pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
T-BERT -- Model for Sentiment Analysis of Micro-blogs Integrating Topic Model and BERT
Authors: Sarojadevi Palani, Prabhu Rajagopal, Sidharth Pancholi
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, model, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Sentiment analysis (SA) has become an extensive research area in recent years impacting diverse fields including ecommerce, consumer business, and politics, driven by increasing adoption and usage of social media platforms. It is challenging to extract topics and sentiments from unsupervised short texts emerging in such contexts, as they may contain figurative words, strident data, and co-existence of many possible meanings for a single word or phrase, all contributing to obtaining incorrect topics. Most prior research is based on a specific theme/rhetoric/focused-content on a clean dataset. In the work reported here, the effectiveness of BERT(Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) in sentiment classification tasks from a raw live dataset taken from a popular microblogging platform is demonstrated. A novel T-BERT framework is proposed to show the enhanced performance obtainable by combining latent topics with contextual BERT embeddings. Numerical experiments were conducted on an ensemble with about 42000 datasets using NimbleBox.ai platform with a hardware configuration consisting of Nvidia Tesla K80(CUDA), 4 core CPU, 15GB RAM running on an isolated Google Cloud Platform instance. The empirical results show that the model improves in performance while adding topics to BERT and an accuracy rate of 90.81% on sentiment classification using BERT with the proposed approach.
Learning to schedule job-shop problems: Representation and policy learning using graph neural network and reinforcement learning
Authors: Junyoung Park, Jaehyeong Chun, Sang Hun Kim, Youngkook Kim, Jinkyoo Park
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning, Scheduling, Sequential Decision Making

We propose a framework to learn to schedule a job-shop problem (JSSP) using a graph neural network (GNN) and reinforcement learning (RL). We formulate the scheduling process of JSSP as a sequential decision-making problem with graph representation of the state to consider the structure of JSSP. In solving the formulated problem, the proposed framework employs a GNN to learn that node features that embed the spatial structure of the JSSP represented as a graph (representation learning) and derive the optimum scheduling policy that maps the embedded node features to the best scheduling action (policy learning). We employ Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based RL strategy to train these two modules in an end-to-end fashion. We empirically demonstrate that the GNN scheduler, due to its superb generalization capability, outperforms practically favored dispatching rules and RL-based schedulers on various benchmark JSSP. We also confirmed that the proposed framework learns a transferable scheduling policy that can be employed to schedule a completely new JSSP (in terms of size and parameters) without further training.
Database Reasoning Over Text
Authors: James Thorne, Majid Yazdani, Marzieh Saeidi, Fabrizio Silvestri, Sebastian Riedel, Alon Halevy
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5

Neural models have shown impressive performance gains in answering queries from natural language text. However, existing works are unable to support database queries, such as "List/Count all female athletes who were born in 20th century", which require reasoning over sets of relevant facts with operations such as join, filtering and aggregation. We show that while state-of-the-art transformer models perform very well for small databases, they exhibit limitations in processing noisy data, numerical operations, and queries that aggregate facts. We propose a modular architecture to answer these database-style queries over multiple spans from text and aggregating these at scale. We evaluate the architecture using WikiNLDB, a novel dataset for exploring such queries. Our architecture scales to databases containing thousands of facts whereas contemporary models are limited by how many facts can be encoded. In direct comparison on small databases, our approach increases overall answer accuracy from 85% to 90%. On larger databases, our approach retains its accuracy whereas transformer baselines could not encode the context.
Evidence-based Factual Error Correction
Authors: James Thorne, Andreas Vlachos
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Fact Checking, Fact Verification

This paper introduces the task of factual error correction: performing edits to a claim so that the generated rewrite is better supported by evidence. This extends the well-studied task of fact verification by providing a mechanism to correct written texts that are refuted or only partially supported by evidence. We demonstrate that it is feasible to train factual error correction systems from existing fact checking datasets which only contain labeled claims accompanied by evidence, but not the correction. We achieve this by employing a two-stage distant supervision approach that incorporates evidence into masked claims when generating corrections. Our approach, based on the T5 transformer and using retrieved evidence, achieved better results than existing work which used a pointer copy network and gold evidence, producing accurate factual error corrections for 5x more instances in human evaluation and a .125 increase in SARI score. The evaluation is conducted on a dataset of 65,000 instances based on a recent fact verification shared task and we release it to enable further work on the task.
Expected Scalarised Returns Dominance: A New Solution Concept for Multi-Objective Decision Making
Authors: Conor F. Hayes, Timothy Verstraeten, Diederik M. Roijers, Enda Howley, Patrick Mannion
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In many real-world scenarios, the utility of a user is derived from the single execution of a policy. In this case, to apply multi-objective reinforcement learning, the expected utility of the returns must be optimised. Various scenarios exist where a user's preferences over objectives (also known as the utility function) are unknown or difficult to specify. In such scenarios, a set of optimal policies must be learned. However, settings where the expected utility must be maximised have been largely overlooked by the multi-objective reinforcement learning community and, as a consequence, a set of optimal solutions has yet to be defined. In this paper we address this challenge by proposing first-order stochastic dominance as a criterion to build solution sets to maximise expected utility. We also propose a new dominance criterion, known as expected scalarised returns (ESR) dominance, that extends first-order stochastic dominance to allow a set of optimal policies to be learned in practice. We then define a new solution concept called the ESR set, which is a set of policies that are ESR dominant. Finally, we define a new multi-objective distributional tabular reinforcement learning (MOT-DRL) algorithm to learn the ESR set in a multi-objective multi-armed bandit setting.
Causal Discovery in Knowledge Graphs by Exploiting Asymmetric Properties of Non-Gaussian Distributions
Authors: Rohan Giriraj, Sinnu Susan Thomas
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Knowledge Graphs

In recent years, causal modelling has been used widely to improve generalization and to provide interpretability in machine learning models. To determine cause-effect relationships in the absence of a randomized trial, we can model causal systems with counterfactuals and interventions given enough domain knowledge. However, there are several cases where domain knowledge is almost absent and the only recourse is using a statistical method to estimate causal relationships. While there have been several works done in estimating causal relationships in unstructured data, we are yet to find a well-defined framework for estimating causal relationships in Knowledge Graphs (KG). It is commonly used to provide a semantic framework for data with complex inter-domain relationships. In this work, we define a hybrid approach that allows us to discover cause-effect relationships in KG. The proposed approach is based around the finding of the instantaneous causal structure of a non-experimental matrix using a non-Gaussian model, i.e; finding the causal ordering of the variables in a non-Gaussian setting. The non-experimental matrix is a low-dimensional tensor projection obtained by decomposing the adjacency tensor of a KG. We use two different pre-existing algorithms, one for the causal discovery and the other for decomposing the KG and combining them to get the causal structure in a KG.
FedHealth 2: Weighted Federated Transfer Learning via Batch Normalization for Personalized Healthcare
Authors: Yiqiang Chen, Wang Lu, Jindong Wang, Xin Qin
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Federated Learning, Transfer Learning, Wearable Activity Recognition

The success of machine learning applications often needs a large quantity of data. Recently, federated learning (FL) is attracting increasing attention due to the demand for data privacy and security, especially in the medical field. However, the performance of existing FL approaches often deteriorates when there exist domain shifts among clients, and few previous works focus on personalization in healthcare. In this article, we propose FedHealth 2, an extension of FedHealth \cite{chen2020fedhealth} to tackle domain shifts and get personalized models for local clients. FedHealth 2 obtains the client similarities via a pretrained model, and then it averages all weighted models with preserving local batch normalization. Wearable activity recognition and COVID-19 auxiliary diagnosis experiments have evaluated that FedHealth 2 can achieve better accuracy (10%+ improvement for activity recognition) and personalized healthcare without compromising privacy and security.
SocAoG: Incremental Graph Parsing for Social Relation Inference in Dialogues
Authors: Liang Qiu, Yuan Liang, Yizhou Zhao, Pan Lu, Baolin Peng, Zhou Yu, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Dialog Relation Extraction, Relation

Inferring social relations from dialogues is vital for building emotionally intelligent robots to interpret human language better and act accordingly. We model the social network as an And-or Graph, named SocAoG, for the consistency of relations among a group and leveraging attributes as inference cues. Moreover, we formulate a sequential structure prediction task, and propose an $\alpha$-$\beta$-$\gamma$ strategy to incrementally parse SocAoG for the dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance: (i) an $\alpha$ process predicting attributes and relations conditioned on the semantics of dialogues, (ii) a $\beta$ process updating the social relations based on related attributes, and (iii) a $\gamma$ process updating individual's attributes based on interpersonal social relations. Empirical results on DialogRE and MovieGraph show that our model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the ablation study shows the three processes complement each other, and the case study demonstrates the dynamic relational inference.
On the Convergence Rate of Off-Policy Policy Optimization Methods with Density-Ratio Correction
Authors: Jiawei Huang, Nan Jiang
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00

In this paper, we study the convergence properties of off-policy policy improvement algorithms with state-action density ratio correction under function approximation setting, where the objective function is formulated as a max-max-min optimization problem. We characterize the bias of the learning objective and present two strategies with finite-time convergence guarantees. In our first strategy, we present algorithm P-SREDA with convergence rate $O(\epsilon^{-3})$, whose dependency on $\epsilon$ is optimal. In our second strategy, we propose a new off-policy actor-critic style algorithm named O-SPIM. We prove that O-SPIM converges to a stationary point with total complexity $O(\epsilon^{-4})$, which matches the convergence rate of some recent actor-critic algorithms in the on-policy setting.
NVC-Net: End-to-End Adversarial Voice Conversion
Authors: Bac Nguyen, Fabien Cardinaux
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion

Voice conversion has gained increasing popularity in many applications of speech synthesis. The idea is to change the voice identity from one speaker into another while keeping the linguistic content unchanged. Many voice conversion approaches rely on the use of a vocoder to reconstruct the speech from acoustic features, and as a consequence, the speech quality heavily depends on such a vocoder. In this paper, we propose NVC-Net, an end-to-end adversarial network, which performs voice conversion directly on the raw audio waveform of arbitrary length. By disentangling the speaker identity from the speech content, NVC-Net is able to perform non-parallel traditional many-to-many voice conversion as well as zero-shot voice conversion from a short utterance of an unseen target speaker. Importantly, NVC-Net is non-autoregressive and fully convolutional, achieving fast inference. Our model is capable of producing samples at a rate of more than 3600 kHz on an NVIDIA V100 GPU, being orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art methods under the same hardware configurations. Objective and subjective evaluations on non-parallel many-to-many voice conversion tasks show that NVC-Net obtains competitive results with significantly fewer parameters.
Sequence to General Tree: Knowledge-Guided Geometry Word Problem Solving
Authors: Shih-hung Tsai, Chao-Chun Liang, Hsin-Min Wang, Keh-Yih Su
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Math

With the recent advancements in deep learning, neural solvers have gained promising results in solving math word problems. However, these SOTA solvers only generate binary expression trees that contain basic arithmetic operators and do not explicitly use the math formulas. As a result, the expression trees they produce are lengthy and uninterpretable because they need to use multiple operators and constants to represent one single formula. In this paper, we propose sequence-to-general tree (S2G) that learns to generate interpretable and executable operation trees where the nodes can be formulas with an arbitrary number of arguments. With nodes now allowed to be formulas, S2G can learn to incorporate mathematical domain knowledge into problem-solving, making the results more interpretable. Experiments show that S2G can achieve a better performance against strong baselines on problems that require domain knowledge.
OctoPath: An OcTree Based Self-Supervised Learning Approach to Local Trajectory Planning for Mobile Robots
Authors: Bogdan Trasnea, Cosmin Ginerica, Mihai Zaha, Gigel Macesanu, Claudiu Pozna, Sorin Grigorescu
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Decoder, regression, Self-Supervised Learning, State Estimation, Trajectory Planning, Trajectory Prediction

Autonomous mobile robots are usually faced with challenging situations when driving in complex environments. Namely, they have to recognize the static and dynamic obstacles, plan the driving path and execute their motion. For addressing the issue of perception and path planning, in this paper, we introduce OctoPath , which is an encoder-decoder deep neural network, trained in a self-supervised manner to predict the local optimal trajectory for the ego-vehicle. Using the discretization provided by a 3D octree environment model, our approach reformulates trajectory prediction as a classification problem with a configurable resolution. During training, OctoPath minimizes the error between the predicted and the manually driven trajectories in a given training dataset. This allows us to avoid the pitfall of regression-based trajectory estimation, in which there is an infinite state space for the output trajectory points. Environment sensing is performed using a 40-channel mechanical LiDAR sensor, fused with an inertial measurement unit and wheels odometry for state estimation. The experiments are performed both in simulation and real-life, using our own developed GridSim simulator and RovisLab's Autonomous Mobile Test Unit platform. We evaluate the predictions of OctoPath in different driving scenarios, both indoor and outdoor, while benchmarking our system against a baseline hybrid A-Star algorithm and a regression-based supervised learning method, as well as against a CNN learning-based optimal path planning method.
Few-Shot Partial-Label Learning
Authors: Yunfeng Zhao, Guoxian Yu, Lei Liu, Zhongmin Yan, Lizhen Cui, Carlotta Domeniconi
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Metric Learning, Partial Label Learning, valid

Partial-label learning (PLL) generally focuses on inducing a noise-tolerant multi-class classifier by training on overly-annotated samples, each of which is annotated with a set of labels, but only one is the valid label. A basic promise of existing PLL solutions is that there are sufficient partial-label (PL) samples for training. However, it is more common than not to have just few PL samples at hand when dealing with new tasks. Furthermore, existing few-shot learning algorithms assume precise labels of the support set; as such, irrelevant labels may seriously mislead the meta-learner and thus lead to a compromised performance. How to enable PLL under a few-shot learning setting is an important problem, but not yet well studied. In this paper, we introduce an approach called FsPLL (Few-shot PLL). FsPLL first performs adaptive distance metric learning by an embedding network and rectifying prototypes on the tasks previously encountered. Next, it calculates the prototype of each class of a new task in the embedding network. An unseen example can then be classified via its distance to each prototype. Experimental results on widely-used few-shot datasets (Omniglot and miniImageNet) demonstrate that our FsPLL can achieve a superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods across different settings, and it needs fewer samples for quickly adapting to new tasks.
End-to-End Hierarchical Relation Extraction for Generic Form Understanding
Authors: Tuan-Anh Nguyen Dang, Duc-Thanh Hoang, Quang-Bach Tran, Chih-Wei Pan, Thanh-Dat Nguyen
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking, Form, Link Prediction, Relation, Relation Extraction

Form understanding is a challenging problem which aims to recognize semantic entities from the input document and their hierarchical relations. Previous approaches face significant difficulty dealing with the complexity of the task, thus treat these objectives separately. To this end, we present a novel deep neural network to jointly perform both entity detection and link prediction in an end-to-end fashion. Our model extends the Multi-stage Attentional U-Net architecture with the Part-Intensity Fields and Part-Association Fields for link prediction, enriching the spatial information flow with the additional supervision from entity linking. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the model on the Form Understanding in Noisy Scanned Documents (FUNSD) dataset, where our method substantially outperforms the original model and state-of-the-art baselines in both Entity Labeling and Entity Linking task.
A Span Extraction Approach for Information Extraction on Visually-Rich Documents
Authors: Tuan-Anh D. Nguyen, Hieu M. Vu, Nguyen Hong Son, Minh-Tien Nguyen
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Information extraction (IE) for visually-rich documents (VRDs) has achieved SOTA performance recently thanks to the adaptation of Transformer-based language models, which shows the great potential of pre-training methods. In this paper, we present a new approach to improve the capability of language model pre-training on VRDs. Firstly, we introduce a new query-based IE model that employs span extraction instead of using the common sequence labeling approach. Secondly, to further extend the span extraction formulation, we propose a new training task that focuses on modelling the relationships among semantic entities within a document. This task enables target spans to be extracted recursively and can be used to pre-train the model or as an IE downstream task. Evaluation on three datasets of popular business documents (invoices, receipts) shows that our proposed method achieves significant improvements compared to existing models. The method also provides a mechanism for knowledge accumulation from multiple downstream IE tasks.
COM2SENSE: A Commonsense Reasoning Benchmark with Complementary Sentences
Authors: Shikhar Singh, Nuan Wen, Yu Hou, Pegah Alipoormolabashi, Te-Lin Wu, Xuezhe Ma, Nanyun Peng
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2021 8
Tasks: 4k, Sentence

Commonsense reasoning is intuitive for humans but has been a long-term challenge for artificial intelligence (AI). Recent advancements in pretrained language models have shown promising results on several commonsense benchmark datasets. However, the reliability and comprehensiveness of these benchmarks towards assessing model's commonsense reasoning ability remains unclear. To this end, we introduce a new commonsense reasoning benchmark dataset comprising natural language true/false statements, with each sample paired with its complementary counterpart, resulting in 4k sentence pairs. We propose a pairwise accuracy metric to reliably measure an agent's ability to perform commonsense reasoning over a given situation. The dataset is crowdsourced and enhanced with an adversarial model-in-the-loop setup to incentivize challenging samples. To facilitate a systematic analysis of commonsense capabilities, we design our dataset along the dimensions of knowledge domains, reasoning scenarios and numeracy. Experimental results demonstrate that our strongest baseline (UnifiedQA-3B), after fine-tuning, achieves ~71% standard accuracy and ~51% pairwise accuracy, well below human performance (~95% for both metrics). The dataset is available at https://github.com/PlusLabNLP/Com2Sense.
A Generalizable Approach to Learning Optimizers
Authors: Diogo Almeida, Clemens Winter, Jie Tang, Wojciech Zaremba
Date: 2021-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

A core issue with learning to optimize neural networks has been the lack of generalization to real world problems. To address this, we describe a system designed from a generalization-first perspective, learning to update optimizer hyperparameters instead of model parameters directly using novel features, actions, and a reward function. This system outperforms Adam at all neural network tasks including on modalities not seen during training. We achieve 2x speedups on ImageNet, and a 2.5x speedup on a language modeling task using over 5 orders of magnitude more compute than the training tasks.