pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automated Machine Learning, Bounded Rationality, and Rational Metareasoning
Authors: Eyke Hüllermeier, Felix Mohr, Alexander Tornede, Marcel Wever
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, BIG-bench Machine Learning

The notion of bounded rationality originated from the insight that perfectly rational behavior cannot be realized by agents with limited cognitive or computational resources. Research on bounded rationality, mainly initiated by Herbert Simon, has a longstanding tradition in economics and the social sciences, but also plays a major role in modern AI and intelligent agent design. Taking actions under bounded resources requires an agent to reflect on how to use these resources in an optimal way - hence, to reason and make decisions on a meta-level. In this paper, we will look at automated machine learning (AutoML) and related problems from the perspective of bounded rationality, essentially viewing an AutoML tool as an agent that has to train a model on a given set of data, and the search for a good way of doing so (a suitable "ML pipeline") as deliberation on a meta-level.
Boosting Graph Search with Attention Network for Solving the General Orienteering Problem
Authors: Zongtao Liu, Jing Xu, Jintao Su, Tao Xiao, Yang Yang
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Recently, several studies have explored the use of neural network to solve different routing problems, which is an auspicious direction. These studies usually design an encoder-decoder based framework that uses encoder embeddings of nodes and the problem-specific context to produce node sequence(path), and further optimize the produced result on top by beam search. However, existing models can only support node coordinates as input, ignore the self-referential property of the studied routing problems, and lack the consideration about the low reliability in the initial stage of node selection, thus are hard to be applied in real-world. In this paper, we take the orienteering problem as an example to tackle these limitations. We propose a novel combination of a variant beam search algorithm and a learned heuristic for solving the general orienteering problem. We acquire the heuristic with an attention network that takes the distances among nodes as input, and learn it via a reinforcement learning framework. The empirical studies show that our method can surpass a wide range of baselines and achieve results close to the optimal or highly specialized approach. Also, our proposed framework can be easily applied to other routing problems. Our code is publicly available.
A Simple and Effective Method To Eliminate the Self Language Bias in Multilingual Representations
Authors: ZiYi Yang, Yinfei Yang, Daniel Cer, Eric Darve
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Retrieval

Language agnostic and semantic-language information isolation is an emerging research direction for multilingual representations models. We explore this problem from a novel angle of geometric algebra and semantic space. A simple but highly effective method "Language Information Removal (LIR)" factors out language identity information from semantic related components in multilingual representations pre-trained on multi-monolingual data. A post-training and model-agnostic method, LIR only uses simple linear operations, e.g. matrix factorization and orthogonal projection. LIR reveals that for weak-alignment multilingual systems, the principal components of semantic spaces primarily encodes language identity information. We first evaluate the LIR on a cross-lingual question answer retrieval task (LAReQA), which requires the strong alignment for the multilingual embedding space. Experiment shows that LIR is highly effectively on this task, yielding almost 100% relative improvement in MAP for weak-alignment models. We then evaluate the LIR on Amazon Reviews and XEVAL dataset, with the observation that removing language information is able to improve the cross-lingual transfer performance.
6MapNet: Representing soccer players from tracking data by a triplet network
Authors: Hyunsung Kim, Jihun Kim, Dongwook Chung, Jonghyun Lee, Jinsung Yoon, Sang-Ki Ko
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Triplet

Although the values of individual soccer players have become astronomical, subjective judgments still play a big part in the player analysis. Recently, there have been new attempts to quantitatively grasp players' styles using video-based event stream data. However, they have some limitations in scalability due to high annotation costs and sparsity of event stream data. In this paper, we build a triplet network named 6MapNet that can effectively capture the movement styles of players using in-game GPS data. Without any annotation of soccer-specific actions, we use players' locations and velocities to generate two types of heatmaps. Our subnetworks then map these heatmap pairs into feature vectors whose similarity corresponds to the actual similarity of playing styles. The experimental results show that players can be accurately identified with only a small number of matches by our method.
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Keyphrase Generation
Authors: Jiacheng Ye, Ruijian Cai, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Decoder, Keyphrase Generation

The encoder-decoder framework achieves state-of-the-art results in keyphrase generation (KG) tasks by predicting both present keyphrases that appear in the source document and absent keyphrases that do not. However, relying solely on the source document can result in generating uncontrollable and inaccurate absent keyphrases. To address these problems, we propose a novel graph-based method that can capture explicit knowledge from related references. Our model first retrieves some document-keyphrases pairs similar to the source document from a pre-defined index as references. Then a heterogeneous graph is constructed to capture relationships of different granularities between the source document and its references. To guide the decoding process, a hierarchical attention and copy mechanism is introduced, which directly copies appropriate words from both the source document and its references based on their relevance and significance. The experimental results on multiple KG benchmarks show that the proposed model achieves significant improvements against other baseline models, especially with regard to the absent keyphrase prediction.
Generating Self-Contained and Summary-Centric Question Answer Pairs via Differentiable Reward Imitation Learning
Authors: Li Zhou, Kevin Small, Yong Zhang, Sandeep Atluri
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Articles, Imitation Learning, News Recommendation, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Recommendation Systems, Text Generation

Motivated by suggested question generation in conversational news recommendation systems, we propose a model for generating question-answer pairs (QA pairs) with self-contained, summary-centric questions and length-constrained, article-summarizing answers. We begin by collecting a new dataset of news articles with questions as titles and pairing them with summaries of varying length. This dataset is used to learn a QA pair generation model producing summaries as answers that balance brevity with sufficiency jointly with their corresponding questions. We then reinforce the QA pair generation process with a differentiable reward function to mitigate exposure bias, a common problem in natural language generation. Both automatic metrics and human evaluation demonstrate these QA pairs successfully capture the central gists of the articles and achieve high answer accuracy.
Enhancing Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Score-Guided Network
Authors: Zongyuan Huang, Baohua Zhang, Guoqiang Hu, Longyuan Li, Yanyan Xu, Yaohui Jin
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection plays a crucial role in various real-world applications, including healthcare and finance systems. Owing to the limited number of anomaly labels in these complex systems, unsupervised anomaly detection methods have attracted great attention in recent years. Two major challenges faced by the existing unsupervised methods are: (i) distinguishing between normal and abnormal data in the transition field, where normal and abnormal data are highly mixed together; (ii) defining an effective metric to maximize the gap between normal and abnormal data in a hypothesis space, which is built by a representation learner. To that end, this work proposes a novel scoring network with a score-guided regularization to learn and enlarge the anomaly score disparities between normal and abnormal data. With such score-guided strategy, the representation learner can gradually learn more informative representation during the model training stage, especially for the samples in the transition field. We next propose a score-guided autoencoder (SG-AE), incorporating the scoring network into an autoencoder framework for anomaly detection, as well as other three state-of-the-art models, to further demonstrate the effectiveness and transferability of the design. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of these score-guided models (SGMs).
PIP: Physical Interaction Prediction via Mental Simulation with Span Selection
Authors: Jiafei Duan, Samson Yu, Soujanya Poria, Bihan Wen, Cheston Tan
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, Semantic Object Interaction Classification

Accurate prediction of physical interaction outcomes is a crucial component of human intelligence and is important for safe and efficient deployments of robots in the real world. While there are existing vision-based intuitive physics models that learn to predict physical interaction outcomes, they mostly focus on generating short sequences of future frames based on physical properties (e.g. mass, friction and velocity) extracted from visual inputs or a latent space. However, there is a lack of intuitive physics models that are tested on long physical interaction sequences with multiple interactions among different objects. We hypothesize that selective temporal attention during approximate mental simulations helps humans in physical interaction outcome prediction. With these motivations, we propose a novel scheme: Physical Interaction Prediction via Mental Simulation with Span Selection (PIP). It utilizes a deep generative model to model approximate mental simulations by generating future frames of physical interactions before employing selective temporal attention in the form of span selection for predicting physical interaction outcomes. To evaluate our model, we further propose the large-scale SPACE+ dataset of synthetic videos with long sequences of three prime physical interactions in a 3D environment. Our experiments show that PIP outperforms human, baseline, and related intuitive physics models that utilize mental simulation. Furthermore, PIP's span selection module effectively identifies the frames indicating key physical interactions among objects, allowing for added interpretability.
Investigating Numeracy Learning Ability of a Text-to-Text Transfer Model
Authors: Kuntal Kumar Pal, Chitta Baral
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The transformer-based pre-trained language models have been tremendously successful in most of the conventional NLP tasks. But they often struggle in those tasks where numerical understanding is required. Some possible reasons can be the tokenizers and pre-training objectives which are not specifically designed to learn and preserve numeracy. Here we investigate the ability of text-to-text transfer learning model (T5), which has outperformed its predecessors in the conventional NLP tasks, to learn numeracy. We consider four numeracy tasks: numeration, magnitude order prediction, finding minimum and maximum in a series, and sorting. We find that, although T5 models perform reasonably well in the interpolation setting, they struggle considerably in the extrapolation setting across all four tasks.
Dynamic Collective Intelligence Learning: Finding Efficient Sparse Model via Refined Gradients for Pruned Weights
Authors: Jangho Kim, Jayeon Yoo, Yeji Song, KiYoon Yoo, Nojun Kwak
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00

With the growth of deep neural networks (DNN), the number of DNN parameters has drastically increased. This makes DNN models hard to be deployed on resource-limited embedded systems. To alleviate this problem, dynamic pruning methods have emerged, which try to find diverse sparsity patterns during training by utilizing Straight-Through-Estimator (STE) to approximate gradients of pruned weights. STE can help the pruned weights revive in the process of finding dynamic sparsity patterns. However, using these coarse gradients causes training instability and performance degradation owing to the unreliable gradient signal of the STE approximation. In this work, to tackle this issue, we introduce refined gradients to update the pruned weights by forming dual forwarding paths from two sets (pruned and unpruned) of weights. We propose a novel Dynamic Collective Intelligence Learning (DCIL) which makes use of the learning synergy between the collective intelligence of both weight sets. We verify the usefulness of the refined gradients by showing enhancements in the training stability and the model performance on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. DCIL outperforms various previously proposed pruning schemes including other dynamic pruning methods with enhanced stability during training.
AI Agents in Emergency Response Applications
Authors: Aryan Naim, Ryan Alimo, Jay Braun
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00

Emergency personnel respond to various situations ranging from fire, medical, hazardous materials, industrial accidents, to natural disasters. Situations such as natural disasters or terrorist acts require a multifaceted response of firefighters, paramedics, hazmat teams, and other agencies. Engineering AI systems that aid emergency personnel proves to be a difficult system engineering problem. Mission-critical "edge AI" situations require low-latency, reliable analytics. To further add complexity, a high degree of model accuracy is required when lives are at stake, creating a need for the deployment of highly accurate, however computationally intensive models to resource-constrained devices. To address all these issues, we propose an agent-based architecture for deployment of AI agents via 5G service-based architecture.
Knowledge-Assisted Reasoning of Model-Augmented System Requirements with Event Calculus and Goal-Directed Answer Set Programming
Authors: Brendan Hall, Sarat Chandra Varanasi, Jan Fiedor, Joaquín Arias, Kinjal Basu, Fang Li, Devesh Bhatt, Kevin Driscoll, Elmer Salazar, Gopal Gupta
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00

We consider requirements for cyber-physical systems represented in constrained natural language. We present novel automated techniques for aiding in the development of these requirements so that they are consistent and can withstand perceived failures. We show how cyber-physical systems' requirements can be modeled using the event calculus (EC), a formalism used in AI for representing actions and change. We also show how answer set programming (ASP) and its query-driven implementation s(CASP) can be used to directly realize the event calculus model of the requirements. This event calculus model can be used to automatically validate the requirements. Since ASP is an expressive knowledge representation language, it can also be used to represent contextual knowledge about cyber-physical systems, which, in turn, can be used to find gaps in their requirements specifications. We illustrate our approach through an altitude alerting system from the avionics domain.
Efficiently Identifying Task Groupings for Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Christopher Fifty, Ehsan Amid, Zhe Zhao, Tianhe Yu, Rohan Anil, Chelsea Finn
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: All, Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning can leverage information learned by one task to benefit the training of other tasks. Despite this capacity, naively training all tasks together in one model often degrades performance, and exhaustively searching through combinations of task groupings can be prohibitively expensive. As a result, efficiently identifying the tasks that would benefit from training together remains a challenging design question without a clear solution. In this paper, we suggest an approach to select which tasks should train together in multi-task learning models. Our method determines task groupings in a single run by training all tasks together and quantifying the effect to which one task's gradient would affect another task's loss. On the large-scale Taskonomy computer vision dataset, we find this method can decrease test loss by 10.0% compared to simply training all tasks together while operating 11.6 times faster than a state-of-the-art task grouping method.
EVOQUER: Enhancing Temporal Grounding with Video-Pivoted BackQuery Generation
Authors: Yanjun Gao, Lulu Liu, Jason Wang, Xin Chen, Huayan Wang, Rui Zhang
Date: 2021-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation, Video Grounding

Temporal grounding aims to predict a time interval of a video clip corresponding to a natural language query input. In this work, we present EVOQUER, a temporal grounding framework incorporating an existing text-to-video grounding model and a video-assisted query generation network. Given a query and an untrimmed video, the temporal grounding model predicts the target interval, and the predicted video clip is fed into a video translation task by generating a simplified version of the input query. EVOQUER forms closed-loop learning by incorporating loss functions from both temporal grounding and query generation serving as feedback. Our experiments on two widely used datasets, Charades-STA and ActivityNet, show that EVOQUER achieves promising improvements by 1.05 and 1.31 at R@0.7. We also discuss how the query generation task could facilitate error analysis by explaining temporal grounding model behavior.
Deciphering Environmental Air Pollution with Large Scale City Data
Authors: Mayukh Bhattacharyya, Sayan Nag, Udita Ghosh
Date: 2021-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Air Pollution Prediction

Air pollution poses a serious threat to sustainable environmental conditions in the 21st century. Its importance in determining the health and living standards in urban settings is only expected to increase with time. Various factors ranging from artificial emissions to natural phenomena are known to be primary causal agents or influencers behind rising air pollution levels. However, the lack of large scale data involving the major artificial and natural factors has hindered the research on the causes and relations governing the variability of the different air pollutants. Through this work, we introduce a large scale city-wise dataset for exploring the relationships among these agents over a long period of time. We also introduce a transformer based model - cosSquareFormer, for the problem of pollutant level estimation and forecasting. Our model outperforms most of the benchmark models for this task. We also analyze and explore the dataset through our model and other methodologies to bring out important inferences which enable us to understand the dynamics of the causal agents at a deeper level. Through our paper, we seek to provide a great set of foundations for further research into this domain that will demand critical attention of ours in the near future.
TENET: Temporal CNN with Attention for Anomaly Detection in Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems
Authors: S. V. Thiruloga, V. K. Kukkala, S. Pasricha
Date: 2021-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Modern vehicles have multiple electronic control units (ECUs) that are connected together as part of a complex distributed cyber-physical system (CPS). The ever-increasing communication between ECUs and external electronic systems has made these vehicles particularly susceptible to a variety of cyber-attacks. In this work, we present a novel anomaly detection framework called TENET to detect anomalies induced by cyber-attacks on vehicles. TENET uses temporal convolutional neural networks with an integrated attention mechanism to detect anomalous attack patterns. TENET is able to achieve an improvement of 32.70% in False Negative Rate, 19.14% in the Mathews Correlation Coefficient, and 17.25% in the ROC-AUC metric, with 94.62% fewer model parameters, 86.95% decrease in memory footprint, and 48.14% lower inference time when compared to the best performing prior work on automotive anomaly detection.
Identifying Morality Frames in Political Tweets using Relational Learning
Authors: Shamik Roy, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Dan Goldwasser
Date: 2021-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Relational Reasoning

Extracting moral sentiment from text is a vital component in understanding public opinion, social movements, and policy decisions. The Moral Foundation Theory identifies five moral foundations, each associated with a positive and negative polarity. However, moral sentiment is often motivated by its targets, which can correspond to individuals or collective entities. In this paper, we introduce morality frames, a representation framework for organizing moral attitudes directed at different entities, and come up with a novel and high-quality annotated dataset of tweets written by US politicians. Then, we propose a relational learning model to predict moral attitudes towards entities and moral foundations jointly. We do qualitative and quantitative evaluations, showing that moral sentiment towards entities differs highly across political ideologies.
Bootstrapped Meta-Learning
Authors: Sebastian Flennerhag, Yannick Schroecker, Tom Zahavy, Hado van Hasselt, David Silver, Satinder Singh
Date: 2021-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning, Q-Learning

Meta-learning empowers artificial intelligence to increase its efficiency by learning how to learn. Unlocking this potential involves overcoming a challenging meta-optimisation problem. We propose an algorithm that tackles this problem by letting the meta-learner teach itself. The algorithm first bootstraps a target from the meta-learner, then optimises the meta-learner by minimising the distance to that target under a chosen (pseudo-)metric. Focusing on meta-learning with gradients, we establish conditions that guarantee performance improvements and show that the metric can control meta-optimisation. Meanwhile, the bootstrapping mechanism can extend the effective meta-learning horizon without requiring backpropagation through all updates. We achieve a new state-of-the art for model-free agents on the Atari ALE benchmark and demonstrate that it yields both performance and efficiency gains in multi-task meta-learning. Finally, we explore how bootstrapping opens up new possibilities and find that it can meta-learn efficient exploration in an epsilon-greedy Q-learning agent, without backpropagating through the update rule.