pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Clipped Hyperbolic Classifiers Are Super-Hyperbolic Classifiers
Authors: Yunhui Guo, Xudong Wang, Yubei Chen, Stella X. Yu
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, General Classification, Out-of-Distribution Detection

Hyperbolic space can naturally embed hierarchies, unlike Euclidean space. Hyperbolic Neural Networks (HNNs) exploit such representational power by lifting Euclidean features into hyperbolic space for classification, outperforming Euclidean neural networks (ENNs) on datasets with known semantic hierarchies. However, HNNs underperform ENNs on standard benchmarks without clear hierarchies, greatly restricting HNNs' applicability in practice. Our key insight is that HNNs' poorer general classification performance results from vanishing gradients during backpropagation, caused by their hybrid architecture connecting Euclidean features to a hyperbolic classifier. We propose an effective solution by simply clipping the Euclidean feature magnitude while training HNNs. Our experiments demonstrate that clipped HNNs become super-hyperbolic classifiers: They are not only consistently better than HNNs which already outperform ENNs on hierarchical data, but also on-par with ENNs on MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet benchmarks, with better adversarial robustness and out-of-distribution detection.
Multi-Echo LiDAR for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Yunze Man, Xinshuo Weng, Prasanna Kumar Sivakuma, Matthew O'Toole, Kris Kitani
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Graph Neural Network, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

LiDAR sensors can be used to obtain a wide range of measurement signals other than a simple 3D point cloud, and those signals can be leveraged to improve perception tasks like 3D object detection. A single laser pulse can be partially reflected by multiple objects along its path, resulting in multiple measurements called echoes. Multi-echo measurement can provide information about object contours and semi-transparent surfaces which can be used to better identify and locate objects. LiDAR can also measure surface reflectance (intensity of laser pulse return), as well as ambient light of the scene (sunlight reflected by objects). These signals are already available in commercial LiDAR devices but have not been used in most LiDAR-based detection models. We present a 3D object detection model which leverages the full spectrum of measurement signals provided by LiDAR. First, we propose a multi-signal fusion (MSF) module to combine (1) the reflectance and ambient features extracted with a 2D CNN, and (2) point cloud features extracted using a 3D graph neural network (GNN). Second, we propose a multi-echo aggregation (MEA) module to combine the information encoded in different set of echo points. Compared with traditional single echo point cloud methods, our proposed Multi-Signal LiDAR Detector (MSLiD) extracts richer context information from a wider range of sensing measurements and achieves more accurate 3D object detection. Experiments show that by incorporating the multi-modality of LiDAR, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by up to 9.1%.
Using a Cross-Task Grid of Linear Probes to Interpret CNN Model Predictions On Retinal Images
Authors: Katy Blumer, Subhashini Venugopalan, Michael P. Brenner, Jon Kleinberg
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We analyze a dataset of retinal images using linear probes: linear regression models trained on some "target" task, using embeddings from a deep convolutional (CNN) model trained on some "source" task as input. We use this method across all possible pairings of 93 tasks in the UK Biobank dataset of retinal images, leading to ~164k different models. We analyze the performance of these linear probes by source and target task and by layer depth. We observe that representations from the middle layers of the network are more generalizable. We find that some target tasks are easily predicted irrespective of the source task, and that some other target tasks are more accurately predicted from correlated source tasks than from embeddings trained on the same task.
Cross-Sentence Temporal and Semantic Relations in Video Activity Localisation
Authors: Jiabo Huang, Yang Liu, Shaogang Gong, Hailin Jin
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Sentence

Video activity localisation has recently attained increasing attention due to its practical values in automatically localising the most salient visual segments corresponding to their language descriptions (sentences) from untrimmed and unstructured videos. For supervised model training, a temporal annotation of both the start and end time index of each video segment for a sentence (a video moment) must be given. This is not only very expensive but also sensitive to ambiguity and subjective annotation bias, a much harder task than image labelling. In this work, we develop a more accurate weakly-supervised solution by introducing Cross-Sentence Relations Mining (CRM) in video moment proposal generation and matching when only a paragraph description of activities without per-sentence temporal annotation is available. Specifically, we explore two cross-sentence relational constraints: (1) Temporal ordering and (2) semantic consistency among sentences in a paragraph description of video activities. Existing weakly-supervised techniques only consider within-sentence video segment correlations in training without considering cross-sentence paragraph context. This can mislead due to ambiguous expressions of individual sentences with visually indiscriminate video moment proposals in isolation. Experiments on two publicly available activity localisation datasets show the advantages of our approach over the state-of-the-art weakly supervised methods, especially so when the video activity descriptions become more complex.
Early Diagnosis of Lung Cancer Using Computer Aided Detection via Lung Segmentation Approach
Authors: Abhir Bhandary, Ananth Prabhu G, Mustafa Basthikodi, Chaitra K M
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Segmentation

Lung cancer begins in the lungs and leading to the reason of cancer demise amid population in the creation. According to the American Cancer Society, which estimates about 27% of the deaths because of cancer. In the early phase of its evolution, lung cancer does not cause any symptoms usually. Many of the patients have been diagnosed in a developed phase where symptoms become more prominent, that results in poor curative treatment and high mortality rate. Computer Aided Detection systems are used to achieve greater accuracies for the lung cancer diagnosis. In this research exertion, we proposed a novel methodology for lung Segmentation on the basis of Fuzzy C-Means Clustering, Adaptive Thresholding, and Segmentation of Active Contour Model. The experimental results are analysed and presented.
Inference for Heteroskedastic PCA with Missing Data
Authors: Yuling Yan, Yuxin Chen, Jianqing Fan
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

This paper studies how to construct confidence regions for principal component analysis (PCA) in high dimension, a problem that has been vastly under-explored. While computing measures of uncertainty for nonlinear/nonconvex estimators is in general difficult in high dimension, the challenge is further compounded by the prevalent presence of missing data and heteroskedastic noise. We propose a novel approach to performing valid inference on the principal subspace under a spiked covariance model with missing data, on the basis of an estimator called HeteroPCA (Zhang et al., 2022). We develop non-asymptotic distributional guarantees for HeteroPCA, and demonstrate how these can be invoked to compute both confidence regions for the principal subspace and entrywise confidence intervals for the spiked covariance matrix. Our inference procedures are fully data-driven and adaptive to heteroskedastic random noise, without requiring prior knowledge about the noise levels.
Beyond Voice Identity Conversion: Manipulating Voice Attributes by Adversarial Learning of Structured Disentangled Representations
Authors: Laurent Benaroya, Nicolas Obin, Axel Roebel
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) consists of digitally altering the voice of an individual to manipulate part of its content, primarily its identity, while maintaining the rest unchanged. Research in neural VC has accomplished considerable breakthroughs with the capacity to falsify a voice identity using a small amount of data with a highly realistic rendering. This paper goes beyond voice identity and presents a neural architecture that allows the manipulation of voice attributes (e.g., gender and age). Leveraging the latest advances on adversarial learning of structured speech representation, a novel structured neural network is proposed in which multiple auto-encoders are used to encode speech as a set of idealistically independent linguistic and extra-linguistic representations, which are learned adversariarly and can be manipulated during VC. Moreover, the proposed architecture is time-synchronized so that the original voice timing is preserved during conversion which allows lip-sync applications. Applied to voice gender conversion on the real-world VCTK dataset, our proposed architecture can learn successfully gender-independent representation and convert the voice gender with a very high efficiency and naturalness.
Sisyphus: A Cautionary Tale of Using Low-Degree Polynomial Activations in Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning
Authors: Karthik Garimella, Nandan Kumar Jha, Brandon Reagen
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Privacy Preserving Deep Learning

Privacy concerns in client-server machine learning have given rise to private inference (PI), where neural inference occurs directly on encrypted inputs. PI protects clients' personal data and the server's intellectual property. A common practice in PI is to use garbled circuits to compute nonlinear functions privately, namely ReLUs. However, garbled circuits suffer from high storage, bandwidth, and latency costs. To mitigate these issues, PI-friendly polynomial activation functions have been employed to replace ReLU. In this work, we ask: Is it feasible to substitute all ReLUs with low-degree polynomial activation functions for building deep, privacy-friendly neural networks? We explore this question by analyzing the challenges of substituting ReLUs with polynomials, starting with simple drop-and-replace solutions to novel, more involved replace-and-retrain strategies. We examine the limitations of each method and provide commentary on the use of polynomial activation functions for PI. We find all evaluated solutions suffer from the escaping activation problem: forward activation values inevitably begin to expand at an exponential rate away from stable regions of the polynomials, which leads to exploding values (NaNs) or poor approximations.
Embedding Signals on Knowledge Graphs with Unbalanced Diffusion Earth Mover's Distance
Authors: Alexander Tong, Guillaume Huguet, Dennis Shung, Amine Natik, Manik Kuchroo, Guillaume Lajoie, Guy Wolf, Smita Krishnaswamy
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs

In modern relational machine learning it is common to encounter large graphs that arise via interactions or similarities between observations in many domains. Further, in many cases the target entities for analysis are actually signals on such graphs. We propose to compare and organize such datasets of graph signals by using an earth mover's distance (EMD) with a geodesic cost over the underlying graph. Typically, EMD is computed by optimizing over the cost of transporting one probability distribution to another over an underlying metric space. However, this is inefficient when computing the EMD between many signals. Here, we propose an unbalanced graph EMD that efficiently embeds the unbalanced EMD on an underlying graph into an $L^1$ space, whose metric we call unbalanced diffusion earth mover's distance (UDEMD). Next, we show how this gives distances between graph signals that are robust to noise. Finally, we apply this to organizing patients based on clinical notes, embedding cells modeled as signals on a gene graph, and organizing genes modeled as signals over a large cell graph. In each case, we show that UDEMD-based embeddings find accurate distances that are highly efficient compared to other methods.
HW2VEC: A Graph Learning Tool for Automating Hardware Security
Authors: Shih-Yuan Yu, Rozhin Yasaei, Qingrong Zhou, Tommy Nguyen, Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

The time-to-market pressure and continuous growing complexity of hardware designs have promoted the globalization of the Integrated Circuit (IC) supply chain. However, such globalization also poses various security threats in each phase of the IC supply chain. Although the advancements of Machine Learning (ML) have pushed the frontier of hardware security, most conventional ML-based methods can only achieve the desired performance by manually finding a robust feature representation for circuits that are non-Euclidean data. As a result, modeling these circuits using graph learning to improve design flows has attracted research attention in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) field. However, due to the lack of supporting tools, only a few existing works apply graph learning to resolve hardware security issues. To attract more attention, we propose HW2VEC, an open-source graph learning tool that lowers the threshold for newcomers to research hardware security applications with graphs. HW2VEC provides an automated pipeline for extracting a graph representation from a hardware design in various abstraction levels (register transfer level or gate-level netlist). Besides, HW2VEC users can automatically transform the non-Euclidean hardware designs into Euclidean graph embeddings for solving their problems. In this paper, we demonstrate that HW2VEC can achieve state-of-the-art performance on two hardware security-related tasks: Hardware Trojan Detection and Intellectual Property Piracy Detection. We provide the time profiling results for the graph extraction and the learning pipelines in HW2VEC.
From Implicit to Explicit feedback: A deep neural network for modeling sequential behaviours and long-short term preferences of online users
Authors: Quyen Tran, Lam Tran, Linh Chu Hai, Linh Ngo Van, Khoat Than
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In this work, we examine the advantages of using multiple types of behaviour in recommendation systems. Intuitively, each user has to do some implicit actions (e.g., click) before making an explicit decision (e.g., purchase). Previous studies showed that implicit and explicit feedback have different roles for a useful recommendation. However, these studies either exploit implicit and explicit behaviour separately or ignore the semantic of sequential interactions between users and items. In addition, we go from the hypothesis that a user's preference at a time is a combination of long-term and short-term interests. In this paper, we propose some Deep Learning architectures. The first one is Implicit to Explicit (ITE), to exploit users' interests through the sequence of their actions. And two versions of ITE with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers based (BERT-based) architecture called BERT-ITE and BERT-ITE-Si, which combine users' long- and short-term preferences without and with side information to enhance user representation. The experimental results show that our models outperform previous state-of-the-art ones and also demonstrate our views on the effectiveness of exploiting the implicit to explicit order as well as combining long- and short-term preferences in two large-scale datasets.
MLDev: Data Science Experiment Automation and Reproducibility Software
Authors: Anton Khritankov, Nikita Pershin, Nikita Ukhov, Artem Ukhov
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00

In this paper we explore the challenges of automating experiments in data science. We propose an extensible experiment model as a foundation for integration of different open source tools for running research experiments. We implement our approach in a prototype open source MLDev software package and evaluate it in a series of experiments yielding promising results. Comparison with other state-of-the-art tools signifies novelty of our approach.
End-to-End Deep Learning of Long-Haul Coherent Optical Fiber Communications via Regular Perturbation Model
Authors: Vladislav Neskorniuk, Andrea Carnio, Vinod Bajaj, Domenico Marsella, Sergei K. Turitsyn, Jaroslaw E. Prilepsky, Vahid Aref
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00

We present a novel end-to-end autoencoder-based learning for coherent optical communications using a "parallelizable" perturbative channel model. We jointly optimized constellation shaping and nonlinear pre-emphasis achieving mutual information gain of 0.18 bits/sym./pol. simulating 64 GBd dual-polarization single-channel transmission over 30x80 km G.652 SMF link with EDFAs.
Enhanced Bilevel Optimization via Bregman Distance
Authors: Feihu Huang, Junyi Li, Shangqian Gao, Heng Huang
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, Hyperparameter Optimization, Meta-Learning, Representation Learning

Bilevel optimization has been recently used in many machine learning problems such as hyperparameter optimization, policy optimization, and meta learning. Although many bilevel optimization methods have been proposed, they still suffer from the high computational complexities and do not consider the more general bilevel problems with nonsmooth regularization. In the paper, thus, we propose a class of enhanced bilevel optimization methods with using Bregman distance to solve bilevel optimization problems, where the outer subproblem is nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth, and the inner subproblem is strongly convex. Specifically, we propose a bilevel optimization method based on Bregman distance (BiO-BreD) to solve deterministic bilevel problems, which achieves a lower computational complexity than the best known results. Meanwhile, we also propose a stochastic bilevel optimization method (SBiO-BreD) to solve stochastic bilevel problems based on stochastic approximated gradients and Bregman distance. Moreover, we further propose an accelerated version of SBiO-BreD method (ASBiO-BreD) using the variance-reduced technique, which can achieve a lower computational complexity than the best known computational complexities with respect to condition number $\kappa$ and target accuracy $\epsilon$ for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point. We conduct data hyper-cleaning task and hyper-representation learning task to demonstrate that our new algorithms outperform related bilevel optimization approaches.
The Holy Grail of Multi-Robot Planning: Learning to Generate Online-Scalable Solutions from Offline-Optimal Experts
Authors: Amanda Prorok, Jan Blumenkamp, QingBiao Li, Ryan Kortvelesy, Zhe Liu, Ethan Stump
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00

Many multi-robot planning problems are burdened by the curse of dimensionality, which compounds the difficulty of applying solutions to large-scale problem instances. The use of learning-based methods in multi-robot planning holds great promise as it enables us to offload the online computational burden of expensive, yet optimal solvers, to an offline learning procedure. Simply put, the idea is to train a policy to copy an optimal pattern generated by a small-scale system, and then transfer that policy to much larger systems, in the hope that the learned strategy scales, while maintaining near-optimal performance. Yet, a number of issues impede us from leveraging this idea to its full potential. This blue-sky paper elaborates some of the key challenges that remain.
Uncertainty-Aware Time-to-Event Prediction using Deep Kernel Accelerated Failure Time Models
Authors: Zhiliang Wu, Yinchong Yang, Peter A. Fasching, Volker Tresp
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Prediction, Time-to-Event Prediction

Recurrent neural network based solutions are increasingly being used in the analysis of longitudinal Electronic Health Record data. However, most works focus on prediction accuracy and neglect prediction uncertainty. We propose Deep Kernel Accelerated Failure Time models for the time-to-event prediction task, enabling uncertainty-awareness of the prediction by a pipeline of a recurrent neural network and a sparse Gaussian Process. Furthermore, a deep metric learning based pre-training step is adapted to enhance the proposed model. Our model shows better point estimate performance than recurrent neural network based baselines in experiments on two real-world datasets. More importantly, the predictive variance from our model can be used to quantify the uncertainty estimates of the time-to-event prediction: Our model delivers better performance when it is more confident in its prediction. Compared to related methods, such as Monte Carlo Dropout, our model offers better uncertainty estimates by leveraging an analytical solution and is more computationally efficient.
Are Bayesian neural networks intrinsically good at out-of-distribution detection?
Authors: Christian Henning, Francesco D'Angelo, Benjamin F. Grewe
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

The need to avoid confident predictions on unfamiliar data has sparked interest in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. It is widely assumed that Bayesian neural networks (BNN) are well suited for this task, as the endowed epistemic uncertainty should lead to disagreement in predictions on outliers. In this paper, we question this assumption and provide empirical evidence that proper Bayesian inference with common neural network architectures does not necessarily lead to good OOD detection. To circumvent the use of approximate inference, we start by studying the infinite-width case, where Bayesian inference can be exact considering the corresponding Gaussian process. Strikingly, the kernels induced under common architectural choices lead to uncertainties that do not reflect the underlying data generating process and are therefore unsuited for OOD detection. Finally, we study finite-width networks using HMC, and observe OOD behavior that is consistent with the infinite-width case. Overall, our study discloses fundamental problems when naively using BNNs for OOD detection and opens interesting avenues for future research.
Protein-RNA interaction prediction with deep learning: Structure matters
Authors: Junkang Wei, Siyuan Chen, Licheng Zong, Xin Gao, Yu Li
Date: 2021-07-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Protein-RNA interactions are of vital importance to a variety of cellular activities. Both experimental and computational techniques have been developed to study the interactions. Due to the limitation of the previous database, especially the lack of protein structure data, most of the existing computational methods rely heavily on the sequence data, with only a small portion of the methods utilizing the structural information. Recently, AlphaFold has revolutionized the entire protein and biology field. Foreseeably, the protein-RNA interaction prediction will also be promoted significantly in the upcoming years. In this work, we give a thorough review of this field, surveying both the binding site and binding preference prediction problems and covering the commonly used datasets, features, and models. We also point out the potential challenges and opportunities in this field. This survey summarizes the development of the RBP-RNA interaction field in the past and foresees its future development in the post-AlphaFold era.