive process, significant attention has been given to developing systems that automatically screen for autism. Prosody abnormalities are among the clearest signs of autism, with affected children displaying speech idiosyncrasies including echolalia, monotonous intonation, atypical pitch, and irregular linguistic stress patterns. In this work, we present a suite of machine learning approaches to detect autism in self-recorded speech audio captured from autistic and neurotypical (NT) children in home environments. We consider three methods to detect autism in child speech: first, Random Forests trained on extracted audio features (including Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients); second, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained on spectrograms; and third, fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0--a state-of-the-art Transformer-based ASR model. We train our classifiers on our novel dataset of cellphone-recorded child speech audio curated from Stanford's Guess What? mobile game, an app designed to crowdsource videos of autistic and neurotypical children in a natural home environment. The Random Forest classifier achieves 70% accuracy, the fine-tuned wav2vec 2.0 model achieves 77% accuracy, and the CNN achieves 79% accuracy when classifying children's audio as either ASD or NT. Our models were able to predict autism status when training on a varied selection of home audio clips with inconsistent recording quality, which may be more generalizable to real world conditions. These results demonstrate that machine learning methods offer promise in detecting autism automatically from speech without specialized equipment.
Deep neural networks for smooth approximation of physics with higher order and continuity B-spline base functions
Authors: Kamil Doległo, Anna Paszyńska, Maciej Paszyński, Leszek Demkowicz
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00

This paper deals with the following important research question. Traditionally, the neural network employs non-linear activation functions concatenated with linear operators to approximate a given physical phenomenon. They "fill the space" with the concatenations of the activation functions and linear operators and adjust their coefficients to approximate the physical phenomena. We claim that it is better to "fill the space" with linear combinations of smooth higher-order B-splines base functions as employed by isogeometric analysis and utilize the neural networks to adjust the coefficients of linear combinations. In other words, the possibilities of using neural networks for approximating the B-spline base functions' coefficients and by approximating the solution directly are evaluated. Solving differential equations with neural networks has been proposed by Maziar Raissi et al. in 2017 by introducing Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINN), which naturally encode underlying physical laws as prior information. Approximation of coefficients using a function as an input leverages the well-known capability of neural networks being universal function approximators. In essence, in the PINN approach the network approximates the value of the given field at a given point. We present an alternative approach, where the physcial quantity is approximated as a linear combination of smooth B-spline basis functions, and the neural network approximates the coefficients of B-splines. This research compares results from the DNN approximating the coefficients of the linear combination of B-spline basis functions, with the DNN approximating the solution directly. We show that our approach is cheaper and more accurate when approximating smooth physical fields.
Biased Hypothesis Formation From Projection Pursuit
Authors: John Patterson, Chris Avery, Tyler Grear, Donald J. Jacobs
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

The effect of bias on hypothesis formation is characterized for an automated data-driven projection pursuit neural network to extract and select features for binary classification of data streams. This intelligent exploratory process partitions a complete vector state space into disjoint subspaces to create working hypotheses quantified by similarities and differences observed between two groups of labeled data streams. Data streams are typically time sequenced, and may exhibit complex spatio-temporal patterns. For example, given atomic trajectories from molecular dynamics simulation, the machine's task is to quantify dynamical mechanisms that promote function by comparing protein mutants, some known to function while others are nonfunctional. Utilizing synthetic two-dimensional molecules that mimic the dynamics of functional and nonfunctional proteins, biases are identified and controlled in both the machine learning model and selected training data under different contexts. The refinement of a working hypothesis converges to a statistically robust multivariate perception of the data based on a context-dependent perspective. Including diverse perspectives during data exploration enhances interpretability of the multivariate characterization of similarities and differences.
Temporal Detection of Anomalies via Actor-Critic Based Controlled Sensing
Authors: Geethu Joseph, M. Cenk Gursoy, Pramod K. Varshney
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

We address the problem of monitoring a set of binary stochastic processes and generating an alert when the number of anomalies among them exceeds a threshold. For this, the decision-maker selects and probes a subset of the processes to obtain noisy estimates of their states (normal or anomalous). Based on the received observations, the decisionmaker first determines whether to declare that the number of anomalies has exceeded the threshold or to continue taking observations. When the decision is to continue, it then decides whether to collect observations at the next time instant or defer it to a later time. If it chooses to collect observations, it further determines the subset of processes to be probed. To devise this three-step sequential decision-making process, we use a Bayesian formulation wherein we learn the posterior probability on the states of the processes. Using the posterior probability, we construct a Markov decision process and solve it using deep actor-critic reinforcement learning. Via numerical experiments, we demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm compared to the traditional model-based algorithms.
Deriving discriminative classifiers from generative models
Authors: Elie Azeraf, Emmanuel Monfrini, Wojciech Pieczynski
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00

We deal with Bayesian generative and discriminative classifiers. Given a model distribution $p(x, y)$, with the observation $y$ and the target $x$, one computes generative classifiers by firstly considering $p(x, y)$ and then using the Bayes rule to calculate $p(x | y)$. A discriminative model is directly given by $p(x | y)$, which is used to compute discriminative classifiers. However, recent works showed that the Bayesian Maximum Posterior classifier defined from the Naive Bayes (NB) or Hidden Markov Chain (HMC), both generative models, can also match the discriminative classifier definition. Thus, there are situations in which dividing classifiers into "generative" and "discriminative" is somewhat misleading. Indeed, such a distinction is rather related to the way of computing classifiers, not to the classifiers themselves. We present a general theoretical result specifying how a generative classifier induced from a generative model can also be computed in a discriminative way from the same model. Examples of NB and HMC are found again as particular cases, and we apply the general result to two original extensions of NB, and two extensions of HMC, one of which being original. Finally, we shortly illustrate the interest of the new discriminative way of computing classifiers in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) framework.
Graph Neural Networks for Multivariate Time Series Regression with Application to Seismic Data
Authors: Stefan Bloemheuvel, Jurgen van den Hoogen, Dario Jozinović, Alberto Michelini, Martin Atzmueller
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, regression, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting, Time Series Regression

Machine learning, with its advances in deep learning has shown great potential in analyzing time series. In many scenarios, however, additional information that can potentially improve the predictions is available. This is crucial for data that arise from e.g., sensor networks that contain information about sensor locations. Then, such spatial information can be exploited by modeling it via graph structures, along with the sequential (time series) information. Recent advances in adapting deep learning to graphs have shown potential in various tasks. However, these methods have not been adapted for time series tasks to a great extent. Most attempts have essentially consolidated around time series forecasting with small sequence lengths. Generally, these architectures are not well suited for regression or classification tasks where the value to be predicted is not strictly depending on the most recent values, but rather on the whole length of the time series. We propose TISER-GCN, a novel graph neural network architecture for processing, in particular, these long time series in a multivariate regression task. Our proposed model is tested on two seismic datasets containing earthquake waveforms, where the goal is to predict maximum intensity measurements of ground shaking at each seismic station. Our findings demonstrate promising results of our approach -- with an average MSE reduction of 16.3% - compared to the best performing baselines. In addition, our approach matches the baseline scores by needing only half the input size. The results are discussed in depth with an additional ablation study.
Adaptive Template Enhancement for Improved Person Recognition using Small Datasets
Authors: Su Yang, Sanaul Hoque, Farzin Deravi
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Person Recognition

A novel instance-based method for the classification of electroencephalography (EEG) signals is presented and evaluated in this paper. The non-stationary nature of the EEG signals, coupled with the demanding task of pattern recognition with limited training data as well as the potentially noisy signal acquisition conditions, have motivated the work reported in this study. The proposed adaptive template enhancement mechanism transforms the feature-level instances by treating each feature dimension separately, hence resulting in improved class separation and better query-class matching. The proposed new instance-based learning algorithm is compared with a few related algorithms in a number of scenarios. A clinical grade 64-electrode EEG database, as well as a low-quality (high-noise level) EEG database obtained with a low-cost system using a single dry sensor have been used for evaluations in biometric person recognition. The proposed approach demonstrates significantly improved classification accuracy in both identification and verification scenarios. In particular, this new method is seen to provide a good classification performance for noisy EEG data, indicating its potential suitability for a wide range of applications.
Multi-Stage Episodic Control for Strategic Exploration in Text Games
Authors: Jens Tuyls, Shunyu Yao, Sham Kakade, Karthik Narasimhan
Date: 2022-01-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

Text adventure games present unique challenges to reinforcement learning methods due to their combinatorially large action spaces and sparse rewards. The interplay of these two factors is particularly demanding because large action spaces require extensive exploration, while sparse rewards provide limited feedback. This work proposes to tackle the explore-vs-exploit dilemma using a multi-stage approach that explicitly disentangles these two strategies within each episode. Our algorithm, called eXploit-Then-eXplore (XTX), begins each episode using an exploitation policy that imitates a set of promising trajectories from the past, and then switches over to an exploration policy aimed at discovering novel actions that lead to unseen state spaces. This policy decomposition allows us to combine global decisions about which parts of the game space to return to with curiosity-based local exploration in that space, motivated by how a human may approach these games. Our method significantly outperforms prior approaches by 27% and 11% average normalized score over 12 games from the Jericho benchmark (Hausknecht et al., 2020) in both deterministic and stochastic settings, respectively. On the game of Zork1, in particular, XTX obtains a score of 103, more than a 2x improvement over prior methods, and pushes past several known bottlenecks in the game that have plagued previous state-of-the-art methods.
DigNet: Digging Clues from Local-Global Interactive Graph for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification
Authors: Bowen Xing, Ivor Tsang
Date: 2022-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

In aspect-level sentiment classification (ASC), state-of-the-art models encode either syntax graph or relation graph to capture the local syntactic information or global relational information. Despite the advantages of syntax and relation graphs, they have respective shortages which are neglected, limiting the representation power in the graph modeling process. To resolve their limitations, we design a novel local-global interactive graph, which marries their advantages by stitching the two graphs via interactive edges. To model this local-global interactive graph, we propose a novel neural network termed DigNet, whose core module is the stacked local-global interactive (LGI) layers performing two processes: intra-graph message passing and cross-graph message passing. In this way, the local syntactic and global relational information can be reconciled as a whole in understanding the aspect-level sentiment. Concretely, we design two variants of local-global interactive graphs with different kinds of interactive edges and three variants of LGI layers. We conduct experiments on several public benchmark datasets and the results show that we outperform previous best scores by 3\%, 2.32\%, and 6.33\% in terms of Macro-F1 on Lap14, Res14, and Res15 datasets, respectively, confirming the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed local-global interactive graph and DigNet.
Semantics-Preserved Distortion for Personal Privacy Protection in Information Management
Authors: Jiajia Li, Lu Yang, Letian Peng, Shitou Zhang, Ping Wang, Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao
Date: 2022-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Constituency Parsing, Federated Learning, Machine Reading Comprehension, Management, Memorization, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Reading Comprehension

In recent years, machine learning - particularly deep learning - has significantly impacted the field of information management. While several strategies have been proposed to restrict models from learning and memorizing sensitive information from raw texts, this paper suggests a more linguistically-grounded approach to distort texts while maintaining semantic integrity. To this end, we leverage Neighboring Distribution Divergence, a novel metric to assess the preservation of semantic meaning during distortion. Building on this metric, we present two distinct frameworks for semantic-preserving distortion: a generative approach and a substitutive approach. Our evaluations across various tasks, including named entity recognition, constituency parsing, and machine reading comprehension, affirm the plausibility and efficacy of our distortion technique in personal privacy protection. We also test our method against attribute attacks in three privacy-focused assignments within the NLP domain, and the findings underscore the simplicity and efficacy of our data-based improvement approach over structural improvement approaches. Moreover, we explore privacy protection in a specific medical information management scenario, showing our method effectively limits sensitive data memorization, underscoring its practicality.
An Adversarial Benchmark for Fake News Detection Models
Authors: Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Yiding Hao
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: AAAI Workshop AdvML 2022 2
Tasks: Fact Checking, Fake News Detection, Misinformation, Sensitivity

With the proliferation of online misinformation, fake news detection has gained importance in the artificial intelligence community. In this paper, we propose an adversarial benchmark that tests the ability of fake news detectors to reason about real-world facts. We formulate adversarial attacks that target three aspects of "understanding": compositional semantics, lexical relations, and sensitivity to modifiers. We test our benchmark using BERT classifiers fine-tuned on the LIAR arXiv:arch-ive/1705648 and Kaggle Fake-News datasets, and show that both models fail to respond to changes in compositional and lexical meaning. Our results strengthen the need for such models to be used in conjunction with other fact checking methods.
AI & Racial Equity: Understanding Sentiment Analysis Artificial Intelligence, Data Security, and Systemic Theory in Criminal Justice Systems
Authors: Alia Abbas
Date: 2022-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sentiment Analysis

Various forms of implications of artificial intelligence that either exacerbate or decrease racial systemic injustice have been explored in this applied research endeavor. Taking each thematic area of identifying, analyzing, and debating an systemic issue have been leveraged in investigating merits and drawbacks of using algorithms to automate human decision making in racially sensitive environments. It has been asserted through the analysis of historical systemic patterns, implicit biases, existing algorithmic risks, and legal implications that natural language processing based AI, such as risk assessment tools, have racially disparate outcomes. It is concluded that more litigative policies are needed to regulate and restrict how internal government institutions and corporations utilize algorithms, privacy and security risks, and auditing requirements in order to diverge from racially injustice outcomes and practices of the past.
Discrete and continuous representations and processing in deep learning: Looking forward
Authors: Ruben Cartuyvels, Graham Spinks, Marie-Francine Moens
Date: 2022-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Discrete and continuous representations of content (e.g., of language or images) have interesting properties to be explored for the understanding of or reasoning with this content by machines. This position paper puts forward our opinion on the role of discrete and continuous representations and their processing in the deep learning field. Current neural network models compute continuous-valued data. Information is compressed into dense, distributed embeddings. By stark contrast, humans use discrete symbols in their communication with language. Such symbols represent a compressed version of the world that derives its meaning from shared contextual information. Additionally, human reasoning involves symbol manipulation at a cognitive level, which facilitates abstract reasoning, the composition of knowledge and understanding, generalization and efficient learning. Motivated by these insights, in this paper we argue that combining discrete and continuous representations and their processing will be essential to build systems that exhibit a general form of intelligence. We suggest and discuss several avenues that could improve current neural networks with the inclusion of discrete elements to combine the advantages of both types of representations.
Network Collaborator: Knowledge Transfer Between Network Reconstruction and Community Detection
Authors: Kai Wu, Chao Wang, Junyuan Chen, Jing Liu
Date: 2022-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Transfer Learning

This paper focuses on jointly inferring network and community structures from the dynamics of complex systems. Although many approaches have been designed to solve these two problems solely, none of them consider explicit shareable knowledge across these two tasks. Community detection (CD) from dynamics and network reconstruction (NR) from dynamics are natural synergistic tasks that motivate the proposed evolutionary multitasking NR and CD framework, called network collaborator (NC). In the process of NC, the NR task explicitly transfers several better network structures for the CD task, and the CD task explicitly transfers a better community structure to assist the NR task. Moreover, to transfer knowledge from the NR task to the CD task, NC models the study of CD from dynamics to find communities in the dynamic network and then considers whether to transfer knowledge across tasks. A test suite for multitasking NR and CD problems (MTNRCDPs) is designed to verify the performance of NC. The experimental results conducted on the designed MTNRCDPs have demonstrated that joint NR with CD has a synergistic effect, where the network structure used to inform the existence of communities is also inherently employed to improve the reconstruction accuracy, which, in turn, can better demonstrate the discovering of the community structure. The code is available at: https://github.com/xiaofangxd/EMTNRCD.
A Survey on Brain-Computer Interaction
Authors: Bosubabu Sambana, Priyanka Mishra
Date: 2022-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, Survey

Brain-Computer Interface(BCI) systems support communication through direct measures of neural activity without muscle activity. Brain-Computer Interface systems need to be validated in long-term studies of real-world use by people with severe disabilities, and effective and viable models for their widespread dissemination must be implemented. Finally, the day-to-day and moment-to-moment reliability of BCI performance must be improved so that approaches the reliability of natural muscle-based function. This review discusses the structure and functions of BCI systems, clarifies terminology integration and progress, and opportunities in the field are also identified and explicated based on the current availability of invasive recording technologies used for BCI systems.