pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FASA: Feature Augmentation and Sampling Adaptation for Long-Tailed Instance Segmentation
Authors: Yuhang Zang, Chen Huang, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Recent methods for long-tailed instance segmentation still struggle on rare object classes with few training data. We propose a simple yet effective method, Feature Augmentation and Sampling Adaptation (FASA), that addresses the data scarcity issue by augmenting the feature space especially for rare classes. Both the Feature Augmentation (FA) and feature sampling components are adaptive to the actual training status -- FA is informed by the feature mean and variance of observed real samples from past iterations, and we sample the generated virtual features in a loss-adapted manner to avoid over-fitting. FASA does not require any elaborate loss design, and removes the need for inter-class transfer learning that often involves large cost and manually-defined head/tail class groups. We show FASA is a fast, generic method that can be easily plugged into standard or long-tailed segmentation frameworks, with consistent performance gains and little added cost. FASA is also applicable to other tasks like long-tailed classification with state-of-the-art performance.
A mathematical modelling framework for the regulation of intra-cellular OCT4 in human pluripotent stem cells
Authors: L E Wadkin, S Orozco-Fuentes, I Neganova, M Lako, N G Parker, A Shukurov
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have promising clinical applications in regenerative medicine, drug-discovery and personalised medicine due to their potential to differentiate into all cell types, a property know as pluripotency. A deeper understanding of how pluripotency is regulated is required to assist in controlling pluripotency and differentiation trajectories experimentally. Mathematical modelling provides a non-invasive tool through which to explore, characterise and replicate the regulation of pluripotency and the consequences on cell fate. Here we use experimental data of the expression of the pluripotency transcription factor OCT4 in a growing hPSC colony to develop and evaluate mathematical models for temporal pluripotency regulation. We consider fractional Brownian motion and the stochastic logistic equation and explore the effects of both additive and multiplicative noise. We illustrate the use of time-dependent carrying capacities and the introduction of Allee effects to the stochastic logistic equation to describe cell differentiation. This mathematical framework for describing intra-cellular OCT4 regulation can be extended to other transcription factors and developed into sophisticated predictive models.
Emotion-Aware, Emotion-Agnostic, or Automatic: Corpus Creation Strategies to Obtain Cognitive Event Appraisal Annotations
Authors: Jan Hofmann, Enrica Troiano, Roman Klinger
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL (WASSA) 2021 4

Appraisal theories explain how the cognitive evaluation of an event leads to a particular emotion. In contrast to theories of basic emotions or affect (valence/arousal), this theory has not received a lot of attention in natural language processing. Yet, in psychology it has been proven powerful: Smith and Ellsworth (1985) showed that the appraisal dimensions attention, certainty, anticipated effort, pleasantness, responsibility/control and situational control discriminate between (at least) 15 emotion classes. We study different annotation strategies for these dimensions, based on the event-focused enISEAR corpus (Troiano et al., 2019). We analyze two manual annotation settings: (1) showing the text to annotate while masking the experienced emotion label; (2) revealing the emotion associated with the text. Setting 2 enables the annotators to develop a more realistic intuition of the described event, while Setting 1 is a more standard annotation procedure, purely relying on text. We evaluate these strategies in two ways: by measuring inter-annotator agreement and by fine-tuning RoBERTa to predict appraisal variables. Our results show that knowledge of the emotion increases annotators' reliability. Further, we evaluate a purely automatic rule-based labeling strategy (inferring appraisal from annotated emotion classes). Training on automatically assigned labels leads to a competitive performance of our classifier, even when tested on manual annotations. This is an indicator that it might be possible to automatically create appraisal corpora for every domain for which emotion corpora already exist.
CausalX: Causal Explanations and Block Multilinear Factor Analysis
Authors: M. Alex O. Vasilescu, Eric Kim, Xiao S. Zeng
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, counterfactual, Object, Object Recognition

By adhering to the dictum, "No causation without manipulation (treatment, intervention)", cause and effect data analysis represents changes in observed data in terms of changes in the causal factors. When causal factors are not amenable for active manipulation in the real world due to current technological limitations or ethical considerations, a counterfactual approach performs an intervention on the model of data formation. In the case of object representation or activity (temporal object) representation, varying object parts is generally unfeasible whether they be spatial and/or temporal. Multilinear algebra, the algebra of higher-order tensors, is a suitable and transparent framework for disentangling the causal factors of data formation. Learning a part-based intrinsic causal factor representations in a multilinear framework requires applying a set of interventions on a part-based multilinear model. We propose a unified multilinear model of wholes and parts. We derive a hierarchical block multilinear factorization, the M-mode Block SVD, that computes a disentangled representation of the causal factors by optimizing simultaneously across the entire object hierarchy. Given computational efficiency considerations, we introduce an incremental bottom-up computational alternative, the Incremental M-mode Block SVD, that employs the lower-level abstractions, the part representations, to represent the higher level of abstractions, the parent wholes. This incremental computational approach may also be employed to update the causal model parameters when data becomes available incrementally. The resulting object representation is an interpretable combinatorial choice of intrinsic causal factor representations related to an object's recursive hierarchy of wholes and parts that renders object recognition robust to occlusion and reduces training data requirements.
QNLP in Practice: Running Compositional Models of Meaning on a Quantum Computer
Authors: Robin Lorenz, Anna Pearson, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Bob Coecke
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Classification

Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) deals with the design and implementation of NLP models intended to be run on quantum hardware. In this paper, we present results on the first NLP experiments conducted on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers for datasets of size greater than 100 sentences. Exploiting the formal similarity of the compositional model of meaning by Coecke, Sadrzadeh and Clark (2010) with quantum theory, we create representations for sentences that have a natural mapping to quantum circuits. We use these representations to implement and successfully train NLP models that solve simple sentence classification tasks on quantum hardware. We conduct quantum simulations that compare the syntax-sensitive model of Coecke et al. with two baselines that use less or no syntax; specifically, we implement the quantum analogues of a "bag-of-words" model, where syntax is not taken into account at all, and of a word-sequence model, where only word order is respected. We demonstrate that all models converge smoothly both in simulations and when run on quantum hardware, and that the results are the expected ones based on the nature of the tasks and the datasets used. Another important goal of this paper is to describe in a way accessible to AI and NLP researchers the main principles, process and challenges of experiments on quantum hardware. Our aim in doing this is to take the first small steps in this unexplored research territory and pave the way for practical Quantum Natural Language Processing.
Generalized Adversarial Distances to Efficiently Discover Classifier Errors
Authors: Walter Bennette, Sally Dufek, Karsten Maurer, Sean Sisti, Bunyod Tusmatov
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00

Given a black-box classification model and an unlabeled evaluation dataset from some application domain, efficient strategies need to be developed to evaluate the model. Random sampling allows a user to estimate metrics like accuracy, precision, and recall, but may not provide insight to high-confidence errors. High-confidence errors are rare events for which the model is highly confident in its prediction, but is wrong. Such errors can represent costly mistakes and should be explicitly searched for. In this paper we propose a generalization to the Adversarial Distance search that leverages concepts from adversarial machine learning to identify predictions for which a classifier may be overly confident. These predictions are useful instances to sample when looking for high-confidence errors because they are prone to a higher rate of error than expected. Our generalization allows Adversarial Distance to be applied to any classifier or data domain. Experimental results show that the generalized method finds errors at rates greater than expected given the confidence of the sampled predictions, and outperforms competing methods.
Spanish Biomedical and Clinical Language Embeddings
Authors: Asier Gutiérrez-Fandiño, Jordi Armengol-Estapé, Casimiro Pio Carrino, Ona de Gibert, Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre, Marta Villegas
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

We computed both Word and Sub-word Embeddings using FastText. For Sub-word embeddings we selected Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm to represent the sub-words. We evaluated the Biomedical Word Embeddings obtaining better results than previous versions showing the implication that with more data, we obtain better representations.
MaskCycleGAN-VC: Learning Non-parallel Voice Conversion with Filling in Frames
Authors: Takuhiro Kaneko, Hirokazu Kameoka, Kou Tanaka, Nobukatsu Hojo
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Conversion

Non-parallel voice conversion (VC) is a technique for training voice converters without a parallel corpus. Cycle-consistent adversarial network-based VCs (CycleGAN-VC and CycleGAN-VC2) are widely accepted as benchmark methods. However, owing to their insufficient ability to grasp time-frequency structures, their application is limited to mel-cepstrum conversion and not mel-spectrogram conversion despite recent advances in mel-spectrogram vocoders. To overcome this, CycleGAN-VC3, an improved variant of CycleGAN-VC2 that incorporates an additional module called time-frequency adaptive normalization (TFAN), has been proposed. However, an increase in the number of learned parameters is imposed. As an alternative, we propose MaskCycleGAN-VC, which is another extension of CycleGAN-VC2 and is trained using a novel auxiliary task called filling in frames (FIF). With FIF, we apply a temporal mask to the input mel-spectrogram and encourage the converter to fill in missing frames based on surrounding frames. This task allows the converter to learn time-frequency structures in a self-supervised manner and eliminates the need for an additional module such as TFAN. A subjective evaluation of the naturalness and speaker similarity showed that MaskCycleGAN-VC outperformed both CycleGAN-VC2 and CycleGAN-VC3 with a model size similar to that of CycleGAN-VC2. Audio samples are available at http://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/people/kaneko.takuhiro/projects/maskcyclegan-vc/index.html.
A deep perceptual metric for 3D point clouds
Authors: Maurice Quach, Aladine Chetouani, Giuseppe Valenzise, Frederic Dufaux
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00

Point clouds are essential for storage and transmission of 3D content. As they can entail significant volumes of data, point cloud compression is crucial for practical usage. Recently, point cloud geometry compression approaches based on deep neural networks have been explored. In this paper, we evaluate the ability to predict perceptual quality of typical voxel-based loss functions employed to train these networks. We find that the commonly used focal loss and weighted binary cross entropy are poorly correlated with human perception. We thus propose a perceptual loss function for 3D point clouds which outperforms existing loss functions on the ICIP2020 subjective dataset. In addition, we propose a novel truncated distance field voxel grid representation and find that it leads to sparser latent spaces and loss functions that are more correlated with perceived visual quality compared to a binary representation. The source code is available at https://github.com/mauriceqch/2021_pc_perceptual_loss.
On a Network SIS Epidemic Model with Cooperative and Antagonistic Opinion Dynamics
Authors: Baike She, Ji Liu, Shreyas Sundaram, Philip E. Paré
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00

We propose a mathematical model to study coupled epidemic and opinion dynamics in a network of communities. Our model captures SIS epidemic dynamics whose evolution is dependent on the opinions of the communities toward the epidemic, and vice versa. In particular, we allow both cooperative and antagonistic interactions, representing similar and opposing perspectives on the severity of the epidemic, respectively. We propose an Opinion-Dependent Reproduction Number to characterize the mutual influence between epidemic spreading and opinion dissemination over the networks. Through stability analysis of the equilibria, we explore the impact of opinions on both epidemic outbreak and eradication, characterized by bounds on the Opinion-Dependent Reproduction Number. We also show how to eradicate epidemics by reshaping the opinions, offering researchers an approach for designing control strategies to reach target audiences to ensure effective epidemic suppression.
Diffusion Earth Mover's Distance and Distribution Embeddings
Authors: Alexander Tong, Guillaume Huguet, Amine Natik, Kincaid MacDonald, Manik Kuchroo, Ronald Coifman, Guy Wolf, Smita Krishnaswamy
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00

We propose a new fast method of measuring distances between large numbers of related high dimensional datasets called the Diffusion Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). We model the datasets as distributions supported on common data graph that is derived from the affinity matrix computed on the combined data. In such cases where the graph is a discretization of an underlying Riemannian closed manifold, we prove that Diffusion EMD is topologically equivalent to the standard EMD with a geodesic ground distance. Diffusion EMD can be computed in $\tilde{O}(n)$ time and is more accurate than similarly fast algorithms such as tree-based EMDs. We also show Diffusion EMD is fully differentiable, making it amenable to future uses in gradient-descent frameworks such as deep neural networks. Finally, we demonstrate an application of Diffusion EMD to single cell data collected from 210 COVID-19 patient samples at Yale New Haven Hospital. Here, Diffusion EMD can derive distances between patients on the manifold of cells at least two orders of magnitude faster than equally accurate methods. This distance matrix between patients can be embedded into a higher level patient manifold which uncovers structure and heterogeneity in patients. More generally, Diffusion EMD is applicable to all datasets that are massively collected in parallel in many medical and biological systems.
Automatic Classification of OSA related Snoring Signals from Nocturnal Audio Recordings
Authors: Arun Sebastian, Peter A. Cistulli, Gary Cohen, Philip de Chazal
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, General Classification

In this study, the development of an automatic algorithm is presented to classify the nocturnal audio recording of an obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) patient as OSA related snore, simple snore and other sounds. Recent studies has been shown that knowledge regarding the OSA related snore could assist in identifying the site of airway collapse. Audio signal was recorded simultaneously with full-night polysomnography during sleep with a ceiling microphone. Time and frequency features of the nocturnal audio signal were extracted to classify the audio signal into OSA related snore, simple snore and other sounds. Two algorithms were developed to extract OSA related snore using an linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier based on the hypothesis that OSA related snoring can assist in identifying the site-of-upper airway collapse. An unbiased nested leave-one patient-out cross-validation process was used to select a high performing feature set from the full set of features. Results indicated that the algorithm achieved an accuracy of 87% for identifying snore events from the audio recordings and an accuracy of 72% for identifying OSA related snore events from the snore events. The direct method to extract OSA-related snore events using a multi-class LDA classifier achieved an accuracy of 64% using the feature selection algorithm. Our results gives a clear indication that OSA-related snore events can be extracted from nocturnal sound recordings, and therefore could potentially be used as a new tool for identifying the site of airway collapse from the nocturnal audio recordings.
ZJUKLAB at SemEval-2021 Task 4: Negative Augmentation with Language Model for Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning
Authors: Xin Xie, Xiangnan Chen, Xiang Chen, Yong Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2021
Tasks: Language Model Evaluation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Reading Comprehension

This paper presents our systems for the three Subtasks of SemEval Task4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning (ReCAM). We explain the algorithms used to learn our models and the process of tuning the algorithms and selecting the best model. Inspired by the similarity of the ReCAM task and the language pre-training, we propose a simple yet effective technology, namely, negative augmentation with language model. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Our models achieve the 4th rank on both official test sets of Subtask 1 and Subtask 2 with an accuracy of 87.9% and an accuracy of 92.8%, respectively. We further conduct comprehensive model analysis and observe interesting error cases, which may promote future researches.
Fast Minimum-norm Adversarial Attacks through Adaptive Norm Constraints
Authors: Maura Pintor, Fabio Roli, Wieland Brendel, Battista Biggio
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Robustness

Evaluating adversarial robustness amounts to finding the minimum perturbation needed to have an input sample misclassified. The inherent complexity of the underlying optimization requires current gradient-based attacks to be carefully tuned, initialized, and possibly executed for many computationally-demanding iterations, even if specialized to a given perturbation model. In this work, we overcome these limitations by proposing a fast minimum-norm (FMN) attack that works with different $\ell_p$-norm perturbation models ($p=0, 1, 2, \infty$), is robust to hyperparameter choices, does not require adversarial starting points, and converges within few lightweight steps. It works by iteratively finding the sample misclassified with maximum confidence within an $\ell_p$-norm constraint of size $\epsilon$, while adapting $\epsilon$ to minimize the distance of the current sample to the decision boundary. Extensive experiments show that FMN significantly outperforms existing attacks in terms of convergence speed and computation time, while reporting comparable or even smaller perturbation sizes.
FAITH: Fast iterative half-plane focus of expansion estimation using event-based optic flow
Authors: Raoul Dinaux, Nikhil Wessendorp, Julien Dupeyroux, Guido de Croon
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Computational Efficiency

Course estimation is a key component for the development of autonomous navigation systems for robots. While state-of-the-art methods widely use visual-based algorithms, it is worth noting that they all fail to deal with the complexity of the real world by being computationally greedy and sometimes too slow. They often require obstacles to be highly textured to improve the overall performance, particularly when the obstacle is located within the focus of expansion (FOE) where the optic flow (OF) is almost null. This study proposes the FAst ITerative Half-plane (FAITH) method to determine the course of a micro air vehicle (MAV). This is achieved by means of an event-based camera, along with a fast RANSAC-based algorithm that uses event-based OF to determine the FOE. The performance is validated by means of a benchmark on a simulated environment and then tested on a dataset collected for indoor obstacle avoidance. Our results show that the computational efficiency of our solution outperforms state-of-the-art methods while keeping a high level of accuracy. This has been further demonstrated onboard an MAV equipped with an event-based camera, showing that our event-based FOE estimation can be achieved online onboard tiny drones, thus opening the path towards fully neuromorphic solutions for autonomous obstacle avoidance and navigation onboard MAVs.
Fronthaul Compression and Passive Beamforming Design for Intelligent Reflecting Surface-aided Cloud Radio Access Networks
Authors: Yu Zhang, Xuelu Wu, Hong Peng, Caijun Zhong, Xiaoming Chen
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

This letter studies a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) with multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) deployed between users and remote radio heads (RRH). Specifically, we consider the uplink transmission where each RRH quantizes the received signals from the users by either point-to-point compression or Wyner-Ziv compression and then transmits the quantization bits to the BBU pool through capacity limited fronthhual links. To maximize the uplink sum rate, we jointly optimize the passive beamformers of IRSs and the quantization noise covariance matrices of fronthoul compression. An joint fronthaul compression and passive beamforming design is proposed by exploiting the Arimoto-Blahut algorithm and semidefinte relaxation (SDR). Numerical results show the performance gain achieved by the proposed algorithm.
Matching with Trade-offs: Revealed Preferences over Competing Characteristics
Authors: Alfred Galichon, Bernard Salanié
Date: 2021-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Econometrics

We investigate in this paper the theory and econometrics of optimal matchings with competing criteria. The surplus from a marriage match, for instance, may depend both on the incomes and on the educations of the partners, as well as on characteristics that the analyst does not observe. Even if the surplus is complementary in incomes, and complementary in educations, imperfect correlation between income and education at the individual level implies that the social optimum must trade off matching on incomes and matching on educations. Given a flexible specification of the surplus function, we characterize under mild assumptions the properties of the set of feasible matchings and of the socially optimal matching. Then we show how data on the covariation of the types of the partners in observed matches can be used to test that the observed matches are socially optimal for this specification, and to estimate the parameters that define social preferences over matches.