pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DeepRapper: Neural Rap Generation with Rhyme and Rhythm Modeling
Authors: Lanqing Xue, Kaitao Song, Duocai Wu, Xu Tan, Nevin L. Zhang, Tao Qin, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Tie-Yan Liu
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Rhythm

Rap generation, which aims to produce lyrics and corresponding singing beats, needs to model both rhymes and rhythms. Previous works for rap generation focused on rhyming lyrics but ignored rhythmic beats, which are important for rap performance. In this paper, we develop DeepRapper, a Transformer-based rap generation system that can model both rhymes and rhythms. Since there is no available rap dataset with rhythmic beats, we develop a data mining pipeline to collect a large-scale rap dataset, which includes a large number of rap songs with aligned lyrics and rhythmic beats. Second, we design a Transformer-based autoregressive language model which carefully models rhymes and rhythms. Specifically, we generate lyrics in the reverse order with rhyme representation and constraint for rhyme enhancement and insert a beat symbol into lyrics for rhythm/beat modeling. To our knowledge, DeepRapper is the first system to generate rap with both rhymes and rhythms. Both objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate that DeepRapper generates creative and high-quality raps with rhymes and rhythms. Code will be released on GitHub.
Detecting Concept Drift With Neural Network Model Uncertainty
Authors: Lucas Baier, Tim Schlör, Jakob Schöffer, Niklas Kühl
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Drift Detection, model

Deployed machine learning models are confronted with the problem of changing data over time, a phenomenon also called concept drift. While existing approaches of concept drift detection already show convincing results, they require true labels as a prerequisite for successful drift detection. Especially in many real-world application scenarios-like the ones covered in this work-true labels are scarce, and their acquisition is expensive. Therefore, we introduce a new algorithm for drift detection, Uncertainty Drift Detection (UDD), which is able to detect drifts without access to true labels. Our approach is based on the uncertainty estimates provided by a deep neural network in combination with Monte Carlo Dropout. Structural changes over time are detected by applying the ADWIN technique on the uncertainty estimates, and detected drifts trigger a retraining of the prediction model. In contrast to input data-based drift detection, our approach considers the effects of the current input data on the properties of the prediction model rather than detecting change on the input data only (which can lead to unnecessary retrainings). We show that UDD outperforms other state-of-the-art strategies on two synthetic as well as ten real-world data sets for both regression and classification tasks.
Control of rough terrain vehicles using deep reinforcement learning
Authors: Viktor Wiberg, Erik Wallin, Martin Servin, Tomas Nordfjell
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We explore the potential to control terrain vehicles using deep reinforcement in scenarios where human operators and traditional control methods are inadequate. This letter presents a controller that perceives, plans, and successfully controls a 16-tonne forestry vehicle with two frame articulation joints, six wheels, and their actively articulated suspensions to traverse rough terrain. The carefully shaped reward signal promotes safe, environmental, and efficient driving, which leads to the emergence of unprecedented driving skills. We test learned skills in a virtual environment, including terrains reconstructed from high-density laser scans of forest sites. The controller displays the ability to handle obstructing obstacles, slopes up to 27$^\circ$, and a variety of natural terrains, all with limited wheel slip, smooth, and upright traversal with intelligent use of the active suspensions. The results confirm that deep reinforcement learning has the potential to enhance control of vehicles with complex dynamics and high-dimensional observation data compared to human operators or traditional control methods, especially in rough terrain.
Winning at Any Cost -- Infringing the Cartel Prohibition With Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Michael Schlechtinger, Damaris Kosack, Heiko Paulheim, Thomas Fetzer
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Pricing decisions are increasingly made by AI. Thanks to their ability to train with live market data while making decisions on the fly, deep reinforcement learning algorithms are especially effective in taking such pricing decisions. In e-commerce scenarios, multiple reinforcement learning agents can set prices based on their competitor's prices. Therefore, research states that agents might end up in a state of collusion in the long run. To further analyze this issue, we build a scenario that is based on a modified version of a prisoner's dilemma where three agents play the game of rock paper scissors. Our results indicate that the action selection can be dissected into specific stages, establishing the possibility to develop collusion prevention systems that are able to recognize situations which might lead to a collusion between competitors. We furthermore provide evidence for a situation where agents are capable of performing a tacit cooperation strategy without being explicitly trained to do so.
GraspME -- Grasp Manifold Estimator
Authors: Janik Hager, Ruben Bauer, Marc Toussaint, Jim Mainprice
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Keypoint Estimation

In this paper, we introduce a Grasp Manifold Estimator (GraspME) to detect grasp affordances for objects directly in 2D camera images. To perform manipulation tasks autonomously it is crucial for robots to have such graspability models of the surrounding objects. Grasp manifolds have the advantage of providing continuously infinitely many grasps, which is not the case when using other grasp representations such as predefined grasp points. For instance, this property can be leveraged in motion optimization to define goal sets as implicit surface constraints in the robot configuration space. In this work, we restrict ourselves to the case of estimating possible end-effector positions directly from 2D camera images. To this extend, we define grasp manifolds via a set of key points and locate them in images using a Mask R-CNN backbone. Using learned features allows generalizing to different view angles, with potentially noisy images, and objects that were not part of the training set. We rely on simulation data only and perform experiments on simple and complex objects, including unseen ones. Our framework achieves an inference speed of 11.5 fps on a GPU, an average precision for keypoint estimation of 94.5% and a mean pixel distance of only 1.29. This shows that we can estimate the objects very well via bounding boxes and segmentation masks as well as approximate the correct grasp manifold's keypoint coordinates.
Provable Convergence of Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient Method for Over-Parameterized Neural Networks
Authors: Xin Liu, Zhisong Pan, Wei Tao
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00

Momentum methods, such as heavy ball method~(HB) and Nesterov's accelerated gradient method~(NAG), have been widely used in training neural networks by incorporating the history of gradients into the current updating process. In practice, they often provide improved performance over (stochastic) gradient descent~(GD) with faster convergence. Despite these empirical successes, theoretical understandings of their accelerated convergence rates are still lacking. Recently, some attempts have been made by analyzing the trajectories of gradient-based methods in an over-parameterized regime, where the number of the parameters is significantly larger than the number of the training instances. However, the majority of existing theoretical work is mainly concerned with GD and the established convergence result of NAG is inferior to HB and GD, which fails to explain the practical success of NAG. In this paper, we take a step towards closing this gap by analyzing NAG in training a randomly initialized over-parameterized two-layer fully connected neural network with ReLU activation. Despite the fact that the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth, we show that NAG converges to a global minimum at a non-asymptotic linear rate $(1-\Theta(1/\sqrt{\kappa}))^t$, where $\kappa > 1$ is the condition number of a gram matrix and $t$ is the number of the iterations. Compared to the convergence rate $(1-\Theta(1/{\kappa}))^t$ of GD, our result provides theoretical guarantees for the acceleration of NAG in neural network training. Furthermore, our findings suggest that NAG and HB have similar convergence rate. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets to validate the correctness of our theoretical results.
ARM-Net: Adaptive Relation Modeling Network for Structured Data
Authors: Shaofeng Cai, Kaiping Zheng, Gang Chen, H. V. Jagadish, Beng Chin Ooi, Meihui Zhang
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decision Making, Relation

Relational databases are the de facto standard for storing and querying structured data, and extracting insights from structured data requires advanced analytics. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved super-human prediction performance in particular data types, e.g., images. However, existing DNNs may not produce meaningful results when applied to structured data. The reason is that there are correlations and dependencies across combinations of attribute values in a table, and these do not follow simple additive patterns that can be easily mimicked by a DNN. The number of possible such cross features is combinatorial, making them computationally prohibitive to model. Furthermore, the deployment of learning models in real-world applications has also highlighted the need for interpretability, especially for high-stakes applications, which remains another issue of concern to DNNs. In this paper, we present ARM-Net, an adaptive relation modeling network tailored for structured data, and a lightweight framework ARMOR based on ARM-Net for relational data analytics. The key idea is to model feature interactions with cross features selectively and dynamically, by first transforming the input features into exponential space, and then determining the interaction order and interaction weights adaptively for each cross feature. We propose a novel sparse attention mechanism to dynamically generate the interaction weights given the input tuple, so that we can explicitly model cross features of arbitrary orders with noisy features filtered selectively. Then during model inference, ARM-Net can specify the cross features being used for each prediction for higher accuracy and better interpretability. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that ARM-Net consistently outperforms existing models and provides more interpretable predictions for data-driven decision making.
A System for Traded Control Teleoperation of Manipulation Tasks using Intent Prediction from Hand Gestures
Authors: Yoojin Oh, Marc Toussaint, Jim Mainprice
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Prediction

This paper presents a teleoperation system that includes robot perception and intent prediction from hand gestures. The perception module identifies the objects present in the robot workspace and the intent prediction module which object the user likely wants to grasp. This architecture allows the approach to rely on traded control instead of direct control: we use hand gestures to specify the goal objects for a sequential manipulation task, the robot then autonomously generates a grasping or a retrieving motion using trajectory optimization. The perception module relies on the model-based tracker to precisely track the 6D pose of the objects and makes use of a state of the art learning-based object detection and segmentation method, to initialize the tracker by automatically detecting objects in the scene. Goal objects are identified from user hand gestures using a trained a multi-layer perceptron classifier. After presenting all the components of the system and their empirical evaluation, we present experimental results comparing our pipeline to a direct traded control approach (i.e., one that does not use prediction) which shows that using intent prediction allows to bring down the overall task execution time.
Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning via Model-Ensemble Exploration and Exploitation
Authors: Yao Yao, Li Xiao, Zhicheng An, Wanpeng Zhang, Dijun Luo
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Model-based deep reinforcement learning has achieved success in various domains that require high sample efficiencies, such as Go and robotics. However, there are some remaining issues, such as planning efficient explorations to learn more accurate dynamic models, evaluating the uncertainty of the learned models, and more rational utilization of models. To mitigate these issues, we present MEEE, a model-ensemble method that consists of optimistic exploration and weighted exploitation. During exploration, unlike prior methods directly selecting the optimal action that maximizes the expected accumulative return, our agent first generates a set of action candidates and then seeks out the optimal action that takes both expected return and future observation novelty into account. During exploitation, different discounted weights are assigned to imagined transition tuples according to their model uncertainty respectively, which will prevent model predictive error propagation in agent training. Experiments on several challenging continuous control benchmark tasks demonstrated that our approach outperforms other model-free and model-based state-of-the-art methods, especially in sample complexity.
An Explainable AI System for the Diagnosis of High Dimensional Biomedical Data
Authors: Alfred Ultsch, Jörg Hoffmann, Maximilian Röhnert, Malte Von Bonin, Uta Oelschlägel, Cornelia Brendel, Michael C. Thrun
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Typical state of the art flow cytometry data samples consists of measures of more than 100.000 cells in 10 or more features. AI systems are able to diagnose such data with almost the same accuracy as human experts. However, there is one central challenge in such systems: their decisions have far-reaching consequences for the health and life of people, and therefore, the decisions of AI systems need to be understandable and justifiable by humans. In this work, we present a novel explainable AI method, called ALPODS, which is able to classify (diagnose) cases based on clusters, i.e., subpopulations, in the high-dimensional data. ALPODS is able to explain its decisions in a form that is understandable for human experts. For the identified subpopulations, fuzzy reasoning rules expressed in the typical language of domain experts are generated. A visualization method based on these rules allows human experts to understand the reasoning used by the AI system. A comparison to a selection of state of the art explainable AI systems shows that ALPODS operates efficiently on known benchmark data and also on everyday routine case data.
Boosting Transferability of Targeted Adversarial Examples via Hierarchical Generative Networks
Authors: Xiao Yang, Yinpeng Dong, Tianyu Pang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML Workshop AML 2021 7

Transfer-based adversarial attacks can evaluate model robustness in the black-box setting. Several methods have demonstrated impressive untargeted transferability, however, it is still challenging to efficiently produce targeted transferability. To this end, we develop a simple yet effective framework to craft targeted transfer-based adversarial examples, applying a hierarchical generative network. In particular, we contribute to amortized designs that well adapt to multi-class targeted attacks. Extensive experiments on ImageNet show that our method improves the success rates of targeted black-box attacks by a significant margin over the existing methods -- it reaches an average success rate of 29.1\% against six diverse models based only on one substitute white-box model, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art gradient-based attack methods. Moreover, the proposed method is also more efficient beyond an order of magnitude than gradient-based methods.
Why is Pruning at Initialization Immune to Reinitializing and Shuffling?
Authors: Sahib Singh, Rosanne Liu
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00

Recent studies assessing the efficacy of pruning neural networks methods uncovered a surprising finding: when conducting ablation studies on existing pruning-at-initialization methods, namely SNIP, GraSP, SynFlow, and magnitude pruning, performances of these methods remain unchanged and sometimes even improve when randomly shuffling the mask positions within each layer (Layerwise Shuffling) or sampling new initial weight values (Reinit), while keeping pruning masks the same. We attempt to understand the reason behind such network immunity towards weight/mask modifications, by studying layer-wise statistics before and after randomization operations. We found that under each of the pruning-at-initialization methods, the distribution of unpruned weights changed minimally with randomization operations.
Continual Contrastive Learning for Image Classification
Authors: Zhiwei Lin, Yongtao Wang, Hongxiang Lin
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Continual Learning, Contrastive Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Recently, self-supervised representation learning gives further development in multimedia technology. Most existing self-supervised learning methods are applicable to packaged data. However, when it comes to streamed data, they are suffering from a catastrophic forgetting problem, which is not studied extensively. In this paper, we make the first attempt to tackle the catastrophic forgetting problem in the mainstream self-supervised methods, i.e., contrastive learning methods. Specifically, we first develop a rehearsal-based framework combined with a novel sampling strategy and a self-supervised knowledge distillation to transfer information over time efficiently. Then, we propose an extra sample queue to help the network separate the feature representations of old and new data in the embedding space. Experimental results show that compared with the naive self-supervised baseline, which learns tasks one by one without taking any technique, we improve the image classification accuracy by 1.60% on CIFAR-100, 2.86% on ImageNet-Sub, and 1.29% on ImageNet-Full under 10 incremental steps setting. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/ContinualContrastiveLearning.
Single Model for Influenza Forecasting of Multiple Countries by Multi-task Learning
Authors: Taichi Murayama, Shoko Wakamiya, Eiji Aramaki
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

The accurate forecasting of infectious epidemic diseases such as influenza is a crucial task undertaken by medical institutions. Although numerous flu forecasting methods and models based mainly on historical flu activity data and online user-generated contents have been proposed in previous studies, no flu forecasting model targeting multiple countries using two types of data exists at present. Our paper leverages multi-task learning to tackle the challenge of building one flu forecasting model targeting multiple countries; each country as each task. Also, to develop the flu prediction model with higher performance, we solved two issues; finding suitable search queries, which are part of the user-generated contents, and how to leverage search queries efficiently in the model creation. For the first issue, we propose the transfer approaches from English to other languages. For the second issue, we propose a novel flu forecasting model that takes advantage of search queries using an attention mechanism and extend the model to a multi-task model for multiple countries' flu forecasts. Experiments on forecasting flu epidemics in five countries demonstrate that our model significantly improved the performance by leveraging the search queries and multi-task learning compared to the baselines.
Learning Geometric Combinatorial Optimization Problems using Self-attention and Domain Knowledge
Authors: Jaeseung Lee, Woojin Choi, Jibum Kim
Date: 2021-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Decoder, Traveling Salesman Problem

Combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) are an important research topic in various fields. In recent times, there have been many attempts to solve COPs using deep learning-based approaches. We propose a novel neural network model that solves COPs involving geometry based on self-attention and a new attention mechanism. The proposed model is designed such that the model efficiently learns point-to-point relationships in COPs involving geometry using self-attention in the encoder. We propose efficient input and output sequence ordering methods that reduce ambiguities such that the model learns the sequences more regularly and effectively. Geometric COPs involve geometric requirements that need to be satisfied. In the decoder, a new masking scheme using domain knowledge is proposed to provide a high penalty when the geometric requirement of the problem is not satisfied. The proposed neural net is a flexible framework that can be applied to various COPs involving geometry. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for three COPs involving geometry: Delaunay triangulation, convex hull, and the planar Traveling Salesman problem. Our experimental results show that the proposed model exhibits competitive performance in finding approximate solutions for solving these problems.
Improve Agents without Retraining: Parallel Tree Search with Off-Policy Correction
Authors: Assaf Hallak, Gal Dalal, Steven Dalton, Iuri Frosio, Shie Mannor, Gal Chechik
Date: 2021-07-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Atari Games, GPU

Tree Search (TS) is crucial to some of the most influential successes in reinforcement learning. Here, we tackle two major challenges with TS that limit its usability: \textit{distribution shift} and \textit{scalability}. We first discover and analyze a counter-intuitive phenomenon: action selection through TS and a pre-trained value function often leads to lower performance compared to the original pre-trained agent, even when having access to the exact state and reward in future steps. We show this is due to a distribution shift to areas where value estimates are highly inaccurate and analyze this effect using Extreme Value theory. To overcome this problem, we introduce a novel off-policy correction term that accounts for the mismatch between the pre-trained value and its corresponding TS policy by penalizing under-sampled trajectories. We prove that our correction eliminates the above mismatch and bound the probability of sub-optimal action selection. Our correction significantly improves pre-trained Rainbow agents without any further training, often more than doubling their scores on Atari games. Next, we address the scalability issue given by the computational complexity of exhaustive TS that scales exponentially with the tree depth. We introduce Batch-BFS: a GPU breadth-first search that advances all nodes in each depth of the tree simultaneously. Batch-BFS reduces runtime by two orders of magnitude and, beyond inference, enables also training with TS of depths that were not feasible before. We train DQN agents from scratch using TS and show improvement in several Atari games compared to both the original DQN and the more advanced Rainbow. The code for BCTS can be found in \url{https://github.com/NVlabs/bcts}.