pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pedagogical Word Recommendation: A novel task and dataset on personalized vocabulary acquisition for L2 learners
Authors: Jamin Shin, Juneyoung Park
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering

When learning a second language (L2), one of the most important but tedious components that often demoralizes students with its ineffectiveness and inefficiency is vocabulary acquisition, or more simply put, memorizing words. In light of such, a personalized and educational vocabulary recommendation system that traces a learner's vocabulary knowledge state would have an immense learning impact as it could resolve both issues. Therefore, in this paper, we propose and release data for a novel task called Pedagogical Word Recommendation (PWR). The main goal of PWR is to predict whether a given learner knows a given word based on other words the learner has already seen. To elaborate, we collect this data via an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that is serviced to ~1M L2 learners who study for the standardized English exam, TOEIC. As a feature of this ITS, students can directly indicate words they do not know from the questions they solved to create wordbooks. Finally, we report the evaluation results of a Neural Collaborative Filtering approach along with an exploratory data analysis and discuss the impact and efficacy of this dataset as a baseline for future studies on this task.
Multi-Image Visual Question Answering
Authors: Harsh Raj, Janhavi Dadhania, Akhilesh Bhardwaj, Prabuchandran KJ
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

While a lot of work has been done on developing models to tackle the problem of Visual Question Answering, the ability of these models to relate the question to the image features still remain less explored. We present an empirical study of different feature extraction methods with different loss functions. We propose New dataset for the task of Visual Question Answering with multiple image inputs having only one ground truth, and benchmark our results on them. Our final model utilising Resnet + RCNN image features and Bert embeddings, inspired from stacked attention network gives 39% word accuracy and 99% image accuracy on CLEVER+TinyImagenet dataset.
Transformer Uncertainty Estimation with Hierarchical Stochastic Attention
Authors: Jiahuan Pei, Cheng Wang, György Szarvas
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis, text-classification, Text Classification

Transformers are state-of-the-art in a wide range of NLP tasks and have also been applied to many real-world products. Understanding the reliability and certainty of transformer model predictions is crucial for building trustable machine learning applications, e.g., medical diagnosis. Although many recent transformer extensions have been proposed, the study of the uncertainty estimation of transformer models is under-explored. In this work, we propose a novel way to enable transformers to have the capability of uncertainty estimation and, meanwhile, retain the original predictive performance. This is achieved by learning a hierarchical stochastic self-attention that attends to values and a set of learnable centroids, respectively. Then new attention heads are formed with a mixture of sampled centroids using the Gumbel-Softmax trick. We theoretically show that the self-attention approximation by sampling from a Gumbel distribution is upper bounded. We empirically evaluate our model on two text classification tasks with both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach: (1) achieves the best predictive performance and uncertainty trade-off among compared methods; (2) exhibits very competitive (in most cases, improved) predictive performance on ID datasets; (3) is on par with Monte Carlo dropout and ensemble methods in uncertainty estimation on OOD datasets.
PRIME: A few primitives can boost robustness to common corruptions
Authors: Apostolos Modas, Rahul Rade, Guillermo Ortiz-Jiménez, Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli, Pascal Frossard
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization, image-classification, Image Classification

Despite their impressive performance on image classification tasks, deep networks have a hard time generalizing to unforeseen corruptions of their data. To fix this vulnerability, prior works have built complex data augmentation strategies, combining multiple methods to enrich the training data. However, introducing intricate design choices or heuristics makes it hard to understand which elements of these methods are indeed crucial for improving robustness. In this work, we take a step back and follow a principled approach to achieve robustness to common corruptions. We propose PRIME, a general data augmentation scheme that relies on simple yet rich families of max-entropy image transformations. PRIME outperforms the prior art in terms of corruption robustness, while its simplicity and plug-and-play nature enable combination with other methods to further boost their robustness. We analyze PRIME to shed light on the importance of the mixing strategy on synthesizing corrupted images, and to reveal the robustness-accuracy trade-offs arising in the context of common corruptions. Finally, we show that the computational efficiency of our method allows it to be easily used in both on-line and off-line data augmentation schemes.
AU Dataset for Visuo-Haptic Object Recognition for Robots
Authors: Lasse Emil R. Bonner, Daniel Daugaard Buhl, Kristian Kristensen, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Recognition

Multimodal object recognition is still an emerging field. Thus, publicly available datasets are still rare and of small size. This dataset was developed to help fill this void and presents multimodal data for 63 objects with some visual and haptic ambiguity. The dataset contains visual, kinesthetic and tactile (audio/vibrations) data. To completely solve sensory ambiguity, sensory integration/fusion would be required. This report describes the creation and structure of the dataset. The first section explains the underlying approach used to capture the visual and haptic properties of the objects. The second section describes the technical aspects (experimental setup) needed for the collection of the data. The third section introduces the objects, while the final section describes the structure and content of the dataset.
Parameter Differentiation based Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Qian Wang, Jiajun Zhang
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Open-Ended Question Answering, Transfer Learning, Translation

Multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) aims to translate multiple languages with a single model and has been proved successful thanks to effective knowledge transfer among different languages with shared parameters. However, it is still an open question which parameters should be shared and which ones need to be task-specific. Currently, the common practice is to heuristically design or search language-specific modules, which is difficult to find the optimal configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel parameter differentiation based method that allows the model to determine which parameters should be language-specific during training. Inspired by cellular differentiation, each shared parameter in our method can dynamically differentiate into more specialized types. We further define the differentiation criterion as inter-task gradient similarity. Therefore, parameters with conflicting inter-task gradients are more likely to be language-specific. Extensive experiments on multilingual datasets have demonstrated that our method significantly outperforms various strong baselines with different parameter sharing configurations. Further analyses reveal that the parameter sharing configuration obtained by our method correlates well with the linguistic proximities.
Bridging the Gap: Using Deep Acoustic Representations to Learn Grounded Language from Percepts and Raw Speech
Authors: Gaoussou Youssouf Kebe, Luke E. Richards, Edward Raff, Francis Ferraro, Cynthia Matuszek
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Acquisition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Learning to understand grounded language, which connects natural language to percepts, is a critical research area. Prior work in grounded language acquisition has focused primarily on textual inputs. In this work we demonstrate the feasibility of performing grounded language acquisition on paired visual percepts and raw speech inputs. This will allow interactions in which language about novel tasks and environments is learned from end users, reducing dependence on textual inputs and potentially mitigating the effects of demographic bias found in widely available speech recognition systems. We leverage recent work in self-supervised speech representation models and show that learned representations of speech can make language grounding systems more inclusive towards specific groups while maintaining or even increasing general performance.
Scalable Batch-Mode Deep Bayesian Active Learning via Equivalence Class Annealing
Authors: Renyu Zhang, Aly A. Khan, Robert L. Grossman, Yuxin Chen
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Diversity, Multi-class Classification

Active learning has demonstrated data efficiency in many fields. Existing active learning algorithms, especially in the context of batch-mode deep Bayesian active models, rely heavily on the quality of uncertainty estimations of the model, and are often challenging to scale to large batches. In this paper, we propose Batch-BALanCe, a scalable batch-mode active learning algorithm, which combines insights from decision-theoretic active learning, combinatorial information measure, and diversity sampling. At its core, Batch-BALanCe relies on a novel decision-theoretic acquisition function that facilitates differentiation among different equivalence classes. Intuitively, each equivalence class consists of hypotheses (e.g., posterior samples of deep neural networks) with similar predictions, and Batch-BALanCe adaptively adjusts the size of the equivalence classes as learning progresses. To scale up the computation of queries to large batches, we further propose an efficient batch-mode acquisition procedure, which aims to maximize a novel information measure defined through the acquisition function. We show that our algorithm can effectively handle realistic multi-class classification tasks, and achieves compelling performance on several benchmark datasets for active learning under both low- and large-batch regimes. Reference code is released at https://github.com/zhangrenyuuchicago/BALanCe.
Graph Collaborative Reasoning
Authors: Hanxiong Chen, Yunqi Li, Shaoyun Shi, Shuchang Liu, He Zhu, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Logical Reasoning, Prediction, Question Answering, Relational Reasoning

Graphs can represent relational information among entities and graph structures are widely used in many intelligent tasks such as search, recommendation, and question answering. However, most of the graph-structured data in practice suffers from incompleteness, and thus link prediction becomes an important research problem. Though many models are proposed for link prediction, the following two problems are still less explored: (1) Most methods model each link independently without making use of the rich information from relevant links, and (2) existing models are mostly designed based on associative learning and do not take reasoning into consideration. With these concerns, in this paper, we propose Graph Collaborative Reasoning (GCR), which can use the neighbor link information for relational reasoning on graphs from logical reasoning perspectives. We provide a simple approach to translate a graph structure into logical expressions, so that the link prediction task can be converted into a neural logic reasoning problem. We apply logical constrained neural modules to build the network architecture according to the logical expression and use back propagation to efficiently learn the model parameters, which bridges differentiable learning and symbolic reasoning in a unified architecture. To show the effectiveness of our work, we conduct experiments on graph-related tasks such as link prediction and recommendation based on commonly used benchmark datasets, and our graph collaborative reasoning approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Survey on Stabilization of Nonlinear Systems via state/output feedback control
Authors: Demelash Abiye Deguale
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00

This survey paper deals with the stabilization of nonlinear systems by analyzing the controlling method in terms of state feedback and output feedback. A brief overview of some literature on how the feedback controller of some dynamic systems in real applications like robots can be applicable is introduced. The aim is to give a direction about the methods of how to solve the state and output feedback stabilization problems for nonlinear systems based on feedback design methods and other theorems like the Lyapunov stability theorem. The feedback controllers can be constructed to ensure the origin of the nonlinear system is whether asymptotically stable or not. The paper is purposely focused on directing the theoretical results regarding the presence of such a feedback controller in stabilization. Keywords: Nonlinear systems, stability, Feedback stabilization, State Feedback, Output Feedback
An Ensemble of Pre-trained Transformer Models For Imbalanced Multiclass Malware Classification
Authors: Ferhat Demirkıran, Aykut Çayır, Uğur Ünal, Hasan Dağ
Date: 2021-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Classification

Classification of malware families is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of how they can infect devices, computers, or systems. Thus, malware identification enables security researchers and incident responders to take precautions against malware and accelerate mitigation. API call sequences made by malware are widely utilized features by machine and deep learning models for malware classification as these sequences represent the behavior of malware. However, traditional machine and deep learning models remain incapable of capturing sequence relationships between API calls. On the other hand, the transformer-based models process sequences as a whole and learn relationships between API calls due to multi-head attention mechanisms and positional embeddings. Our experiments demonstrate that the transformer model with one transformer block layer surpassed the widely used base architecture, LSTM. Moreover, BERT or CANINE, pre-trained transformer models, outperformed in classifying highly imbalanced malware families according to evaluation metrics, F1-score, and AUC score. Furthermore, the proposed bagging-based random transformer forest (RTF), an ensemble of BERT or CANINE, has reached the state-of-the-art evaluation scores on three out of four datasets, particularly state-of-the-art F1-score of 0.6149 on one of the commonly used benchmark dataset.
NFTGAN: Non-Fungible Token Art Generation Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Sakib Shahriar, Kadhim Hayawi
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00

Digital arts have gained an unprecedented level of popularity with the emergence of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs are cryptographic assets that are stored on blockchain networks and represent a digital certificate of ownership that cannot be forged. NFTs can be incorporated into a smart contract which allows the owner to benefit from a future sale percentage. While digital art producers can benefit immensely with NFTs, their production is time consuming. Therefore, this paper explores the possibility of using generative adversarial networks (GANs) for automatic generation of digital arts. GANs are deep learning architectures that are widely and effectively used for synthesis of audio, images, and video contents. However, their application to NFT arts have been limited. In this paper, a GAN-based architecture is implemented and evaluated for novel NFT-style digital arts generation. Results from the qualitative case study indicate that the generated artworks are comparable to the real samples in terms of being interesting and inspiring and they were judged to be more innovative than real samples.
MISO hierarchical inference engine satisfying the law of importation with aggregation functions
Authors: Dechao Li, Qiannan Guo
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Fuzzy inference engine, as one of the most important components of fuzzy systems, can obtain some meaningful outputs from fuzzy sets on input space and fuzzy rule base using fuzzy logic inference methods. In order to enhance the computational efficiency of fuzzy inference engine in multi-input-single-output(MISO) fuzzy systems,this paper aims mainly to investigate three MISO fuzzy hierarchial inference engines based on fuzzy implications satisfying the law of importation with aggregation functions (LIA). We firstly find some aggregation functions for well-known fuzzy implications such that they satisfy (LIA). For a given aggregation function, the fuzzy implication which satisfies (LIA) with this aggregation function is then characterized. Finally, we construct three fuzzy hierarchical inference engines in MISO fuzzy systems applying aforementioned theoretical developments.
"A Passage to India": Pre-trained Word Embeddings for Indian Languages
Authors: Kumar Saurav, Kumar Saunack, Diptesh Kanojia, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, NER, Question Answering, Retrieval, Word Embeddings, Word Sense Disambiguation

Dense word vectors or 'word embeddings' which encode semantic properties of words, have now become integral to NLP tasks like Machine Translation (MT), Question Answering (QA), Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), and Information Retrieval (IR). In this paper, we use various existing approaches to create multiple word embeddings for 14 Indian languages. We place these embeddings for all these languages, viz., Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Odiya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu in a single repository. Relatively newer approaches that emphasize catering to context (BERT, ELMo, etc.) have shown significant improvements, but require a large amount of resources to generate usable models. We release pre-trained embeddings generated using both contextual and non-contextual approaches. We also use MUSE and XLM to train cross-lingual embeddings for all pairs of the aforementioned languages. To show the efficacy of our embeddings, we evaluate our embedding models on XPOS, UPOS and NER tasks for all these languages. We release a total of 436 models using 8 different approaches. We hope they are useful for the resource-constrained Indian language NLP. The title of this paper refers to the famous novel 'A Passage to India' by E.M. Forster, published initially in 1924.
HeteroQA: Learning towards Question-and-Answering through Multiple Information Sources via Heterogeneous Graph Modeling
Authors: Shen Gao, Yuchi Zhang, Yongliang Wang, Yang Dong, Xiuying Chen, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Community Question Answering, Question Answering

Community Question Answering (CQA) is a well-defined task that can be used in many scenarios, such as E-Commerce and online user community for special interests. In these communities, users can post articles, give comment, raise a question and answer it. These data form the heterogeneous information sources where each information source have their own special structure and context (comments attached to an article or related question with answers). Most of the CQA methods only incorporate articles or Wikipedia to extract knowledge and answer the user's question. However, various types of information sources in the community are not fully explored by these CQA methods and these multiple information sources (MIS) can provide more related knowledge to user's questions. Thus, we propose a question-aware heterogeneous graph transformer to incorporate the MIS in the user community to automatically generate the answer. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct the experiments on two datasets: $\text{MSM}^{\text{plus}}$ the modified version of benchmark dataset MS-MARCO and the AntQA dataset which is the first large-scale CQA dataset with four types of MIS. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that our model outperforms all the baselines in terms of all the metrics.
Deep Gradient Compression Reduce the Communication Bandwidth For distributed Traning
Authors: Yujun Lin, Song Han, Huizi Mao, Yu Wang, W. Dally
Date: 2017-12-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: The International Conference on Learning Representations 2017 12
Tasks: Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Large-scale distributed training requires significant communication bandwidth for gradient exchange that limits the scalability of multi-node training, and requires expensive high-bandwidth network infrastructure. The situation gets even worse with distributed training on mobile devices (federated learning), which suffers from higher latency, lower throughput, and intermittent poor connections. In this paper, we find 99.9% of the gradient exchange in distributed SGD is redundant, and propose Deep Gradient Compression (DGC) to greatly reduce the communication bandwidth. To preserve accuracy during compression, DGC employs four methods: momentum correction, local gradient clipping, momentum factor masking, and warm-up training. We have applied Deep Gradient Compression to image classification, speech recognition, and language modeling with multiple datasets including Cifar10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank, and Librispeech Corpus. On these scenarios, Deep Gradient Compression achieves a gradient compression ratio from 270x to 600x without losing accuracy, cutting the gradient size of ResNet-50 from 97MB to 0.35MB, and for DeepSpeech from 488MB to 0.74MB. Deep gradient compression enables large-scale distributed training on inexpensive commodity 1Gbps Ethernet and facilitates distributed training on mobile.
Learn Layer-wise Connections in Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Lanning Wei, Huan Zhao, Zhiqiang He
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown superior performance on diverse applications on real-world datasets. To improve the model capacity and alleviate the over-smoothing problem, several methods proposed to incorporate the intermediate layers by layer-wise connections. However, due to the highly diverse graph types, the performance of existing methods vary on diverse graphs, leading to a need for data-specific layer-wise connection methods. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework LLC (Learn Layer-wise Connections) based on neural architecture search (NAS) to learn adaptive connections among intermediate layers in GNNs. LLC contains one novel search space which consists of 3 types of blocks and learnable connections, and one differentiable search algorithm to enable the efficient search process. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets are conducted, and the results show that the searched layer-wise connections can not only improve the performance but also alleviate the over-smoothing problem.