pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A geometric analysis of nonlinear dynamics and its application to financial time series
Authors: Isao Shoji, Masahiro Nozawa
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

A geometric method to analyze nonlinear oscillations is discussed. We consider a nonlinear oscillation modeled by a second order ordinary differential equation without specifying the function form. By transforming the differential equation into the system of first order ordinary differential equations, the trajectory is embedded in $R^3$ as a curve, and thereby the time evolution of the original state can be translated into the behavior of the curve in $R^3$, or the vector field along the curve. We analyze the vector field to investigate the dynamic properties of a nonlinear oscillation. While the function form of the model is unspecified, the vector fields and those associated quantities can be estimated by a nonparametric filtering method. We apply the proposed analysis to the time series of the Japanese stock price index. The application shows that the vector field and its derivative will be used as the tools of picking up various signals that help understanding of the dynamic properties of the stock price index.
Receding Horizon Optimization for Disturbance-aware Predictive Control of Power Electronic Inverters
Authors: Zhengxi Chen, Xun Shen
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00

A disturbance-aware predictive control policy is proposed for DC-AC power inverters with the receding horizon optimization approach. First, a discrete event-driven hybrid automaton model has been constructed for the nonlinear inverter system dynamics. A control problem of infinite discrete state-space transition sequence optimization is formulated. A receding horizon optimization approach is applied to solve the discrete optimization problem piece-wisely on-line. Accordingly, disturbance-aware adaptive control is proposed, the external disturbance is sampled and estimated by an on-line Recursive Least Square (RLS) algorithm. Then it is elaborated that the conventional PWM control solution is a subset of solutions of the proposed control strategy and the code-transition between them is provided. By adding extra PWM constraints to the proposed control strategy, an Optimal PWM Control Mode (OPCM) is introduced as an example. The proposed controller can freely operate under the original Optimal Discrete Control Mode (ODCM) and the OPCM. The numerical simulation results have verified that the proposed discrete control strategy has realized disturbance-aware adaptive control of DC-AC inversion against load-shift, and ODCM has better control performance than OPCM. In addition, the proposed modeling and control frame has the potential to support other forms of control modes.
NetReAct: Interactive Learning for Network Summarization
Authors: Sorour E. Amiri, Bijaya Adhikari, John Wenskovitch, Alexander Rodriguez, Michelle Dowling, Chris North, B. Aditya Prakash
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00

Generating useful network summaries is a challenging and important problem with several applications like sensemaking, visualization, and compression. However, most of the current work in this space do not take human feedback into account while generating summaries. Consider an intelligence analysis scenario, where the analyst is exploring a similarity network between documents. The analyst can express her agreement/disagreement with the visualization of the network summary via iterative feedback, e.g. closing or moving documents ("nodes") together. How can we use this feedback to improve the network summary quality? In this paper, we present NetReAct, a novel interactive network summarization algorithm which supports the visualization of networks induced by text corpora to perform sensemaking. NetReAct incorporates human feedback with reinforcement learning to summarize and visualize document networks. Using scenarios from two datasets, we show how NetReAct is successful in generating high-quality summaries and visualizations that reveal hidden patterns better than other non-trivial baselines.
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations
Authors: Soujanya Poria, Navonil Majumder, Devamanyu Hazarika, Deepanway Ghosal, Rishabh Bhardwaj, Samson Yu Bai Jian, Pengfei Hong, Romila Ghosh, Abhinaba Roy, Niyati Chhaya, Alexander Gelbukh, Rada Mihalcea
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Emotion Entailment, Emotion Cause Extraction, Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

We address the problem of recognizing emotion cause in conversations, define two novel sub-tasks of this problem, and provide a corresponding dialogue-level dataset, along with strong Transformer-based baselines. The dataset is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/RECCON. Introduction: Recognizing the cause behind emotions in text is a fundamental yet under-explored area of research in NLP. Advances in this area hold the potential to improve interpretability and performance in affect-based models. Identifying emotion causes at the utterance level in conversations is particularly challenging due to the intermingling dynamics among the interlocutors. Method: We introduce the task of Recognizing Emotion Cause in CONversations with an accompanying dataset named RECCON, containing over 1,000 dialogues and 10,000 utterance cause-effect pairs. Furthermore, we define different cause types based on the source of the causes, and establish strong Transformer-based baselines to address two different sub-tasks on this dataset: causal span extraction and causal emotion entailment. Result: Our Transformer-based baselines, which leverage contextual pre-trained embeddings, such as RoBERTa, outperform the state-of-the-art emotion cause extraction approaches Conclusion: We introduce a new task highly relevant for (explainable) emotion-aware artificial intelligence: recognizing emotion cause in conversations, provide a new highly challenging publicly available dialogue-level dataset for this task, and give strong baseline results on this dataset.
Molecular CT: Unifying Geometry and Representation Learning for Molecules at Different Scales
Authors: Jun Zhang, Yao-Kun Lei, Yaqiang Zhou, Yi Isaac Yang, Yi Qin Gao
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Representation Learning

Deep learning is changing many areas in molecular physics, and it has shown great potential to deliver new solutions to challenging molecular modeling problems. Along with this trend arises the increasing demand of expressive and versatile neural network architectures which are compatible with molecular systems. A new deep neural network architecture, Molecular Configuration Transformer (Molecular CT), is introduced for this purpose. Molecular CT is composed of a relation-aware encoder module and a computationally universal geometry learning unit, thus able to account for the relational constraints between particles meanwhile scalable to different particle numbers and invariant with respect to the trans-rotational transforms. The computational efficiency and universality make Molecular CT versatile for a variety of molecular learning scenarios and especially appealing for transferable representation learning across different molecular systems. As examples, we show that Molecular CT enables representational learning for molecular systems at different scales, and achieves comparable or improved results on common benchmarks using a more light-weighted structure compared to baseline models.
Subject-independent Human Pose Image Construction with Commodity Wi-Fi
Authors: Shuang Zhou, Lingchao Guo, Zhaoming Lu, Xiangming Wen, Wei Zheng, Yiming Wang
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00

Recently, commodity Wi-Fi devices have been shown to be able to construct human pose images, i.e., human skeletons, as fine-grained as cameras. Existing papers achieve good results when constructing the images of subjects who are in the prior training samples. However, the performance drops when it comes to new subjects, i.e., the subjects who are not in the training samples. This paper focuses on solving the subject-generalization problem in human pose image construction. To this end, we define the subject as the domain. Then we design a Domain-Independent Neural Network (DINN) to extract subject-independent features and convert them into fine-grained human pose images. We also propose a novel training method to train the DINN and it has no re-training overhead comparing with the domain-adversarial approach. We build a prototype system and experimental results demonstrate that our system can construct fine-grained human pose images of new subjects with commodity Wi-Fi in both the visible and through-wall scenarios, which shows the effectiveness and the subject-generalization ability of our model.
Progressive One-shot Human Parsing
Authors: Haoyu He, Jing Zhang, Bhavani Thuraisingham, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Parsing, Metric Learning, One-Shot Segmentation

Prior human parsing models are limited to parsing humans into classes pre-defined in the training data, which is not flexible to generalize to unseen classes, e.g., new clothing in fashion analysis. In this paper, we propose a new problem named one-shot human parsing (OSHP) that requires to parse human into an open set of reference classes defined by any single reference example. During training, only base classes defined in the training set are exposed, which can overlap with part of reference classes. In this paper, we devise a novel Progressive One-shot Parsing network (POPNet) to address two critical challenges , i.e., testing bias and small sizes. POPNet consists of two collaborative metric learning modules named Attention Guidance Module and Nearest Centroid Module, which can learn representative prototypes for base classes and quickly transfer the ability to unseen classes during testing, thereby reducing testing bias. Moreover, POPNet adopts a progressive human parsing framework that can incorporate the learned knowledge of parent classes at the coarse granularity to help recognize the descendant classes at the fine granularity, thereby handling the small sizes issue. Experiments on the ATR-OS benchmark tailored for OSHP demonstrate POPNet outperforms other representative one-shot segmentation models by large margins and establishes a strong baseline. Source code can be found at https://github.com/Charleshhy/One-shot-Human-Parsing.
Improved Biomedical Word Embeddings in the Transformer Era
Authors: Jiho Noh, Ramakanth Kavuluru
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Word Embeddings, Word Similarity

Biomedical word embeddings are usually pre-trained on free text corpora with neural methods that capture local and global distributional properties. They are leveraged in downstream tasks using various neural architectures that are designed to optimize task-specific objectives that might further tune such embeddings. Since 2018, however, there is a marked shift from these static embeddings to contextual embeddings motivated by language models (e.g., ELMo, transformers such as BERT, and ULMFiT). These dynamic embeddings have the added benefit of being able to distinguish homonyms and acronyms given their context. However, static embeddings are still relevant in low resource settings (e.g., smart devices, IoT elements) and to study lexical semantics from a computational linguistics perspective. In this paper, we jointly learn word and concept embeddings by first using the skip-gram method and further fine-tuning them with correlational information manifesting in co-occurring Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) concepts in biomedical citations. This fine-tuning is accomplished with the BERT transformer architecture in the two-sentence input mode with a classification objective that captures MeSH pair co-occurrence. In essence, we repurpose a transformer architecture (typically used to generate dynamic embeddings) to improve static embeddings using concept correlations. We conduct evaluations of these tuned static embeddings using multiple datasets for word relatedness developed by previous efforts. Without selectively culling concepts and terms (as was pursued by previous efforts), we believe we offer the most exhaustive evaluation of static embeddings to date with clear performance improvements across the board. We provide our code and embeddings for public use for downstream applications and research endeavors: https://github.com/bionlproc/BERT-CRel-Embeddings
Learning Disentangled Semantic Representation for Domain Adaptation
Authors: Ruichu Cai, Zijian Li, Pengfei Wei, Jie Qiao, Kun Zhang, Zhifeng Hao
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation is an important but challenging task. Most of the existing domain adaptation methods struggle to extract the domain-invariant representation on the feature space with entangling domain information and semantic information. Different from previous efforts on the entangled feature space, we aim to extract the domain invariant semantic information in the latent disentangled semantic representation (DSR) of the data. In DSR, we assume the data generation process is controlled by two independent sets of variables, i.e., the semantic latent variables and the domain latent variables. Under the above assumption, we employ a variational auto-encoder to reconstruct the semantic latent variables and domain latent variables behind the data. We further devise a dual adversarial network to disentangle these two sets of reconstructed latent variables. The disentangled semantic latent variables are finally adapted across the domains. Experimental studies testify that our model yields state-of-the-art performance on several domain adaptation benchmark datasets.
Graph and Temporal Convolutional Networks for 3D Multi-person Pose Estimation in Monocular Videos
Authors: Yu Cheng, Bo wang, Bo Yang, Robby T. Tan
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Absolute Human Pose Estimation, 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation, 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation (absolute), 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation (root-relative), 3D Pose Estimation, Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation, Multi-Person Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Root Joint Localization

Despite the recent progress, 3D multi-person pose estimation from monocular videos is still challenging due to the commonly encountered problem of missing information caused by occlusion, partially out-of-frame target persons, and inaccurate person detection. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel framework integrating graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to robustly estimate camera-centric multi-person 3D poses that do not require camera parameters. In particular, we introduce a human-joint GCN, which, unlike the existing GCN, is based on a directed graph that employs the 2D pose estimator's confidence scores to improve the pose estimation results. We also introduce a human-bone GCN, which models the bone connections and provides more information beyond human joints. The two GCNs work together to estimate the spatial frame-wise 3D poses and can make use of both visible joint and bone information in the target frame to estimate the occluded or missing human-part information. To further refine the 3D pose estimation, we use our temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) to enforce the temporal and human-dynamics constraints. We use a joint-TCN to estimate person-centric 3D poses across frames, and propose a velocity-TCN to estimate the speed of 3D joints to ensure the consistency of the 3D pose estimation in consecutive frames. Finally, to estimate the 3D human poses for multiple persons, we propose a root-TCN that estimates camera-centric 3D poses without requiring camera parameters. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
To Talk or to Work: Flexible Communication Compression for Energy Efficient Federated Learning over Heterogeneous Mobile Edge Devices
Authors: Liang Li, Dian Shi, Ronghui Hou, Hui Li, Miao Pan, Zhu Han
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Recent advances in machine learning, wireless communication, and mobile hardware technologies promisingly enable federated learning (FL) over massive mobile edge devices, which opens new horizons for numerous intelligent mobile applications. Despite the potential benefits, FL imposes huge communication and computation burdens on participating devices due to periodical global synchronization and continuous local training, raising great challenges to battery constrained mobile devices. In this work, we target at improving the energy efficiency of FL over mobile edge networks to accommodate heterogeneous participating devices without sacrificing the learning performance. To this end, we develop a convergence-guaranteed FL algorithm enabling flexible communication compression. Guided by the derived convergence bound, we design a compression control scheme to balance the energy consumption of local computing (i.e., "working") and wireless communication (i.e., "talking") from the long-term learning perspective. In particular, the compression parameters are elaborately chosen for FL participants adapting to their computing and communication environments. Extensive simulations are conducted using various datasets to validate our theoretical analysis, and the results also demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in energy saving.
APIK: Active Physics-Informed Kriging Model with Partial Differential Equations
Authors: Jialei Chen, Zhehui Chen, Chuck Zhang, C. F. Jeff Wu
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

Kriging (or Gaussian process regression) is a popular machine learning method for its flexibility and closed-form prediction expressions. However, one of the key challenges in applying kriging to engineering systems is that the available measurement data is scarce due to the measurement limitations and high sensing costs. On the other hand, physical knowledge of the engineering system is often available and represented in the form of partial differential equations (PDEs). We present in this work a PDE Informed Kriging model (PIK), which introduces PDE information via a set of PDE points and conducts posterior prediction similar to the standard kriging method. The proposed PIK model can incorporate physical knowledge from both linear and nonlinear PDEs. To further improve learning performance, we propose an Active PIK framework (APIK) that designs PDE points to leverage the PDE information based on the PIK model and measurement data. The selected PDE points not only explore the whole input space but also exploit the locations where the PDE information is critical in reducing predictive uncertainty. Finally, an expectation-maximization algorithm is developed for parameter estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APIK in two synthetic examples, a shock wave case study, and a laser heating case study.
Time Series Domain Adaptation via Sparse Associative Structure Alignment
Authors: Ruichu Cai, Jiawei Chen, Zijian Li, Wei Chen, Keli Zhang, Junjian Ye, Zhuozhang Li, Xiaoyan Yang, Zhenjie Zhang
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Domain adaptation on time series data is an important but challenging task. Most of the existing works in this area are based on the learning of the domain-invariant representation of the data with the help of restrictions like MMD. However, such extraction of the domain-invariant representation is a non-trivial task for time series data, due to the complex dependence among the timestamps. In detail, in the fully dependent time series, a small change of the time lags or the offsets may lead to difficulty in the domain invariant extraction. Fortunately, the stability of the causality inspired us to explore the domain invariant structure of the data. To reduce the difficulty in the discovery of causal structure, we relax it to the sparse associative structure and propose a novel sparse associative structure alignment model for domain adaptation. First, we generate the segment set to exclude the obstacle of offsets. Second, the intra-variables and inter-variables sparse attention mechanisms are devised to extract associative structure time-series data with considering time lags. Finally, the associative structure alignment is used to guide the transfer of knowledge from the source domain to the target one. Experimental studies not only verify the good performance of our methods on three real-world datasets but also provide some insightful discoveries on the transferred knowledge.
Multiple-Perspective Clustering of Passive Wi-Fi Sensing Trajectory Data
Authors: Zann Koh, Yuren Zhou, Billy Pik Lik Lau, Chau Yuen, Bige Tuncer, Keng Hua Chong
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Information about the spatiotemporal flow of humans within an urban context has a wide plethora of applications. Currently, although there are many different approaches to collect such data, there lacks a standardized framework to analyze it. The focus of this paper is on the analysis of the data collected through passive Wi-Fi sensing, as such passively collected data can have a wide coverage at low cost. We propose a systematic approach by using unsupervised machine learning methods, namely k-means clustering and hierarchical agglomerative clustering (HAC) to analyze data collected through such a passive Wi-Fi sniffing method. We examine three aspects of clustering of the data, namely by time, by person, and by location, and we present the results obtained by applying our proposed approach on a real-world dataset collected over five months.
Are We On The Same Page? Hierarchical Explanation Generation for Planning Tasks in Human-Robot Teaming using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mehrdad Zakershahrak, Samira Ghodratnama
Date: 2020-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Decision Making, Explanation Generation

Providing explanations is considered an imperative ability for an AI agent in a human-robot teaming framework. The right explanation provides the rationale behind an AI agent's decision-making. However, to maintain the human teammate's cognitive demand to comprehend the provided explanations, prior works have focused on providing explanations in a specific order or intertwining the explanation generation with plan execution. Moreover, these approaches do not consider the degree of details required to share throughout the provided explanations. In this work, we argue that the agent-generated explanations, especially the complex ones, should be abstracted to be aligned with the level of details the human teammate desires to maintain the recipient's cognitive load. Therefore, learning a hierarchical explanations model is a challenging task. Moreover, the agent needs to follow a consistent high-level policy to transfer the learned teammate preferences to a new scenario while lower-level detailed plans are different. Our evaluation confirmed the process of understanding an explanation, especially a complex and detailed explanation, is hierarchical. The human preference that reflected this aspect corresponded exactly to creating and employing abstraction for knowledge assimilation hidden deeper in our cognitive process. We showed that hierarchical explanations achieved better task performance and behavior interpretability while reduced cognitive load. These results shed light on designing explainable agents utilizing reinforcement learning and planning across various domains.