pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Nondiagonal Mixture of Dirichlet Network Distributions for Analyzing a Stock Ownership Network
Authors: Wenning Zhang, Ryohei Hisano, Takaaki Ohnishi, Takayuki Mizuno
Date: 2020-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Stochastic Block Model

Block modeling is widely used in studies on complex networks. The cornerstone model is the stochastic block model (SBM), widely used over the past decades. However, the SBM is limited in analyzing complex networks as the model is, in essence, a random graph model that cannot reproduce the basic properties of many complex networks, such as sparsity and heavy-tailed degree distribution. In this paper, we provide an edge exchangeable block model that incorporates such basic features and simultaneously infers the latent block structure of a given complex network. Our model is a Bayesian nonparametric model that flexibly estimates the number of blocks and takes into account the possibility of unseen nodes. Using one synthetic dataset and one real-world stock ownership dataset, we show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art SBMs for held-out link prediction tasks.
Towards an Interoperable Data Protocol Aimed at Linking the Fashion Industry with AI Companies
Authors: Mohammed Al-Rawi, Joeran Beel
Date: 2020-09-07 00:00:00

The fashion industry is looking forward to use artificial intelligence technologies to enhance their processes, services, and applications. Although the amount of fashion data currently in use is increasing, there is a large gap in data exchange between the fashion industry and the related AI companies, not to mention the different structure used for each fashion dataset. As a result, AI companies are relying on manually annotated fashion data to build different applications. Furthermore, as of this writing, the terminology, vocabulary and methods of data representation used to denote fashion items are still ambiguous and confusing. Hence, it is clear that the fashion industry and AI companies will benefit from a protocol that allows them to exchange and organise fashion information in a unified way. To achieve this goal we aim (1) to define a protocol called DDOIF that will allow interoperability of fashion data; (2) for DDOIF to contain diverse entities including extensive information on clothing and accessories attributes in the form of text and various media formats; and (3)To design and implement an API that includes, among other things, functions for importing and exporting a file built according to the DDOIF protocol that stores all information about a single item of clothing. To this end, we identified over 1000 class and subclass names used to name fashion items and use them to build the DDOIF dictionary. We make DDOIF publicly available to all interested users and developers and look forward to engaging more collaborators to improve and enrich it.
DeepSun: Machine-Learning-as-a-Service for Solar Flare Prediction
Authors: Yasser Abduallah, Jason T. L. Wang, Yang Nie, Chang Liu, Haimin Wang
Date: 2020-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Prediction, Solar Flare Prediction

Solar flare prediction plays an important role in understanding and forecasting space weather. The main goal of the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI), one of the instruments on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, is to study the origin of solar variability and characterize the Sun's magnetic activity. HMI provides continuous full-disk observations of the solar vector magnetic field with high cadence data that lead to reliable predictive capability; yet, solar flare prediction effort utilizing these data is still limited. In this paper, we present a machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) framework, called DeepSun, for predicting solar flares on the Web based on HMI's data products. Specifically, we construct training data by utilizing the physical parameters provided by the Space-weather HMI Active Region Patches (SHARP) and categorize solar flares into four classes, namely B, C, M, X, according to the X-ray flare catalogs available at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Thus, the solar flare prediction problem at hand is essentially a multi-class (i.e., four-class) classification problem. The DeepSun system employs several machine learning algorithms to tackle this multi-class prediction problem and provides an application programming interface (API) for remote programming users. To our knowledge, DeepSun is the first MLaaS tool capable of predicting solar flares through the Internet.
On SkipGram Word Embedding Models with Negative Sampling: Unified Framework and Impact of Noise Distributions
Authors: Ziqiao Wang, Yongyi Mao, Hongyu Guo, Richong Zhang
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00

SkipGram word embedding models with negative sampling, or SGN in short, is an elegant family of word embedding models. In this paper, we formulate a framework for word embedding, referred to as Word-Context Classification (WCC), that generalizes SGN to a wide family of models. The framework, utilizing some "noise examples", is justified through a theoretical analysis. The impact of noise distribution on the learning of the WCC embedding models is studied experimentally, suggesting that the best noise distribution is in fact the data distribution, in terms of both the embedding performance and the speed of convergence during training. Along our way, we discover several novel embedding models that outperform the existing WCC models.
Combining Determinism and Indeterminism
Authors: Michael Stephen Fiske
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00

Our goal is to construct mathematical operations that combine indeterminism measured from quantum randomness with computational determinism so that non-mechanistic behavior is preserved in the computation. Formally, some results about operations applied to computably enumerable (c.e.) and bi-immune sets are proven here, where the objective is for the operations to preserve bi-immunity. While developing rearrangement operations on the natural numbers, we discovered that the bi-immune rearrangements generate an uncountable subgroup of the infinite symmetric group (Sym$(\mathbb{N})$) on the natural numbers $\mathbb{N}$. This new uncountable subgroup is called the bi-immune symmetric group. We show that the bi-immune symmetric group contains the finitary symmetric group on the natural numbers, and consequently is highly transitive. Furthermore, the bi-immune symmetric group is dense in Sym$(\mathbb{N})$ with respect to the pointwise convergence topology. The complete structure of the bi-immune symmetric group and its subgroups generated by one or more bi-immune rearrangements is unknown.
Extreme learning machine-based model for Solubility estimation of hydrocarbon gases in electrolyte solutions
Authors: Narjes Nabipour, Amir Mosavi, Alireza Baghban, Shahaboddin Shamshirband, Imre Felde
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00

Calculating hydrocarbon components solubility of natural gases is known as one of the important issues for operational works in petroleum and chemical engineering. In this work, a novel solubility estimation tool has been proposed for hydrocarbon gases including methane, ethane, propane, and butane in aqueous electrolyte solutions based on extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm. Comparing the ELM outputs with a comprehensive real databank which has 1175 solubility points concluded to R-squared values of 0.985 and 0.987 for training and testing phases respectively. Furthermore, the visual comparison of estimated and actual hydrocarbon solubility led to confirm the ability of the proposed solubility model. Additionally, sensitivity analysis has been employed on the input variables of the model to identify their impacts on hydrocarbon solubility. Such a comprehensive and reliable study can help engineers and scientists to successfully determine the important thermodynamic properties which are key factors in optimizing and designing different industrial units such as refineries and petrochemical plants.
Tangent Space Based Alternating Projections for Nonnegative Low Rank Matrix Approximation
Authors: Guangjing Song, Michael K. Ng, Tai-Xiang Jiang
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

In this paper, we develop a new alternating projection method to compute nonnegative low rank matrix approximation for nonnegative matrices. In the nonnegative low rank matrix approximation method, the projection onto the manifold of fixed rank matrices can be expensive as the singular value decomposition is required. We propose to use the tangent space of the point in the manifold to approximate the projection onto the manifold in order to reduce the computational cost. We show that the sequence generated by the alternating projections onto the tangent spaces of the fixed rank matrices manifold and the nonnegative matrix manifold, converge linearly to a point in the intersection of the two manifolds where the convergent point is sufficiently close to optimal solutions. This convergence result based inexact projection onto the manifold is new and is not studied in the literature. Numerical examples in data clustering, pattern recognition and hyperspectral data analysis are given to demonstrate that the performance of the proposed method is better than that of nonnegative matrix factorization methods in terms of computational time and accuracy.
Automated Model Selection for Time-Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Yuanxiang Ying, Juanyong Duan, Chunlei Wang, Yujing Wang, Congrui Huang, Bixiong Xu
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, model, Model Selection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection

Time-series anomaly detection is a popular topic in both academia and industrial fields. Many companies need to monitor thousands of temporal signals for their applications and services and require instant feedback and alerts for potential incidents in time. The task is challenging because of the complex characteristics of time-series, which are messy, stochastic, and often without proper labels. This prohibits training supervised models because of lack of labels and a single model hardly fits different time series. In this paper, we propose a solution to address these issues. We present an automated model selection framework to automatically find the most suitable detection model with proper parameters for the incoming data. The model selection layer is extensible as it can be updated without too much effort when a new detector is available to the service. Finally, we incorporate a customized tuning algorithm to flexibly filter anomalies to meet customers' criteria. Experiments on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our solution.
When Deep Learning Meets Digital Image Correlation
Authors: S. Boukhtache, K. Abdelouahab, F. Berry, B. Blaysat, M. Grediac, F. Sur
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Optical Flow Estimation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) constitute a class of Deep Learning models which have been used in the recent past to resolve many problems in computer vision, in particular optical flow estimation. Measuring displacement and strain fields can be regarded as a particular case of this problem. However, it seems that CNNs have never been used so far to perform such measurements. This work is aimed at implementing a CNN able to retrieve displacement and strain fields from pairs of reference and deformed images of a flat speckled surface, as Digital Image Correlation (DIC) does. This paper explains how a CNN called StrainNet can be developed to reach this goal, and how specific ground truth datasets are elaborated to train this CNN. The main result is that StrainNet successfully performs such measurements, and that it achieves competing results in terms of metrological performance and computing time. The conclusion is that CNNs like StrainNet offer a viable alternative to DIC, especially for real-time applications.
Probabilistic Gradients for Fast Calibration of Differential Equation Models
Authors: Jon Cockayne, Andrew B. Duncan
Date: 2020-09-03 00:00:00

Calibration of large-scale differential equation models to observational or experimental data is a widespread challenge throughout applied sciences and engineering. A crucial bottleneck in state-of-the art calibration methods is the calculation of local sensitivities, i.e. derivatives of the loss function with respect to the estimated parameters, which often necessitates several numerical solves of the underlying system of partial or ordinary differential equations. In this paper we present a new probabilistic approach to computing local sensitivities. The proposed method has several advantages over classical methods. Firstly, it operates within a constrained computational budget and provides a probabilistic quantification of uncertainty incurred in the sensitivities from this constraint. Secondly, information from previous sensitivity estimates can be recycled in subsequent computations, reducing the overall computational effort for iterative gradient-based calibration methods. The methodology presented is applied to two challenging test problems and compared against classical methods.
Beyond Observed Connections : Link Injection
Authors: Jie Bu, M. Maruf, Arka Daw
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Node Classification

In this paper, we proposed the \textit{link injection}, a novel method that helps any differentiable graph machine learning models to go beyond observed connections from the input data in an end-to-end learning fashion. It finds out (weak) connections in favor of the current task that is not present in the input data via a parametric link injection layer. We evaluate our method on both node classification and link prediction tasks using a series of state-of-the-art graph convolution networks. Results show that the link injection helps a variety of models to achieve better performances on both applications. Further empirical analysis shows a great potential of this method in efficiently exploiting unseen connections from the injected links.
Effect of Mitigation Measures on the Spreading of COVID-19 in Hard-Hit States
Authors: Ka-Ming Tam, Nicholas Walker, Juana Moreno
Date: 2020-04-30 00:00:00

State government-mandated social distancing measures have helped to slow down the growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Current predictive models of the development of COVID-19, especially after mitigation efforts, are largely based on extrapolating the data from other countries. Since most states enforced stay-at-home orders towards the end of March, their effect should be reflected in the death and infection counts at the end of April. Using the data available until April 25th, we investigate the change in the infection rate due to the mitigation efforts, and project death and infection counts until September, 2020, for some of the most heavily impacted states: New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois and Louisiana. We find that with the current mitigation efforts five of those six states reduce their reproduction number to a value less than one, stopping the exponential growth of the pandemic. We also projected different scenarios after the mitigation is relaxed. Analysis for other states can be found at https://covid19projection.org/.
Learning a Neural Solver for Multiple Object Tracking
Authors: Guillem Brasó, Laura Leal-Taixé
Date: 2019-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Multiple Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

Graphs offer a natural way to formulate Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) within the tracking-by-detection paradigm. However, they also introduce a major challenge for learning methods, as defining a model that can operate on such \textit{structured domain} is not trivial. As a consequence, most learning-based work has been devoted to learning better features for MOT, and then using these with well-established optimization frameworks. In this work, we exploit the classical network flow formulation of MOT to define a fully differentiable framework based on Message Passing Networks (MPNs). By operating directly on the graph domain, our method can reason globally over an entire set of detections and predict final solutions. Hence, we show that learning in MOT does not need to be restricted to feature extraction, but it can also be applied to the data association step. We show a significant improvement in both MOTA and IDF1 on three publicly available benchmarks. Our code is available at https://bit.ly/motsolv .
Deep HDR Imaging via A Non-Local Network
Authors: Q. Yan and L. Zhang and Y. Liu and Y. Zhu and J. Sun and Q. Shi and Y. Zhang
Date: 2020-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: HDR Reconstruction, Image Registration

One of the most challenging problems in reconstructing a high dynamic range (HDR) image from multiple low dynamic range (LDR) inputs is the ghosting artifacts caused by the object motion across different inputs. When the object motion is slight, most existing methods can well suppress the ghosting artifacts through aligning LDR inputs based on optical flow or detecting anomalies among them. However, they often fail to produce satisfactory results in practice, since the real object motion can be very large. In this study, we present a novel deep framework, termed NHDRRnet, which adopts an alternative direction and attempts to remove ghosting artifacts by exploiting the non-local correlation in inputs. In NHDRRnet, we first adopt an Unet architecture to fuse all inputs and map the fusion results into a low-dimensional deep feature space. Then, we feed the resultant features into a novel global non-local module which reconstructs each pixel by weighted averaging all the other pixels using the weights determined by their correspondences. By doing this, the proposed NHDRRnet is able to adaptively select the useful information (e.g., which are not corrupted by large motions or adverse lighting conditions) in the whole deep feature space to accurately reconstruct each pixel. In addition, we also incorporate a triple-pass residual module to capture more powerful local features, which proves to be effective in further boosting the performance. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed NDHRnet in terms of suppressing the ghosting artifacts in HDR reconstruction, especially when the objects have large motions.
Understanding the Role of Individual Units in a Deep Neural Network
Authors: David Bau, Jun-Yan Zhu, Hendrik Strobelt, Agata Lapedriza, Bolei Zhou, Antonio Torralba
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation, Scene Classification

Deep neural networks excel at finding hierarchical representations that solve complex tasks over large data sets. How can we humans understand these learned representations? In this work, we present network dissection, an analytic framework to systematically identify the semantics of individual hidden units within image classification and image generation networks. First, we analyze a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on scene classification and discover units that match a diverse set of object concepts. We find evidence that the network has learned many object classes that play crucial roles in classifying scene classes. Second, we use a similar analytic method to analyze a generative adversarial network (GAN) model trained to generate scenes. By analyzing changes made when small sets of units are activated or deactivated, we find that objects can be added and removed from the output scenes while adapting to the context. Finally, we apply our analytic framework to understanding adversarial attacks and to semantic image editing.
GeoSPARQL+: Syntax, Semantics and System for Integrated Querying of Graph, Raster and Vector Data -- Technical Report
Authors: Timo Homburg, Steffen Staab, Daniel Janke
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00

We introduce an approach to semantically represent and query raster data in a Semantic Web graph. We extend the GeoSPARQL vocabulary and query language to support raster data as a new type of geospatial data. We define new filter functions and illustrate our approach using several use cases on real-world data sets. Finally, we describe a prototypical implementation and validate the feasibility of our approach.
Finite Group Equivariant Neural Networks for Games
Authors: Oisín Carroll, Joeran Beel
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Games such as go, chess and checkers have multiple equivalent game states, i.e. multiple board positions where symmetrical and opposite moves should be made. These equivalences are not exploited by current state of the art neural agents which instead must relearn similar information, thereby wasting computing time. Group equivariant CNNs in existing work create networks which can exploit symmetries to improve learning, however, they lack the expressiveness to correctly reflect the move embeddings necessary for games. We introduce Finite Group Neural Networks (FGNNs), a method for creating agents with an innate understanding of these board positions. FGNNs are shown to improve the performance of networks playing checkers (draughts), and can be easily adapted to other games and learning problems. Additionally, FGNNs can be created from existing network architectures. These include, for the first time, those with skip connections and arbitrary layer types. We demonstrate that an equivariant version of U-Net (FGNN-U-Net) outperforms the unmodified network in image segmentation.
Learning Shape Features and Abstractions in 3D Convolutional Neural Networks for Detecting Alzheimer's Disease
Authors: Md Motiur Rahman Sagar, Martin Dyrba
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Transfer Learning

Deep Neural Networks - especially Convolutional Neural Network (ConvNet) has become the state-of-the-art for image classification, pattern recognition and various computer vision tasks. ConvNet has a huge potential in medical domain for analyzing medical data to diagnose diseases in an efficient way. Based on extracted features by ConvNet model from MRI data, early diagnosis is very crucial for preventing progress and treating the Alzheimer's disease. Despite having the ability to deliver great performance, absence of interpretability of the model's decision can lead to misdiagnosis which can be life threatening. In this thesis, learned shape features and abstractions by 3D ConvNets for detecting Alzheimer's disease were investigated using various visualization techniques. How changes in network structures, used filters sizes and filters shapes affects the overall performance and learned features of the model were also inspected. LRP relevance map of different models revealed which parts of the brain were more relevant for the classification decision. Comparing the learned filters by Activation Maximization showed how patterns were encoded in different layers of the network. Finally, transfer learning from a convolutional autoencoder was implemented to check whether increasing the number of training samples with patches of input to extract the low-level features improves learned features and the model performance.