pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LocATe: End-to-end Localization of Actions in 3D with Transformers
Authors: Jiankai Sun, Bolei Zhou, Michael J. Black, Arjun Chandrasekaran
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Action Recognition, object-detection, Object Detection, Temporal Action Localization

Understanding a person's behavior from their 3D motion is a fundamental problem in computer vision with many applications. An important component of this problem is 3D Temporal Action Localization (3D-TAL), which involves recognizing what actions a person is performing, and when. State-of-the-art 3D-TAL methods employ a two-stage approach in which the action span detection task and the action recognition task are implemented as a cascade. This approach, however, limits the possibility of error-correction. In contrast, we propose LocATe, an end-to-end approach that jointly localizes and recognizes actions in a 3D sequence. Further, unlike existing autoregressive models that focus on modeling the local context in a sequence, LocATe's transformer model is capable of capturing long-term correlations between actions in a sequence. Unlike transformer-based object-detection and classification models which consider image or patch features as input, the input in 3D-TAL is a long sequence of highly correlated frames. To handle the high-dimensional input, we implement an effective input representation, and overcome the diffuse attention across long time horizons by introducing sparse attention in the model. LocATe outperforms previous approaches on the existing PKU-MMD 3D-TAL benchmark (mAP=93.2%). Finally, we argue that benchmark datasets are most useful where there is clear room for performance improvement. To that end, we introduce a new, challenging, and more realistic benchmark dataset, BABEL-TAL-20 (BT20), where the performance of state-of-the-art methods is significantly worse. The dataset and code for the method will be available for research purposes.
Prediction Algorithm for Heat Demand of Science and Technology Topics Based on Time Convolution Network
Authors: Cui Haiyan, Li Yawen, Xu Xin
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Thanks to the rapid development of deep learning, big data analysis technology is not only widely used in the field of natural language processing, but also more mature in the field of numerical prediction. It is of great significance for the subject heat prediction and analysis of science and technology demand data. How to apply theme features to accurately predict the theme heat of science and technology demand is the core to solve this problem. In this paper, a prediction method of subject heat of science and technology demand based on time convolution network (TCN) is proposed to obtain the subject feature representation of science and technology demand. Time series prediction is carried out based on TCN network and self attention mechanism, which increases the accuracy of subject heat prediction of science and technology demand data Experiments show that the prediction accuracy of this algorithm is better than other time series prediction methods on the real science and technology demand datasets.
An Intellectual Property Entity Recognition Method Based on Transformer and Technological Word Information
Authors: Yuhui Wang, Junping Du, Yingxia Shao
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Patent texts contain a large amount of entity information. Through named entity recognition, intellectual property entity information containing key information can be extracted from it, helping researchers to understand the patent content faster. Therefore, it is difficult for existing named entity extraction methods to make full use of the semantic information at the word level brought about by professional vocabulary changes. This paper proposes a method for extracting intellectual property entities based on Transformer and technical word information , and provides accurate word vector representation in combination with the BERT language method. In the process of word vector generation, the technical word information extracted by IDCNN is added to improve the understanding of intellectual property entities Representation ability. Finally, the Transformer encoder that introduces relative position encoding is used to learn the deep semantic information of the text from the sequence of word vectors, and realize entity label prediction. Experimental results on public datasets and annotated patent datasets show that the method improves the accuracy of entity recognition.
A Policy Driven AI-Assisted PoW Framework
Authors: Trisha Chakraborty, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Maxwell Young
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00

Proof of Work (PoW) based cyberdefense systems require incoming network requests to expend effort solving an arbitrary mathematical puzzle. Current state of the art is unable to differentiate between trustworthy and untrustworthy connections, requiring all to solve complex puzzles. In this paper, we introduce an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted PoW framework that utilizes IP traffic based features to inform an adaptive issuer which can then generate puzzles with varying hardness. The modular framework uses these capabilities to ensure that untrustworthy clients solve harder puzzles thereby incurring longer latency than authentic requests to receive a response from the server. Our preliminary findings reveal our approach effectively throttles untrustworthy traffic.
Leveraging Expert Guided Adversarial Augmentation For Improving Generalization in Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Aaron Reich, Jiaao Chen, Aastha Agrawal, Yanzhe Zhang, Diyi Yang
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Domain Generalization, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems often demonstrate great performance on in-distribution data, but perform poorly on examples drawn from a shifted distribution. One way to evaluate the generalization ability of NER models is to use adversarial examples, on which the specific variations associated with named entities are rarely considered. To this end, we propose leveraging expert-guided heuristics to change the entity tokens and their surrounding contexts thereby altering their entity types as adversarial attacks. Using expert-guided heuristics, we augmented the CoNLL 2003 test set and manually annotated it to construct a high-quality challenging set. We found that state-of-the-art NER systems trained on CoNLL 2003 training data drop performance dramatically on our challenging set. By training on adversarial augmented training examples and using mixup for regularization, we were able to significantly improve the performance on the challenging set as well as improve out-of-domain generalization which we evaluated by using OntoNotes data. We have publicly released our dataset and code at https://github.com/GT-SALT/Guided-Adversarial-Augmentation.
Online Continual Learning for Embedded Devices
Authors: Tyler L. Hayes, Christopher Kanan
Date: 2022-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Real-time on-device continual learning is needed for new applications such as home robots, user personalization on smartphones, and augmented/virtual reality headsets. However, this setting poses unique challenges: embedded devices have limited memory and compute capacity and conventional machine learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when updated on non-stationary data streams. While several online continual learning models have been developed, their effectiveness for embedded applications has not been rigorously studied. In this paper, we first identify criteria that online continual learners must meet to effectively perform real-time, on-device learning. We then study the efficacy of several online continual learning methods when used with mobile neural networks. We measure their performance, memory usage, compute requirements, and ability to generalize to out-of-domain inputs.
Mitigating Gender Bias in Machine Translation through Adversarial Learning
Authors: Eve Fleisig, Christiane Fellbaum
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Machine translation and other NLP systems often contain significant biases regarding sensitive attributes, such as gender or race, that worsen system performance and perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Recent preliminary research suggests that adversarial learning can be used as part of a model-agnostic bias mitigation method that requires no data modifications. However, adapting this strategy for machine translation and other modern NLP domains requires (1) restructuring training objectives in the context of fine-tuning pretrained large language models and (2) developing measures for gender or other protected variables for tasks in which these attributes must be deduced from the data itself. We present an adversarial learning framework that addresses these challenges to mitigate gender bias in seq2seq machine translation. Our framework improves the disparity in translation quality for sentences with male vs. female entities by 86% for English-German translation and 91% for English-French translation, with minimal effect on translation quality. The results suggest that adversarial learning is a promising technique for mitigating gender bias in machine translation.
Fully Convolutional Fractional Scaling
Authors: Michael Soloveitchik, Michael Werman
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00

We introduce a fully convolutional fractional scaling component, FCFS. Fully convolutional networks can be applied to any size input and previously did not support non-integer scaling. Our architecture is simple with an efficient single layer implementation. Examples and code implementations of three common scaling methods are published.
From Stance to Concern: Adaptation of Propositional Analysis to New Tasks and Domains
Authors: Brodie Mather, Bonnie J Dorr, Adam Dalton, William de Beaumont, Owen Rambow, Sonja M. Schmer-Galunder
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

We present a generalized paradigm for adaptation of propositional analysis (predicate-argument pairs) to new tasks and domains. We leverage an analogy between stances (belief-driven sentiment) and concerns (topical issues with moral dimensions/endorsements) to produce an explanatory representation. A key contribution is the combination of semi-automatic resource building for extraction of domain-dependent concern types (with 2-4 hours of human labor per domain) and an entirely automatic procedure for extraction of domain-independent moral dimensions and endorsement values. Prudent (automatic) selection of terms from propositional structures for lexical expansion (via semantic similarity) produces new moral dimension lexicons at three levels of granularity beyond a strong baseline lexicon. We develop a ground truth (GT) based on expert annotators and compare our concern detection output to GT, to yield 231% improvement in recall over baseline, with only a 10% loss in precision. F1 yields 66% improvement over baseline and 97.8% of human performance. Our lexically based approach yields large savings over approaches that employ costly human labor and model building. We provide to the community a newly expanded moral dimension/value lexicon, annotation guidelines, and GT.
Continual Sequence Generation with Adaptive Compositional Modules
Authors: Yanzhe Zhang, Xuezhi Wang, Diyi Yang
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Continual Learning, Transfer Learning

Continual learning is essential for real-world deployment when there is a need to quickly adapt the model to new tasks without forgetting knowledge of old tasks. Existing work on continual sequence generation either always reuses existing parameters to learn new tasks, which is vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting on dissimilar tasks, or blindly adds new parameters for every new task, which could prevent knowledge sharing between similar tasks. To get the best of both worlds, in this work, we propose continual sequence generation with adaptive compositional modules to adaptively add modules in transformer architectures and compose both old and new modules for new tasks. We also incorporate pseudo experience replay to facilitate knowledge transfer in those shared modules. Experiment results on various sequences of generation tasks show that our framework can adaptively add modules or reuse modules based on task similarity, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both performance and parameter efficiency. We make our code public at https://github.com/GT-SALT/Adaptive-Compositional-Modules.
Immersive Text Game and Personality Classification
Authors: Wanshui Li, Yifan Bai, Jiaxuan Lu, Kexin Yi
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

We designed and built a game called \textit{Immersive Text Game}, which allows the player to choose a story and a character, and interact with other characters in the story in an immersive manner of dialogues. The game is based on several latest models, including text generation language model, information extraction model, commonsense reasoning model, and psychology evaluation model. In the past, similar text games usually let players choose from limited actions instead of answering on their own, and not every time what characters said are determined by the player. Through the combination of these models and elaborate game mechanics and modes, the player will find some novel experiences as driven through the storyline.
Differentiable Reasoning over Long Stories -- Assessing Systematic Generalisation in Neural Models
Authors: Wanshui Li, Pasquale Minervini
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Graph Neural Network, Natural Language Understanding

Contemporary neural networks have achieved a series of developments and successes in many aspects; however, when exposed to data outside the training distribution, they may fail to predict correct answers. In this work, we were concerned about this generalisation issue and thus analysed a broad set of models systematically and robustly over long stories. Related experiments were conducted based on the CLUTRR, which is a diagnostic benchmark suite that can analyse generalisation of natural language understanding (NLU) systems by training over small story graphs and testing on larger ones. In order to handle the multi-relational story graph, we consider two classes of neural models: "E-GNN", the graph-based models that can process graph-structured data and consider the edge attributes simultaneously; and "L-Graph", the sequence-based models which can process linearized version of the graphs. We performed an extensive empirical evaluation, and we found that the modified recurrent neural network yield surprisingly accurate results across every systematic generalisation tasks which outperform the modified graph neural network, while the latter produced more robust models.
Towards Large-Scale Interpretable Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Dialogue Systems
Authors: Yi-Lin Tuan, Sajjad Beygi, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Qiaozi Gao, Alessandra Cervone, William Yang Wang
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Users interacting with voice assistants today need to phrase their requests in a very specific manner to elicit an appropriate response. This limits the user experience, and is partly due to the lack of reasoning capabilities of dialogue platforms and the hand-crafted rules that require extensive labor. One possible way to improve user experience and relieve the manual efforts of designers is to build an end-to-end dialogue system that can do reasoning itself while perceiving user's utterances. In this work, we propose a novel method to incorporate the knowledge reasoning capability into dialogue systems in a more scalable and generalizable manner. Our proposed method allows a single transformer model to directly walk on a large-scale knowledge graph to generate responses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to have transformer models generate responses by reasoning over differentiable knowledge graphs. We investigate the reasoning abilities of the proposed method on both task-oriented and domain-specific chit-chat dialogues. Empirical results show that this method can effectively and efficiently incorporate a knowledge graph into a dialogue system with fully-interpretable reasoning paths.
Qualia as physical measurements: a mathematical model of qualia and pure concepts
Authors: Pedro Resende
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00

A space of qualia is defined to be a sober topological space whose points are the qualia and whose open sets are the pure concepts in the sense of Lewis, carrying additional algebraic structure that conveys the conscious experience of subjective time and logical abstraction. This structure is analogous to that of a space of physical measurements. It is conjectured that qualia and measurements have the same nature, corresponding to fundamental processes via which classical information is produced and physically stored, and that therefore the hard problem of consciousness and the measurement problem are two facets of the same problem. The space of qualia is independent from any preexisting notions of spacetime and conscious agent, but its structure caters for a derived geometric model of observer. Intersubjectivity is based on relating different observers in a way that leads to a logical version of quantum superposition.
Neuro-physical dynamic load modeling using differentiable parametric optimization
Authors: Shrirang Abhyankar, Jan Drgona, Andrew August, Elliot Skomski, Aaron Tuor
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00

In this work, we investigate a data-driven approach for obtaining a reduced equivalent load model of distribution systems for electromechanical transient stability analysis. The proposed reduced equivalent is a neuro-physical model comprising of a traditional ZIP load model augmented with a neural network. This neuro-physical model is trained through differentiable programming. We discuss the formulation, modeling details, and training of the proposed model set up as a differential parametric program. The performance and accuracy of this neurophysical ZIP load model is presented on a medium-scale 350-bus transmission-distribution network.
Small Batch Sizes Improve Training of Low-Resource Neural MT
Authors: Àlex R. Atrio, Andrei Popescu-Belis
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICON 2021 12
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We study the role of an essential hyper-parameter that governs the training of Transformers for neural machine translation in a low-resource setting: the batch size. Using theoretical insights and experimental evidence, we argue against the widespread belief that batch size should be set as large as allowed by the memory of the GPUs. We show that in a low-resource setting, a smaller batch size leads to higher scores in a shorter training time, and argue that this is due to better regularization of the gradients during training.
Multi-view Multi-behavior Contrastive Learning in Recommendation
Authors: Yiqing Wu, Ruobing Xie, Yongchun Zhu, Xiang Ao, Xin Chen, Xu Zhang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Leyu Lin, Qing He
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Multi-behavior recommendation (MBR) aims to jointly consider multiple behaviors to improve the target behavior's performance. We argue that MBR models should: (1) model the coarse-grained commonalities between different behaviors of a user, (2) consider both individual sequence view and global graph view in multi-behavior modeling, and (3) capture the fine-grained differences between multiple behaviors of a user. In this work, we propose a novel Multi-behavior Multi-view Contrastive Learning Recommendation (MMCLR) framework, including three new CL tasks to solve the above challenges, respectively. The multi-behavior CL aims to make different user single-behavior representations of the same user in each view to be similar. The multi-view CL attempts to bridge the gap between a user's sequence-view and graph-view representations. The behavior distinction CL focuses on modeling fine-grained differences of different behaviors. In experiments, we conduct extensive evaluations and ablation tests to verify the effectiveness of MMCLR and various CL tasks on two real-world datasets, achieving SOTA performance over existing baselines. Our code will be available on \url{https://github.com/wyqing20/MMCLR}
Accelerating Integrated Task and Motion Planning with Neural Feasibility Checking
Authors: Lei Xu, Tianyu Ren, Georgia Chalvatzaki, Jan Peters
Date: 2022-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning, Task and Motion Planning

As robots play an increasingly important role in the industrial, the expectations about their applications for everyday living tasks are getting higher. Robots need to perform long-horizon tasks that consist of several sub-tasks that need to be accomplished. Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) provides a hierarchical framework to handle the sequential nature of manipulation tasks by interleaving a symbolic task planner that generates a possible action sequence, with a motion planner that checks the kinematic feasibility in the geometric world, generating robot trajectories if several constraints are satisfied, e.g., a collision-free trajectory from one state to another. Hence, the reasoning about the task plan's geometric grounding is taken over by the motion planner. However, motion planning is computationally intense and is usability as feasibility checker casts TAMP methods inapplicable to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce neural feasibility classifier (NFC), a simple yet effective visual heuristic for classifying the feasibility of proposed actions in TAMP. Namely, NFC will identify infeasible actions of the task planner without the need for costly motion planning, hence reducing planning time in multi-step manipulation tasks. NFC encodes the image of the robot's workspace into a feature map thanks to convolutional neural network (CNN). We train NFC using simulated data from TAMP problems and label the instances based on IK feasibility checking. Our empirical results in different simulated manipulation tasks show that our NFC generalizes to the entire robot workspace and has high prediction accuracy even in scenes with multiple obstructions. When combined with state-of-the-art integrated TAMP, our NFC enhances its performance while reducing its planning time.