pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Aggregating Bipolar Opinions (With Appendix)
Authors: Stefan Lauren, Francesco Belardinelli, Francesca Toni
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00

We introduce a novel method to aggregate Bipolar Argumentation (BA) Frameworks expressing opinions by different parties in debates. We use Bipolar Assumption-based Argumentation (ABA) as an all-encompassing formalism for BA under different semantics. By leveraging on recent results on judgement aggregation in Social Choice Theory, we prove several preservation results, both positive and negative, for relevant properties of Bipolar ABA.
Nonlinear Independent Component Analysis for Discrete-Time and Continuous-Time Signals
Authors: Alexander Schell, Harald Oberhauser
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: blind source separation, Contrastive Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We study the classical problem of recovering a multidimensional source signal from observations of nonlinear mixtures of this signal. We show that this recovery is possible (up to a permutation and monotone scaling of the source's original component signals) if the mixture is due to a sufficiently differentiable and invertible but otherwise arbitrarily nonlinear function and the component signals of the source are statistically independent with 'non-degenerate' second-order statistics. The latter assumption requires the source signal to meet one of three regularity conditions which essentially ensure that the source is sufficiently far away from the non-recoverable extremes of being deterministic or constant in time. These assumptions, which cover many popular time series models and stochastic processes, allow us to reformulate the initial problem of nonlinear blind source separation as a simple-to-state problem of optimisation-based function approximation. We propose to solve this approximation problem by minimizing a novel type of objective function that efficiently quantifies the mutual statistical dependence between multiple stochastic processes via cumulant-like statistics. This yields a scalable and direct new method for nonlinear Independent Component Analysis with widely applicable theoretical guarantees and for which our experiments indicate good performance.
Feedback in Imitation Learning: The Three Regimes of Covariate Shift
Authors: Jonathan Spencer, Sanjiban Choudhury, Arun Venkatraman, Brian Ziebart, J. Andrew Bagnell
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Decision Making, Imitation Learning

Imitation learning practitioners have often noted that conditioning policies on previous actions leads to a dramatic divergence between "held out" error and performance of the learner in situ. Interactive approaches can provably address this divergence but require repeated querying of a demonstrator. Recent work identifies this divergence as stemming from a "causal confound" in predicting the current action, and seek to ablate causal aspects of current state using tools from causal inference. In this work, we argue instead that this divergence is simply another manifestation of covariate shift, exacerbated particularly by settings of feedback between decisions and input features. The learner often comes to rely on features that are strongly predictive of decisions, but are subject to strong covariate shift. Our work demonstrates a broad class of problems where this shift can be mitigated, both theoretically and practically, by taking advantage of a simulator but without any further querying of expert demonstration. We analyze existing benchmarks used to test imitation learning approaches and find that these benchmarks are realizable and simple and thus insufficient for capturing the harder regimes of error compounding seen in real-world decision making problems. We find, in a surprising contrast with previous literature, but consistent with our theory, that naive behavioral cloning provides excellent results. We detail the need for new standardized benchmarks that capture the phenomena seen in robotics problems.
ChainCQG: Flow-Aware Conversational Question Generation
Authors: Jing Gu, Mostafa Mirshekari, Zhou Yu, Aaron Sisto
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

Conversational systems enable numerous valuable applications, and question-answering is an important component underlying many of these. However, conversational question-answering remains challenging due to the lack of realistic, domain-specific training data. Inspired by this bottleneck, we focus on conversational question generation as a means to generate synthetic conversations for training and evaluation purposes. We present a number of novel strategies to improve conversational flow and accommodate varying question types and overall fluidity. Specifically, we design ChainCQG as a two-stage architecture that learns question-answer representations across multiple dialogue turns using a flow propagation training strategy.ChainCQG significantly outperforms both answer-aware and answer-unaware SOTA baselines (e.g., up to 48% BLEU-1 improvement). Additionally, our model is able to generate different types of questions, with improved fluidity and coreference alignment.
Learning the Update Operator for 2D/3D Image Registration
Authors: Srikrishna Jaganathan, Jian Wang, Anja Borsdorf, Andreas Maier
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Registration, Operator learning

Image guidance in minimally invasive interventions is usually provided using live 2D X-ray imaging. To enhance the information available during the intervention, the preoperative volume can be overlaid over the 2D images using 2D/3D image registration. Recently, deep learning-based 2D/3D registration methods have shown promising results by improving computational efficiency and robustness. However, there is still a gap in terms of registration accuracy compared to traditional optimization-based methods. We aim to address this gap by incorporating traditional methods in deep neural networks using known operator learning. As an initial step in this direction, we propose to learn the update step of an iterative 2D/3D registration framework based on the Point-to-Plane Correspondence model. We embed the Point-to-Plane Correspondence model as a known operator in our deep neural network and learn the update step for the iterative registration. We show an improvement of 1.8 times in terms of registration accuracy for the update step prediction compared to learning without the known operator.
Machine Learning for Auxiliary Sources
Authors: Daniele Casati
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Position

We rewrite the numerical ansatz of the Method of Auxiliary Sources (MAS), typically used in computational electromagnetics, as a neural network, i.e. as a composed function of linear and activation layers. MAS is a numerical method for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) that employs point sources, which are also exact solutions of the considered PDE, as radial basis functions to match a given boundary condition. In the framework of neural networks we rely on optimization algorithms such as Adam to train MAS and find both its optimal coefficients and positions of the central singularities of the sources. In this work we also show that the MAS ansatz trained as a neural network can be used, in the case of an unknown function with a central singularity, to detect the position of such singularity.
Eliciting judgements about dependent quantities of interest: The SHELF extension and copula methods illustrated using an asthma case study
Authors: Björn Holzhauer, Lisa V. Hampson, John Paul Gosling, Björn Bornkamp, Joseph Kahn, Markus R. Lange, Wen-Lin Luo, Caterina Brindicci, David Lawrence, Steffen Ballerstedt, Anthony O'Hagan
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00

Pharmaceutical companies regularly need to make decisions about drug development programs based on the limited knowledge from early stage clinical trials. In this situation, eliciting the judgements of experts is an attractive approach for synthesising evidence on the unknown quantities of interest. When calculating the probability of success for a drug development program, multiple quantities of interest - such as the effect of a drug on different endpoints - should not be treated as unrelated. We discuss two approaches for establishing a multivariate distribution for several related quantities within the SHeffield ELicitation Framework (SHELF). The first approach elicits experts' judgements about a quantity of interest conditional on knowledge about another one. For the second approach, we first elicit marginal distributions for each quantity of interest. Then, for each pair of quantities, we elicit the concordance probability that both lie on the same side of their respective elicited medians. This allows us to specify a copula to obtain the joint distribution of the quantities of interest. We show how these approaches were used in an elicitation workshop that was performed to assess the probability of success of the registrational program of an asthma drug. The judgements of the experts, which were obtained prior to completion of the pivotal studies, were well aligned with the final trial results.
Undecidability of Underfitting in Learning Algorithms
Authors: Sonia Sehra, David Flores, George D. Montanez
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Using recent machine learning results that present an information-theoretic perspective on underfitting and overfitting, we prove that deciding whether an encodable learning algorithm will always underfit a dataset, even if given unlimited training time, is undecidable. We discuss the importance of this result and potential topics for further research, including information-theoretic and probabilistic strategies for bounding learning algorithm fit.
Semi-Synchronous Federated Learning for Energy-Efficient Training and Accelerated Convergence in Cross-Silo Settings
Authors: Dimitris Stripelis, Jose Luis Ambite
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Federated Learning

There are situations where data relevant to machine learning problems are distributed across multiple locations that cannot share the data due to regulatory, competitiveness, or privacy reasons. Machine learning approaches that require data to be copied to a single location are hampered by the challenges of data sharing. Federated Learning (FL) is a promising approach to learn a joint model over all the available data across silos. In many cases, the sites participating in a federation have different data distributions and computational capabilities. In these heterogeneous environments, existing approaches exhibit poor performance: synchronous FL protocols are communication efficient, but have slow learning convergence and high energy cost; conversely, asynchronous FL protocols have faster convergence with lower energy cost, but higher communication. In this work, we introduce a novel energy-efficient Semi-Synchronous Federated Learning protocol that mixes local models periodically with minimal idle time and fast convergence. We show through extensive experiments over established benchmark datasets in the computer-vision domain as well as in real-world biomedical settings that our approach significantly outperforms previous work in data and computationally heterogeneous environments.
The EpiBench Platform to Propel AI/ML-based Epidemic Forecasting: A Prototype Demonstration Reaching Human Expert-level Performance
Authors: Ajitesh Srivastava, Tianjian Xu, Viktor K. Prasanna
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Epidemiology

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant effort has gone into developing ML-driven epidemic forecasting techniques. However, benchmarks do not exist to claim if a new AI/ML technique is better than the existing ones. The "covid-forecast-hub" is a collection of more than 30 teams, including us, that submit their forecasts weekly to the CDC. It is not possible to declare whether one method is better than the other using those forecasts because each team's submission may correspond to different techniques over the period and involve human interventions as the teams are continuously changing/tuning their approach. Such forecasts may be considered "human-expert" forecasts and do not qualify as AI/ML approaches, although they can be used as an indicator of human expert performance. We are interested in supporting AI/ML research in epidemic forecasting which can lead to scalable forecasting without human intervention. Which modeling technique, learning strategy, and data pre-processing technique work well for epidemic forecasting is still an open problem. To help advance the state-of-the-art AI/ML applied to epidemiology, a benchmark with a collection of performance points is needed and the current "state-of-the-art" techniques need to be identified. We propose EpiBench a platform consisting of community-driven benchmarks for AI/ML applied to epidemic forecasting to standardize the challenge with a uniform evaluation protocol. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of EpiBench which is currently running and accepting submissions for the task of forecasting COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US states and We demonstrate that we can utilize the prototype to develop an ensemble relying on fully automated epidemic forecasts (no human intervention) that reaches human-expert level ensemble currently being used by the CDC.
Building Representative Corpora from Illiterate Communities: A Review of Challenges and Mitigation Strategies for Developing Countries
Authors: Stephanie Hirmer, Alycia Leonard, Josephine Tumwesige, Costanza Conforti
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00

Most well-established data collection methods currently adopted in NLP depend on the assumption of speaker literacy. Consequently, the collected corpora largely fail to represent swathes of the global population, which tend to be some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in society, and often live in rural developing areas. Such underrepresented groups are thus not only ignored when making modeling and system design decisions, but also prevented from benefiting from development outcomes achieved through data-driven NLP. This paper aims to address the under-representation of illiterate communities in NLP corpora: we identify potential biases and ethical issues that might arise when collecting data from rural communities with high illiteracy rates in Low-Income Countries, and propose a set of practical mitigation strategies to help future work.
Escaping Saddle Points for Nonsmooth Weakly Convex Functions via Perturbed Proximal Algorithms
Authors: Minhui Huang
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00

We propose perturbed proximal algorithms that can provably escape strict saddles for nonsmooth weakly convex functions. The main results are based on a novel characterization of $\epsilon$-approximate local minimum for nonsmooth functions, and recent developments on perturbed gradient methods for escaping saddle points for smooth problems. Specifically, we show that under standard assumptions, the perturbed proximal point, perturbed proximal gradient and perturbed proximal linear algorithms find $\epsilon$-approximate local minimum for nonsmooth weakly convex functions in $O(\epsilon^{-2}\log(d)^4)$ iterations, where $d$ is the dimension of the problem.
Scattering Networks on the Sphere for Scalable and Rotationally Equivariant Spherical CNNs
Authors: Jason D. McEwen, Christopher G. R. Wallis, Augustine N. Mavor-Parker
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) constructed natively on the sphere have been developed recently and shown to be highly effective for the analysis of spherical data. While an efficient framework has been formulated, spherical CNNs are nevertheless highly computationally demanding; typically they cannot scale beyond spherical signals of thousands of pixels. We develop scattering networks constructed natively on the sphere that provide a powerful representational space for spherical data. Spherical scattering networks are computationally scalable and exhibit rotational equivariance, while their representational space is invariant to isometries and provides efficient and stable signal representations. By integrating scattering networks as an additional type of layer in the generalized spherical CNN framework, we show how they can be leveraged to scale spherical CNNs to the high-resolution data typical of many practical applications, with spherical signals of many tens of megapixels and beyond.
Bayesian multiscale deep generative model for the solution of high-dimensional inverse problems
Authors: Yingzhi Xia, Nicholas Zabaras
Date: 2021-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, parameter estimation

Estimation of spatially-varying parameters for computationally expensive forward models governed by partial differential equations is addressed. A novel multiscale Bayesian inference approach is introduced based on deep probabilistic generative models. Such generative models provide a flexible representation by inferring on each scale a low-dimensional latent encoding while allowing hierarchical parameter generation from coarse- to fine-scales. Combining the multiscale generative model with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), inference across scales is achieved enabling us to efficiently obtain posterior parameter samples at various scales. The estimation of coarse-scale parameters using a low-dimensional latent embedding captures global and notable parameter features using an inexpensive but inaccurate solver. MCMC sampling of the fine-scale parameters is enabled by utilizing the posterior information in the immediate coarser-scale. In this way, the global features are identified in the coarse-scale with inference of low-dimensional variables and inexpensive forward computation, and the local features are refined and corrected in the fine-scale. The developed method is demonstrated with two types of permeability estimation for flow in heterogeneous media. One is a Gaussian random field (GRF) with uncertain length scales, and the other is channelized permeability with the two regions defined by different GRFs. The obtained results indicate that the method allows high-dimensional parameter estimation while exhibiting stability, efficiency and accuracy.
Scenario Generation for Cooling, Heating, and Power Loads Using Generative Moment Matching Networks
Authors: Wenlong Liao, Yusen Wang, Yuelong Wang, Kody Powell, Qi Liu, Zhe Yang
Date: 2021-02-05 00:00:00

Scenario generations of cooling, heating, and power loads are of great significance for the economic operation and stability analysis of integrated energy systems. In this paper, a novel deep generative network is proposed to model cooling, heating, and power load curves based on a generative moment matching networks (GMMN) where an auto-encoder transforms high-dimensional load curves into low-dimensional latent variables and the maximum mean discrepancy represents the similarity metrics between the generated samples and the real samples. After training the model, the new scenarios are generated by feeding Gaussian noises to the scenario generator of the GMMN. Unlike the explicit density models, the proposed GMMN does not need to artificially assume the probability distribution of the load curves, which leads to stronger universality. The simulation results show that the GMMN not only fits the probability distribution of multi-class load curves well, but also accurately captures the shape (e.g., large peaks, fast ramps, and fluctuation), frequency-domain characteristics, and temporal-spatial correlations of cooling, heating, and power loads. Furthermore, the energy consumption of generated samples closely resembles that of real samples.
Securing V2I Communications in 5G and Beyond Wireless System Using Gradient Ascent Approach
Authors: Neji Mensi, Danda B. Rawat, Elyes Balti
Date: 2021-02-01 00:00:00

The 5G and beyond wireless systems, instead of being just an extension of 4G, are regarded as `network of networks' which is expected to integrate heterogeneous wireless networks including wireless vehicular networks (WVN). The WVN promises to solve many issues such as reducing road accidents, traffic jams, fuel consumption and commute time, which is subject to various security issues such as eavesdropping, where attackers attempt to overhear the secret transmitted signal passively (which makes the detection/defense very difficult). In this work, our objective is to implement a security scheme by improving the secrecy capacity in Sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands. Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) for 5G and beyond wireless network. Unlike previous works where the secrecy capacity is increased by randomly augmenting the source power or setting the system combiners/precoders, in this work we employ the Gradient Ascent algorithm to search for the best combiners/precoders that maximize the secrecy rate performance. We further present two different optimization scenarios: fixed and variable transmission power.
Symbolic Models for Infinite Networks of Control Systems: A Compositional Approach
Authors: Siyuan Liu, Navid Noroozi, Majid Zamani
Date: 2021-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

This paper presents a compositional framework for the construction of symbolic models for a network composed of a countably infinite number of finite-dimensional discrete-time control subsystems. We refer to such a network as infinite network. The proposed approach is based on the notion of alternating simulation functions. This notion relates a concrete network to its symbolic model with guaranteed mismatch bounds between their output behaviors. We propose a compositional approach to construct a symbolic model for an infinite network, together with an alternating simulation function, by composing symbolic models and alternating simulation functions constructed for subsystems. Assuming that each subsystem is incrementally input-to-state stable and under some small-gain type conditions, we present an algorithm for orderly constructing local symbolic models with properly designed quantization parameters. In this way, the proposed compositional approach can provide us a guideline for constructing an overall symbolic model with any desired approximation accuracy. A compositional controller synthesis scheme is also provided to enforce safety properties on the infinite network in a decentralized fashion. The effectiveness of our result is illustrated through a road traffic network consisting of infinitely many road cells.
Infant Cry Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Chunyan Ji, Ming Chen, Bin Li, Yi Pan
Date: 2021-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Diversity, General Classification, Node Classification

We propose an approach of graph convolutional networks for robust infant cry classification. We construct non-fully connected graphs based on the similarities among the relevant nodes in both supervised and semi-supervised node classification with convolutional neural networks to consider the short-term and long-term effects of infant cry signals related to inner-class and inter-class messages. The approach captures the diversity of variations within infant cries, especially for limited training samples. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated on Baby Chillanto Database and Baby2020 database. With as limited as 20% of labeled training data, our model outperforms that of CNN model with 80% labeled training data and the accuracy stably improves as the number of labeled training samples increases. The best results give significant improvements of 7.36% and 3.59% compared with the results of the CNN models on Baby Chillanto database and Baby2020 database respectively.