pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evolution of Artificial Intelligent Plane
Authors: Puneet Kumar
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

With the growth of the internet, it is becoming hard to manage, configure and monitor networks. Recent trends to control and operate them is artificial intelligence based automation to minimize human intervention. Albeit this concept has been introduced since a decade with several different names, but the underlying goal remains the same, which is to make network intelligent enough to assemble, reassemble if configuration changes, and detect a problem on its own and fix it. As a result, in addition to Data Plane, Control Plane and Management Plane, a new plane called Artificial Intelligence (AI) Plane is introduced. Our main objective is to analyze all major AI plane techniques, frameworks and algorithms proposed in various types of networks. We propose a comprehensive and network independent framework to cover all aspects of AI plane, in particular we provide a systematically means of comparison. In conjunction to make AI plane understand simpler, this framework highlights relevant challenges and design considerations for future research. To the best of our knowledge this is the first survey report which represents a complete comparison of AI planes with their investigation issues in several types of networks.
Reliable Off-policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jie Wang, Rui Gao, Hongyuan Zha
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Off-policy evaluation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy. Reinforcement learning in high-stake environments, such as healthcare and education, is often limited to off-policy settings due to safety or ethical concerns, or inability of exploration. Hence it is imperative to quantify the uncertainty of the off-policy estimate before deployment of the target policy. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that provides robust and optimistic cumulative reward estimates using one or multiple logged trajectories data. Leveraging methodologies from distributionally robust optimization, we show that with proper selection of the size of the distributional uncertainty set, these estimates serve as confidence bounds with non-asymptotic and asymptotic guarantees under stochastic or adversarial environments. Our results are also generalized to batch reinforcement learning and are supported by empirical analysis.
Metrics also Disagree in the Low Scoring Range: Revisiting Summarization Evaluation Metrics
Authors: Manik Bhandari, Pranav Gour, Atabak Ashfaq, PengFei Liu
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Text Summarization

In text summarization, evaluating the efficacy of automatic metrics without human judgments has become recently popular. One exemplar work concludes that automatic metrics strongly disagree when ranking high-scoring summaries. In this paper, we revisit their experiments and find that their observations stem from the fact that metrics disagree in ranking summaries from any narrow scoring range. We hypothesize that this may be because summaries are similar to each other in a narrow scoring range and are thus, difficult to rank. Apart from the width of the scoring range of summaries, we analyze three other properties that impact inter-metric agreement - Ease of Summarization, Abstractiveness, and Coverage. To encourage reproducible research, we make all our analysis code and data publicly available.
Image Clustering using an Augmented Generative Adversarial Network and Information Maximization
Authors: Foivos Ntelemis, Yaochu Jin, Spencer A. Thomas
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Clustering

Image clustering has recently attracted significant attention due to the increased availability of unlabelled datasets. The efficiency of traditional clustering algorithms heavily depends on the distance functions used and the dimensionality of the features. Therefore, performance degradation is often observed when tackling either unprocessed images or high-dimensional features extracted from processed images. To deal with these challenges, we propose a deep clustering framework consisting of a modified generative adversarial network (GAN) and an auxiliary classifier. The modification employs Sobel operations prior to the discriminator of the GAN to enhance the separability of the learned features. The discriminator is then leveraged to generate representations as the input to an auxiliary classifier. An adaptive objective function is utilised to train the auxiliary classifier for clustering the representations, aiming to increase the robustness by minimizing the divergence of multiple representations generated by the discriminator. The auxiliary classifier is implemented with a group of multiple cluster-heads, where a tolerance hyper-parameter is used to tackle imbalanced data. Our results indicate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, and is competitive on the STL10 and MNIST datasets.
Frequency Gating: Improved Convolutional Neural Networks for Speech Enhancement in the Time-Frequency Domain
Authors: Koen Oostermeijer, Qing Wang, Jun Du
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

One of the strengths of traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is their inherent translational invariance. However, for the task of speech enhancement in the time-frequency domain, this property cannot be fully exploited due to a lack of invariance in the frequency direction. In this paper we propose to remedy this inefficiency by introducing a method, which we call Frequency Gating, to compute multiplicative weights for the kernels of the CNN in order to make them frequency dependent. Several mechanisms are explored: temporal gating, in which weights are dependent on prior time frames, local gating, whose weights are generated based on a single time frame and the ones adjacent to it, and frequency-wise gating, where each kernel is assigned a weight independent of the input data. Experiments with an autoencoder neural network with skip connections show that both local and frequency-wise gating outperform the baseline and are therefore viable ways to improve CNN-based speech enhancement neural networks. In addition, a loss function based on the extended short-time objective intelligibility score (ESTOI) is introduced, which we show to outperform the standard mean squared error (MSE) loss function.
Kimera-Multi: a System for Distributed Multi-Robot Metric-Semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
Authors: Yun Chang, Yulun Tian, Jonathan P. How, Luca Carlone
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

We present the first fully distributed multi-robot system for dense metric-semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Our system, dubbed Kimera-Multi, is implemented by a team of robots equipped with visual-inertial sensors, and builds a 3D mesh model of the environment in real-time, where each face of the mesh is annotated with a semantic label (e.g., building, road, objects). In Kimera-Multi, each robot builds a local trajectory estimate and a local mesh using Kimera. Then, when two robots are within communication range, they initiate a distributed place recognition and robust pose graph optimization protocol with a novel incremental maximum clique outlier rejection; the protocol allows the robots to improve their local trajectory estimates by leveraging inter-robot loop closures. Finally, each robot uses its improved trajectory estimate to correct the local mesh using mesh deformation techniques. We demonstrate Kimera-Multi in photo-realistic simulations and real data. Kimera-Multi (i) is able to build accurate 3D metric-semantic meshes, (ii) is robust to incorrect loop closures while requiring less computation than state-of-the-art distributed SLAM back-ends, and (iii) is efficient, both in terms of computation at each robot as well as communication bandwidth.
A Semantic Framework for Enabling Radio Spectrum Policy Management and Evaluation
Authors: H. Santos, A. Mulvehill, J. S. Erickson, J. P. McCusker, M. Gordon, O. Xie, S. Stouffer, G. Capraro, A. Pidwerbetsky, J. Burgess, A. Berlinsky, K. Turck, J. Ashdown, D. L. McGuinness
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Because radio spectrum is a finite resource, its usage and sharing is regulated by government agencies. These agencies define policies to manage spectrum allocation and assignment across multiple organizations, systems, and devices. With more portions of the radio spectrum being licensed for commercial use, the importance of providing an increased level of automation when evaluating such policies becomes crucial for the efficiency and efficacy of spectrum management. We introduce our Dynamic Spectrum Access Policy Framework for supporting the United States government's mission to enable both federal and non-federal entities to compatibly utilize available spectrum. The DSA Policy Framework acts as a machine-readable policy repository providing policy management features and spectrum access request evaluation. The framework utilizes a novel policy representation using OWL and PROV-O along with a domain-specific reasoning implementation that mixes GeoSPARQL, OWL reasoning, and knowledge graph traversal to evaluate incoming spectrum access requests and explain how applicable policies were used. The framework is currently being used to support live, over-the-air field exercises involving a diverse set of federal and commercial radios, as a component of a prototype spectrum management system.
Exploring market power using deep reinforcement learning for intelligent bidding strategies
Authors: Alexander J. M. Kell, Matthew Forshaw, A. Stephen McGough
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Decentralized electricity markets are often dominated by a small set of generator companies who control the majority of the capacity. In this paper, we explore the effect of the total controlled electricity capacity by a single, or group, of generator companies can have on the average electricity price. We demonstrate this through the use of ElecSim, a simulation of a country-wide energy market. We develop a strategic agent, representing a generation company, which uses a deep deterministic policy gradient reinforcement learning algorithm to bid in a uniform pricing electricity market. A uniform pricing market is one where all players are paid the highest accepted price. ElecSim is parameterized to the United Kingdom for the year 2018. This work can help inform policy on how to best regulate a market to ensure that the price of electricity remains competitive. We find that capacity has an impact on the average electricity price in a single year. If any single generator company, or a collaborating group of generator companies, control more than ${\sim}$11$\%$ of generation capacity and bid strategically, prices begin to increase by ${\sim}$25$\%$. The value of ${\sim}$25\% and ${\sim}$11\% may vary between market structures and countries. For instance, different load profiles may favour a particular type of generator or a different distribution of generation capacity. Once the capacity controlled by a generator company, which bids strategically, is higher than ${\sim}$35\%, prices increase exponentially. We observe that the use of a market cap of approximately double the average market price has the effect of significantly decreasing this effect and maintaining a competitive market. A fair and competitive electricity market provides value to consumers and enables a more competitive economy through the utilisation of electricity by both industry and consumers.
A Psychophysical Oriented Saliency Map Prediction Model
Authors: Qiang Li
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Prediction, Saliency Prediction

Visual attention is one of the most significant characteristics for selecting and understanding the outside redundancy world. The nature of complex scenes includes enormous redundancy. The human vision system can not process all information simultaneously because of visual information bottleneck. The human visual system mainly focuses on dominant parts of the scenes to reduce the input visual redundancy information. It is commonly known as visual attention prediction or visual saliency map. This paper proposes a new psychophysical saliency prediction architecture, WECSF, inspired by human low-level visual cortex function. The model consists of opponent color channels, wavelet transform, wavelet energy map, and contrast sensitivity function for extracting low-level image features and maximum approximation to the human visual system. The proposed model is evaluated several datasets, including MIT1003, MIT300, TORONTO, SID4VAM and UCF Sports dataset to explain its efficiency. We also quantitatively and qualitatively compared the performance of saliency prediction with other state-of-the-art models. Our model achieved very stable and good performance. Second, we also confirmed that Fourier and spectral-inspired saliency prediction models achieved outperformance compared to other start-of-the-art non-neural networks and even deep neural network models on psychophysical synthesis images. Finally, the proposed model also can be applied to spatial-temporal saliency prediction and got better performance.
Bait and Switch: Online Training Data Poisoning of Autonomous Driving Systems
Authors: Naman Patel, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Siddharth Garg, Farshad Khorrami
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Poisoning

We show that by controlling parts of a physical environment in which a pre-trained deep neural network (DNN) is being fine-tuned online, an adversary can launch subtle data poisoning attacks that degrade the performance of the system. While the attack can be applied in general to any perception task, we consider a DNN based traffic light classifier for an autonomous car that has been trained in one city and is being fine-tuned online in another city. We show that by injecting environmental perturbations that do not modify the traffic lights themselves or ground-truth labels, the adversary can cause the deep network to learn spurious concepts during the online learning phase. The attacker can leverage the introduced spurious concepts in the environment to cause the model's accuracy to degrade during operation; therefore, causing the system to malfunction.
AI on the Bog: Monitoring and Evaluating Cranberry Crop Risk
Authors: Peri Akiva, Benjamin Planche, Aditi Roy, Kristin Dana, Peter Oudemans, Michael Mars
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00

Machine vision for precision agriculture has attracted considerable research interest in recent years. The goal of this paper is to develop an end-to-end cranberry health monitoring system to enable and support real time cranberry over-heating assessment to facilitate informed decisions that may sustain the economic viability of the farm. Toward this goal, we propose two main deep learning-based modules for: 1) cranberry fruit segmentation to delineate the exact fruit regions in the cranberry field image that are exposed to sun, 2) prediction of cloud coverage conditions and sun irradiance to estimate the inner temperature of exposed cranberries. We develop drone-based field data and ground-based sky data collection systems to collect video imagery at multiple time points for use in crop health analysis. Extensive evaluation on the data set shows that it is possible to predict exposed fruit's inner temperature with high accuracy (0.02% MAPE). The sun irradiance prediction error was found to be 8.41-20.36% MAPE in the 5-20 minutes time horizon. With 62.54% mIoU for segmentation and 13.46 MAE for counting accuracies in exposed fruit identification, this system is capable of giving informed feedback to growers to take precautionary action (e.g. irrigation) in identified crop field regions with higher risk of sunburn in the near future. Though this novel system is applied for cranberry health monitoring, it represents a pioneering step forward for efficient farming and is useful in precision agriculture beyond the problem of cranberry overheating.
MLAS: Metric Learning on Attributed Sequences
Authors: Zhongfang Zhuang, Xiangnan Kong, Elke Rundensteiner, Jihane Zouaoui, Aditya Arora
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Metric Learning

Distance metric learning has attracted much attention in recent years, where the goal is to learn a distance metric based on user feedback. Conventional approaches to metric learning mainly focus on learning the Mahalanobis distance metric on data attributes. Recent research on metric learning has been extended to sequential data, where we only have structural information in the sequences, but no attribute is available. However, real-world applications often involve attributed sequence data (e.g., clickstreams), where each instance consists of not only a set of attributes (e.g., user session context) but also a sequence of categorical items (e.g., user actions). In this paper, we study the problem of metric learning on attributed sequences. Unlike previous work on metric learning, we now need to go beyond the Mahalanobis distance metric in the attribute feature space while also incorporating the structural information in sequences. We propose a deep learning framework, called MLAS (Metric Learning on Attributed Sequences), to learn a distance metric that effectively measures dissimilarities between attributed sequences. Empirical results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed MLAS framework significantly improves the performance of metric learning compared to state-of-the-art methods on attributed sequences.
Analysis of Dimensional Influence of Convolutional Neural Networks for Histopathological Cancer Classification
Authors: Shreyas Rajesh Labhsetwar, Alistair Michael Baretto, Raj Sunil Salvi, Piyush Arvind Kolte, Veerasai Subramaniam Venkatesh
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, General Classification

Convolutional Neural Networks can be designed with different levels of complexity depending upon the task at hand. This paper analyzes the effect of dimensional changes to the CNN architecture on its performance on the task of Histopathological Cancer Classification. The research starts with a baseline 10-layer CNN model with (3 X 3) convolution filters. Thereafter, the baseline architecture is scaled in multiple dimensions including width, depth, resolution and a combination of all of these. Width scaling involves inculcating greater number of neurons per CNN layer, whereas depth scaling involves deepening the hierarchical layered structure. Resolution scaling is performed by increasing the dimensions of the input image, and compound scaling involves a hybrid combination of width, depth and resolution scaling. The results indicate that histopathological cancer scans are very complex in nature and hence require high resolution images fed to a large hierarchy of Convolution, MaxPooling, Dropout and Batch Normalization layers to extract all the intricacies and perform perfect classification. Since compound scaling the baseline model ensures that all the three dimensions: width, depth and resolution are scaled, the best performance is obtained with compound scaling. This research shows that better performance of CNN models is achieved by compound scaling of the baseline model for the task of Histopathological Cancer Classification.
Performance Analysis of Optimizers for Plant Disease Classification with Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Shreyas Rajesh Labhsetwar, Soumya Haridas, Riyali Panmand, Rutuja Deshpande, Piyush Arvind Kolte, Sandhya Pati
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Crop failure owing to pests & diseases are inherent within Indian agriculture, leading to annual losses of 15 to 25% of productivity, resulting in a huge economic loss. This research analyzes the performance of various optimizers for predictive analysis of plant diseases with deep learning approach. The research uses Convolutional Neural Networks for classification of farm or plant leaf samples of 3 crops into 15 classes. The various optimizers used in this research include RMSprop, Adam and AMSgrad. Optimizers Performance is visualised by plotting the Training and Validation Accuracy and Loss curves, ROC curves and Confusion Matrix. The best performance is achieved using Adam optimizer, with the maximum validation accuracy being 98%. This paper focuses on the research analysis proving that plant diseases can be predicted and pre-empted using deep learning methodology with the help of satellite, drone based or mobile based images that result in reducing crop failure and agricultural losses.
Fourier-based and Rational Graph Filters for Spectral Processing
Authors: Giuseppe Patanè
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00

Data are represented as graphs in a wide range of applications, such as Computer Vision (e.g., images) and Graphics (e.g., 3D meshes), network analysis (e.g., social networks), and bio-informatics (e.g., molecules). In this context, our overall goal is the definition of novel Fourier-based and graph filters induced by rational polynomials for graph processing, which generalise polynomial filters and the Fourier transform to non-Euclidean domains. For the efficient evaluation of discrete spectral Fourier-based and wavelet operators, we introduce a spectrum-free approach, which requires the solution of a small set of sparse, symmetric, well-conditioned linear systems and is oblivious of the evaluation of the Laplacian or kernel spectrum. Approximating arbitrary graph filters with rational polynomials provides a more accurate and numerically stable alternative with respect to polynomials. To achieve these goals, we also study the link between spectral operators, wavelets, and filtered convolution with integral operators induced by spectral kernels. According to our tests, main advantages of the proposed approach are (i) its generality with respect to the input data (e.g., graphs, 3D shapes), applications (e.g., signal reconstruction and smoothing, shape correspondence), and filters (e.g., polynomial, rational polynomial), and (ii) a spectrum-free computation with a generally low computational cost and storage overhead.