pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SamWalker++: recommendation with informative sampling strategy
Authors: Can Wang, Jiawei Chen, Sheng Zhou, Qihao Shi, Yan Feng, Chun Chen
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommendation from implicit feedback is a highly challenging task due to the lack of reliable negative feedback data. Existing methods address this challenge by treating all the un-observed data as negative (dislike) but downweight the confidence of these data. However, this treatment causes two problems: (1) Confidence weights of the unobserved data are usually assigned manually, which lack flexibility and may create empirical bias on evaluating user's preference. (2) To handle massive volume of the unobserved feedback data, most of the existing methods rely on stochastic inference and data sampling strategies. However, since a user is only aware of a very small fraction of items in a large dataset, it is difficult for existing samplers to select informative training instances in which the user really dislikes the item rather than does not know it. To address the above two problems, we propose two novel recommendation methods SamWalker and SamWalker++ that support both adaptive confidence assignment and efficient model learning. SamWalker models data confidence with a social network-aware function, which can adaptively specify different weights to different data according to users' social contexts. However, the social network information may not be available in many recommender systems, which hinders application of SamWalker. Thus, we further propose SamWalker++, which does not require any side information and models data confidence with a constructed pseudo-social network. We also develop fast random-walk-based sampling strategies for our SamWalker and SamWalker++ to adaptively draw informative training instances, which can speed up gradient estimation and reduce sampling variance. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed SamWalker and SamWalker++.
Gram Regularization for Multi-view 3D Shape Retrieval
Authors: Zhaoqun Li
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Retrieval, 3D Shape Retrieval, L2 Regularization, Multi-View 3D Shape Retrieval, Retrieval

How to obtain the desirable representation of a 3D shape is a key challenge in 3D shape retrieval task. Most existing 3D shape retrieval methods focus on capturing shape representation with different neural network architectures, while the learning ability of each layer in the network is neglected. A common and tough issue that limits the capacity of the network is overfitting. To tackle this, L2 regularization is applied widely in existing deep learning frameworks. However,the effect on the generalization ability with L2 regularization is limited as it only controls large value in parameters. To make up the gap, in this paper, we propose a novel regularization term called Gram regularization which reinforces the learning ability of the network by encouraging the weight kernels to extract different information on the corresponding feature map. By forcing the variance between weight kernels to be large, the regularizer can help to extract discriminative features. The proposed Gram regularization is data independent and can converge stably and quickly without bells and whistles. Moreover, it can be easily plugged into existing off-the-shelf architectures. Extensive experimental results on the popular 3D object retrieval benchmark ModelNet demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Theoretical Insights Into Multiclass Classification: A High-dimensional Asymptotic View
Authors: Christos Thrampoulidis, Samet Oymak, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Contemporary machine learning applications often involve classification tasks with many classes. Despite their extensive use, a precise understanding of the statistical properties and behavior of classification algorithms is still missing, especially in modern regimes where the number of classes is rather large. In this paper, we take a step in this direction by providing the first asymptotically precise analysis of linear multiclass classification. Our theoretical analysis allows us to precisely characterize how the test error varies over different training algorithms, data distributions, problem dimensions as well as number of classes, inter/intra class correlations and class priors. Specifically, our analysis reveals that the classification accuracy is highly distribution-dependent with different algorithms achieving optimal performance for different data distributions and/or training/features sizes. Unlike linear regression/binary classification, the test error in multiclass classification relies on intricate functions of the trained model (e.g., correlation between some of the trained weights) whose asymptotic behavior is difficult to characterize. This challenge is already present in simple classifiers, such as those minimizing a square loss. Our novel theoretical techniques allow us to overcome some of these challenges. The insights gained may pave the way for a precise understanding of other classification algorithms beyond those studied in this paper.
Distributed Bandits: Probabilistic Communication on $d$-regular Graphs
Authors: Udari Madhushani, Naomi Ehrich Leonard
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00

We study the decentralized multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem for agents that communicate with probability over a network defined by a $d$-regular graph. Every edge in the graph has probabilistic weight $p$ to account for the ($1\!-\!p$) probability of a communication link failure. At each time step, each agent chooses an arm and receives a numerical reward associated with the chosen arm. After each choice, each agent observes the last obtained reward of each of its neighbors with probability $p$. We propose a new Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) based algorithm and analyze how agent-based strategies contribute to minimizing group regret in this probabilistic communication setting. We provide theoretical guarantees that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms. We illustrate our results and validate the theoretical claims using numerical simulations.
Blind Decision Making: Reinforcement Learning with Delayed Observations
Authors: Mridul Agarwal, Vaneet Aggarwal
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning typically assumes that the state update from the previous actions happens instantaneously, and thus can be used for making future decisions. However, this may not always be true. When the state update is not available, the decision taken is partly in the blind since it cannot rely on the current state information. This paper proposes an approach, where the delay in the knowledge of the state can be used, and the decisions are made based on the available information which may not include the current state information. One approach could be to include the actions after the last-known state as a part of the state information, however, that leads to an increased state-space making the problem complex and slower in convergence. The proposed algorithm gives an alternate approach where the state space is not enlarged, as compared to the case when there is no delay in the state update. Evaluations on the basic RL environments further illustrate the improved performance of the proposed algorithm.
DARE: AI-based Diver Action Recognition System using Multi-Channel CNNs for AUV Supervision
Authors: Jing Yang, James P. Wilson, Shalabh Gupta
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Autonomous Driving

With the growth of sensing, control and robotic technologies, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have become useful assistants to human divers for performing various underwater operations. In the current practice, the divers are required to carry expensive, bulky, and waterproof keyboards or joystick-based controllers for supervision and control of AUVs. Therefore, diver action-based supervision is becoming increasingly popular because it is convenient, easier to use, faster, and cost effective. However, the various environmental, diver and sensing uncertainties present underwater makes it challenging to train a robust and reliable diver action recognition system. In this regard, this paper presents DARE, a diver action recognition system, that is trained based on Cognitive Autonomous Driving Buddy (CADDY) dataset, which is a rich set of data containing images of different diver gestures and poses in several different and realistic underwater environments. DARE is based on fusion of stereo-pairs of camera images using a multi-channel convolutional neural network supported with a systematically trained tree-topological deep neural network classifier to enhance the classification performance. DARE is fast and requires only a few milliseconds to classify one stereo-pair, thus making it suitable for real-time underwater implementation. DARE is comparatively evaluated against several existing classifier architectures and the results show that DARE supersedes the performance of all classifiers for diver action recognition in terms of overall as well as individual class accuracies and F1-scores.
Mode Penalty Generative Adversarial Network with adapted Auto-encoder
Authors: Gahye Lee, Seungkyu Lee
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are trained to generate sample images of interest distribution. To this end, generator network of GAN learns implicit distribution of real data set from the classification with candidate generated samples. Recently, various GANs have suggested novel ideas for stable optimizing of its networks. However, in real implementation, sometimes they still represent a only narrow part of true distribution or fail to converge. We assume this ill posed problem comes from poor gradient from objective function of discriminator, which easily trap the generator in a bad situation. To address this problem, we propose a mode penalty GAN combined with pre-trained auto encoder for explicit representation of generated and real data samples in the encoded space. In this space, we make a generator manifold to follow a real manifold by finding entire modes of target distribution. In addition, penalty for uncovered modes of target distribution is given to the generator which encourages it to find overall target distribution. We demonstrate that applying the proposed method to GANs helps generator's optimization becoming more stable and having faster convergence through experimental evaluations.
Multi-view Sensor Fusion by Integrating Model-based Estimation and Graph Learning for Collaborative Object Localization
Authors: Peng Gao, Rui Guo, HongSheng Lu, Hao Zhang
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Graph Learning, Object, Object Localization, Sensor Fusion, State Estimation

Collaborative object localization aims to collaboratively estimate locations of objects observed from multiple views or perspectives, which is a critical ability for multi-agent systems such as connected vehicles. To enable collaborative localization, several model-based state estimation and learning-based localization methods have been developed. Given their encouraging performance, model-based state estimation often lacks the ability to model the complex relationships among multiple objects, while learning-based methods are typically not able to fuse the observations from an arbitrary number of views and cannot well model uncertainty. In this paper, we introduce a novel spatiotemporal graph filter approach that integrates graph learning and model-based estimation to perform multi-view sensor fusion for collaborative object localization. Our approach models complex object relationships using a new spatiotemporal graph representation and fuses multi-view observations in a Bayesian fashion to improve location estimation under uncertainty. We evaluate our approach in the applications of connected autonomous driving and multiple pedestrian localization. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms previous techniques and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on collaboration localization.
Efficient falsification approach for autonomous vehicle validation using a parameter optimisation technique based on reinforcement learning
Authors: Dhanoop Karunakaran, Stewart Worrall, Eduardo Nebot
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

The widescale deployment of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) appears to be imminent despite many safety challenges that are yet to be resolved. It is well-known that there are no universally agreed Verification and Validation (VV) methodologies guarantee absolute safety, which is crucial for the acceptance of this technology. The uncertainties in the behaviour of the traffic participants and the dynamic world cause stochastic reactions in advanced autonomous systems. The addition of ML algorithms and probabilistic techniques adds significant complexity to the process for real-world testing when compared to traditional methods. Most research in this area focuses on generating challenging concrete scenarios or test cases to evaluate the system performance by looking at the frequency distribution of extracted parameters as collected from the real-world data. These approaches generally employ Monte-Carlo simulation and importance sampling to generate critical cases. This paper presents an efficient falsification method to evaluate the System Under Test. The approach is based on a parameter optimisation problem to search for challenging scenarios. The optimisation process aims at finding the challenging case that has maximum return. The method applies policy-gradient reinforcement learning algorithm to enable the learning. The riskiness of the scenario is measured by the well established RSS safety metric, euclidean distance, and instance of a collision. We demonstrate that by using the proposed method, we can more efficiently search for challenging scenarios which could cause the system to fail in order to satisfy the safety requirements.
Ensemble of Models Trained by Key-based Transformed Images for Adversarially Robust Defense Against Black-box Attacks
Authors: MaungMaung AprilPyone, Hitoshi Kiya
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

We propose a voting ensemble of models trained by using block-wise transformed images with secret keys for an adversarially robust defense. Key-based adversarial defenses were demonstrated to outperform state-of-the-art defenses against gradient-based (white-box) attacks. However, the key-based defenses are not effective enough against gradient-free (black-box) attacks without requiring any secret keys. Accordingly, we aim to enhance robustness against black-box attacks by using a voting ensemble of models. In the proposed ensemble, a number of models are trained by using images transformed with different keys and block sizes, and then a voting ensemble is applied to the models. In image classification experiments, the proposed defense is demonstrated to defend state-of-the-art attacks. The proposed defense achieves a clean accuracy of 95.56 % and an attack success rate of less than 9 % under attacks with a noise distance of 8/255 on the CIFAR-10 dataset.
Measuring agreement on linguistic expressions in medical treatment scenarios
Authors: J Navrro, C Wagner, Uwe Aickelin, L Green, R Ashford
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00

Quality of life assessment represents a key process of deciding treatment success and viability. As such, patients' perceptions of their functional status and well-being are important inputs for impairment assessment. Given that patient completed questionnaires are often used to assess patient status and determine future treatment options, it is important to know the level of agreement of the words used by patients and different groups of medical professionals. In this paper, we propose a measure called the Agreement Ratio which provides a ratio of overall agreement when modelling words through Fuzzy Sets (FSs). The measure has been specifically designed for assessing this agreement in fuzzy sets which are generated from data such as patient responses. The measure relies on using the Jaccard Similarity Measure for comparing the different levels of agreement in the FSs generated.
Drone LAMS: A Drone-based Face Detection Dataset with Large Angles and Many Scenarios
Authors: Yi Luo, Siyi Chen, X. -G. Ma
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Detection

This work presented a new drone-based face detection dataset Drone LAMS in order to solve issues of low performance of drone-based face detection in scenarios such as large angles which was a predominant working condition when a drone flies high. The proposed dataset captured images from 261 videos with over 43k annotations and 4.0k images with pitch or yaw angle in the range of -90{\deg} to 90{\deg}. Drone LAMS showed significant improvement over currently available drone-based face detection datasets in terms of detection performance, especially with large pitch and yaw angle. Detailed analysis of how key factors, such as duplication rate, annotation method, etc., impact dataset performance was also provided to facilitate further usage of a drone on face detection.
DART: aDaptive Accept RejecT for non-linear top-K subset identification
Authors: Mridul Agarwal, Vaneet Aggarwal, Christopher J. Quinn, Abhishek Umrawal
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00

We consider the bandit problem of selecting $K$ out of $N$ arms at each time step. The reward can be a non-linear function of the rewards of the selected individual arms. The direct use of a multi-armed bandit algorithm requires choosing among $\binom{N}{K}$ options, making the action space large. To simplify the problem, existing works on combinatorial bandits {typically} assume feedback as a linear function of individual rewards. In this paper, we prove the lower bound for top-$K$ subset selection with bandit feedback with possibly correlated rewards. We present a novel algorithm for the combinatorial setting without using individual arm feedback or requiring linearity of the reward function. Additionally, our algorithm works on correlated rewards of individual arms. Our algorithm, aDaptive Accept RejecT (DART), sequentially finds good arms and eliminates bad arms based on confidence bounds. DART is computationally efficient and uses storage linear in $N$. Further, DART achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(K\sqrt{KNT})$ for a time horizon $T$, which matches the lower bound in bandit feedback up to a factor of $\sqrt{\log{2NT}}$. When applied to the problem of cross-selling optimization and maximizing the mean of individual rewards, the performance of the proposed algorithm surpasses that of state-of-the-art algorithms. We also show that DART significantly outperforms existing methods for both linear and non-linear joint reward environments.
Hypergraph Partitioning using Tensor Eigenvalue Decomposition
Authors: Deepak Maurya, Balaraman Ravindran
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: graph partitioning, hypergraph partitioning

Hypergraphs have gained increasing attention in the machine learning community lately due to their superiority over graphs in capturing super-dyadic interactions among entities. In this work, we propose a novel approach for the partitioning of k-uniform hypergraphs. Most of the existing methods work by reducing the hypergraph to a graph followed by applying standard graph partitioning algorithms. The reduction step restricts the algorithms to capturing only some weighted pairwise interactions and hence loses essential information about the original hypergraph. We overcome this issue by utilizing the tensor-based representation of hypergraphs, which enables us to capture actual super-dyadic interactions. We prove that the hypergraph to graph reduction is a special case of tensor contraction. We extend the notion of minimum ratio-cut and normalized-cut from graphs to hypergraphs and show the relaxed optimization problem is equivalent to tensor eigenvalue decomposition. This novel formulation also enables us to capture different ways of cutting a hyperedge, unlike the existing reduction approaches. We propose a hypergraph partitioning algorithm inspired from spectral graph theory that can accommodate this notion of hyperedge cuts. We also derive a tighter upper bound on the minimum positive eigenvalue of even-order hypergraph Laplacian tensor in terms of its conductance, which is utilized in the partitioning algorithm to approximate the normalized cut. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated numerically on simple hypergraphs. We also show improvement for the min-cut solution on 2-uniform hypergraphs (graphs) over the standard spectral partitioning algorithm.
A Large-Scale Database for Graph Representation Learning
Authors: Scott Freitas, Yuxiao Dong, Joshua Neil, Duen Horng Chau
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, imbalanced classification, Representation Learning

With the rapid emergence of graph representation learning, the construction of new large-scale datasets is necessary to distinguish model capabilities and accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of each technique. By carefully analyzing existing graph databases, we identify 3 critical components important for advancing the field of graph representation learning: (1) large graphs, (2) many graphs, and (3) class diversity. To date, no single graph database offers all these desired properties. We introduce MalNet, the largest public graph database ever constructed, representing a large-scale ontology of malicious software function call graphs. MalNet contains over 1.2 million graphs, averaging over 15k nodes and 35k edges per graph, across a hierarchy of 47 types and 696 families. Compared to the popular REDDIT-12K database, MalNet offers 105x more graphs, 39x larger graphs on average, and 63x more classes. We provide a detailed analysis of MalNet, discussing its properties and provenance, along with the evaluation of state-of-the-art machine learning and graph neural network techniques. The unprecedented scale and diversity of MalNet offers exciting opportunities to advance the frontiers of graph representation learning--enabling new discoveries and research into imbalanced classification, explainability and the impact of class hardness. The database is publicly available at www.mal-net.org.
Reinforced Medical Report Generation with X-Linear Attention and Repetition Penalty
Authors: Wenting Xu, Chang Qi, Zhenghua Xu, Thomas Lukasiewicz
Date: 2020-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Medical Report Generation

To reduce doctors' workload, deep-learning-based automatic medical report generation has recently attracted more and more research efforts, where attention mechanisms and reinforcement learning are integrated with the classic encoder-decoder architecture to enhance the performance of deep models. However, these state-of-the-art solutions mainly suffer from two shortcomings: (i) their attention mechanisms cannot utilize high-order feature interactions, and (ii) due to the use of TF-IDF-based reward functions, these methods are fragile with generating repeated terms. Therefore, in this work, we propose a reinforced medical report generation solution with x-linear attention and repetition penalty mechanisms (ReMRG-XR) to overcome these problems. Specifically, x-linear attention modules are used to explore high-order feature interactions and achieve multi-modal reasoning, while repetition penalty is used to apply penalties to repeated terms during the model's training process. Extensive experimental studies have been conducted on two public datasets, and the results show that ReMRG-XR greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of all metrics.