pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling
Authors: Zhengxiao Du, Yujie Qian, Xiao Liu, Ming Ding, Jiezhong Qiu, Zhilin Yang, Jie Tang
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Classification, Decoder, Document Summarization, General Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding

There have been various types of pretraining architectures including autoencoding models (e.g., BERT), autoregressive models (e.g., GPT), and encoder-decoder models (e.g., T5). However, none of the pretraining frameworks performs the best for all tasks of three main categories including natural language understanding (NLU), unconditional generation, and conditional generation. We propose a General Language Model (GLM) based on autoregressive blank infilling to address this challenge. GLM improves blank filling pretraining by adding 2D positional encodings and allowing an arbitrary order to predict spans, which results in performance gains over BERT and T5 on NLU tasks. Meanwhile, GLM can be pretrained for different types of tasks by varying the number and lengths of blanks. On a wide range of tasks across NLU, conditional and unconditional generation, GLM outperforms BERT, T5, and GPT given the same model sizes and data, and achieves the best performance from a single pretrained model with 1.25x parameters of BERT Large , demonstrating its generalizability to different downstream tasks.
The Case for High-Accuracy Classification: Think Small, Think Many!
Authors: Mohammad Hosseini, Mahmudul Hasan
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Philosophy, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

To facilitate implementation of high-accuracy deep neural networks especially on resource-constrained devices, maintaining low computation requirements is crucial. Using very deep models for classification purposes not only decreases the neural network training speed and increases the inference time, but also need more data for higher prediction accuracy and to mitigate false positives. In this paper, we propose an efficient and lightweight deep classification ensemble structure based on a combination of simple color features, which is particularly designed for "high-accuracy" image classifications with low false positives. We designed, implemented, and evaluated our approach for explosion detection use-case applied to images and videos. Our evaluation results based on a large test test show considerable improvements on the prediction accuracy compared to the popular ResNet-50 model, while benefiting from 7.64x faster inference and lower computation cost. While we applied our approach to explosion detection, our approach is general and can be applied to other similar classification use cases as well. Given the insight gained from our experiments, we hence propose a "think small, think many" philosophy in classification scenarios: that transforming a single, large, monolithic deep model into a verification-based step model ensemble of multiple small, simple, lightweight models with narrowed-down color spaces can possibly lead to predictions with higher accuracy.
A Framework for Energy and Carbon Footprint Analysis of Distributed and Federated Edge Learning
Authors: Stefano Savazzi, Sanaz Kianoush, Vittorio Rampa, Mehdi Bennis
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Recent advances in distributed learning raise environmental concerns due to the large energy needed to train and move data to/from data centers. Novel paradigms, such as federated learning (FL), are suitable for decentralized model training across devices or silos that simultaneously act as both data producers and learners. Unlike centralized learning (CL) techniques, relying on big-data fusion and analytics located in energy hungry data centers, in FL scenarios devices collaboratively train their models without sharing their private data. This article breaks down and analyzes the main factors that influence the environmental footprint of FL policies compared with classical CL/Big-Data algorithms running in data centers. The proposed analytical framework takes into account both learning and communication energy costs, as well as the carbon equivalent emissions; in addition, it models both vanilla and decentralized FL policies driven by consensus. The framework is evaluated in an industrial setting assuming a real-world robotized workplace. Results show that FL allows remarkable end-to-end energy savings (30%-40%) for wireless systems characterized by low bit/Joule efficiency (50 kbit/Joule or lower). Consensus-driven FL does not require the parameter server and further reduces emissions in mesh networks (200 kbit/Joule). On the other hand, all FL policies are slower to converge when local data are unevenly distributed (often 2x slower than CL). Energy footprint and learning loss can be traded off to optimize efficiency.
Structure Inducing Pre-Training
Authors: Matthew B. A. McDermott, Brendan Yap, Peter Szolovits, Marinka Zitnik
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Inductive Bias, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Metric Learning, Natural Language Understanding

Language model pre-training and derived methods are incredibly impactful in machine learning. However, there remains considerable uncertainty on exactly why pre-training helps improve performance for fine-tuning tasks. This is especially true when attempting to adapt language-model pre-training to domains outside of natural language. Here, we analyze this problem by exploring how existing pre-training methods impose relational structure in their induced per-sample latent spaces -- i.e., what constraints do pre-training methods impose on the distance or geometry between the pre-trained embeddings of two samples $\vec x_i$ and $\vec x_j$. Through a comprehensive review of existing pre-training methods, we find that this question remains open. This is true despite theoretical analyses demonstrating the importance of understanding this form of induced structure. Based on this review, we introduce a descriptive framework for pre-training that allows for a granular, comprehensive understanding of how relational structure can be induced. We present a theoretical analysis of this framework from first principles and establish a connection between the relational inductive bias of pre-training and fine-tuning performance. We also show how to use the framework to define new pre-training methods. We build upon these findings with empirical studies on benchmarks spanning 3 data modalities and ten fine-tuning tasks. These experiments validate our theoretical analyses, inform the design of novel pre-training methods, and establish consistent improvements over a compelling suite of baseline methods.
Contextual Biasing of Language Models for Speech Recognition in Goal-Oriented Conversational Agents
Authors: Ashish Shenoy, Sravan Bodapati, Katrin Kirchhoff
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Chatbot, Natural Language Understanding, Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Goal-oriented conversational interfaces are designed to accomplish specific tasks and typically have interactions that tend to span multiple turns adhering to a pre-defined structure and a goal. However, conventional neural language models (NLM) in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are mostly trained sentence-wise with limited context. In this paper, we explore different ways to incorporate context into a LSTM based NLM in order to model long range dependencies and improve speech recognition. Specifically, we use context carry over across multiple turns and use lexical contextual cues such as system dialog act from Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models and the user provided structure of the chatbot. We also propose a new architecture that utilizes context embeddings derived from BERT on sample utterances provided during inference time. Our experiments show a word error rate (WER) relative reduction of 7% over non-contextual utterance-level NLM rescorers on goal-oriented audio datasets.
Learning How to Optimize Black-Box Functions With Extreme Limits on the Number of Function Evaluations
Authors: Carlos Ansotegui, Meinolf Sellmann, Tapan Shah, Kevin Tierney
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00

We consider black-box optimization in which only an extremely limited number of function evaluations, on the order of around 100, are affordable and the function evaluations must be performed in even fewer batches of a limited number of parallel trials. This is a typical scenario when optimizing variable settings that are very costly to evaluate, for example in the context of simulation-based optimization or machine learning hyperparameterization. We propose an original method that uses established approaches to propose a set of points for each batch and then down-selects from these candidate points to the number of trials that can be run in parallel. The key novelty of our approach lies in the introduction of a hyperparameterized method for down-selecting the number of candidates to the allowed batch-size, which is optimized offline using automated algorithm configuration. We tune this method for black box optimization and then evaluate on classical black box optimization benchmarks. Our results show that it is possible to learn how to combine evaluation points suggested by highly diverse black box optimization methods conditioned on the progress of the optimization. Compared with the state of the art in black box minimization and various other methods specifically geared towards few-shot minimization, we achieve an average reduction of 50\% of normalized cost, which is a highly significant improvement in performance.
Real-Time, Deep Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) Autofocus
Authors: Isaac D. Gerg, Vishal Monga
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

Synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) requires precise time-of-flight measurements of the transmitted/received waveform to produce well-focused imagery. It is not uncommon for errors in these measurements to be present resulting in image defocusing. To overcome this, an \emph{autofocus} algorithm is employed as a post-processing step after image reconstruction to improve image focus. A particular class of these algorithms can be framed as a sharpness/contrast metric-based optimization. To improve convergence, a hand-crafted weighting function to remove "bad" areas of the image is sometimes applied to the image-under-test before the optimization procedure. Additionally, dozens of iterations are necessary for convergence which is a large compute burden for low size, weight, and power (SWaP) systems. We propose a deep learning technique to overcome these limitations and implicitly learn the weighting function in a data-driven manner. Our proposed method, which we call Deep Autofocus, uses features from the single-look-complex (SLC) to estimate the phase correction which is applied in $k$-space. Furthermore, we train our algorithm on batches of training imagery so that during deployment, only a single iteration of our method is sufficient to autofocus. We show results demonstrating the robustness of our technique by comparing our results to four commonly used image sharpness metrics. Our results demonstrate Deep Autofocus can produce imagery perceptually better than common iterative techniques but at a lower computational cost. We conclude that Deep Autofocus can provide a more favorable cost-quality trade-off than alternatives with significant potential of future research.
Lighting Enhancement Aids Reconstruction of Colonoscopic Surfaces
Authors: Yubo Zhang, Shuxian Wang, Ruibin Ma, Sarah K. McGill, Julian G. Rosenman, Stephen M. Pizer
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Surface Reconstruction

High screening coverage during colonoscopy is crucial to effectively prevent colon cancer. Previous work has allowed alerting the doctor to unsurveyed regions by reconstructing the 3D colonoscopic surface from colonoscopy videos in real-time. However, the lighting inconsistency of colonoscopy videos can cause a key component of the colonoscopic reconstruction system, the SLAM optimization, to fail. In this work we focus on the lighting problem in colonoscopy videos. To successfully improve the lighting consistency of colonoscopy videos, we have found necessary a lighting correction that adapts to the intensity distribution of recent video frames. To achieve this in real-time, we have designed and trained an RNN network. This network adapts the gamma value in a gamma-correction process. Applied in the colonoscopic surface reconstruction system, our light-weight model significantly boosts the reconstruction success rate, making a larger proportion of colonoscopy video segments reconstructable and improving the reconstruction quality of the already reconstructed segments.
Future Frame Prediction for Robot-assisted Surgery
Authors: Xiaojie Gao, Yueming Jin, Zixu Zhao, Qi Dou, Pheng-Ann Heng
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Future prediction, Optical Flow Estimation, Prediction

Predicting future frames for robotic surgical video is an interesting, important yet extremely challenging problem, given that the operative tasks may have complex dynamics. Existing approaches on future prediction of natural videos were based on either deterministic models or stochastic models, including deep recurrent neural networks, optical flow, and latent space modeling. However, the potential in predicting meaningful movements of robots with dual arms in surgical scenarios has not been tapped so far, which is typically more challenging than forecasting independent motions of one arm robots in natural scenarios. In this paper, we propose a ternary prior guided variational autoencoder (TPG-VAE) model for future frame prediction in robotic surgical video sequences. Besides content distribution, our model learns motion distribution, which is novel to handle the small movements of surgical tools. Furthermore, we add the invariant prior information from the gesture class into the generation process to constrain the latent space of our model. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that the future frames of dual arm robots are predicted considering their unique characteristics relative to general robotic videos. Experiments demonstrate that our model gains more stable and realistic future frame prediction scenes with the suturing task on the public JIGSAWS dataset.
Learning to Schedule Heuristics in Branch-and-Bound
Authors: Antonia Chmiela, Elias B. Khalil, Ambros Gleixner, Andrea Lodi, Sebastian Pokutta
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Decision Making, Scheduling

Primal heuristics play a crucial role in exact solvers for Mixed Integer Programming (MIP). While solvers are guaranteed to find optimal solutions given sufficient time, real-world applications typically require finding good solutions early on in the search to enable fast decision-making. While much of MIP research focuses on designing effective heuristics, the question of how to manage multiple MIP heuristics in a solver has not received equal attention. Generally, solvers follow hard-coded rules derived from empirical testing on broad sets of instances. Since the performance of heuristics is instance-dependent, using these general rules for a particular problem might not yield the best performance. In this work, we propose the first data-driven framework for scheduling heuristics in an exact MIP solver. By learning from data describing the performance of primal heuristics, we obtain a problem-specific schedule of heuristics that collectively find many solutions at minimal cost. We provide a formal description of the problem and propose an efficient algorithm for computing such a schedule. Compared to the default settings of a state-of-the-art academic MIP solver, we are able to reduce the average primal integral by up to 49% on a class of challenging instances.
Neural tensor contractions and the expressive power of deep neural quantum states
Authors: Or Sharir, Amnon Shashua, Giuseppe Carleo
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Tensor Networks

We establish a direct connection between general tensor networks and deep feed-forward artificial neural networks. The core of our results is the construction of neural-network layers that efficiently perform tensor contractions, and that use commonly adopted non-linear activation functions. The resulting deep networks feature a number of edges that closely matches the contraction complexity of the tensor networks to be approximated. In the context of many-body quantum states, this result establishes that neural-network states have strictly the same or higher expressive power than practically usable variational tensor networks. As an example, we show that all matrix product states can be efficiently written as neural-network states with a number of edges polynomial in the bond dimension and depth logarithmic in the system size. The opposite instead does not hold true, and our results imply that there exist quantum states that are not efficiently expressible in terms of matrix product states or PEPS, but that are instead efficiently expressible with neural network states.
How I failed machine learning in medical imaging -- shortcomings and recommendations
Authors: Gaël Varoquaux, Veronika Cheplygina
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Medical imaging is an important research field with many opportunities for improving patients' health. However, there are a number of challenges that are slowing down the progress of the field as a whole, such optimizing for publication. In this paper we reviewed several problems related to choosing datasets, methods, evaluation metrics, and publication strategies. With a review of literature and our own analysis, we show that at every step, potential biases can creep in. On a positive note, we also see that initiatives to counteract these problems are already being started. Finally we provide a broad range of recommendations on how to further these address problems in the future. For reproducibility, data and code for our analyses are available on \url{https://github.com/GaelVaroquaux/ml_med_imaging_failures}
Smoothing and Shrinking the Sparse Seq2Seq Search Space
Authors: Ben Peters, André F. T. Martins
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion, Machine Translation, Morphological Inflection, Translation

Current sequence-to-sequence models are trained to minimize cross-entropy and use softmax to compute the locally normalized probabilities over target sequences. While this setup has led to strong results in a variety of tasks, one unsatisfying aspect is its length bias: models give high scores to short, inadequate hypotheses and often make the empty string the argmax -- the so-called cat got your tongue problem. Recently proposed entmax-based sparse sequence-to-sequence models present a possible solution, since they can shrink the search space by assigning zero probability to bad hypotheses, but their ability to handle word-level tasks with transformers has never been tested. In this work, we show that entmax-based models effectively solve the cat got your tongue problem, removing a major source of model error for neural machine translation. In addition, we generalize label smoothing, a critical regularization technique, to the broader family of Fenchel-Young losses, which includes both cross-entropy and the entmax losses. Our resulting label-smoothed entmax loss models set a new state of the art on multilingual grapheme-to-phoneme conversion and deliver improvements and better calibration properties on cross-lingual morphological inflection and machine translation for 6 language pairs.
Integrated Decision and Control: Towards Interpretable and Computationally Efficient Driving Intelligence
Authors: Yang Guan, Yangang Ren, Qi Sun, Shengbo Eben Li, Haitong Ma, Jingliang Duan, Yifan Dai, Bo Cheng
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Decision and control are core functionalities of high-level automated vehicles. Current mainstream methods, such as functionality decomposition and end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL), either suffer high time complexity or poor interpretability and adaptability on real-world autonomous driving tasks. In this paper, we present an interpretable and computationally efficient framework called integrated decision and control (IDC) for automated vehicles, which decomposes the driving task into static path planning and dynamic optimal tracking that are structured hierarchically. First, the static path planning generates several candidate paths only considering static traffic elements. Then, the dynamic optimal tracking is designed to track the optimal path while considering the dynamic obstacles. To that end, we formulate a constrained optimal control problem (OCP) for each candidate path, optimize them separately and follow the one with the best tracking performance. To unload the heavy online computation, we propose a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that can be served as an approximate constrained OCP solver. Specifically, the OCPs for all paths are considered together to construct a single complete RL problem and then solved offline in the form of value and policy networks, for real-time online path selecting and tracking respectively. We verify our framework in both simulations and the real world. Results show that compared with baseline methods IDC has an order of magnitude higher online computing efficiency, as well as better driving performance including traffic efficiency and safety. In addition, it yields great interpretability and adaptability among different driving tasks. The effectiveness of the proposed method is also demonstrated in real road tests with complicated traffic conditions.
SG-Net: Spatial Granularity Network for One-Stage Video Instance Segmentation
Authors: Dongfang Liu, Yiming Cui, Wenbo Tan, Yingjie Chen
Date: 2021-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Head Detection, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Instance Segmentation

Video instance segmentation (VIS) is a new and critical task in computer vision. To date, top-performing VIS methods extend the two-stage Mask R-CNN by adding a tracking branch, leaving plenty of room for improvement. In contrast, we approach the VIS task from a new perspective and propose a one-stage spatial granularity network (SG-Net). Compared to the conventional two-stage methods, SG-Net demonstrates four advantages: 1) Our method has a one-stage compact architecture and each task head (detection, segmentation, and tracking) is crafted interdependently so they can effectively share features and enjoy the joint optimization; 2) Our mask prediction is dynamically performed on the sub-regions of each detected instance, leading to high-quality masks of fine granularity; 3) Each of our task predictions avoids using expensive proposal-based RoI features, resulting in much reduced runtime complexity per instance; 4) Our tracking head models objects centerness movements for tracking, which effectively enhances the tracking robustness to different object appearances. In evaluation, we present state-of-the-art comparisons on the YouTube-VIS dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our compact one-stage method can achieve improved performance in both accuracy and inference speed. We hope our SG-Net could serve as a strong and flexible baseline for the VIS task. Our code will be available.