pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Super-resolution Guided Pore Detection for Fingerprint Recognition
Authors: Syeda Nyma Ferdous, Ali Dabouei, Jeremy Dawson, Nasser M Nasrabadi
Date: 2020-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Performance of fingerprint recognition algorithms substantially rely on fine features extracted from fingerprints. Apart from minutiae and ridge patterns, pore features have proven to be usable for fingerprint recognition. Although features from minutiae and ridge patterns are quite attainable from low-resolution images, using pore features is practical only if the fingerprint image is of high resolution which necessitates a model that enhances the image quality of the conventional 500 ppi legacy fingerprints preserving the fine details. To find a solution for recovering pore information from low-resolution fingerprints, we adopt a joint learning-based approach that combines both super-resolution and pore detection networks. Our modified single image Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (SRGAN) framework helps to reliably reconstruct high-resolution fingerprint samples from low-resolution ones assisting the pore detection network to identify pores with a high accuracy. The network jointly learns a distinctive feature representation from a real low-resolution fingerprint sample and successfully synthesizes a high-resolution sample from it. To add discriminative information and uniqueness for all the subjects, we have integrated features extracted from a deep fingerprint verifier with the SRGAN quality discriminator. We also add ridge reconstruction loss, utilizing ridge patterns to make the best use of extracted features. Our proposed method solves the recognition problem by improving the quality of fingerprint images. High recognition accuracy of the synthesized samples that is close to the accuracy achieved using the original high-resolution images validate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
Comparison of Update and Genetic Training Algorithms in a Memristor Crossbar Perceptron
Authors: Kyle N. Edwards, Xiao Shen
Date: 2020-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Memristor-based computer architectures are becoming more attractive as a possible choice of hardware for the implementation of neural networks. However, at present, memristor technologies are susceptible to a variety of failure modes, a serious concern in any application where regular access to the hardware may not be expected or even possible. In this study, we investigate whether certain training algorithms may be more resilient to particular hardware failure modes, and therefore more suitable for use in those applications. We implement two training algorithms -- a local update scheme and a genetic algorithm -- in a simulated memristor crossbar, and compare their ability to train for a simple image classification task as an increasing number of memristors fail to adjust their conductance. We demonstrate that there is a clear distinction between the two algorithms in several measures of the rate of failure to train.
Feature Selection Based on Sparse Neural Network Layer with Normalizing Constraints
Authors: Peter Bugata, Peter Drotar
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Feature selection is important step in machine learning since it has shown to improve prediction accuracy while depressing the curse of dimensionality of high dimensional data. The neural networks have experienced tremendous success in solving many nonlinear learning problems. Here, we propose new neural-network based feature selection approach that introduces two constrains, the satisfying of which leads to sparse FS layer. We have performed extensive experiments on synthetic and real world data to evaluate performance of the proposed FS. In experiments we focus on the high dimension, low sample size data since those represent the main challenge for feature selection. The results confirm that proposed Feature Selection Based on Sparse Neural Network Layer with Normalizing Constraints (SNEL-FS) is able to select the important features and yields superior performance compared to other conventional FS methods.
Multilingual Transfer Learning for QA Using Translation as Data Augmentation
Authors: Mihaela Bornea, Lin Pan, Sara Rosenthal, Radu Florian, Avirup Sil
Date: 2020-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Transfer Learning, Translation

Prior work on multilingual question answering has mostly focused on using large multilingual pre-trained language models (LM) to perform zero-shot language-wise learning: train a QA model on English and test on other languages. In this work, we explore strategies that improve cross-lingual transfer by bringing the multilingual embeddings closer in the semantic space. Our first strategy augments the original English training data with machine translation-generated data. This results in a corpus of multilingual silver-labeled QA pairs that is 14 times larger than the original training set. In addition, we propose two novel strategies, language adversarial training and language arbitration framework, which significantly improve the (zero-resource) cross-lingual transfer performance and result in LM embeddings that are less language-variant. Empirically, we show that the proposed models outperform the previous zero-shot baseline on the recently introduced multilingual MLQA and TyDiQA datasets.
Exploring Deep Neural Networks and Transfer Learning for Analyzing Emotions in Tweets
Authors: Yasas Senarath, Uthayasanker Thayasivam
Date: 2020-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we present an experiment on using deep learning and transfer learning techniques for emotion analysis in tweets and suggest a method to interpret our deep learning models. The proposed approach for emotion analysis combines a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then we extend this approach for emotion intensity prediction using transfer learning technique. Furthermore, we propose a technique to visualize the importance of each word in a tweet to get a better understanding of the model. Experimentally, we show in our analysis that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art in emotion classification while maintaining competitive results in predicting emotion intensity.
Reinforced Multi-Teacher Selection for Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Fei Yuan, Linjun Shou, Jian Pei, Wutao Lin, Ming Gong, Yan Fu, Daxin Jiang
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

In natural language processing (NLP) tasks, slow inference speed and huge footprints in GPU usage remain the bottleneck of applying pre-trained deep models in production. As a popular method for model compression, knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from one or multiple large (teacher) models to a small (student) model. When multiple teacher models are available in distillation, the state-of-the-art methods assign a fixed weight to a teacher model in the whole distillation. Furthermore, most of the existing methods allocate an equal weight to every teacher model. In this paper, we observe that, due to the complexity of training examples and the differences in student model capability, learning differentially from teacher models can lead to better performance of student models distilled. We systematically develop a reinforced method to dynamically assign weights to teacher models for different training instances and optimize the performance of student model. Our extensive experimental results on several NLP tasks clearly verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
EQG-RACE: Examination-Type Question Generation
Authors: Xin Jia, Wenjie Zhou, Xu sun, Yunfang Wu
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation, Sentence, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Question Generation (QG) is an essential component of the automatic intelligent tutoring systems, which aims to generate high-quality questions for facilitating the reading practice and assessments. However, existing QG technologies encounter several key issues concerning the biased and unnatural language sources of datasets which are mainly obtained from the Web (e.g. SQuAD). In this paper, we propose an innovative Examination-type Question Generation approach (EQG-RACE) to generate exam-like questions based on a dataset extracted from RACE. Two main strategies are employed in EQG-RACE for dealing with discrete answer information and reasoning among long contexts. A Rough Answer and Key Sentence Tagging scheme is utilized to enhance the representations of input. An Answer-guided Graph Convolutional Network (AG-GCN) is designed to capture structure information in revealing the inter-sentences and intra-sentence relations. Experimental results show a state-of-the-art performance of EQG-RACE, which is apparently superior to the baselines. In addition, our work has established a new QG prototype with a reshaped dataset and QG method, which provides an important benchmark for related research in future work. We will make our data and code publicly available for further research.
Document-aligned Japanese-English Conversation Parallel Corpus
Authors: Matīss Rikters, Ryokan Ri, Tong Li, Toshiaki Nakazawa
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: WMT (EMNLP) 2020 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Sentence-level (SL) machine translation (MT) has reached acceptable quality for many high-resourced languages, but not document-level (DL) MT, which is difficult to 1) train with little amount of DL data; and 2) evaluate, as the main methods and data sets focus on SL evaluation. To address the first issue, we present a document-aligned Japanese-English conversation corpus, including balanced, high-quality business conversation data for tuning and testing. As for the second issue, we manually identify the main areas where SL MT fails to produce adequate translations in lack of context. We then create an evaluation set where these phenomena are annotated to alleviate automatic evaluation of DL systems. We train MT models using our corpus to demonstrate how using context leads to improvements.
Improving Task-Agnostic BERT Distillation with Layer Mapping Search
Authors: Xiaoqi Jiao, Huating Chang, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Xiao Chen, Linlin Li, Fang Wang, Qun Liu
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) which transfers the knowledge from a large teacher model to a small student model, has been widely used to compress the BERT model recently. Besides the supervision in the output in the original KD, recent works show that layer-level supervision is crucial to the performance of the student BERT model. However, previous works designed the layer mapping strategy heuristically (e.g., uniform or last-layer), which can lead to inferior performance. In this paper, we propose to use the genetic algorithm (GA) to search for the optimal layer mapping automatically. To accelerate the search process, we further propose a proxy setting where a small portion of the training corpus are sampled for distillation, and three representative tasks are chosen for evaluation. After obtaining the optimal layer mapping, we perform the task-agnostic BERT distillation with it on the whole corpus to build a compact student model, which can be directly fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Comprehensive experiments on the evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that 1) layer mapping strategy has a significant effect on task-agnostic BERT distillation and different layer mappings can result in quite different performances; 2) the optimal layer mapping strategy from the proposed search process consistently outperforms the other heuristic ones; 3) with the optimal layer mapping, our student model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE tasks.
Improving Zero Shot Learning Baselines with Commonsense Knowledge
Authors: Abhinaba Roy, Deepanway Ghosal, Erik Cambria, Navonil Majumder, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings, Zero-Shot Learning

Zero shot learning -- the problem of training and testing on a completely disjoint set of classes -- relies greatly on its ability to transfer knowledge from train classes to test classes. Traditionally semantic embeddings consisting of human defined attributes (HA) or distributed word embeddings (DWE) are used to facilitate this transfer by improving the association between visual and semantic embeddings. In this paper, we take advantage of explicit relations between nodes defined in ConceptNet, a commonsense knowledge graph, to generate commonsense embeddings of the class labels by using a graph convolution network-based autoencoder. Our experiments performed on three standard benchmark datasets surpass the strong baselines when we fuse our commonsense embeddings with existing semantic embeddings i.e. HA and DWE.
Improved Robustness to Disfluencies in RNN-Transducer Based Speech Recognition
Authors: Valentin Mendelev, Tina Raissi, Guglielmo Camporese, Manuel Giollo
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) based on Recurrent Neural Network Transducers (RNN-T) is gaining interest in the speech community. We investigate data selection and preparation choices aiming for improved robustness of RNN-T ASR to speech disfluencies with a focus on partial words. For evaluation we use clean data, data with disfluencies and a separate dataset with speech affected by stuttering. We show that after including a small amount of data with disfluencies in the training set the recognition accuracy on the tests with disfluencies and stuttering improves. Increasing the amount of training data with disfluencies gives additional gains without degradation on the clean data. We also show that replacing partial words with a dedicated token helps to get even better accuracy on utterances with disfluencies and stutter. The evaluation of our best model shows 22.5% and 16.4% relative WER reduction on those two evaluation sets.
Morphology Matters: A Multilingual Language Modeling Analysis
Authors: Hyunji Hayley Park, Katherine J. Zhang, Coleman Haley, Kenneth Steimel, Han Liu, Lane Schwartz
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Segmentation

Prior studies in multilingual language modeling (e.g., Cotterell et al., 2018; Mielke et al., 2019) disagree on whether or not inflectional morphology makes languages harder to model. We attempt to resolve the disagreement and extend those studies. We compile a larger corpus of 145 Bible translations in 92 languages and a larger number of typological features. We fill in missing typological data for several languages and consider corpus-based measures of morphological complexity in addition to expert-produced typological features. We find that several morphological measures are significantly associated with higher surprisal when LSTM models are trained with BPE-segmented data. We also investigate linguistically-motivated subword segmentation strategies like Morfessor and Finite-State Transducers (FSTs) and find that these segmentation strategies yield better performance and reduce the impact of a language's morphology on language modeling.
An algorithm for onset detection of linguistic segments in continuous electroencephalogram signals
Authors: Tonatiuh Hernández-Del-Toro, Carlos A. Reyes-García
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, Onset Detection

A Brain Computer Interface based on imagined words can decode the word a subject is thinking on through brain signals to control an external device. In order to build a fully asynchronous Brain Computer Interface based on imagined words in electroencephalogram signals as source, we need to solve the problem of detecting the onset of the imagined words. Although there has been some research in this field, the problem has not been fully solved. In this paper we present an approach to solve this problem by using values from statistics, information theory and chaos theory as features to correctly identify the onset of imagined words in a continuous signal. On detecting the onsets of imagined words, the highest True Positive Rate achieved by our approach was obtained using features based on the generalized Hurst exponent, this True Positive Rate was 0.69 and 0.77 with a timing error tolerance region of 3 and 4 seconds respectively.
Exploring wav2vec 2.0 on speaker verification and language identification
Authors: Zhiyun Fan, Meng Li, Shiyu Zhou, Bo Xu
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, Multi-Task Learning, Representation Learning, Speaker Verification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Representation Learning

Wav2vec 2.0 is a recently proposed self-supervised framework for speech representation learning. It follows a two-stage training process of pre-training and fine-tuning, and performs well in speech recognition tasks especially ultra-low resource cases. In this work, we attempt to extend self-supervised framework to speaker verification and language identification. First, we use some preliminary experiments to indicate that wav2vec 2.0 can capture the information about the speaker and language. Then we demonstrate the effectiveness of wav2vec 2.0 on the two tasks respectively. For speaker verification, we obtain a new state-of-the-art result, Equal Error Rate (EER) of 3.61% on the VoxCeleb1 dataset. For language identification, we obtain an EER of 12.02% on 1 second condition and an EER of 3.47% on full-length condition of the AP17-OLR dataset. Finally, we utilize one model to achieve the unified modeling by the multi-task learning for the two tasks.
A Topic Coverage Approach to Evaluation of Topic Models
Authors: Damir Korenčić, Strahil Ristov, Jelena Repar, Jan Šnajder
Date: 2020-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Topic coverage, Topic Models

Topic models are widely used unsupervised models capable of learning topics - weighted lists of words and documents - from large collections of text documents. When topic models are used for discovery of topics in text collections, a question that arises naturally is how well the model-induced topics correspond to topics of interest to the analyst. In this paper we revisit and extend a so far neglected approach to topic model evaluation based on measuring topic coverage - computationally matching model topics with a set of reference topics that models are expected to uncover. The approach is well suited for analyzing models' performance in topic discovery and for large-scale analysis of both topic models and measures of model quality. We propose new measures of coverage and evaluate, in a series of experiments, different types of topic models on two distinct text domains for which interest for topic discovery exists. The experiments include evaluation of model quality, analysis of coverage of distinct topic categories, and the analysis of the relationship between coverage and other methods of topic model evaluation. The paper contributes a new supervised measure of coverage, and the first unsupervised measure of coverage. The supervised measure achieves topic matching accuracy close to human agreement. The unsupervised measure correlates highly with the supervised one (Spearman's $\rho \geq 0.95$). Other contributions include insights into both topic models and different methods of model evaluation, and the datasets and code for facilitating future research on topic coverage.
Control Flow Obfuscation for FJ using Continuation Passing
Authors: Kenny Zhuo Ming Lu
Date: 2020-12-08 00:00:00

Control flow obfuscation deters software reverse engineering attempts by altering the program's control flow transfer. The alternation should not affect the software's run-time behaviour. In this paper, we propose a control flow obfuscation approach for FJ with exception handling. The approach is based on a source to source transformation using continuation passing style (CPS). We argue that the proposed CPS transformation causes malicious attacks using context insensitive static analysis and context sensitive analysis with fixed call string to lose precision.
Image-Graph-Image Translation via Auto-Encoding
Authors: Chenyang Lu, Gijs Dubbelman
Date: 2020-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Translation, Triplet

This work presents the first convolutional neural network that learns an image-to-graph translation task without needing external supervision. Obtaining graph representations of image content, where objects are represented as nodes and their relationships as edges, is an important task in scene understanding. Current approaches follow a fully-supervised approach thereby requiring meticulous annotations. To overcome this, we are the first to present a self-supervised approach based on a fully-differentiable auto-encoder in which the bottleneck encodes the graph's nodes and edges. This self-supervised approach can currently encode simple line drawings into graphs and obtains comparable results to a fully-supervised baseline in terms of F1 score on triplet matching. Besides these promising results, we provide several directions for future research on how our approach can be extended to cover more complex imagery.
A Generative Approach for Detection-driven Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Chelsey Edge, Md Jahidul Islam, Christopher Morse, Junaed Sattar
Date: 2020-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Enhancement

In this paper, we introduce a generative model for image enhancement specifically for improving diver detection in the underwater domain. In particular, we present a model that integrates generative adversarial network (GAN)-based image enhancement with the diver detection task. Our proposed approach restructures the GAN objective function to include information from a pre-trained diver detector with the goal to generate images which would enhance the accuracy of the detector in adverse visual conditions. By incorporating the detector output into both the generator and discriminator networks, our model is able to focus on enhancing images beyond aesthetic qualities and specifically to improve robotic detection of scuba divers. We train our network on a large dataset of scuba divers, using a state-of-the-art diver detector, and demonstrate its utility on images collected from oceanic explorations of human-robot teams. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach significantly improves diver detection performance over raw, unenhanced images, and even outperforms detection performance on the output of state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate the inference performance of our network on embedded devices to highlight the feasibility of operating on board mobile robotic platforms.
A MAC-less Neural Inference Processor Supporting Compressed, Variable Precision Weights
Authors: Vincenzo Liguori
Date: 2020-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Pathfinder

This paper introduces two architectures for the inference of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Both architectures exploit weight sparsity and compression to reduce computational complexity and bandwidth. The first architecture uses multiply-accumulators (MACs) but avoids unnecessary multiplications by skipping zero weights. The second architecture exploits weight sparsity at the level of their bit representation by substituting resource-intensive MACs with much smaller Bit Layer Multiply Accumulators (BLMACs). The use of BLMACs also allows variable precision weights as variable size integers and even floating points. Some details of an implementation of the second architecture are given. Weight compression with arithmetic coding is also discussed as well as bandwidth implications. Finally, some implementation results for a pathfinder design and various technologies are presented.