pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploiting Knowledge Graphs for Facilitating Product/Service Discovery
Authors: Sarika Jain
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Product Categorization

Most of the existing techniques to product discovery rely on syntactic approaches, thus ignoring valuable and specific semantic information of the underlying standards during the process. The product data comes from different heterogeneous sources and formats giving rise to the problem of interoperability. Above all, due to the continuously increasing influx of data, the manual labeling is getting costlier. Integrating the descriptions of different products into a single representation requires organizing all the products across vendors in a single taxonomy. Practically relevant and quality product categorization standards are still limited in number; and that too in academic research projects where we can majorly see only prototypes as compared to industry. This work presents a cost-effective solution for e-commerce on the Data Web by employing an unsupervised approach for data classification and exploiting the knowledge graphs for matching. The proposed architecture describes available products in web ontology language OWL and stores them in a triple store. User input specifications for certain products are matched against the available product categories to generate a knowledge graph. This mullti-phased top-down approach to develop and improve existing, if any, tailored product recommendations will be able to connect users with the exact product/service of their choice.
GuCNet: A Guided Clustering-based Network for Improved Classification
Authors: Ushasi Chaudhuri, Syomantak Chaudhuri, Subhasis Chaudhuri
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, General Classification

We deal with the problem of semantic classification of challenging and highly-cluttered dataset. We present a novel, and yet a very simple classification technique by leveraging the ease of classifiability of any existing well separable dataset for guidance. Since the guide dataset which may or may not have any semantic relationship with the experimental dataset, forms well separable clusters in the feature set, the proposed network tries to embed class-wise features of the challenging dataset to those distinct clusters of the guide set, making them more separable. Depending on the availability, we propose two types of guide sets: one using texture (image) guides and another using prototype vectors representing cluster centers. Experimental results obtained on the challenging benchmark RSSCN, LSUN, and TU-Berlin datasets establish the efficacy of the proposed method as we outperform the existing state-of-the-art techniques by a considerable margin.
Generalized Few-shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Zhuotao Tian, Xin Lai, Li Jiang, Shu Liu, Michelle Shu, Hengshuang Zhao, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Training semantic segmentation models requires a large amount of finely annotated data, making it hard to quickly adapt to novel classes not satisfying this condition. Few-Shot Segmentation (FS-Seg) tackles this problem with many constraints. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, called Generalized Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation (GFS-Seg), to analyze the generalization ability of simultaneously segmenting the novel categories with very few examples and the base categories with sufficient examples. It is the first study showing that previous representative state-of-the-art FS-Seg methods fall short in GFS-Seg and the performance discrepancy mainly comes from the constrained setting of FS-Seg. To make GFS-Seg tractable, we set up a GFS-Seg baseline that achieves decent performance without structural change on the original model. Then, since context is essential for semantic segmentation, we propose the Context-Aware Prototype Learning (CAPL) that significantly improves performance by 1) leveraging the co-occurrence prior knowledge from support samples, and 2) dynamically enriching contextual information to the classifier, conditioned on the content of each query image. Both two contributions are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merit. Extensive experiments on Pascal-VOC and COCO manifest the effectiveness of CAPL, and CAPL generalizes well to FS-Seg by achieving competitive performance. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/GFS-Seg.
Connecting the Dots Between Fact Verification and Fake News Detection
Authors: Qifei Li, Wangchunshu Zhou
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Fact Verification, Fake News Detection, Text Summarization

Fact verification models have enjoyed a fast advancement in the last two years with the development of pre-trained language models like BERT and the release of large scale datasets such as FEVER. However, the challenging problem of fake news detection has not benefited from the improvement of fact verification models, which is closely related to fake news detection. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to connect the dots between fact verification and fake news detection. Our approach first employs a text summarization model pre-trained on news corpora to summarize the long news article into a short claim. Then we use a fact verification model pre-trained on the FEVER dataset to detect whether the input news article is real or fake. Our approach makes use of the recent success of fact verification models and enables zero-shot fake news detection, alleviating the need of large-scale training data to train fake news detection models. Experimental results on FakenewsNet, a benchmark dataset for fake news detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
TaxoNN: A Light-Weight Accelerator for Deep Neural Network Training
Authors: Reza Hojabr, Kamyar Givaki, Kossar Pourahmadi, Parsa Nooralinejad, Ahmad Khonsari, Dara Rahmati, M. Hassan Najafi
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00

Emerging intelligent embedded devices rely on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to be able to interact with the real-world environment. This interaction comes with the ability to retrain DNNs, since environmental conditions change continuously in time. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm to train DNNs by optimizing the parameters over the training data iteratively. In this work, first we present a novel approach to add the training ability to a baseline DNN accelerator (inference only) by splitting the SGD algorithm into simple computational elements. Then, based on this heuristic approach we propose TaxoNN, a light-weight accelerator for DNN training. TaxoNN can easily tune the DNN weights by reusing the hardware resources used in the inference process using a time-multiplexing approach and low-bitwidth units. Our experimental results show that TaxoNN delivers, on average, 0.97% higher misclassification rate compared to a full-precision implementation. Moreover, TaxoNN provides 2.1$\times$ power saving and 1.65$\times$ area reduction over the state-of-the-art DNN training accelerator.
Detecting Foodborne Illness Complaints in Multiple Languages Using English Annotations Only
Authors: Ziyi Liu, Giannis Karamanolakis, Daniel Hsu, Luis Gravano
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (Louhi) 2020 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, text-classification, Text Classification

Health departments have been deploying text classification systems for the early detection of foodborne illness complaints in social media documents such as Yelp restaurant reviews. Current systems have been successfully applied for documents in English and, as a result, a promising direction is to increase coverage and recall by considering documents in additional languages, such as Spanish or Chinese. Training previous systems for more languages, however, would be expensive, as it would require the manual annotation of many documents for each new target language. To address this challenge, we consider cross-lingual learning and train multilingual classifiers using only the annotations for English-language reviews. Recent zero-shot approaches based on pre-trained multi-lingual BERT (mBERT) have been shown to effectively align languages for aspects such as sentiment. Interestingly, we show that those approaches are less effective for capturing the nuances of foodborne illness, our public health application of interest. To improve performance without extra annotations, we create artificial training documents in the target language through machine translation and train mBERT jointly for the source (English) and target language. Furthermore, we show that translating labeled documents to multiple languages leads to additional performance improvements for some target languages. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach through extensive experiments with Yelp restaurant reviews in seven languages. Our classifiers identify foodborne illness complaints in multilingual reviews from the Yelp Challenge dataset, which highlights the potential of our general approach for deployment in health departments.
Lexically Cohesive Neural Machine Translation with Copy Mechanism
Authors: Vipul Mishra, Chenhui Chu, Yuki Arase
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Lexically cohesive translations preserve consistency in word choices in document-level translation. We employ a copy mechanism into a context-aware neural machine translation model to allow copying words from previous translation outputs. Different from previous context-aware neural machine translation models that handle all the discourse phenomena implicitly, our model explicitly addresses the lexical cohesion problem by boosting the probabilities to output words consistently. We conduct experiments on Japanese to English translation using an evaluation dataset for discourse translation. The results showed that the proposed model significantly improved lexical cohesion compared to previous context-aware models.
Learning Adaptive Language Interfaces through Decomposition
Authors: Siddharth Karamcheti, Dorsa Sadigh, Percy Liang
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (intexsempar) 2020 11
Tasks: Semantic Parsing

Our goal is to create an interactive natural language interface that efficiently and reliably learns from users to complete tasks in simulated robotics settings. We introduce a neural semantic parsing system that learns new high-level abstractions through decomposition: users interactively teach the system by breaking down high-level utterances describing novel behavior into low-level steps that it can understand. Unfortunately, existing methods either rely on grammars which parse sentences with limited flexibility, or neural sequence-to-sequence models that do not learn efficiently or reliably from individual examples. Our approach bridges this gap, demonstrating the flexibility of modern neural systems, as well as the one-shot reliable generalization of grammar-based methods. Our crowdsourced interactive experiments suggest that over time, users complete complex tasks more efficiently while using our system by leveraging what they just taught. At the same time, getting users to trust the system enough to be incentivized to teach high-level utterances is still an ongoing challenge. We end with a discussion of some of the obstacles we need to overcome to fully realize the potential of the interactive paradigm.
Constructing a Visual Relationship Authenticity Dataset
Authors: Chenhui Chu, Yuto Takebayashi, Mishra Vipul, Yuta Nakashima
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Relationship Detection, Scene Understanding, Triplet, Visual Relationship Detection

A visual relationship denotes a relationship between two objects in an image, which can be represented as a triplet of (subject; predicate; object). Visual relationship detection is crucial for scene understanding in images. Existing visual relationship detection datasets only contain true relationships that correctly describe the content in an image. However, distinguishing false visual relationships from true ones is also crucial for image understanding and grounded natural language processing. In this paper, we construct a visual relationship authenticity dataset, where both true and false relationships among all objects appeared in the captions in the Flickr30k entities image caption dataset are annotated. The dataset is available at https://github.com/codecreator2053/VR_ClassifiedDataset. We hope that this dataset can promote the study on both vision and language understanding.
Contrastive Explanations for Reinforcement Learning via Embedded Self Predictions
Authors: Zhengxian Lin, Kim-Ho Lam, Alan Fern
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We investigate a deep reinforcement learning (RL) architecture that supports explaining why a learned agent prefers one action over another. The key idea is to learn action-values that are directly represented via human-understandable properties of expected futures. This is realized via the embedded self-prediction (ESP)model, which learns said properties in terms of human provided features. Action preferences can then be explained by contrasting the future properties predicted for each action. To address cases where there are a large number of features, we develop a novel method for computing minimal sufficient explanations from anESP. Our case studies in three domains, including a complex strategy game, show that ESP models can be effectively learned and support insightful explanations.
MammoGANesis: Controlled Generation of High-Resolution Mammograms for Radiology Education
Authors: Cyril Zakka, Ghida Saheb, Elie Najem, Ghina Berjawi
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Generative Adversarial Network, Medical Image Generation, Radiologist Binary Classification, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

During their formative years, radiology trainees are required to interpret hundreds of mammograms per month, with the objective of becoming apt at discerning the subtle patterns differentiating benign from malignant lesions. Unfortunately, medico-legal and technical hurdles make it difficult to access and query medical images for training. In this paper we train a generative adversarial network (GAN) to synthesize 512 x 512 high-resolution mammograms. The resulting model leads to the unsupervised separation of high-level features (e.g. the standard mammography views and the nature of the breast lesions), with stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g. breast adipose tissue, calcification), enabling user-controlled global and local attribute-editing of the synthesized images. We demonstrate the model's ability to generate anatomically and medically relevant mammograms by achieving an average AUC of 0.54 in a double-blind study on four expert mammography radiologists to distinguish between generated and real images, ascribing to the high visual quality of the synthesized and edited mammograms, and to their potential use in advancing and facilitating medical education.
Complexity-based speciation and genotype representation for neuroevolution
Authors: Alexander Hadjiivanov, Alan Blair
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

This paper introduces a speciation principle for neuroevolution where evolving networks are grouped into species based on the number of hidden neurons, which is indicative of the complexity of the search space. This speciation principle is indivisibly coupled with a novel genotype representation which is characterised by zero genome redundancy, high resilience to bloat, explicit marking of recurrent connections, as well as an efficient and reproducible stack-based evaluation procedure for networks with arbitrary topology. Furthermore, the proposed speciation principle is employed in several techniques designed to promote and preserve diversity within species and in the ecosystem as a whole. The competitive performance of the proposed framework, named Cortex, is demonstrated through experiments. A highly customisable software platform which implements the concepts proposed in this study is also introduced in the hope that it will serve as a useful and reliable tool for experimentation in the field of neuroevolution.
The Knowledge Graph for Macroeconomic Analysis with Alternative Big Data
Authors: Yucheng Yang, Yue Pang, Guanhua Huang, Weinan E
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Variable Selection

The current knowledge system of macroeconomics is built on interactions among a small number of variables, since traditional macroeconomic models can mostly handle a handful of inputs. Recent work using big data suggests that a much larger number of variables are active in driving the dynamics of the aggregate economy. In this paper, we introduce a knowledge graph (KG) that consists of not only linkages between traditional economic variables but also new alternative big data variables. We extract these new variables and the linkages by applying advanced natural language processing (NLP) tools on the massive textual data of academic literature and research reports. As one example of the potential applications, we use it as the prior knowledge to select variables for economic forecasting models in macroeconomics. Compared to statistical variable selection methods, KG-based methods achieve significantly higher forecasting accuracy, especially for long run forecasts.
fairseq S2T: Fast Speech-to-Text Modeling with fairseq
Authors: Changhan Wang, Yun Tang, Xutai Ma, Anne Wu, Sravya Popuri, Dmytro Okhonko, Juan Pino
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Asian Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Machine Translation, Multi-Task Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Transfer Learning, Translation

We introduce fairseq S2T, a fairseq extension for speech-to-text (S2T) modeling tasks such as end-to-end speech recognition and speech-to-text translation. It follows fairseq's careful design for scalability and extensibility. We provide end-to-end workflows from data pre-processing, model training to offline (online) inference. We implement state-of-the-art RNN-based, Transformer-based as well as Conformer-based models and open-source detailed training recipes. Fairseq's machine translation models and language models can be seamlessly integrated into S2T workflows for multi-task learning or transfer learning. Fairseq S2T documentation and examples are available at https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/speech_to_text.
What causes the test error? Going beyond bias-variance via ANOVA
Authors: Licong Lin, Edgar Dobriban
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00

Modern machine learning methods are often overparametrized, allowing adaptation to the data at a fine level. This can seem puzzling; in the worst case, such models do not need to generalize. This puzzle inspired a great amount of work, arguing when overparametrization reduces test error, in a phenomenon called "double descent". Recent work aimed to understand in greater depth why overparametrization is helpful for generalization. This leads to discovering the unimodality of variance as a function of the level of parametrization, and to decomposing the variance into that arising from label noise, initialization, and randomness in the training data to understand the sources of the error. In this work we develop a deeper understanding of this area. Specifically, we propose using the analysis of variance (ANOVA) to decompose the variance in the test error in a symmetric way, for studying the generalization performance of certain two-layer linear and non-linear networks. The advantage of the analysis of variance is that it reveals the effects of initialization, label noise, and training data more clearly than prior approaches. Moreover, we also study the monotonicity and unimodality of the variance components. While prior work studied the unimodality of the overall variance, we study the properties of each term in variance decomposition. One key insight is that in typical settings, the interaction between training samples and initialization can dominate the variance; surprisingly being larger than their marginal effect. Also, we characterize "phase transitions" where the variance changes from unimodal to monotone. On a technical level, we leverage advanced deterministic equivalent techniques for Haar random matrices, that -- to our knowledge -- have not yet been used in the area. We also verify our results in numerical simulations and on empirical data examples.
Robust Fairness under Covariate Shift
Authors: Ashkan Rezaei, Anqi Liu, Omid Memarrast, Brian Ziebart
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Making predictions that are fair with regard to protected group membership (race, gender, age, etc.) has become an important requirement for classification algorithms. Existing techniques derive a fair model from sampled labeled data relying on the assumption that training and testing data are identically and independently drawn (iid) from the same distribution. In practice, distribution shift can and does occur between training and testing datasets as the characteristics of individuals interacting with the machine learning system change. We investigate fairness under covariate shift, a relaxation of the iid assumption in which the inputs or covariates change while the conditional label distribution remains the same. We seek fair decisions under these assumptions on target data with unknown labels. We propose an approach that obtains the predictor that is robust to the worst-case in terms of target performance while satisfying target fairness requirements and matching statistical properties of the source data. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach on benchmark prediction tasks.
A General Model of Conversational Dynamics and an Example Application in Serious Illness Communication
Authors: Laurence A. Clarfeld, Robert Gramling, Donna M. Rizzo, Margaret J. Eppstein
Date: 2020-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Conversation has been a primary means for the exchange of information since ancient times. Understanding patterns of information flow in conversations is a critical step in assessing and improving communication quality. In this paper, we describe COnversational DYnamics Model (CODYM) analysis, a novel approach for studying patterns of information flow in conversations. CODYMs are Markov Models that capture sequential dependencies in the lengths of speaker turns. The proposed method is automated and scalable, and preserves the privacy of the conversational participants. The primary function of CODYM analysis is to quantify and visualize patterns of information flow, concisely summarized over sequential turns from one or more conversations. Our approach is general and complements existing methods, providing a new tool for use in the analysis of any type of conversation. As an important first application, we demonstrate the model on transcribed conversations between palliative care clinicians and seriously ill patients. These conversations are dynamic and complex, taking place amidst heavy emotions, and include difficult topics such as end-of-life preferences and patient values. We perform a versatile set of CODYM analyses that (a) establish the validity of the model by confirming known patterns of conversational turn-taking and word usage, (b) identify normative patterns of information flow in serious illness conversations, and (c) show how these patterns vary across narrative time and differ under expressions of anger, fear and sadness. Potential applications of CODYMs range from assessment and training of effective healthcare communication to comparing conversational dynamics across language and culture, with the prospect of identifying universal similarities and unique "fingerprints" of information flow.