pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
S2IGAN: Speech-to-Image Generation via Adversarial Learning
Authors: Xinsheng Wang, Tingting Qiao, Jihua Zhu, Alan Hanjalic, Odette Scharenborg
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

An estimated half of the world's languages do not have a written form, making it impossible for these languages to benefit from any existing text-based technologies. In this paper, a speech-to-image generation (S2IG) framework is proposed which translates speech descriptions to photo-realistic images without using any text information, thus allowing unwritten languages to potentially benefit from this technology. The proposed S2IG framework, named S2IGAN, consists of a speech embedding network (SEN) and a relation-supervised densely-stacked generative model (RDG). SEN learns the speech embedding with the supervision of the corresponding visual information. Conditioned on the speech embedding produced by SEN, the proposed RDG synthesizes images that are semantically consistent with the corresponding speech descriptions. Extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets CUB and Oxford-102 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed S2IGAN on synthesizing high-quality and semantically-consistent images from the speech signal, yielding a good performance and a solid baseline for the S2IG task.
Echo State Networks trained by Tikhonov least squares are L2(μ) approximators of ergodic dynamical systems
Authors: Allen G Hart, James L Hook, Jonathan H P Dawes
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Echo State Networks (ESNs) are a class of single-layer recurrent neural networks with randomly generated internal weights, and a single layer of tuneable outer weights, which are usually trained by regularised linear least squares regression. Remarkably, ESNs still enjoy the universal approximation property despite the training procedure being entirely linear. In this paper, we prove that an ESN trained on a sequence of observations from an ergodic dynamical system (with invariant measure $\mu$) using Tikhonov least squares regression against a set of targets, will approximate the target function in the $L^2(\mu)$ norm. In the special case that the targets are future observations, the ESN is learning the next step map, which allows time series forecasting. We demonstrate the theory numerically by training an ESN using Tikhonov least squares on a sequence of scalar observations of the Lorenz system.
NIT-Agartala-NLP-Team at SemEval-2020 Task 8: Building Multimodal Classifiers to tackle Internet Humor
Authors: Steve Durairaj Swamy, Shubham Laddha, Basil Abdussalam, Debayan Datta, Anupam Jamatia
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020
Tasks: regression, Transfer Learning

The paper describes the systems submitted to SemEval-2020 Task 8: Memotion by the `NIT-Agartala-NLP-Team'. A dataset of 8879 memes was made available by the task organizers to train and test our models. Our systems include a Logistic Regression baseline, a BiLSTM + Attention-based learner and a transfer learning approach with BERT. For the three sub-tasks A, B and C, we attained ranks 24/33, 11/29 and 15/26, respectively. We highlight our difficulties in harnessing image information as well as some techniques and handcrafted features we employ to overcome these issues. We also discuss various modelling issues and theorize possible solutions and reasons as to why these problems persist.
Simultaneous imputation and disease classification in incomplete medical datasets using Multigraph Geometric Matrix Completion (MGMC)
Authors: Gerome Vivar, Anees Kazi, Hendrik Burwinkel, Andreas Zwergal, Nassir Navab, Seyed-Ahmad Ahmadi
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Disease Prediction, General Classification, Imputation, Matrix Completion

Large-scale population-based studies in medicine are a key resource towards better diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment of diseases. They also serve as enablers of clinical decision support systems, in particular Computer Aided Diagnosis (CADx) using machine learning (ML). Numerous ML approaches for CADx have been proposed in literature. However, these approaches assume full data availability, which is not always feasible in clinical data. To account for missing data, incomplete data samples are either removed or imputed, which could lead to data bias and may negatively affect classification performance. As a solution, we propose an end-to-end learning of imputation and disease prediction of incomplete medical datasets via Multigraph Geometric Matrix Completion (MGMC). MGMC uses multiple recurrent graph convolutional networks, where each graph represents an independent population model based on a key clinical meta-feature like age, sex, or cognitive function. Graph signal aggregation from local patient neighborhoods, combined with multigraph signal fusion via self-attention, has a regularizing effect on both matrix reconstruction and classification performance. Our proposed approach is able to impute class relevant features as well as perform accurate classification on two publicly available medical datasets. We empirically show the superiority of our proposed approach in terms of classification and imputation performance when compared with state-of-the-art approaches. MGMC enables disease prediction in multimodal and incomplete medical datasets. These findings could serve as baseline for future CADx approaches which utilize incomplete datasets.
Protecting the integrity of the training procedure of neural networks
Authors: Christian Berghoff
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00

Due to significant improvements in performance in recent years, neural networks are currently used for an ever-increasing number of applications. However, neural networks have the drawback that their decisions are not readily interpretable and traceable for a human. This creates several problems, for instance in terms of safety and IT security for high-risk applications, where assuring these properties is crucial. One of the most striking IT security problems aggravated by the opacity of neural networks is the possibility of so-called poisoning attacks during the training phase, where an attacker inserts specially crafted data to manipulate the resulting model. We propose an approach to this problem which allows provably verifying the integrity of the training procedure by making use of standard cryptographic mechanisms.
Manthan: A Data Driven Approach for Boolean Function Synthesis
Authors: Priyanka Golia, Subhajit Roy, Kuldeep S. Meel
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Boolean functional synthesis is a fundamental problem in computer science with wide-ranging applications and has witnessed a surge of interest resulting in progressively improved techniques over the past decade. Despite intense algorithmic development, a large number of problems remain beyond the reach of the state of the art techniques. Motivated by the progress in machine learning, we propose Manthan, a novel data-driven approach to Boolean functional synthesis. Manthan views functional synthesis as a classification problem, relying on advances in constrained sampling for data generation, and advances in automated reasoning for a novel proof-guided refinement and provable verification. On an extensive and rigorous evaluation over 609 benchmarks, we demonstrate that Manthan significantly improves upon the current state of the art, solving 356 benchmarks in comparison to 280, which is the most solved by a state of the art technique; thereby, we demonstrate an increase of 76 benchmarks over the current state of the art. Furthermore, Manthan solves 60 benchmarks that none of the current state of the art techniques could solve. The significant performance improvements, along with our detailed analysis, highlights several interesting avenues of future work at the intersection of machine learning, constrained sampling, and automated reasoning.
Towards NLP-supported Semantic Data Management
Authors: Andreas Burgdorf, André Pomp, Tobias Meisen
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Management

The heterogeneity of data poses a great challenge when data from different sources is to be merged for one application. Solutions for this are offered, for example, by ontology-based data management (OBDM). A challenge of OBDM is the automatic creation of semantic models from datasets. This process is typically performed either data- or label-driven and always involves manual human intervention. We identified textual descriptions of data, a form of metadata, quickly to be produced and consumed by humans, as third possible basis for automatic semantic modelling. In this paper, we present, how we plan to use textual descriptions to enhance semantic data management. We will use state of the art NLP technologies to identify concepts within textual descriptions and build semantic models from this in combination with an evolving ontology. We will use automatically identified models in combination with the human data provider to automatically extend the ontology so that it learns new verified concepts over time. Finally, we will use the created ontology and automatically identified semantic models to either rate descriptions for new data sources or even to automatically generate descriptive texts that are easier to understand by the human user than formal models. We present the procedure which we plan for the ongoing research, as well as expected outcomes.
Can The Crowd Identify Misinformation Objectively? The Effects of Judgment Scale and Assessor's Background
Authors: Kevin Roitero, Michael Soprano, Shaoyang Fan, Damiano Spina, Stefano Mizzaro, Gianluca Demartini
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

Truthfulness judgments are a fundamental step in the process of fighting misinformation, as they are crucial to train and evaluate classifiers that automatically distinguish true and false statements. Usually such judgments are made by experts, like journalists for political statements or medical doctors for medical statements. In this paper, we follow a different approach and rely on (non-expert) crowd workers. This of course leads to the following research question: Can crowdsourcing be reliably used to assess the truthfulness of information and to create large-scale labeled collections for information credibility systems? To address this issue, we present the results of an extensive study based on crowdsourcing: we collect thousands of truthfulness assessments over two datasets, and we compare expert judgments with crowd judgments, expressed on scales with various granularity levels. We also measure the political bias and the cognitive background of the workers, and quantify their effect on the reliability of the data provided by the crowd.
Cognitive Amplifier for Internet of Things
Authors: Bing Huang, Athman Bouguettaya, Azadeh Ghari Neiat
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

We present a Cognitive Amplifier framework to augment things part of an IoT, with cognitive capabilities for the purpose of improving life convenience. Specifically, the Cognitive Amplifier consists of knowledge discovery and prediction components. The knowledge discovery component focuses on finding natural activity patterns considering their regularity, variations, and transitions in real life setting. The prediction component takes the discovered knowledge as the base for inferring what, when, and where the next activity will happen. Experimental results on real-life data validate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach.
Classification of Arrhythmia by Using Deep Learning with 2-D ECG Spectral Image Representation
Authors: Amin Ullah, Syed M. Anwar, Muhammad Bilal, Raja M Mehmood
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Specificity, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most extensively employed signals used in the diagnosis and prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The ECG signals can capture the heart's rhythmic irregularities, commonly known as arrhythmias. A careful study of ECG signals is crucial for precise diagnoses of patients' acute and chronic heart conditions. In this study, we propose a two-dimensional (2-D) convolutional neural network (CNN) model for the classification of ECG signals into eight classes; namely, normal beat, premature ventricular contraction beat, paced beat, right bundle branch block beat, left bundle branch block beat, atrial premature contraction beat, ventricular flutter wave beat, and ventricular escape beat. The one-dimensional ECG time series signals are transformed into 2-D spectrograms through short-time Fourier transform. The 2-D CNN model consisting of four convolutional layers and four pooling layers is designed for extracting robust features from the input spectrograms. Our proposed methodology is evaluated on a publicly available MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset. We achieved a state-of-the-art average classification accuracy of 99.11\%, which is better than those of recently reported results in classifying similar types of arrhythmias. The performance is significant in other indices as well, including sensitivity and specificity, which indicates the success of the proposed method.
DRTS Parsing with Structure-Aware Encoding and Decoding
Authors: Qiankun Fu, Yue Zhang, Jiangming Liu, Meishan Zhang
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Decoder, Graph Attention, Semantic Parsing

Discourse representation tree structure (DRTS) parsing is a novel semantic parsing task which has been concerned most recently. State-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a neural sequence-to-sequence model, treating the tree construction as an incremental sequence generation problem. Structural information such as input syntax and the intermediate skeleton of the partial output has been ignored in the model, which could be potentially useful for the DRTS parsing. In this work, we propose a structural-aware model at both the encoder and decoder phase to integrate the structural information, where graph attention network (GAT) is exploited for effectively modeling. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset show that our proposed model is effective and can obtain the best performance in the literature.
Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Learning Data Sets
Authors: Susan Leavy, Gerardine Meaney, Karen Wade, Derek Greene
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, Recommendation Systems

Artificial Intelligence has the capacity to amplify and perpetuate societal biases and presents profound ethical implications for society. Gender bias has been identified in the context of employment advertising and recruitment tools, due to their reliance on underlying language processing and recommendation algorithms. Attempts to address such issues have involved testing learned associations, integrating concepts of fairness to machine learning and performing more rigorous analysis of training data. Mitigating bias when algorithms are trained on textual data is particularly challenging given the complex way gender ideology is embedded in language. This paper proposes a framework for the identification of gender bias in training data for machine learning.The work draws upon gender theory and sociolinguistics to systematically indicate levels of bias in textual training data and associated neural word embedding models, thus highlighting pathways for both removing bias from training data and critically assessing its impact.
Neural Networks Versus Conventional Filters for Inertial-Sensor-based Attitude Estimation
Authors: Daniel Weber, Clemens Gühmann, Thomas Seel
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

Inertial measurement units are commonly used to estimate the attitude of moving objects. Numerous nonlinear filter approaches have been proposed for solving the inherent sensor fusion problem. However, when a large range of different dynamic and static rotational and translational motions is considered, the attainable accuracy is limited by the need for situation-dependent adjustment of accelerometer and gyroscope fusion weights. We investigate to what extent these limitations can be overcome by means of artificial neural networks and how much domain-specific optimization of the neural network model is required to outperform the conventional filter solution. A diverse set of motion recordings with a marker-based optical ground truth is used for performance evaluation and comparison. The proposed neural networks are found to outperform the conventional filter across all motions only if domain-specific optimizations are introduced. We conclude that they are a promising tool for inertial-sensor-based real-time attitude estimation, but both expert knowledge and rich datasets are required to achieve top performance.
Service mining for Internet of Things
Authors: Bing Huang, Athman Bouguettaya
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00

A service mining framework is proposed that enables discovering interesting relationships in Internet of Things services bottom-up. The service relationships are modeled based on spatial-temporal aspects, environment, people, and operation. An ontology-based service model is proposed to describe services. We present a set of metrics to evaluate the interestingness of discovered service relationships. Analytical and simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation measures.
ZynqNet: An FPGA-Accelerated Embedded Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: David Gschwend
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, High-Level Synthesis, image-classification, Image Classification

Image Understanding is becoming a vital feature in ever more applications ranging from medical diagnostics to autonomous vehicles. Many applications demand for embedded solutions that integrate into existing systems with tight real-time and power constraints. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) presently achieve record-breaking accuracies in all image understanding benchmarks, but have a very high computational complexity. Embedded CNNs thus call for small and efficient, yet very powerful computing platforms. This master thesis explores the potential of FPGA-based CNN acceleration and demonstrates a fully functional proof-of-concept CNN implementation on a Zynq System-on-Chip. The ZynqNet Embedded CNN is designed for image classification on ImageNet and consists of ZynqNet CNN, an optimized and customized CNN topology, and the ZynqNet FPGA Accelerator, an FPGA-based architecture for its evaluation. ZynqNet CNN is a highly efficient CNN topology. Detailed analysis and optimization of prior topologies using the custom-designed Netscope CNN Analyzer have enabled a CNN with 84.5% top-5 accuracy at a computational complexity of only 530 million multiplyaccumulate operations. The topology is highly regular and consists exclusively of convolutional layers, ReLU nonlinearities and one global pooling layer. The CNN fits ideally onto the FPGA accelerator. The ZynqNet FPGA Accelerator allows an efficient evaluation of ZynqNet CNN. It accelerates the full network based on a nested-loop algorithm which minimizes the number of arithmetic operations and memory accesses. The FPGA accelerator has been synthesized using High-Level Synthesis for the Xilinx Zynq XC-7Z045, and reaches a clock frequency of 200MHz with a device utilization of 80% to 90 %.
Enabling Edge Cloud Intelligence for Activity Learning in Smart Home
Authors: Bing Huang, Athman Bouguettaya, Hai Dong
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition

We propose a novel activity learning framework based on Edge Cloud architecture for the purpose of recognizing and predicting human activities. Although activity recognition has been vastly studied by many researchers, the temporal features that constitute an activity, which can provide useful insights for activity models, have not been exploited to their full potentials by mining algorithms. In this paper, we utilize temporal features for activity recognition and prediction in a single smart home setting. We discover activity patterns and temporal relations such as the order of activities from real data to develop a prompting system. Analysis of real data collected from smart homes was used to validate the proposed method.
Solve Traveling Salesman Problem by Monte Carlo Tree Search and Deep Neural Network
Authors: Zhihao Xing, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Self-Learning, Traveling Salesman Problem

We present a self-learning approach that combines deep reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo tree search to solve the traveling salesman problem. The proposed approach has two advantages. First, it adopts deep reinforcement learning to compute the value functions for decision, which removes the need of hand-crafted features and labelled data. Second, it uses Monte Carlo tree search to select the best policy by comparing different value functions, which increases its generalization ability. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs favorably against other methods in small-to-medium problem settings. And it shows comparable performance as state-of-the-art in large problem setting.
A Category Theory Approach to Interoperability
Authors: Riccardo Del Gratta
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00

In this article, we propose a Category Theory approach to (syntactic) interoperability between linguistic tools. The resulting category consists of textual documents, including any linguistic annotations, NLP tools that analyze texts and add additional linguistic information, and format converters. Format converters are necessary to make the tools both able to read and to produce different output formats, which is the key to interoperability. The idea behind this document is the parallelism between the concepts of composition and associativity in Category Theory with the NLP pipelines. We show how pipelines of linguistic tools can be modeled into the conceptual framework of Category Theory and we successfully apply this method to two real-life examples.
Dynamic Sparse Training: Find Efficient Sparse Network From Scratch With Trainable Masked Layers
Authors: Junjie Liu, Zhe Xu, Runbin Shi, Ray C. C. Cheung, Hayden K. -H. So
Date: 2020-05-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Network Pruning

We present a novel network pruning algorithm called Dynamic Sparse Training that can jointly find the optimal network parameters and sparse network structure in a unified optimization process with trainable pruning thresholds. These thresholds can have fine-grained layer-wise adjustments dynamically via backpropagation. We demonstrate that our dynamic sparse training algorithm can easily train very sparse neural network models with little performance loss using the same number of training epochs as dense models. Dynamic Sparse Training achieves the state of the art performance compared with other sparse training algorithms on various network architectures. Additionally, we have several surprising observations that provide strong evidence for the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm. These observations reveal the underlying problems of traditional three-stage pruning algorithms and present the potential guidance provided by our algorithm to the design of more compact network architectures.