pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Closer Look at the Adversarial Robustness of Information Bottleneck Models
Authors: Iryna Korshunova, David Stutz, Alexander A. Alemi, Olivia Wiles, Sven Gowal
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML Workshop AML 2021 7
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

We study the adversarial robustness of information bottleneck models for classification. Previous works showed that the robustness of models trained with information bottlenecks can improve upon adversarial training. Our evaluation under a diverse range of white-box $l_{\infty}$ attacks suggests that information bottlenecks alone are not a strong defense strategy, and that previous results were likely influenced by gradient obfuscation.
Optimal input representation in neural systems at the edge of chaos
Authors: Guillermo B. Morales, Miguel A. Muñoz
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Unity

Shedding light onto how biological systems represent, process and store information in noisy environments is a key and challenging goal. A stimulating, though controversial, hypothesis poses that operating in dynamical regimes near the edge of a phase transition, i.e. at criticality or the "edge of chaos", can provide information-processing living systems with important operational advantages, creating, e.g., an optimal trade-off between robustness and flexibility. Here, we elaborate on a recent theoretical result, which establishes that the spectrum of covariance matrices of neural networks representing complex inputs in a robust way needs to decay as a power-law of the rank, with an exponent close to unity, a result that has been indeed experimentally verified in neurons of the mouse visual cortex. Aimed at understanding and mimicking these results, we construct an artificial neural network and train it to classify images. Remarkably, we find that the best performance in such a task is obtained when the network operates near the critical point, at which the eigenspectrum of the covariance matrix follows the very same statistics as actual neurons do. Thus, we conclude that operating near criticality can also have -- besides the usually alleged virtues -- the advantage of allowing for flexible, robust and efficient input representations.
Computational modelling and data-driven homogenisation of knitted membranes
Authors: Sumudu Herath, Xiao Xiao, Fehmi Cirak
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: GPR

Knitting is an effective technique for producing complex three-dimensional surfaces owing to the inherent flexibility of interlooped yarns and recent advances in manufacturing providing better control of local stitch patterns. Fully yarn-level modelling of large-scale knitted membranes is not feasible. Therefore, we use a two-scale homogenisation approach and model the membrane as a Kirchhoff-Love shell on the macroscale and as Euler-Bernoulli rods on the microscale. The governing equations for both the shell and the rod are discretised with cubic B-spline basis functions. For homogenisation we consider only the in-plane response of the membrane. The solution of the nonlinear microscale problem requires a significant amount of time due to the large deformations and the enforcement of contact constraints, rendering conventional online computational homogenisation approaches infeasible. To sidestep this problem, we use a pre-trained statistical Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model to map the macroscale deformations to macroscale stresses. During the offline learning phase, the GPR model is trained by solving the microscale problem for a sufficiently rich set of deformation states obtained by either uniform or Sobol sampling. The trained GPR model encodes the nonlinearities and anisotropies present in the microscale and serves as a material model for the membrane response of the macroscale shell. The bending response can be chosen in dependence of the mesh size to penalise the fine out-of-plane wrinkling of the membrane. After verifying and validating the different components of the proposed approach, we introduce several examples involving membranes subjected to tension and shear to demonstrate its versatility and good performance.
Quantifying Explainability in NLP and Analyzing Algorithms for Performance-Explainability Tradeoff
Authors: Mitchell Naylor, Christi French, Samantha Terker, Uday Kamath
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Mortality Prediction, text-classification, Text Classification

The healthcare domain is one of the most exciting application areas for machine learning, but a lack of model transparency contributes to a lag in adoption within the industry. In this work, we explore the current art of explainability and interpretability within a case study in clinical text classification, using a task of mortality prediction within MIMIC-III clinical notes. We demonstrate various visualization techniques for fully interpretable methods as well as model-agnostic post hoc attributions, and we provide a generalized method for evaluating the quality of explanations using infidelity and local Lipschitz across model types from logistic regression to BERT variants. With these metrics, we introduce a framework through which practitioners and researchers can assess the frontier between a model's predictive performance and the quality of its available explanations. We make our code available to encourage continued refinement of these methods.
Revisiting Uncertainty-based Query Strategies for Active Learning with Transformers
Authors: Christopher Schröder, Andreas Niekler, Martin Potthast
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Active Learning, Classification, Sentence Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Active learning is the iterative construction of a classification model through targeted labeling, enabling significant labeling cost savings. As most research on active learning has been carried out before transformer-based language models ("transformers") became popular, despite its practical importance, comparably few papers have investigated how transformers can be combined with active learning to date. This can be attributed to the fact that using state-of-the-art query strategies for transformers induces a prohibitive runtime overhead, which effectively nullifies, or even outweighs the desired cost savings. For this reason, we revisit uncertainty-based query strategies, which had been largely outperformed before, but are particularly suited in the context of fine-tuning transformers. In an extensive evaluation, we connect transformers to experiments from previous research, assessing their performance on five widely used text classification benchmarks. For active learning with transformers, several other uncertainty-based approaches outperform the well-known prediction entropy query strategy, thereby challenging its status as most popular uncertainty baseline in active learning for text classification.
The Role of Pretrained Representations for the OOD Generalization of Reinforcement Learning Agents
Authors: Andrea Dittadi, Frederik Träuble, Manuel Wüthrich, Felix Widmaier, Peter Gehler, Ole Winther, Francesco Locatello, Olivier Bachem, Bernhard Schölkopf, Stefan Bauer
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

Building sample-efficient agents that generalize out-of-distribution (OOD) in real-world settings remains a fundamental unsolved problem on the path towards achieving higher-level cognition. One particularly promising approach is to begin with low-dimensional, pretrained representations of our world, which should facilitate efficient downstream learning and generalization. By training 240 representations and over 10,000 reinforcement learning (RL) policies on a simulated robotic setup, we evaluate to what extent different properties of pretrained VAE-based representations affect the OOD generalization of downstream agents. We observe that many agents are surprisingly robust to realistic distribution shifts, including the challenging sim-to-real case. In addition, we find that the generalization performance of a simple downstream proxy task reliably predicts the generalization performance of our RL agents under a wide range of OOD settings. Such proxy tasks can thus be used to select pretrained representations that will lead to agents that generalize.
Codified audio language modeling learns useful representations for music information retrieval
Authors: Rodrigo Castellon, Chris Donahue, Percy Liang
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Genre classification, Information Retrieval, Key Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Music Generation, Music Genre Classification, Music Information Retrieval, Music Tagging, Retrieval

We demonstrate that language models pre-trained on codified (discretely-encoded) music audio learn representations that are useful for downstream MIR tasks. Specifically, we explore representations from Jukebox (Dhariwal et al. 2020): a music generation system containing a language model trained on codified audio from 1M songs. To determine if Jukebox's representations contain useful information for MIR, we use them as input features to train shallow models on several MIR tasks. Relative to representations from conventional MIR models which are pre-trained on tagging, we find that using representations from Jukebox as input features yields 30% stronger performance on average across four MIR tasks: tagging, genre classification, emotion recognition, and key detection. For key detection, we observe that representations from Jukebox are considerably stronger than those from models pre-trained on tagging, suggesting that pre-training via codified audio language modeling may address blind spots in conventional approaches. We interpret the strength of Jukebox's representations as evidence that modeling audio instead of tags provides richer representations for MIR.
Quality of Service Guarantees for Physical Unclonable Functions
Authors: Onur Günlü, Rafael F. Schaefer, H. Vincent Poor
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00

We consider a secret key agreement problem in which noisy physical unclonable function (PUF) outputs facilitate reliable, secure, and private key agreement with the help of public, noiseless, and authenticated storage. PUF outputs are highly correlated, so transform coding methods have been combined with scalar quantizers to extract uncorrelated bit sequences with reliability guarantees. For PUF circuits with continuous-valued outputs, the models for transformed outputs are made more realistic by replacing the fitted distributions with corresponding truncated ones. The state-of-the-art PUF methods that provide reliability guarantees to each extracted bit are shown to be inadequate to guarantee the same reliability level for all PUF outputs. Thus, a quality of service parameter is introduced to control the percentage of PUF outputs for which a target reliability level can be guaranteed. A public ring oscillator (RO) output dataset is used to illustrate that a truncated Gaussian distribution can be fitted to transformed RO outputs that are inputs to uniform scalar quantizers such that reliability guarantees can be provided for each bit extracted from any PUF device under additive Gaussian noise components by eliminating a small subset of PUF outputs. Furthermore, we conversely show that it is not possible to provide such reliability guarantees without eliminating any PUF output if no extra secrecy and privacy leakage is allowed.
Stress Classification and Personalization: Getting the most out of the least
Authors: Ramesh Kumar Sah, Hassan Ghasemzadeh
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Stress detection and monitoring is an active area of research with important implications for the personal, professional, and social health of an individual. Current approaches for affective state classification use traditional machine learning algorithms with features computed from multiple sensor modalities. These methods are data-intensive and rely on hand-crafted features which impede the practical applicability of these sensor systems in daily lives. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based stress detection and classification framework without any feature computation using data from only one sensor modality. Our method is competitive and outperforms current state-of-the-art techniques and achieves a classification accuracy of $92.85\%$ and an $f1$ score of $0.89$. Through our leave-one-subject-out analysis, we also show the importance of personalizing stress models.
Conservative Offline Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yecheng Jason Ma, Dinesh Jayaraman, Osbert Bastani
Date: 2021-07-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: D4RL, Distributional Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Navigation

Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems in practice are offline, learning purely from observational data. A key challenge is how to ensure the learned policy is safe, which requires quantifying the risk associated with different actions. In the online setting, distributional RL algorithms do so by learning the distribution over returns (i.e., cumulative rewards) instead of the expected return; beyond quantifying risk, they have also been shown to learn better representations for planning. We propose Conservative Offline Distributional Actor Critic (CODAC), an offline RL algorithm suitable for both risk-neutral and risk-averse domains. CODAC adapts distributional RL to the offline setting by penalizing the predicted quantiles of the return for out-of-distribution actions. We prove that CODAC learns a conservative return distribution -- in particular, for finite MDPs, CODAC converges to an uniform lower bound on the quantiles of the return distribution; our proof relies on a novel analysis of the distributional Bellman operator. In our experiments, on two challenging robot navigation tasks, CODAC successfully learns risk-averse policies using offline data collected purely from risk-neutral agents. Furthermore, CODAC is state-of-the-art on the D4RL MuJoCo benchmark in terms of both expected and risk-sensitive performance.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data augmentation through conditional ICA
Authors: Badr Tajini, Hugo Richard, Bertrand Thirion
Date: 2021-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Decoding, Data Augmentation

Advances in computational cognitive neuroimaging research are related to the availability of large amounts of labeled brain imaging data, but such data are scarce and expensive to generate. While powerful data generation mechanisms, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), have been designed in the last decade for computer vision, such improvements have not yet carried over to brain imaging. A likely reason is that GANs training is ill-suited to the noisy, high-dimensional and small-sample data available in functional neuroimaging. In this paper, we introduce Conditional Independent Components Analysis (Conditional ICA): a fast functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data augmentation technique, that leverages abundant resting-state data to create images by sampling from an ICA decomposition. We then propose a mechanism to condition the generator on classes observed with few samples. We first show that the generative mechanism is successful at synthesizing data indistinguishable from observations, and that it yields gains in classification accuracy in brain decoding problems. In particular it outperforms GANs while being much easier to optimize and interpret. Lastly, Conditional ICA enhances classification accuracy in eight datasets without further parameters tuning.
DiCOVA-Net: Diagnosing COVID-19 using Acoustics based on Deep Residual Network for the DiCOVA Challenge 2021
Authors: Jiangeng Chang, Shaoze Cui, Mengling Feng
Date: 2021-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Ensemble Learning

In this paper, we propose a deep residual network-based method, namely the DiCOVA-Net, to identify COVID-19 infected patients based on the acoustic recording of their coughs. Since there are far more healthy people than infected patients, this classification problem faces the challenge of imbalanced data. To improve the model's ability to recognize minority class (the infected patients), we introduce data augmentation and cost-sensitive methods into our model. Besides, considering the particularity of this task, we deploy some fine-tuning techniques to adjust the pre-training ResNet50. Furthermore, to improve the model's generalizability, we use ensemble learning to integrate prediction results from multiple base classifiers generated using different random seeds. To evaluate the proposed DiCOVA-Net's performance, we conducted experiments with the DiCOVA challenge dataset. The results show that our method has achieved 85.43\% in AUC, among the top of all competing teams.
Intermittent Jamming against Telemetry and Telecommand of Satellite Systems and A Learning-driven Detection Strategy
Authors: Selen Gecgel, Gunes Karabulut Kurt
Date: 2021-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Towards sixth-generation networks (6G), satellite communication systems, especially based on Low Earth Orbit (LEO) networks, become promising due to their unique and comprehensive capabilities. These advantages are accompanied by a variety of challenges such as security vulnerabilities, management of hybrid systems, and high mobility. In this paper, firstly, a security deficiency in the physical layer is addressed with a conceptual framework, considering the cyber-physical nature of the satellite systems, highlighting the potential attacks. Secondly, a learning-driven detection scheme is proposed, and the lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) is designed. The performance of the designed CNN architecture is compared with a prevalent machine learning algorithm, support vector machine (SVM). The results show that deficiency attacks against the satellite systems can be detected by employing the proposed scheme.
Practical and Configurable Network Traffic Classification Using Probabilistic Machine Learning
Authors: Jiahui Chen, Joe Breen, Jeff M. Phillips, Jacobus Van der Merwe
Date: 2021-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification, Management, Traffic Classification

Network traffic classification that is widely applicable and highly accurate is valuable for many network security and management tasks. A flexible and easily configurable classification framework is ideal, as it can be customized for use in a wide variety of networks. In this paper, we propose a highly configurable and flexible machine learning traffic classification method that relies only on statistics of sequences of packets to distinguish known, or approved, traffic from unknown traffic. Our method is based on likelihood estimation, provides a measure of certainty for classification decisions, and can classify traffic at adjustable certainty levels. Our classification method can also be applied in different classification scenarios, each prioritizing a different classification goal. We demonstrate how our classification scheme and all its configurations perform well on real-world traffic from a high performance computing network environment.
Using Causal Analysis for Conceptual Deep Learning Explanation
Authors: Sumedha Singla, Stephen Wallace, Sofia Triantafillou, Kayhan Batmanghelich
Date: 2021-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Clinical Knowledge, counterfactual, Decision Making, Deep Learning

Model explainability is essential for the creation of trustworthy Machine Learning models in healthcare. An ideal explanation resembles the decision-making process of a domain expert and is expressed using concepts or terminology that is meaningful to the clinicians. To provide such an explanation, we first associate the hidden units of the classifier to clinically relevant concepts. We take advantage of radiology reports accompanying the chest X-ray images to define concepts. We discover sparse associations between concepts and hidden units using a linear sparse logistic regression. To ensure that the identified units truly influence the classifier's outcome, we adopt tools from Causal Inference literature and, more specifically, mediation analysis through counterfactual interventions. Finally, we construct a low-depth decision tree to translate all the discovered concepts into a straightforward decision rule, expressed to the radiologist. We evaluated our approach on a large chest x-ray dataset, where our model produces a global explanation consistent with clinical knowledge.
Transformer-Based Behavioral Representation Learning Enables Transfer Learning for Mobile Sensing in Small Datasets
Authors: Mike A. Merrill, Tim Althoff
Date: 2021-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Transfer Learning

While deep learning has revolutionized research and applications in NLP and computer vision, this has not yet been the case for behavioral modeling and behavioral health applications. This is because the domain's datasets are smaller, have heterogeneous datatypes, and typically exhibit a large degree of missingness. Therefore, off-the-shelf deep learning models require significant, often prohibitive, adaptation. Accordingly, many research applications still rely on manually coded features with boosted tree models, sometimes with task-specific features handcrafted by experts. Here, we address these challenges by providing a neural architecture framework for mobile sensing data that can learn generalizable feature representations from time series and demonstrates the feasibility of transfer learning on small data domains through finetuning. This architecture combines benefits from CNN and Trans-former architectures to (1) enable better prediction performance by learning directly from raw minute-level sensor data without the need for handcrafted features by up to 0.33 ROC AUC, and (2) use pretraining to outperform simpler neural models and boosted decision trees with data from as few a dozen participants.
Parameterization of Forced Isotropic Turbulent Flow using Autoencoders and Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Kanishk, Tanishk Nandal, Prince Tyagi, Raj Kumar Singh
Date: 2021-07-08 00:00:00

Autoencoders and generative neural network models have recently gained popularity in fluid mechanics due to their spontaneity and low processing time instead of high fidelity CFD simulations. Auto encoders are used as model order reduction tools in applications of fluid mechanics by compressing input high-dimensional data using an encoder to map the input space into a lower-dimensional latent space. Whereas, generative models such as Variational Auto-encoders (VAEs) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are proving to be effective in generating solutions to chaotic models with high 'randomness' such as turbulent flows. In this study, forced isotropic turbulence flow is generated by parameterizing into some basic statistical characteristics. The models trained on pre-simulated data from dependencies on these characteristics and the flow generation is then affected by varying these parameters. The latent vectors pushed along the generator models like the decoders and generators contain independent entries which can be used to create different outputs with similar properties. The use of neural network-based architecture removes the need for dependency on the classical mesh-based Navier-Stoke equation estimation which is prominent in many CFD softwares.