pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Nonparametric Extrema Analysis in Time Series for Envelope Extraction, Peak Detection and Clustering
Authors: Kaan Gokcesu, Hakan Gokcesu
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In this paper, we propose a nonparametric approach that can be used in envelope extraction, peak-burst detection and clustering in time series. Our problem formalization results in a naturally defined splitting/forking of the time series. With a possibly hierarchical implementation, it can be used for various applications in machine learning, signal processing and mathematical finance. From an incoming input signal, our iterative procedure sequentially creates two signals (one upper bounding and one lower bounding signal) by minimizing the cumulative $L_1$ drift. We show that a solution can be efficiently calculated by use of a Viterbi-like path tracking algorithm together with an optimal elimination rule. We consider many interesting settings, where our algorithm has near-linear time complexities.
Providing an Approach to Predicting Customer Quality in E-Commerce Social Networks Based on Big Data and Unsupervised Learning Method
Authors: Mohammad Arab
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Marketing

One of the goals of every business enterprise is to increase customer loyalty. The degree of customer loyalty is called customer quality which its forecasting will affect strategic marketing practices. The purpose of this study is to predict the quality of customers of large e-commerce social networks by big data algorithms and unsupervised learning. For this purpose, a graph-based social network analysis framework was used for community detection in the Stanford Network Analysis Platform (SNAP). Then in the found communities, the quality of customers was predicted. The results showed that various visits with an impact of 37.13% can have the greatest impact on customer quality and the order of impact of other parameters were from highest to lowest: number of frequent customer visits (28.56%), role in social networks (28.37%), Indirect transactions (26.74%), activity days (25.62%) and customer social network size (25.06%).
Global-Local Item Embedding for Temporal Set Prediction
Authors: Seungjae Jung, Young-Jin Park, Jisu Jeong, Kyung-Min Kim, Hiun Kim, Minkyu Kim, Hanock Kwak
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Prediction, Recommendation Systems

Temporal set prediction is becoming increasingly important as many companies employ recommender systems in their online businesses, e.g., personalized purchase prediction of shopping baskets. While most previous techniques have focused on leveraging a user's history, the study of combining it with others' histories remains untapped potential. This paper proposes Global-Local Item Embedding (GLOIE) that learns to utilize the temporal properties of sets across whole users as well as within a user by coining the names as global and local information to distinguish the two temporal patterns. GLOIE uses Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and dynamic graph-based model to capture global and local information and then applies attention to integrate resulting item embeddings. Additionally, we propose to use Tweedie output for the decoder of VAE as it can easily model zero-inflated and long-tailed distribution, which is more suitable for several real-world data distributions than Gaussian or multinomial counterparts. When evaluated on three public benchmarks, our algorithm consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in most ranking metrics.
The Phonexia VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2021 System Description
Authors: Josef Slavíček, Albert Swart, Michal Klčo, Niko Brümmer
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Speaker Recognition, Speaker Verification

We describe the Phonexia submission for the VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2021 (VoxSRC-21) in the unsupervised speaker verification track. Our solution was very similar to IDLab's winning submission for VoxSRC-20. An embedding extractor was bootstrapped using momentum contrastive learning, with input augmentations as the only source of supervision. This was followed by several iterations of clustering to assign pseudo-speaker labels that were then used for supervised embedding extractor training. Finally, a score fusion was done, by averaging the zt-normalized cosine scores of five different embedding extractors. We briefly also describe unsuccessful solutions involving i-vectors instead of DNN embeddings and PLDA instead of cosine scoring.
NAS-OoD: Neural Architecture Search for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Authors: Haoyue Bai, Fengwei Zhou, Lanqing Hong, Nanyang Ye, S. -H. Gary Chan, Zhenguo Li
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Neural Architecture Search, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Recent advances on Out-of-Distribution (OoD) generalization reveal the robustness of deep learning models against distribution shifts. However, existing works focus on OoD algorithms, such as invariant risk minimization, domain generalization, or stable learning, without considering the influence of deep model architectures on OoD generalization, which may lead to sub-optimal performance. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods search for architecture based on its performance on the training data, which may result in poor generalization for OoD tasks. In this work, we propose robust Neural Architecture Search for OoD generalization (NAS-OoD), which optimizes the architecture with respect to its performance on generated OoD data by gradient descent. Specifically, a data generator is learned to synthesize OoD data by maximizing losses computed by different neural architectures, while the goal for architecture search is to find the optimal architecture parameters that minimize the synthetic OoD data losses. The data generator and the neural architecture are jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner, and the minimax training process effectively discovers robust architectures that generalize well for different distribution shifts. Extensive experimental results show that NAS-OoD achieves superior performance on various OoD generalization benchmarks with deep models having a much fewer number of parameters. In addition, on a real industry dataset, the proposed NAS-OoD method reduces the error rate by more than 70% compared with the state-of-the-art method, demonstrating the proposed method's practicality for real applications.
Variational Physics Informed Neural Networks: the role of quadratures and test functions
Authors: Stefano Berrone, Claudio Canuto, Moreno Pintore
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00

In this work we analyze how quadrature rules of different precisions and piecewise polynomial test functions of different degrees affect the convergence rate of Variational Physics Informed Neural Networks (VPINN) with respect to mesh refinement, while solving elliptic boundary-value problems. Using a Petrov-Galerkin framework relying on an inf-sup condition, we derive an a priori error estimate in the energy norm between the exact solution and a suitable high-order piecewise interpolant of a computed neural network. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical predictions and highlight the importance of the inf-sup condition. Our results suggest, somehow counterintuitively, that for smooth solutions the best strategy to achieve a high decay rate of the error consists in choosing test functions of the lowest polynomial degree, while using quadrature formulas of suitably high precision.
Optimal transport weights for causal inference
Authors: Eric Dunipace
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

Imbalance in covariate distributions leads to biased estimates of causal effects. Weighting methods attempt to correct this imbalance but rely on specifying models for the treatment assignment mechanism, which is unknown in observational studies. This leaves researchers to choose the proper weighting method and the appropriate covariate functions for these models without knowing the correct combination to achieve distributional balance. In response to these difficulties, we propose a nonparametric generalization of several other weighting schemes found in the literature: Causal Optimal Transport. This new method directly targets distributional balance by minimizing optimal transport distances between treatment and control groups or, more generally, between any source and target population. Our approach is semiparametrically efficient and model-free but can also incorporate moments or any other important functions of covariates that a researcher desires to balance. Moreover, our method can provide nonparametric estimate the conditional mean outcome function and we give rates for the convergence of this estimator. Moreover, we show how this method can provide nonparametric imputations of the missing potential outcomes and give rates of convergence for this estimator. We find that Causal Optimal Transport outperforms competitor methods when both the propensity score and outcome models are misspecified, indicating it is a robust alternative to common weighting methods. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our method in an external control trial examining the effect of misoprostol versus oxytocin for the treatment of post-partum hemorrhage.
Scalable Feature Selection for (Multitask) Gradient Boosted Trees
Authors: Cuize Han, Nikhil Rao, Daria Sorokina, Karthik Subbian
Date: 2021-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) are widely used for building ranking and relevance models in search and recommendation. Considerations such as latency and interpretability dictate the use of as few features as possible to train these models. Feature selection in GBDT models typically involves heuristically ranking the features by importance and selecting the top few, or by performing a full backward feature elimination routine. On-the-fly feature selection methods proposed previously scale suboptimally with the number of features, which can be daunting in high dimensional settings. We develop a scalable forward feature selection variant for GBDT, via a novel group testing procedure that works well in high dimensions, and enjoys favorable theoretical performance and computational guarantees. We show via extensive experiments on both public and proprietary datasets that the proposed method offers significant speedups in training time, while being as competitive as existing GBDT methods in terms of model performance metrics. We also extend the method to the multitask setting, allowing the practitioner to select common features across tasks, as well as selecting task-specific features.
A Neural Network-Based Linguistic Similarity Measure for Entrainment in Conversations
Authors: Mingzhi Yu, Diane Litman, Shuang Ma, Jian Wu
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00

Linguistic entrainment is a phenomenon where people tend to mimic each other in conversation. The core instrument to quantify entrainment is a linguistic similarity measure between conversational partners. Most of the current similarity measures are based on bag-of-words approaches that rely on linguistic markers, ignoring the overall language structure and dialogue context. To address this issue, we propose to use a neural network model to perform the similarity measure for entrainment. Our model is context-aware, and it further leverages a novel component to learn the shared high-level linguistic features across dialogues. We first investigate the effectiveness of our novel component. Then we use the model to perform similarity measure in a corpus-based entrainment analysis. We observe promising results for both evaluation tasks.
Training Graph Neural Networks by Graphon Estimation
Authors: Ziqing Hu, Yihao Fang, Lizhen Lin
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Graphon Estimation

In this work, we propose to train a graph neural network via resampling from a graphon estimate obtained from the underlying network data. More specifically, the graphon or the link probability matrix of the underlying network is first obtained from which a new network will be resampled and used during the training process at each layer. Due to the uncertainty induced from the resampling, it helps mitigate the well-known issue of over-smoothing in a graph neural network (GNN) model. Our framework is general, computationally efficient, and conceptually simple. Another appealing feature of our method is that it requires minimal additional tuning during the training process. Extensive numerical results show that our approach is competitive with and in many cases outperform the other over-smoothing reducing GNN training methods.
Barycentric-alignment and reconstruction loss minimization for domain generalization
Authors: Boyang Lyu, Thuan Nguyen, Prakash Ishwar, Matthias Scheutz, Shuchin Aeron
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Representation Learning

This paper advances the theory and practice of Domain Generalization (DG) in machine learning. We consider the typical DG setting where the hypothesis is composed of a representation mapping followed by a labeling function. Within this setting, the majority of popular DG methods aim to jointly learn the representation and the labeling functions by minimizing a well-known upper bound for the classification risk in the unseen domain. In practice, however, methods based on this theoretical upper bound ignore a term that cannot be directly optimized due to its dual dependence on both the representation mapping and the unknown optimal labeling function in the unseen domain. To bridge this gap between theory and practice, we introduce a new upper bound that is free of terms having such dual dependence, resulting in a fully optimizable risk upper bound for the unseen domain. Our derivation leverages classical and recent transport inequalities that link optimal transport metrics with information-theoretic measures. Compared to previous bounds, our bound introduces two new terms: (i) the Wasserstein-2 barycenter term that aligns distributions between domains, and (ii) the reconstruction loss term that assesses the quality of representation in reconstructing the original data. Based on this new upper bound, we propose a novel DG algorithm named Wasserstein Barycenter Auto-Encoder (WBAE) that simultaneously minimizes the classification loss, the barycenter loss, and the reconstruction loss. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art DG algorithms on several datasets.
Uncovering the Limits of Text-based Emotion Detection
Authors: Nurudin Alvarez-Gonzalez, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, Vicenç Gómez
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Emotion Classification

Identifying emotions from text is crucial for a variety of real world tasks. We consider the two largest now-available corpora for emotion classification: GoEmotions, with 58k messages labelled by readers, and Vent, with 33M writer-labelled messages. We design a benchmark and evaluate several feature spaces and learning algorithms, including two simple yet novel models on top of BERT that outperform previous strong baselines on GoEmotions. Through an experiment with human participants, we also analyze the differences between how writers express emotions and how readers perceive them. Our results suggest that emotions expressed by writers are harder to identify than emotions that readers perceive. We share a public web interface for researchers to explore our models.
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation of tomographic images in the diagnosis of stroke
Authors: Anna Dobshik, Andrey Tulupov, Vladimir Berikov
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents an automatic algorithm for the segmentation of areas affected by an acute stroke on the non-contrast computed tomography brain images. The proposed algorithm is designed for learning in a weakly supervised scenario when some images are labeled accurately, and some images are labeled inaccurately. Wrong labels appear as a result of inaccuracy made by a radiologist in the process of manual annotation of computed tomography images. We propose methods for solving the segmentation problem in the case of inaccurately labeled training data. We use the U-Net neural network architecture with several modifications. Experiments on real computed tomography scans show that the proposed methods increase the segmentation accuracy.
Attentive Neural Controlled Differential Equations for Time-series Classification and Forecasting
Authors: Sheo Yon Jhin, Heejoo Shin, Seoyoung Hong, Solhee Park, Noseong Park
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Irregular Time Series, Representation Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

Neural networks inspired by differential equations have proliferated for the past several years. Neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs) and neural controlled differential equations (NCDEs) are two representative examples of them. In theory, NCDEs provide better representation learning capability for time-series data than NODEs. In particular, it is known that NCDEs are suitable for processing irregular time-series data. Whereas NODEs have been successfully extended after adopting attention, however, it had not been studied yet how to integrate attention into NCDEs. To this end, we present the method of Attentive Neural Controlled Differential Equations (ANCDEs) for time-series classification and forecasting, where dual NCDEs are used: one for generating attention values, and the other for evolving hidden vectors for a downstream machine learning task. We conduct experiments with three real-world time-series datasets and 10 baselines. After dropping some values, we also conduct irregular time-series experiments. Our method consistently shows the best accuracy in all cases by non-trivial margins. Our visualizations also show that the presented attention mechanism works as intended by focusing on crucial information.
Customer 360-degree Insights in Predicting Chronic Diabetes
Authors: Asish Satpathy, Satyajit Behari
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00

Chronic diseases such as diabetes are quite prevalent in the world and are responsible for a significant number of deaths per year. In addition, treatments for such chronic diseases account for a high healthcare cost. However, research has shown that diabetes can be proactively managed and prevented while lowering these healthcare costs. We have mined a sample of ten million customers' 360-degree data representing the state of Texas, USA, with attributes current as of late 2018. The sample received from a market research data vendor has over 1000 customer attributes consisting of demography, lifestyle, and in some cases self-reported chronic conditions. In this study, we have developed a classification model to predict chronic diabetes with an accuracy of 80%. We demonstrate a use case where a large volume of 360-degree customer data can be useful to predict and hence proactively prevent chronic diseases such as diabetes.
Estimating permeability of 3D micro-CT images by physics-informed CNNs based on DNS
Authors: Stephan Gärttner, Faruk O. Alpak, Andreas Meier, Nadja Ray, Florian Frank
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have experienced an increasing interest in their ability to perform a fast approximation of effective hydrodynamic parameters in porous media research and applications. This paper presents a novel methodology for permeability prediction from micro-CT scans of geological rock samples. The training data set for CNNs dedicated to permeability prediction consists of permeability labels that are typically generated by classical lattice Boltzmann methods (LBM) that simulate the flow through the pore space of the segmented image data. We instead perform direct numerical simulation (DNS) by solving the stationary Stokes equation in an efficient and distributed-parallel manner. As such, we circumvent the convergence issues of LBM that frequently are observed on complex pore geometries, and therefore, improve the generality and accuracy of our training data set. Using the DNS-computed permeabilities, a physics-informed CNN PhyCNN) is trained by additionally providing a tailored characteristic quantity of the pore space. More precisely, by exploiting the connection to flow problems on a graph representation of the pore space, additional information about confined structures is provided to the network in terms of the maximum flow value, which is the key innovative component of our workflow. The robustness of this approach is reflected by very high prediction accuracy, which is observed for a variety of sandstone samples from archetypal rock formations.
On Faster Convergence of Scaled Sign Gradient Descent
Authors: Xiuxian Li, Kuo-Yi Lin, Li Li, Yiguang Hong, Jie Chen
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00

Communication has been seen as a significant bottleneck in industrial applications over large-scale networks. To alleviate the communication burden, sign-based optimization algorithms have gained popularity recently in both industrial and academic communities, which is shown to be closely related to adaptive gradient methods, such as Adam. Along this line, this paper investigates faster convergence for a variant of sign-based gradient descent, called scaled signGD, in three cases: 1) the objective function is strongly convex; 2) the objective function is nonconvex but satisfies the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality; 3) the gradient is stochastic, called scaled signGD in this case. For the first two cases, it can be shown that the scaled signGD converges at a linear rate. For case 3), the algorithm is shown to converge linearly to a neighborhood of the optimal value when a constant learning rate is employed, and the algorithm converges at a rate of $O(1/k)$ when using a diminishing learning rate, where $k$ is the iteration number. The results are also extended to the distributed setting by majority vote in a parameter-server framework. Finally, numerical experiments on logistic regression are performed to corroborate the theoretical findings.
On the Complexity of Computing Markov Perfect Equilibrium in General-Sum Stochastic Games
Authors: Xiaotie Deng, Ningyuan Li, David Mguni, Jun Wang, Yaodong Yang
Date: 2021-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Similar to the role of Markov decision processes in reinforcement learning, Stochastic Games (SGs) lay the foundation for the study of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and sequential agent interactions. In this paper, we derive that computing an approximate Markov Perfect Equilibrium (MPE) in a finite-state discounted Stochastic Game within the exponential precision is \textbf{PPAD}-complete. We adopt a function with a polynomially bounded description in the strategy space to convert the MPE computation to a fixed-point problem, even though the stochastic game may demand an exponential number of pure strategies, in the number of states, for each agent. The completeness result follows the reduction of the fixed-point problem to {\sc End of the Line}. Our results indicate that finding an MPE in SGs is highly unlikely to be \textbf{NP}-hard unless \textbf{NP}=\textbf{co-NP}. Our work offers confidence for MARL research to study MPE computation on general-sum SGs and to develop fruitful algorithms as currently on zero-sum SGs.