pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Embedded K-Means Clustering
Authors: Wengang Guo, Kaiyan Lin, Wei Ye
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Decoder, Deep Clustering, Representation Learning

Recently, deep clustering methods have gained momentum because of the high representational power of deep neural networks (DNNs) such as autoencoder. The key idea is that representation learning and clustering can reinforce each other: Good representations lead to good clustering while good clustering provides good supervisory signals to representation learning. Critical questions include: 1) How to optimize representation learning and clustering? 2) Should the reconstruction loss of autoencoder be considered always? In this paper, we propose DEKM (for Deep Embedded K-Means) to answer these two questions. Since the embedding space generated by autoencoder may have no obvious cluster structures, we propose to further transform the embedding space to a new space that reveals the cluster-structure information. This is achieved by an orthonormal transformation matrix, which contains the eigenvectors of the within-class scatter matrix of K-means. The eigenvalues indicate the importance of the eigenvectors' contributions to the cluster-structure information in the new space. Our goal is to increase the cluster-structure information. To this end, we discard the decoder and propose a greedy method to optimize the representation. Representation learning and clustering are alternately optimized by DEKM. Experimental results on the real-world datasets demonstrate that DEKM achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Transfer Learning Based Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm for Dynamic Community Detection
Authors: Jungang Zou, Fan Lin, Siyu Gao, Gaoshan Deng, Wenhua Zeng, Gil Alterovitz
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection, Dynamic Community Detection, Evolutionary Algorithms, Transfer Learning

Dynamic community detection is the hotspot and basic problem of complex network and artificial intelligence research in recent years. It is necessary to maximize the accuracy of clustering as the network structure changes, but also to minimize the two consecutive clustering differences between the two results. There is a trade-off relationship between these two objectives. In this paper, we propose a Feature Transfer Based Multi-Objective Optimization Genetic Algorithm (TMOGA) based on transfer learning and traditional multi-objective evolutionary algorithm framework. The main idea is to extract stable features from past community structures, retain valuable feature information, and integrate this feature information into current optimization processes to improve the evolutionary algorithms. Additionally, a new theoretical framework is proposed in this paper to analyze community detection problem based on information theory. Then, we exploit this framework to prove the rationality of TMOGA. Finally, the experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve better clustering effects compared with the state-of-the-art dynamic network community detection algorithms in diverse test problems.
Feature Selection on a Flare Forecasting Testbed: A Comparative Study of 24 Methods
Authors: Atharv Yeoleka, Sagar Patel, Shreejaa Talla, Krishna Rukmini Puthucode, Azim Ahmadzadeh, Viacheslav M. Sadykov, Rafal A. Angryk
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The Space-Weather ANalytics for Solar Flares (SWAN-SF) is a multivariate time series benchmark dataset recently created to serve the heliophysics community as a testbed for solar flare forecasting models. SWAN-SF contains 54 unique features, with 24 quantitative features computed from the photospheric magnetic field maps of active regions, describing their precedent flare activity. In this study, for the first time, we systematically attacked the problem of quantifying the relevance of these features to the ambitious task of flare forecasting. We implemented an end-to-end pipeline for preprocessing, feature selection, and evaluation phases. We incorporated 24 Feature Subset Selection (FSS) algorithms, including multivariate and univariate, supervised and unsupervised, wrappers and filters. We methodologically compared the results of different FSS algorithms, both on the multivariate time series and vectorized formats, and tested their correlation and reliability, to the extent possible, by using the selected features for flare forecasting on unseen data, in univariate and multivariate fashions. We concluded our investigation with a report of the best FSS methods in terms of their top-k features, and the analysis of the findings. We wish the reproducibility of our study and the availability of the data allow the future attempts be comparable with our findings and themselves.
BulletTrain: Accelerating Robust Neural Network Training via Boundary Example Mining
Authors: Weizhe Hua, Yichi Zhang, Chuan Guo, Zhiru Zhang, G. Edward Suh
Date: 2021-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Neural network robustness has become a central topic in machine learning in recent years. Most training algorithms that improve the model's robustness to adversarial and common corruptions also introduce a large computational overhead, requiring as many as ten times the number of forward and backward passes in order to converge. To combat this inefficiency, we propose BulletTrain $-$ a boundary example mining technique to drastically reduce the computational cost of robust training. Our key observation is that only a small fraction of examples are beneficial for improving robustness. BulletTrain dynamically predicts these important examples and optimizes robust training algorithms to focus on the important examples. We apply our technique to several existing robust training algorithms and achieve a 2.1$\times$ speed-up for TRADES and MART on CIFAR-10 and a 1.7$\times$ speed-up for AugMix on CIFAR-10-C and CIFAR-100-C without any reduction in clean and robust accuracy.
MatSciBERT: A Materials Domain Language Model for Text Mining and Information Extraction
Authors: Tanishq Gupta, Mohd Zaki, N. M. Anoop Krishnan, Mausam
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction

An overwhelmingly large amount of knowledge in the materials domain is generated and stored as text published in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Recent developments in natural language processing, such as bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) models, provide promising tools to extract information from these texts. However, direct application of these models in the materials domain may yield suboptimal results as the models themselves may not be trained on notations and jargon that are specific to the domain. Here, we present a materials-aware language model, namely, MatSciBERT, which is trained on a large corpus of scientific literature published in the materials domain. We further evaluate the performance of MatSciBERT on three downstream tasks, namely, abstract classification, named entity recognition, and relation extraction, on different materials datasets. We show that MatSciBERT outperforms SciBERT, a language model trained on science corpus, on all the tasks. Further, we discuss some of the applications of MatSciBERT in the materials domain for extracting information, which can, in turn, contribute to materials discovery or optimization. Finally, to make the work accessible to the larger materials community, we make the pretrained and finetuned weights and the models of MatSciBERT freely accessible.
How Neural Processes Improve Graph Link Prediction
Authors: Huidong Liang, Junbin Gao
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Learning, Inductive Link Prediction, Link Prediction, Meta-Learning, Prediction

Link prediction is a fundamental problem in graph data analysis. While most of the literature focuses on transductive link prediction that requires all the graph nodes and majority of links in training, inductive link prediction, which only uses a proportion of the nodes and their links in training, is a more challenging problem in various real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning approach with graph neural networks for link prediction: Neural Processes for Graph Neural Networks (NPGNN), which can perform both transductive and inductive learning tasks and adapt to patterns in a large new graph after training with a small subgraph. Experiments on real-world graphs are conducted to validate our model, where the results suggest that the proposed method achieves stronger performance compared to other state-of-the-art models, and meanwhile generalizes well when training on a small subgraph.
Unsupervised Few-Shot Action Recognition via Action-Appearance Aligned Meta-Adaptation
Authors: Jay Patravali, Gaurav Mittal, Ye Yu, Fuxin Li, Mei Chen
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Action Recognition, Contrastive Learning, Few-Shot action recognition, Few Shot Action Recognition, Meta-Learning

We present MetaUVFS as the first Unsupervised Meta-learning algorithm for Video Few-Shot action recognition. MetaUVFS leverages over 550K unlabeled videos to train a two-stream 2D and 3D CNN architecture via contrastive learning to capture the appearance-specific spatial and action-specific spatio-temporal video features respectively. MetaUVFS comprises a novel Action-Appearance Aligned Meta-adaptation (A3M) module that learns to focus on the action-oriented video features in relation to the appearance features via explicit few-shot episodic meta-learning over unsupervised hard-mined episodes. Our action-appearance alignment and explicit few-shot learner conditions the unsupervised training to mimic the downstream few-shot task, enabling MetaUVFS to significantly outperform all unsupervised methods on few-shot benchmarks. Moreover, unlike previous few-shot action recognition methods that are supervised, MetaUVFS needs neither base-class labels nor a supervised pretrained backbone. Thus, we need to train MetaUVFS just once to perform competitively or sometimes even outperform state-of-the-art supervised methods on popular HMDB51, UCF101, and Kinetics100 few-shot datasets.
Scalable Online Planning via Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning
Authors: Arnaud Fickinger, Hengyuan Hu, Brandon Amos, Stuart Russell, Noam Brown
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Lookahead search has been a critical component of recent AI successes, such as in the games of chess, go, and poker. However, the search methods used in these games, and in many other settings, are tabular. Tabular search methods do not scale well with the size of the search space, and this problem is exacerbated by stochasticity and partial observability. In this work we replace tabular search with online model-based fine-tuning of a policy neural network via reinforcement learning, and show that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art search algorithms in benchmark settings. In particular, we use our search algorithm to achieve a new state-of-the-art result in self-play Hanabi, and show the generality of our algorithm by also showing that it outperforms tabular search in the Atari game Ms. Pacman.
Is Policy Learning Overrated?: Width-Based Planning and Active Learning for Atari
Authors: Benjamin Ayton, Masataro Asai
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Atari Games, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Width-based planning has shown promising results on Atari 2600 games using pixel input, while using substantially fewer environment interactions than reinforcement learning. Recent width-based approaches have computed feature vectors for each screen using a hand designed feature set or a variational autoencoder trained on game screens (VAE-IW), and prune screens that do not have novel features during the search. We propose Olive (Online-VAE-IW), which updates the VAE features online using active learning to maximize the utility of screens observed during planning. Experimental results in 55 Atari games demonstrate that it outperforms Rollout-IW by 42-to-11 and VAE-IW by 32-to-20. Moreover, Olive outperforms existing work based on policy-learning ($\pi$-IW, DQN) trained with 100x training budget by 30-to-22 and 31-to-17, and a state of the art data-efficient reinforcement learning (EfficientZero) trained with the same training budget and ran with 1.8x planning budget by 18-to-7 in Atari 100k benchmark, with no policy learning at all. The source code is available at github.com/ibm/atari-active-learning .
Modeling Interactions of Autonomous Vehicles and Pedestrians with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Collision Avoidance
Authors: Raphael Trumpp, Harald Bayerlein, David Gesbert
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Collision Avoidance, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reliable pedestrian crash avoidance mitigation (PCAM) systems are crucial components of safe autonomous vehicles (AVs). The nature of the vehicle-pedestrian interaction where decisions of one agent directly affect the other agent's optimal behavior, and vice versa, is a challenging yet often neglected aspect of such systems. We address this issue by modeling a Markov decision process (MDP) for a simulated AV-pedestrian interaction at an unmarked crosswalk. The AV's PCAM decision policy is learned through deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Since modeling pedestrians realistically is challenging, we compare two levels of intelligent pedestrian behavior. While the baseline model follows a predefined strategy, our advanced pedestrian model is defined as a second DRL agent. This model captures continuous learning and the uncertainty inherent in human behavior, making the AV-pedestrian interaction a deep multi-agent reinforcement learning (DMARL) problem. We benchmark the developed PCAM systems according to the collision rate and the resulting traffic flow efficiency with a focus on the influence of observation uncertainty on the decision-making of the agents. The results show that the AV is able to completely mitigate collisions under the majority of the investigated conditions and that the DRL pedestrian model learns an intelligent crossing behavior.
Inducing Transformer's Compositional Generalization Ability via Auxiliary Sequence Prediction Tasks
Authors: Yichen Jiang, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00

Systematic compositionality is an essential mechanism in human language, allowing the recombination of known parts to create novel expressions. However, existing neural models have been shown to lack this basic ability in learning symbolic structures. Motivated by the failure of a Transformer model on the SCAN compositionality challenge (Lake and Baroni, 2018), which requires parsing a command into actions, we propose two auxiliary sequence prediction tasks that track the progress of function and argument semantics, as additional training supervision. These automatically-generated sequences are more representative of the underlying compositional symbolic structures of the input data. During inference, the model jointly predicts the next action and the next tokens in the auxiliary sequences at each step. Experiments on the SCAN dataset show that our method encourages the Transformer to understand compositional structures of the command, improving its accuracy on multiple challenging splits from <= 10% to 100%. With only 418 (5%) training instances, our approach still achieves 97.8% accuracy on the MCD1 split. Therefore, we argue that compositionality can be induced in Transformers given minimal but proper guidance. We also show that a better result is achieved using less contextualized vectors as the attention's query, providing insights into architecture choices in achieving systematic compositionality. Finally, we show positive generalization results on the groundedSCAN task (Ruis et al., 2020). Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/jiangycTarheel/compositional-auxseq
Multi Scale Graph Wavenet for Wind Speed Forecasting
Authors: Neetesh Rathore, Pradeep Rathore, Arghya Basak, Sri Harsha Nistala, Venkataramana Runkana
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Geometric deep learning has gained tremendous attention in both academia and industry due to its inherent capability of representing arbitrary structures. Due to exponential increase in interest towards renewable sources of energy, especially wind energy, accurate wind speed forecasting has become very important. . In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture, Multi Scale Graph Wavenet for wind speed forecasting. It is based on a graph convolutional neural network and captures both spatial and temporal relationships in multivariate time series weather data for wind speed forecasting. We especially took inspiration from dilated convolutions, skip connections and the inception network to capture temporal relationships and graph convolutional networks for capturing spatial relationships in the data. We conducted experiments on real wind speed data measured at different cities in Denmark and compared our results with the state-of-the-art baseline models. Our novel architecture outperformed the state-of-the-art methods on wind speed forecasting for multiple forecast horizons by 4-5%.
Multilingual AMR Parsing with Noisy Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Deng Cai, Xin Li, Jackie Chun-Sing Ho, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: AMR Parsing, Knowledge Distillation

We study multilingual AMR parsing from the perspective of knowledge distillation, where the aim is to learn and improve a multilingual AMR parser by using an existing English parser as its teacher. We constrain our exploration in a strict multilingual setting: there is but one model to parse all different languages including English. We identify that noisy input and precise output are the key to successful distillation. Together with extensive pre-training, we obtain an AMR parser whose performances surpass all previously published results on four different foreign languages, including German, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese, by large margins (up to 18.8 \textsc{Smatch} points on Chinese and on average 11.3 \textsc{Smatch} points). Our parser also achieves comparable performance on English to the latest state-of-the-art English-only parser.
Submodular Optimization Beyond Nonnegativity: Adaptive Seed Selection in Incentivized Social Advertising
Authors: Shaojie Tang, Jing Yuan
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00

The idea of social advertising (or social promotion) is to select a group of influential individuals (a.k.a \emph{seeds}) to help promote some products or ideas through an online social networks. There are two major players in the social advertising ecosystem: advertiser and platform. The platform sells viral engagements such as "like"s to advertisers by inserting their ads into the feed of seeds. These seeds receive monetary incentives from the platform in exchange for their participation in the social advertising campaign. Once an ad is engaged by a follower of some seed, the platform receives a fixed amount of payment, called cost per engagement, from the advertiser. The ad could potentially attract more engagements from followers' followers and trigger a viral contagion. At the beginning of a campaign, the advertiser submits a budget to the platform and this budget can be used for two purposes: recruiting seeds and paying for the viral engagements generated by the seeds. Note that the first part of payment goes to the seeds and the latter one is the actual revenue collected by the platform. In this setting, the problem for the platform is to recruit a group of seeds such that she can collect the largest possible amount of revenue subject to the budget constraint. We formulate this problem as a seed selection problem whose objective function is non-monotone and it might take on negative values, making existing results on submodular optimization and influence maximization not applicable to our setting. We study this problem under both non-adaptive and adaptive settings. Although we focus on social advertising in this paper, our results apply to any optimization problems whose objective function is the expectation of the minimum of a stochastic submodular function and a linear function.
You Cannot Easily Catch Me: A Low-Detectable Adversarial Patch for Object Detectors
Authors: Zijian Zhu, Hang Su, Chang Liu, Wenzhao Xiang, Shibao Zheng
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Driving Cars

Blind spots or outright deceit can bedevil and deceive machine learning models. Unidentified objects such as digital "stickers," also known as adversarial patches, can fool facial recognition systems, surveillance systems and self-driving cars. Fortunately, most existing adversarial patches can be outwitted, disabled and rejected by a simple classification network called an adversarial patch detector, which distinguishes adversarial patches from original images. An object detector classifies and predicts the types of objects within an image, such as by distinguishing a motorcyclist from the motorcycle, while also localizing each object's placement within the image by "drawing" so-called bounding boxes around each object, once again separating the motorcyclist from the motorcycle. To train detectors even better, however, we need to keep subjecting them to confusing or deceitful adversarial patches as we probe for the models' blind spots. For such probes, we came up with a novel approach, a Low-Detectable Adversarial Patch, which attacks an object detector with small and texture-consistent adversarial patches, making these adversaries less likely to be recognized. Concretely, we use several geometric primitives to model the shapes and positions of the patches. To enhance our attack performance, we also assign different weights to the bounding boxes in terms of loss function. Our experiments on the common detection dataset COCO as well as the driving-video dataset D2-City show that LDAP is an effective attack method, and can resist the adversarial patch detector.
Focused Contrastive Training for Test-based Constituency Analysis
Authors: Benjamin Roth, Erion Çano
Date: 2021-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Position, Sentence

We propose a scheme for self-training of grammaticality models for constituency analysis based on linguistic tests. A pre-trained language model is fine-tuned by contrastive estimation of grammatical sentences from a corpus, and ungrammatical sentences that were perturbed by a syntactic test, a transformation that is motivated by constituency theory. We show that consistent gains can be achieved if only certain positive instances are chosen for training, depending on whether they could be the result of a test transformation. This way, the positives, and negatives exhibit similar characteristics, which makes the objective more challenging for the language model, and also allows for additional markup that indicates the position of the test application within the sentence.