pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DeepShovel: An Online Collaborative Platform for Data Extraction in Geoscience Literature with AI Assistance
Authors: Shao Zhang, Yuting Jia, Hui Xu, Ying Wen, Dakuo Wang, Xinbing Wang
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

Geoscientists, as well as researchers in many fields, need to read a huge amount of literature to locate, extract, and aggregate relevant results and data to enable future research or to build a scientific database, but there is no existing system to support this use case well. In this paper, based on the findings of a formative study about how geoscientists collaboratively annotate literature and extract and aggregate data, we proposed DeepShovel, a publicly-available AI-assisted data extraction system to support their needs. DeepShovel leverages the state-of-the-art neural network models to support researcher(s) easily and accurately annotate papers (in the PDF format) and extract data from tables, figures, maps, etc. in a human-AI collaboration manner. A follow-up user evaluation with 14 researchers suggested DeepShovel improved users' efficiency of data extraction for building scientific databases, and encouraged teams to form a larger scale but more tightly-coupled collaboration.
Inferring Lexicographically-Ordered Rewards from Preferences
Authors: Alihan Hüyük, William R. Zame, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

Modeling the preferences of agents over a set of alternatives is a principal concern in many areas. The dominant approach has been to find a single reward/utility function with the property that alternatives yielding higher rewards are preferred over alternatives yielding lower rewards. However, in many settings, preferences are based on multiple, often competing, objectives; a single reward function is not adequate to represent such preferences. This paper proposes a method for inferring multi-objective reward-based representations of an agent's observed preferences. We model the agent's priorities over different objectives as entering lexicographically, so that objectives with lower priorities matter only when the agent is indifferent with respect to objectives with higher priorities. We offer two example applications in healthcare, one inspired by cancer treatment, the other inspired by organ transplantation, to illustrate how the lexicographically-ordered rewards we learn can provide a better understanding of a decision-maker's preferences and help improve policies when used in reinforcement learning.
The Good Shepherd: An Oracle Agent for Mechanism Design
Authors: Jan Balaguer, Raphael Koster, Christopher Summerfield, Andrea Tacchetti
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

From social networks to traffic routing, artificial learning agents are playing a central role in modern institutions. We must therefore understand how to leverage these systems to foster outcomes and behaviors that align with our own values and aspirations. While multiagent learning has received considerable attention in recent years, artificial agents have been primarily evaluated when interacting with fixed, non-learning co-players. While this evaluation scheme has merit, it fails to capture the dynamics faced by institutions that must deal with adaptive and continually learning constituents. Here we address this limitation, and construct agents ("mechanisms") that perform well when evaluated over the learning trajectory of their adaptive co-players ("participants"). The algorithm we propose consists of two nested learning loops: an inner loop where participants learn to best respond to fixed mechanisms; and an outer loop where the mechanism agent updates its policy based on experience. We report the performance of our mechanism agents when paired with both artificial learning agents and humans as co-players. Our results show that our mechanisms are able to shepherd the participants strategies towards favorable outcomes, indicating a path for modern institutions to effectively and automatically influence the strategies and behaviors of their constituents.
HCMD-zero: Learning Value Aligned Mechanisms from Data
Authors: Jan Balaguer, Raphael Koster, Ari Weinstein, Lucy Campbell-Gillingham, Christopher Summerfield, Matthew Botvinick, Andrea Tacchetti
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

Artificial learning agents are mediating a larger and larger number of interactions among humans, firms, and organizations, and the intersection between mechanism design and machine learning has been heavily investigated in recent years. However, mechanism design methods often make strong assumptions on how participants behave (e.g. rationality), on the kind of knowledge designers have access to a priori (e.g. access to strong baseline mechanisms), or on what the goal of the mechanism should be (e.g. total welfare). Here we introduce HCMD-zero, a general purpose method to construct mechanisms making none of these three assumptions. HCMD-zero learns to mediate interactions among participants and adjusts the mechanism parameters to make itself more likely to be preferred by participants. It does so by remaining engaged in an electoral contest with copies of itself, thereby accessing direct feedback from participants. We test our method on a stylized resource allocation game that highlights the tension between productivity, equality and the temptation to free ride. HCMD-zero produces a mechanism that is preferred by human participants over a strong baseline, it does so automatically, without requiring prior knowledge, and using human behavioral trajectories sparingly and effectively. Our analysis shows HCMD-zero consistently makes the mechanism policy more and more likely to be preferred by human participants over the course of training, and that it results in a mechanism with an interpretable and intuitive policy.
Applications of blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies for enabling prosumers in smart grids: A review
Authors: Weiqi Hua, Ying Chen, Meysam Qadrdan, Jing Jiang, Hongjian Sun, Jianzhong Wu
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Governments' net zero emission target aims at increasing the share of renewable energy sources as well as influencing the behaviours of consumers to support the cost-effective balancing of energy supply and demand. These will be achieved by the advanced information and control infrastructures of smart grids which allow the interoperability among various stakeholders. Under this circumstance, increasing number of consumers produce, store, and consume energy, giving them a new role of prosumers. The integration of prosumers and accommodation of incurred bidirectional flows of energy and information rely on two key factors: flexible structures of energy markets and intelligent operations of power systems. The blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are innovative technologies to fulfil these two factors, by which the blockchain provides decentralised trading platforms for energy markets and the AI supports the optimal operational control of power systems. This paper attempts to address how to incorporate the blockchain and AI in the smart grids for facilitating prosumers to participate in energy markets. To achieve this objective, first, this paper reviews how policy designs price carbon emissions caused by the fossil-fuel based generation so as to facilitate the integration of prosumers with renewable energy sources. Second, the potential structures of energy markets with the support of the blockchain technologies are discussed. Last, how to apply the AI for enhancing the state monitoring and decision making during the operations of power systems is introduced.
Exploring the Effects of AI-assisted Emotional Support Processes in Online Mental Health Community
Authors: Donghoon Shin, Subeen Park, Esther Hehsun Kim, SooMin Kim, Jinwook Seo, Hwajung Hong
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

Social support in online mental health communities (OMHCs) is an effective and accessible way of managing mental wellbeing. In this process, sharing emotional supports is considered crucial to the thriving social supports in OMHCs, yet often difficult for both seekers and providers. To support empathetic interactions, we design an AI-infused workflow that allows users to write emotional supporting messages to other users' posts based on the elicitation of the seeker's emotion and contextual keywords from writing. Based on a preliminary user study (N = 10), we identified that the system helped seekers to clarify emotion and describe text concretely while writing a post. Providers could also learn how to react empathetically to the post. Based on these results, we suggest design implications for our proposed system.
CCPT: Automatic Gameplay Testing and Validation with Curiosity-Conditioned Proximal Trajectories
Authors: Alessandro Sestini, Linus Gisslén, Joakim Bergdahl, Konrad Tollmar, Andrew D. Bagdanov
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Game Design, Imitation Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning algorithm to perform automatic analysis and detection of gameplay issues in complex 3D navigation environments. The Curiosity-Conditioned Proximal Trajectories (CCPT) method combines curiosity and imitation learning to train agents to methodically explore in the proximity of known trajectories derived from expert demonstrations. We show how CCPT can explore complex environments, discover gameplay issues and design oversights in the process, and recognize and highlight them directly to game designers. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm in a novel 3D navigation environment which reflects the complexity of modern AAA video games. Our results show a higher level of coverage and bug discovery than baselines methods, and it hence can provide a valuable tool for game designers to identify issues in game design automatically.
Domain-level Pairwise Semantic Interaction for Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification
Authors: Zhenxin Wu, Jiazheng Gong, Kecen Guo, Guanye Liang, Qingliang Che, Bo Liu
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Aspect-based sentiment classification (ABSC) is a very challenging subtask of sentiment analysis (SA) and suffers badly from the class-imbalance. Existing methods only process sentences independently, without considering the domain-level relationship between sentences, and fail to provide effective solutions to the problem of class-imbalance. From an intuitive point of view, sentences in the same domain often have high-level semantic connections. The interaction of their high-level semantic features can force the model to produce better semantic representations, and find the similarities and nuances between sentences better. Driven by this idea, we propose a plug-and-play Pairwise Semantic Interaction (PSI) module, which takes pairwise sentences as input, and obtains interactive information by learning the semantic vectors of the two sentences. Subsequently, different gates are generated to effectively highlight the key semantic features of each sentence. Finally, the adversarial interaction between the vectors is used to make the semantic representation of two sentences more distinguishable. Experimental results on four ABSC datasets show that, in most cases, PSI is superior to many competitive state-of-the-art baselines and can significantly alleviate the problem of class-imbalance.
CCDD: A Tractable Representation for Model Counting and Uniform Sampling
Authors: Yong Lai, Kuldeep S. Meel, Roland H. C. Yap
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

Knowledge compilation concerns with the compilation of representation languages to target languages supporting a wide range of tractable operations arising from diverse areas of computer science. Tractable target compilation languages are usually achieved by restrictions on the internal nodes of the NNF. In this paper, we propose a new representation language CCDD, which introduces new restrictions on conjunction nodes to capture equivalent literals. We show that CCDD supports two key queries, model counting and uniform samping, in polytime. We present algorithms and a compiler to compile propositional formulas expressed in CNF into CCDD. Experiments over a large set of benchmarks show that our compilation times are better with smaller representation than state-of-art Decision-DNNF, SDD and OBDD[AND] compilers. We apply our techniques to model counting and uniform sampling, and develop model counter and uniform sampler on CNF. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the following significant improvements: our model counter can solve 885 instances while the prior state of the art solved only 843 instances, representing an improvement of 43 instances; and our uniform sampler can solve 780 instances while the prior state of the art solved only 648 instances, representing an improvement of 132 instances.
Autonomous Warehouse Robot using Deep Q-Learning
Authors: Ismot Sadik Peyas, Zahid Hasan, Md. Rafat Rahman Tushar, Al Musabbir, Raisa Mehjabin Azni, Shahnewaz Siddique
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Navigate, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Navigation

In warehouses, specialized agents need to navigate, avoid obstacles and maximize the use of space in the warehouse environment. Due to the unpredictability of these environments, reinforcement learning approaches can be applied to complete these tasks. In this paper, we propose using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to address the robot navigation and obstacle avoidance problem and traditional Q-learning with minor variations to maximize the use of space for product placement. We first investigate the problem for the single robot case. Next, based on the single robot model, we extend our system to the multi-robot case. We use a strategic variation of Q-tables to perform multi-agent Q-learning. We successfully test the performance of our model in a 2D simulation environment for both the single and multi-robot cases.
Recurrent Auto-Encoder With Multi-Resolution Ensemble and Predictive Coding for Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection
Authors: Heejeong Choi, Subin Kim, Pilsung Kang
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decoder, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection

As large-scale time-series data can easily be found in real-world applications, multivariate time-series anomaly detection has played an essential role in diverse industries. It enables productivity improvement and maintenance cost reduction by preventing malfunctions and detecting anomalies based on time-series data. However, multivariate time-series anomaly detection is challenging because real-world time-series data exhibit complex temporal dependencies. For this task, it is crucial to learn a rich representation that effectively contains the nonlinear temporal dynamics of normal behavior. In this study, we propose an unsupervised multivariate time-series anomaly detection model named RAE-MEPC which learns informative normal representations based on multi-resolution ensemble and predictive coding. We introduce multi-resolution ensemble encoding to capture the multi-scale dependency from the input time series. The encoder hierarchically aggregates the temporal features extracted from the sub-encoders with different encoding lengths. From these encoded features, the reconstruction decoder reconstructs the input time series based on multi-resolution ensemble decoding where lower-resolution information helps to decode sub-decoders with higher-resolution outputs. Predictive coding is further introduced to encourage the model to learn the temporal dependencies of the time series. Experiments on real-world benchmark datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the benchmark models for multivariate time-series anomaly detection.
Domain-Augmented Domain Adaptation
Authors: Qiuhao Zeng, Tianze Luo, Boyu Wang
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) enables knowledge transfer from the labelled source domain to the unlabeled target domain by reducing the cross-domain discrepancy. However, most of the studies were based on direct adaptation from the source domain to the target domain and have suffered from large domain discrepancies. To overcome this challenge, in this paper, we propose the domain-augmented domain adaptation (DADA) to generate pseudo domains that have smaller discrepancies with the target domain, to enhance the knowledge transfer process by minimizing the discrepancy between the target domain and pseudo domains. Furthermore, we design a pseudo-labeling method for DADA by projecting representations from the target domain to multiple pseudo domains and taking the averaged predictions on the classification from the pseudo domains as the pseudo labels. We conduct extensive experiments with the state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods on four benchmark datasets: Office Home, Office-31, VisDA2017, and Digital datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of our model.
Goal-directed Planning and Goal Understanding by Active Inference: Evaluation Through Simulated and Physical Robot Experiments
Authors: Takazumi Matsumoto, Wataru Ohata, Fabien C. Y. Benureau, Jun Tani
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

We show that goal-directed action planning and generation in a teleological framework can be formulated using the free energy principle. The proposed model, which is built on a variational recurrent neural network model, is characterized by three essential features. These are that (1) goals can be specified for both static sensory states, e.g., for goal images to be reached and dynamic processes, e.g., for moving around an object, (2) the model can not only generate goal-directed action plans, but can also understand goals by sensory observation, and (3) the model generates future action plans for given goals based on the best estimate of the current state, inferred using past sensory observations. The proposed model is evaluated by conducting experiments on a simulated mobile agent as well as on a real humanoid robot performing object manipulation.
Multiscale Crowd Counting and Localization By Multitask Point Supervision
Authors: Mohsen Zand, Haleh Damirchi, Andrew Farley, Mahdiyar Molahasani, Michael Greenspan, Ali Etemad
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

We propose a multitask approach for crowd counting and person localization in a unified framework. As the detection and localization tasks are well-correlated and can be jointly tackled, our model benefits from a multitask solution by learning multiscale representations of encoded crowd images, and subsequently fusing them. In contrast to the relatively more popular density-based methods, our model uses point supervision to allow for crowd locations to be accurately identified. We test our model on two popular crowd counting datasets, ShanghaiTech A and B, and demonstrate that our method achieves strong results on both counting and localization tasks, with MSE measures of 110.7 and 15.0 for crowd counting and AP measures of 0.71 and 0.75 for localization, on ShanghaiTech A and B respectively. Our detailed ablation experiments show the impact of our multiscale approach as well as the effectiveness of the fusion module embedded in our network. Our code is available at: https://github.com/RCVLab-AiimLab/crowd_counting.
Deconstructing Distributions: A Pointwise Framework of Learning
Authors: Gal Kaplun, Nikhil Ghosh, Saurabh Garg, Boaz Barak, Preetum Nakkiran
Date: 2022-02-20 00:00:00

In machine learning, we traditionally evaluate the performance of a single model, averaged over a collection of test inputs. In this work, we propose a new approach: we measure the performance of a collection of models when evaluated on a $\textit{single input point}$. Specifically, we study a point's $\textit{profile}$: the relationship between models' average performance on the test distribution and their pointwise performance on this individual point. We find that profiles can yield new insights into the structure of both models and data -- in and out-of-distribution. For example, we empirically show that real data distributions consist of points with qualitatively different profiles. On one hand, there are "compatible" points with strong correlation between the pointwise and average performance. On the other hand, there are points with weak and even $\textit{negative}$ correlation: cases where improving overall model accuracy actually $\textit{hurts}$ performance on these inputs. We prove that these experimental observations are inconsistent with the predictions of several simplified models of learning proposed in prior work. As an application, we use profiles to construct a dataset we call CIFAR-10-NEG: a subset of CINIC-10 such that for standard models, accuracy on CIFAR-10-NEG is $\textit{negatively correlated}$ with accuracy on CIFAR-10 test. This illustrates, for the first time, an OOD dataset that completely inverts "accuracy-on-the-line" (Miller, Taori, Raghunathan, Sagawa, Koh, Shankar, Liang, Carmon, and Schmidt 2021)
Conflict-Based Search for Explainable Multi-Agent Path Finding
Authors: Justin Kottinger, Shaull Almagor, Morteza Lahijanian
Date: 2022-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Agent Path Finding

In the Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) problem, the goal is to find non-colliding paths for agents in an environment, such that each agent reaches its goal from its initial location. In safety-critical applications, a human supervisor may want to verify that the plan is indeed collision-free. To this end, a recent work introduces a notion of explainability for MAPF based on a visualization of the plan as a short sequence of images representing time segments, where in each time segment the trajectories of the agents are disjoint. Then, the explainable MAPF problem asks for a set of non-colliding paths that admits a short-enough explanation. Explainable MAPF adds a new difficulty to MAPF, in that it is NP-hard with respect to the size of the environment, and not just the number of agents. Thus, traditional MAPF algorithms are not equipped to directly handle explainable-MAPF. In this work, we adapt Conflict Based Search (CBS), a well-studied algorithm for MAPF, to handle explainable MAPF. We show how to add explainability constraints on top of the standard CBS tree and its underlying A* search. We examine the usefulness of this approach and, in particular, the tradeoff between planning time and explainability.
Disentangling Autoencoders (DAE)
Authors: Jaehoon Cha, Jeyan Thiyagalingam
Date: 2022-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

Noting the importance of factorizing (or disentangling) the latent space, we propose a novel, non-probabilistic disentangling framework for autoencoders, based on the principles of symmetry transformations in group-theory. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first deterministic model that is aiming to achieve disentanglement based on autoencoders without regularizers. The proposed model is compared to seven state-of-the-art generative models based on autoencoders and evaluated based on five supervised disentanglement metrics. The experimental results show that the proposed model can have better disentanglement when variances of each features are different. We believe that this model leads to a new field for disentanglement learning based on autoencoders without regularizers.