pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Objective Diagnosis for Histopathological Images Based on Machine Learning Techniques: Classical Approaches and New Trends
Authors: Naira Elazab, Hassan Soliman, Shaker El-Sappagh, S. M. Riazul Islam, Mohammed Elmogy
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Diagnostic

Histopathology refers to the examination by a pathologist of biopsy samples. Histopathology images are captured by a microscope to locate, examine, and classify many diseases, such as different cancer types. They provide a detailed view of different types of diseases and their tissue status. These images are an essential resource with which to define biological compositions or analyze cell and tissue structures. This imaging modality is very important for diagnostic applications. The analysis of histopathology images is a prolific and relevant research area supporting disease diagnosis. In this paper, the challenges of histopathology image analysis are evaluated. An extensive review of conventional and deep learning techniques which have been applied in histological image analyses is presented. This review summarizes many current datasets and highlights important challenges and constraints with recent deep learning techniques, alongside possible future research avenues. Despite the progress made in this research area so far, it is still a significant area of open research because of the variety of imaging techniques and disease-specific characteristics.
Mode hunting through active information
Authors: Daniel Andrés Díaz-Pachón, Juan Pablo Sáenz, J. Sunil Rao, Jean-Eudes Dazard
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00

We propose a new method to find modes based on active information. We develop an algorithm that, when applied to the whole space, will say whether there are any modes present \textit{and} where they are; this algorithm will reduce the dimensionality without resorting to Principal Components; and more importantly, population-wise, will not detect modes when they are not present.
Challenges of Applying Deep Reinforcement Learning in Dynamic Dispatching
Authors: Hamed Khorasgani, HaiYan Wang, Chetan Gupta
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Dynamic dispatching aims to smartly allocate the right resources to the right place at the right time. Dynamic dispatching is one of the core problems for operations optimization in the mining industry. Theoretically, deep reinforcement learning (RL) should be a natural fit to solve this problem. However, the industry relies on heuristics or even human intuitions, which are often short-sighted and sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we review the main challenges in using deep RL to address the dynamic dispatching problem in the mining industry.
On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Bohan Li, Hao Zhou, Junxian He, Mingxuan Wang, Yiming Yang, Lei LI
Date: 2020-11-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings

Pre-trained contextual representations like BERT have achieved great success in natural language processing. However, the sentence embeddings from the pre-trained language models without fine-tuning have been found to poorly capture semantic meaning of sentences. In this paper, we argue that the semantic information in the BERT embeddings is not fully exploited. We first reveal the theoretical connection between the masked language model pre-training objective and the semantic similarity task theoretically, and then analyze the BERT sentence embeddings empirically. We find that BERT always induces a non-smooth anisotropic semantic space of sentences, which harms its performance of semantic similarity. To address this issue, we propose to transform the anisotropic sentence embedding distribution to a smooth and isotropic Gaussian distribution through normalizing flows that are learned with an unsupervised objective. Experimental results show that our proposed BERT-flow method obtains significant performance gains over the state-of-the-art sentence embeddings on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/bohanli/BERT-flow.
The Vulnerability of the Neural Networks Against Adversarial Examples in Deep Learning Algorithms
Authors: Rui Zhao
Date: 2020-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

With further development in the fields of computer vision, network security, natural language processing and so on so forth, deep learning technology gradually exposed certain security risks. The existing deep learning algorithms cannot effectively describe the essential characteristics of data, making the algorithm unable to give the correct result in the face of malicious input. Based on current security threats faced by deep learning, this paper introduces the problem of adversarial examples in deep learning, sorts out the existing attack and defense methods of the black box and white box, and classifies them. It briefly describes the application of some adversarial examples in different scenarios in recent years, compares several defense technologies of adversarial examples, and finally summarizes the problems in this research field and prospects for its future development. This paper introduces the common white box attack methods in detail, and further compares the similarities and differences between the attack of the black and white box. Correspondingly, the author also introduces the defense methods, and analyzes the performance of these methods against the black and white box attack.
Non-Equilibrium Skewness, Market Crises, and Option Pricing: Non-Linear Langevin Model of Markets with Supersymmetry
Authors: Igor Halperin
Date: 2020-11-03 00:00:00

This paper presents a tractable model of non-linear dynamics of market returns using a Langevin approach. Due to non-linearity of an interaction potential, the model admits regimes of both small and large return fluctuations. Langevin dynamics are mapped onto an equivalent quantum mechanical (QM) system. Borrowing ideas from supersymmetric quantum mechanics (SUSY QM), a parameterized ground state wave function (WF) of this QM system is used as a direct input to the model, which also fixes a non-linear Langevin potential. Using a two-component Gaussian mixture as a ground state WF with an asymmetric double well potential produces a tractable low-parametric model with interpretable parameters, referred to as the NES (Non-Equilibrium Skew) model. Supersymmetry (SUSY) is then used to find time-dependent solutions of the model in an analytically tractable way. Additional approximations give rise to a final practical version of the NES model, where real-measure and risk-neutral return distributions are given by three component Gaussian mixtures. This produces a closed-form approximation for option pricing in the NES model by a mixture of three Black-Scholes prices, providing accurate calibration to option prices for either benign or distressed market environments, while using only a single volatility parameter. These results stand in stark contrast to the most of other option pricing models such as local, stochastic, or rough volatility models that need more complex specifications of noise to fit the market data.
Scalable Unsupervised Multi-Criteria Trajectory Segmentation and Driving Preference Mining
Authors: Florian Barth, Stefan Funke, Tobias Skovgaard Jepsen, Claudius Proissl
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00

We present analysis techniques for large trajectory data sets that aim to provide a semantic understanding of trajectories reaching beyond them being point sequences in time and space. The presented techniques use a driving preference model w.r.t. road segment traversal costs, e.g., travel time and distance, to analyze and explain trajectories. In particular, we present trajectory mining techniques that can (a) find interesting points within a trajectory indicating, e.g., a via-point, and (b) recover the driving preferences of a driver based on their chosen trajectory. We evaluate our techniques on the tasks of via-point identification and personalized routing using a data set of more than 1 million vehicle trajectories collected throughout Denmark during a 3-year period. Our techniques can be implemented efficiently and are highly parallelizable, allowing them to scale to millions or billions of trajectories.
Challenges and Opportunities in Rapid Epidemic Information Propagation with Live Knowledge Aggregation from Social Media
Authors: Calton Pu, Abhijit Suprem, Rodrigo Alves Lima
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

A rapidly evolving situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic is a significant challenge for AI/ML models because of its unpredictability. %The most reliable indicator of the pandemic spreading has been the number of test positive cases. However, the tests are both incomplete (due to untested asymptomatic cases) and late (due the lag from the initial contact event, worsening symptoms, and test results). Social media can complement physical test data due to faster and higher coverage, but they present a different challenge: significant amounts of noise, misinformation and disinformation. We believe that social media can become good indicators of pandemic, provided two conditions are met. The first (True Novelty) is the capture of new, previously unknown, information from unpredictably evolving situations. The second (Fact vs. Fiction) is the distinction of verifiable facts from misinformation and disinformation. Social media information that satisfy those two conditions are called live knowledge. We apply evidence-based knowledge acquisition (EBKA) approach to collect, filter, and update live knowledge through the integration of social media sources with authoritative sources. Although limited in quantity, the reliable training data from authoritative sources enable the filtering of misinformation as well as capturing truly new information. We describe the EDNA/LITMUS tools that implement EBKA, integrating social media such as Twitter and Facebook with authoritative sources such as WHO and CDC, creating and updating live knowledge on the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Small Survey On Event Detection Using Twitter
Authors: Debanjan Datta
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Survey

A small survey on event detection using Twitter. This work first defines the problem statement, and then summarizes and collates the different research works towards solving the problem.
Using machine-learning modelling to understand macroscopic dynamics in a system of coupled maps
Authors: Francesco Borra, Marco Baldovin
Date: 2020-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Machine learning techniques not only offer efficient tools for modelling dynamical systems from data, but can also be employed as frontline investigative instruments for the underlying physics. Nontrivial information about the original dynamics, which would otherwise require sophisticated ad-hoc techniques, can be obtained by a careful usage of such methods. To illustrate this point, we consider as a case study the macroscopic motion emerging from a system of globally coupled maps. We build a coarse-grained Markov process for the macroscopic dynamics both with a machine learning approach and with a direct numerical computation of the transition probability of the coarse-grained process, and we compare the outcomes of the two analyses. Our purpose is twofold: on the one hand, we want to test the ability of the stochastic machine learning approach to describe nontrivial evolution laws, as the one considered in our study; on the other hand, we aim at gaining some insight into the physics of the macroscopic dynamics by modulating the information available to the network, we are able to infer important information about the effective dimension of the attractor, the persistence of memory effects and the multi-scale structure of the dynamics.
The Potential of Machine Learning and NLP for Handling Students' Feedback (A Short Survey)
Authors: Maryam Edalati
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This article provides a review of the literature of students' feedback papers published in recent years employing data mining techniques. In particular, the focus is to highlight those papers which are using either machine learning or deep learning approaches. Student feedback assessment is a hot topic which has attracted a lot of attention in recent times. The importance has increased manyfold due to the recent pandemic outbreak which pushed many colleges and universities to shift teaching from on-campus physical classes to online via eLearning platforms and tools including massive open online courses (MOOCs). Assessing student feedback is even more important now. This short survey paper, therefore, highlights recent trends in the natural language processing domain on the topic of automatic student feedback assessment. It presents techniques commonly utilized in this domain and discusses some future research directions.
Linking OpenStreetMap with Knowledge Graphs -- Link Discovery for Schema-Agnostic Volunteered Geographic Information
Authors: Nicolas Tempelmeier, Elena Demidova
Date: 2020-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction

Representations of geographic entities captured in popular knowledge graphs such as Wikidata and DBpedia are often incomplete. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a rich source of openly available, volunteered geographic information that has a high potential to complement these representations. However, identity links between the knowledge graph entities and OSM nodes are still rare. The problem of link discovery in these settings is particularly challenging due to the lack of a strict schema and heterogeneity of the user-defined node representations in OSM. In this article, we propose OSM2KG - a novel link discovery approach to predict identity links between OSM nodes and geographic entities in a knowledge graph. The core of the OSM2KG approach is a novel latent, compact representation of OSM nodes that captures semantic node similarity in an embedding. OSM2KG adopts this latent representation to train a supervised model for link prediction and utilises existing links between OSM and knowledge graphs for training. Our experiments conducted on several OSM datasets, as well as the Wikidata and DBpedia knowledge graphs, demonstrate that OSM2KG can reliably discover identity links. OSM2KG achieves an F1 score of 92.05% on Wikidata and of 94.17% on DBpedia on average, which corresponds to a 21.82 percentage points increase in F1 score on Wikidata compared to the best performing baselines.
A survey on practical adversarial examples for malware classifiers
Authors: Daniel Park, Bülent Yener
Date: 2020-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Detection, Survey

Machine learning based solutions have been very helpful in solving problems that deal with immense amounts of data, such as malware detection and classification. However, deep neural networks have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, or inputs that have been purposefully perturbed to result in an incorrect label. Researchers have shown that this vulnerability can be exploited to create evasive malware samples. However, many proposed attacks do not generate an executable and instead generate a feature vector. To fully understand the impact of adversarial examples on malware detection, we review practical attacks against malware classifiers that generate executable adversarial malware examples. We also discuss current challenges in this area of research, as well as suggestions for improvement and future research directions.
Crime Prediction Using Multiple-ANFIS Architecture and Spatiotemporal Data
Authors: Mashnoon Islam, Redwanul Karim, Kalyan Roy, Saif Mahmood, Sadat Hossain, M. Rashedur Rahman
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Crime Prediction, Decision Making, Prediction

Statistical values alone cannot bring the whole scenario of crime occurrences in the city of Dhaka. We need a better way to use these statistical values to predict crime occurrences and make the city a safer place to live. Proper decision-making for the future is key in reducing the rate of criminal offenses in an area or a city. If the law enforcement bodies can allocate their resources efficiently for the future, the rate of crime in Dhaka can be brought down to a minimum. In this work, we have made an initiative to provide an effective tool with which law enforcement officials and detectives can predict crime occurrences ahead of time and take better decisions easily and quickly. We have used several Fuzzy Inference Systems (FIS) and Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS) to predict the type of crime that is highly likely to occur at a certain place and time.
Detecting Synthetic Phenomenology in a Contained Artificial General Intelligence
Authors: Jason M. Pittman, Ashlyn Hanks
Date: 2020-11-06 00:00:00

Human-like intelligence in a machine is a contentious subject. Whether mankind should or should not pursue the creation of artificial general intelligence is hotly debated. As well, researchers have aligned in opposing factions according to whether mankind can create it. For our purposes, we assume mankind can and will do so. Thus, it becomes necessary to contemplate how to do so in a safe and trusted manner -- enter the idea of boxing or containment. As part of such thinking, we wonder how a phenomenology might be detected given the operational constraints imposed by any potential containment system. Accordingly, this work provides an analysis of existing measures of phenomenology through qualia and extends those ideas into the context of a contained artificial general intelligence.
Open-Source Morphology for Endangered Mordvinic Languages
Authors: Jack Rueter, Mika Hämäläinen, Niko Partanen
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Unity

This document describes shared development of finite-state description of two closely related but endangered minority languages, Erzya and Moksha. It touches upon morpholexical unity and diversity of the two languages and how this provides a motivation for shared open-source FST development. We describe how we have designed the transducers so that they can benefit from existing open-source infrastructures and are as reusable as possible.
The nonlinearity of interactions drives networks of neural oscillators to decoherence at strong coupling
Authors: Richa Tripathi, Shakti N. Menon, Sitabhra Sinha
Date: 2020-10-29 00:00:00

While phase oscillators are often used to model neuronal populations, in contrast to the Kuramoto paradigm, strong interactions between brain areas can be associated with loss of synchrony. Using networks of coupled oscillators described by neural mass models, we find that a transition to decoherence at increased coupling strength results from the fundamental nonlinearity, e.g., arising from refractoriness, of the interactions between the nodes. The nonlinearity-driven transition also depends on the connection topology, underlining the role of network structure in shaping brain activity.
From passive to active: Flexibility from electric vehicles in the context of transmission system development
Authors: Philipp Andreas Gunkel, Claire Bergaentzlé, Ida Græsted Jensen, Fabian Scheller
Date: 2020-11-11 00:00:00

Community electricity storage systems for multiple applications promise benefits over household electricity storage systems. More economical flexibility options such as demand response and sector coupling might reduce the market size for storage facilities. This paper assesses the economic performance of community electricity storage systems by taking competitive flexibility options into account. For this purpose, an actor-related, scenario-based optimization framework is applied. The results are in line with the literature and show that community storage systems are economically more efficient than household storage systems. Relative storage capacity reductions of community storage systems over household storage systems are possible, as the demand and generation profiles are balanced out among end users. On average, storage capacity reductions of 9% per household are possible in the base case, resulting in lower specific investments. The simultaneous application of demand-side flexibility options such as sector coupling and demand response enable a further capacity reduction of the community storage size by up to 23%. At the same time, the competition between flexibility options leads to smaller benefits regarding the community storage flexibility potential, which reduces the market viability for these applications. In the worst case, the cannibalization effects reach up to 38% between the flexibility measures. The losses of the flexibility benefits outweigh the savings of the capacity reduction whereby sector coupling constitutes a far greater influencing factor than demand response. Overall, in consideration of the stated cost trends, the economies of scale, and the reduction possibilities, a profitable community storage model might be reached between 2025 and 2035. Future work should focus on the analysis of policy frameworks.
A graph similarity for deep learning
Authors: Seongmin Ok
Date: 2020-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Deep Learning, Graph Classification, Graph Generation, Graph Regression, Graph Similarity, Node Classification

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successful in learning representations from graphs. Many popular GNNs follow the pattern of aggregate-transform: they aggregate the neighbors' attributes and then transform the results of aggregation with a learnable function. Analyses of these GNNs explain which pairs of non-identical graphs have different representations. However, we still lack an understanding of how similar these representations will be. We adopt kernel distance and propose transform-sum-cat as an alternative to aggregate-transform to reflect the continuous similarity between the node neighborhoods in the neighborhood aggregation. The idea leads to a simple and efficient graph similarity, which we name Weisfeiler-Leman similarity (WLS). In contrast to existing graph kernels, WLS is easy to implement with common deep learning frameworks. In graph classification experiments, transform-sum-cat significantly outperforms other neighborhood aggregation methods from popular GNN models. We also develop a simple and fast GNN model based on transform-sum-cat, which obtains, in comparison with widely used GNN models, (1) a higher accuracy in node classification, (2) a lower absolute error in graph regression, and (3) greater stability in adversarial training of graph generation.
Improved Algorithms for Online Submodular Maximization via First-order Regret Bounds
Authors: Nicholas Harvey, Christopher Liaw, Tasuku Soma
Date: 2020-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

We consider the problem of nonnegative submodular maximization in the online setting. At time step t, an algorithm selects a set St ∈ C ⊆ 2^V where C is a feasible family of sets. An adversary then reveals a submodular function ft. The goal is to design an efficient algorithm for minimizing the expected approximate regret. In this work, we give a general approach for improving regret bounds in online submodular maximization by exploiting “first-order” regret bounds for online linear optimization. 
- For monotone submodular maximization subject to a matroid, we give an efficient algorithm which achieves a (1 − c/e − ε)-regret of O(√kT ln(n/k)) where n is the size of the ground set, k is the rank of the matroid, ε > 0 is a constant, and c is the average curvature. Even without assuming any curvature (i.e., taking c = 1), this regret bound improves on previous results of Streeter et al. (2009) and Golovin et al. (2014). 
- For nonmonotone, unconstrained submodular functions, we give an algorithm with 1/2-regret O(√ nT), improving on the results of Roughgarden and Wang (2018). Our approach is based on Blackwell approachability; in particular, we give a novel first-order regret bound for the Blackwell instances that arise in this setting