pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Quality meets Diversity: A Model-Agnostic Framework for Computerized Adaptive Testing
Authors: Haoyang Bi, Haiping Ma, Zhenya Huang, Yu Yin, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen, Yu Su, Shijin Wang
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Diversity

Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) is emerging as a promising testing application in many scenarios, such as education, game and recruitment, which targets at diagnosing the knowledge mastery levels of examinees on required concepts. It shows the advantage of tailoring a personalized testing procedure for each examinee, which selects questions step by step, depending on her performance. While there are many efforts on developing CAT systems, existing solutions generally follow an inflexible model-specific fashion. That is, they need to observe a specific cognitive model which can estimate examinee's knowledge levels and design the selection strategy according to the model estimation. In this paper, we study a novel model-agnostic CAT problem, where we aim to propose a flexible framework that can adapt to different cognitive models. Meanwhile, this work also figures out CAT solution with addressing the problem of how to generate both high-quality and diverse questions simultaneously, which can give a comprehensive knowledge diagnosis for each examinee. Inspired by Active Learning, we propose a novel framework, namely Model-Agnostic Adaptive Testing (MAAT) for CAT solution, where we design three sophisticated modules including Quality Module, Diversity Module and Importance Module. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly demonstrate that our MAAT can support CAT with guaranteeing both quality and diversity perspectives.
Randomized Ensembled Double Q-Learning: Learning Fast Without a Model
Authors: Xinyue Chen, Che Wang, Zijian Zhou, Keith Ross
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: MuJoCo, Q-Learning

Using a high Update-To-Data (UTD) ratio, model-based methods have recently achieved much higher sample efficiency than previous model-free methods for continuous-action DRL benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a simple model-free algorithm, Randomized Ensembled Double Q-Learning (REDQ), and show that its performance is just as good as, if not better than, a state-of-the-art model-based algorithm for the MuJoCo benchmark. Moreover, REDQ can achieve this performance using fewer parameters than the model-based method, and with less wall-clock run time. REDQ has three carefully integrated ingredients which allow it to achieve its high performance: (i) a UTD ratio >> 1; (ii) an ensemble of Q functions; (iii) in-target minimization across a random subset of Q functions from the ensemble. Through carefully designed experiments, we provide a detailed analysis of REDQ and related model-free algorithms. To our knowledge, REDQ is the first successful model-free DRL algorithm for continuous-action spaces using a UTD ratio >> 1.
Inductive Representation Learning in Temporal Networks via Causal Anonymous Walks
Authors: Yanbang Wang, Yen-Yu Chang, Yunyu Liu, Jure Leskovec, Pan Li
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Representation Learning, Retrieval

Temporal networks serve as abstractions of many real-world dynamic systems. These networks typically evolve according to certain laws, such as the law of triadic closure, which is universal in social networks. Inductive representation learning of temporal networks should be able to capture such laws and further be applied to systems that follow the same laws but have not been unseen during the training stage. Previous works in this area depend on either network node identities or rich edge attributes and typically fail to extract these laws. Here, we propose Causal Anonymous Walks (CAWs) to inductively represent a temporal network. CAWs are extracted by temporal random walks and work as automatic retrieval of temporal network motifs to represent network dynamics while avoiding the time-consuming selection and counting of those motifs. CAWs adopt a novel anonymization strategy that replaces node identities with the hitting counts of the nodes based on a set of sampled walks to keep the method inductive, and simultaneously establish the correlation between motifs. We further propose a neural-network model CAW-N to encode CAWs, and pair it with a CAW sampling strategy with constant memory and time cost to support online training and inference. CAW-N is evaluated to predict links over 6 real temporal networks and uniformly outperforms previous SOTA methods by averaged 10% AUC gain in the inductive setting. CAW-N also outperforms previous methods in 4 out of the 6 networks in the transductive setting.
"Killing Me" Is Not a Spoiler: Spoiler Detection Model using Graph Neural Networks with Dependency Relation-Aware Attention Mechanism
Authors: Buru Chang, Inggeol Lee, Hyunjae Kim, Jaewoo Kang
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Several machine learning-based spoiler detection models have been proposed recently to protect users from spoilers on review websites. Although dependency relations between context words are important for detecting spoilers, current attention-based spoiler detection models are insufficient for utilizing dependency relations. To address this problem, we propose a new spoiler detection model called SDGNN that is based on syntax-aware graph neural networks. In the experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets, we show that our SDGNN outperforms the existing spoiler detection models.
Affordance-based Reinforcement Learning for Urban Driving
Authors: Tanmay Agarwal, Hitesh Arora, Jeff Schneider
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Traditional autonomous vehicle pipelines that follow a modular approach have been very successful in the past both in academia and industry, which has led to autonomy deployed on road. Though this approach provides ease of interpretation, its generalizability to unseen environments is limited and hand-engineering of numerous parameters is required, especially in the prediction and planning systems. Recently, deep reinforcement learning has been shown to learn complex strategic games and perform challenging robotic tasks, which provides an appealing framework for learning to drive. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework to learn optimal control policy using waypoints and low-dimensional visual representations, also known as affordances. We demonstrate that our agents when trained from scratch learn the tasks of lane-following, driving around inter-sections as well as stopping in front of other actors or traffic lights even in the dense traffic setting. We note that our method achieves comparable or better performance than the baseline methods on the original and NoCrash benchmarks on the CARLA simulator.
Responsible AI Challenges in End-to-end Machine Learning
Authors: Steven Euijong Whang, Ki Hyun Tae, Yuji Roh, Geon Heo
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, Management

Responsible AI is becoming critical as AI is widely used in our everyday lives. Many companies that deploy AI publicly state that when training a model, we not only need to improve its accuracy, but also need to guarantee that the model does not discriminate against users (fairness), is resilient to noisy or poisoned data (robustness), is explainable, and more. In addition, these objectives are not only relevant to model training, but to all steps of end-to-end machine learning, which include data collection, data cleaning and validation, model training, model evaluation, and model management and serving. Finally, responsible AI is conceptually challenging, and supporting all the objectives must be as easy as possible. We thus propose three key research directions towards this vision - depth, breadth, and usability - to measure progress and introduce our ongoing research. First, responsible AI must be deeply supported where multiple objectives like fairness and robust must be handled together. To this end, we propose FR-Train, a holistic framework for fair and robust model training in the presence of data bias and poisoning. Second, responsible AI must be broadly supported, preferably in all steps of machine learning. Currently we focus on the data pre-processing steps and propose Slice Tuner, a selective data acquisition framework for training fair and accurate models, and MLClean, a data cleaning framework that also improves fairness and robustness. Finally, responsible AI must be usable where the techniques must be easy to deploy and actionable. We propose FairBatch, a batch selection approach for fairness that is effective and simple to use, and Slice Finder, a model evaluation tool that automatically finds problematic slices. We believe we scratched the surface of responsible AI for end-to-end machine learning and suggest research challenges moving forward.
SoftNER: Mining Knowledge Graphs From Cloud Incidents
Authors: Manish Shetty, Chetan Bansal, Sumit Kumar, Nikitha Rao, Nachiappan Nagappan
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Knowledge Graphs, Management, Multi-Task Learning, NER

The move from boxed products to services and the widespread adoption of cloud computing has had a huge impact on the software development life cycle and DevOps processes. Particularly, incident management has become critical for developing and operating large-scale services. Prior work on incident management has heavily focused on the challenges with incident triaging and de-duplication. In this work, we address the fundamental problem of structured knowledge extraction from service incidents. We have built SoftNER, a framework for mining Knowledge Graphs from incident reports. First, we build a novel multi-task learning based BiLSTM-CRF model which leverages not just the semantic context but also the data-types for extracting factual information in the form of named entities. Next, we present an approach to mine relations between the named entities for automatically constructing knowledge graphs. We have deployed SoftNER at Microsoft, a major cloud service provider and have evaluated it on more than 2 months of cloud incidents. We show that the unsupervised machine learning pipeline has a high precision of 0.96. Our multi-task learning based deep learning model also outperforms the state-of-the-art NER models. Lastly, using the knowledge extracted by SoftNER, we are able to build accurate models for applications such as incident triaging and recommending entities based on their relevance to incident titles.
DeepWaste: Applying Deep Learning to Waste Classification for a Sustainable Planet
Authors: Yash Narayan
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, General Classification

Accurate waste disposal, at the point of disposal, is crucial to fighting climate change. When materials that could be recycled or composted get diverted into landfills, they cause the emission of potent greenhouse gases such as methane. Current attempts to reduce erroneous waste disposal are expensive, inaccurate, and confusing. In this work, we propose DeepWaste, an easy-to-use mobile app, that utilizes highly optimized deep learning techniques to provide users instantaneous waste classification into trash, recycling, and compost. We experiment with several convolution neural network architectures to detect and classify waste items. Our best model, a deep learning residual neural network with 50 layers, achieves an average precision of 0.881 on the test set. We demonstrate the performance and efficiency of our app on a set of real-world images.
Stochastic Learning Approach to Binary Optimization for Optimal Design of Experiments
Authors: Ahmed Attia, Sven Leyffer, Todd Munson
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Stochastic Optimization

We present a novel stochastic approach to binary optimization for optimal experimental design (OED) for Bayesian inverse problems governed by mathematical models such as partial differential equations. The OED utility function, namely, the regularized optimality criterion, is cast into a stochastic objective function in the form of an expectation over a multivariate Bernoulli distribution. The probabilistic objective is then solved by using a stochastic optimization routine to find an optimal observational policy. The proposed approach is analyzed from an optimization perspective and also from a machine learning perspective with correspondence to policy gradient reinforcement learning. The approach is demonstrated numerically by using an idealized two-dimensional Bayesian linear inverse problem, and validated by extensive numerical experiments carried out for sensor placement in a parameter identification setup.
Descriptive AI Ethics: Collecting and Understanding the Public Opinion
Authors: Gabriel Lima, Meeyoung Cha
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Ethics

There is a growing need for data-driven research efforts on how the public perceives the ethical, moral, and legal issues of autonomous AI systems. The current debate on the responsibility gap posed by these systems is one such example. This work proposes a mixed AI ethics model that allows normative and descriptive research to complement each other, by aiding scholarly discussion with data gathered from the public. We discuss its implications on bridging the gap between optimistic and pessimistic views towards AI systems' deployment.
Recent Advances in Video Question Answering: A Review of Datasets and Methods
Authors: Devshree Patel, Ratnam Parikh, Yesha Shastri
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Retrieval, Survey, Translation, Video Captioning, Video-Guided Machine Translation, Video Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Video Question Answering (VQA) is a recent emerging challenging task in the field of Computer Vision. Several visual information retrieval techniques like Video Captioning/Description and Video-guided Machine Translation have preceded the task of VQA. VQA helps to retrieve temporal and spatial information from the video scenes and interpret it. In this survey, we review a number of methods and datasets for the task of VQA. To the best of our knowledge, no previous survey has been conducted for the VQA task.
Hostility Detection and Covid-19 Fake News Detection in Social Media
Authors: Ayush Gupta, Rohan Sukumaran, Kevin John, Sundeep Teki
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Abusive Language, Fake News Detection, Multi-Label Text Classification, Word Embeddings

Withtheadventofsocialmedia,therehasbeenanextremely rapid increase in the content shared online. Consequently, the propagation of fake news and hostile messages on social media platforms has also skyrocketed. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting hostile and fake content in the Devanagari (Hindi) script as a multi-class, multi-label problem. Using NLP techniques, we build a model that makes use of an abusive language detector coupled with features extracted via Hindi BERT and Hindi FastText models and metadata. Our model achieves a 0.97 F1 score on coarse grain evaluation on Hostility detection task. Additionally, we built models to identify fake news related to Covid-19 in English tweets. We leverage entity information extracted from the tweets along with textual representations learned from word embeddings and achieve a 0.93 F1 score on the English fake news detection task.
Dynamic DNN Decomposition for Lossless Synergistic Inference
Authors: Beibei Zhang, Tian Xiang, Hongxuan Zhang, Te Li, Shiqiang Zhu, Jianjun Gu
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Deep neural networks (DNNs) sustain high performance in today's data processing applications. DNN inference is resource-intensive thus is difficult to fit into a mobile device. An alternative is to offload the DNN inference to a cloud server. However, such an approach requires heavy raw data transmission between the mobile device and the cloud server, which is not suitable for mission-critical and privacy-sensitive applications such as autopilot. To solve this problem, recent advances unleash DNN services using the edge computing paradigm. The existing approaches split a DNN into two parts and deploy the two partitions to computation nodes at two edge computing tiers. Nonetheless, these methods overlook collaborative device-edge-cloud computation resources. Besides, previous algorithms demand the whole DNN re-partitioning to adapt to computation resource changes and network dynamics. Moreover, for resource-demanding convolutional layers, prior works do not give a parallel processing strategy without loss of accuracy at the edge side. To tackle these issues, we propose D3, a dynamic DNN decomposition system for synergistic inference without precision loss. The proposed system introduces a heuristic algorithm named horizontal partition algorithm to split a DNN into three parts. The algorithm can partially adjust the partitions at run time according to processing time and network conditions. At the edge side, a vertical separation module separates feature maps into tiles that can be independently run on different edge nodes in parallel. Extensive quantitative evaluation of five popular DNNs illustrates that D3 outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts up to 3.4 times in end-to-end DNN inference time and reduces backbone network communication overhead up to 3.68 times.
Robusta: Robust AutoML for Feature Selection via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xiaoyang Wang, Bo Li, Yibo Zhang, Bhavya Kailkhura, Klara Nahrstedt
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Feature Importance, feature selection, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Several AutoML approaches have been proposed to automate the machine learning (ML) process, such as searching for the ML model architectures and hyper-parameters. However, these AutoML pipelines only focus on improving the learning accuracy of benign samples while ignoring the ML model robustness under adversarial attacks. As ML systems are increasingly being used in a variety of mission-critical applications, improving the robustness of ML systems has become of utmost importance. In this paper, we propose the first robust AutoML framework, Robusta--based on reinforcement learning (RL)--to perform feature selection, aiming to select features that lead to both accurate and robust ML systems. We show that a variation of the 0-1 robust loss can be directly optimized via an RL-based combinatorial search in the feature selection scenario. In addition, we employ heuristics to accelerate the search procedure based on feature scoring metrics, which are mutual information scores, tree-based classifiers feature importance scores, F scores, and Integrated Gradient (IG) scores, as well as their combinations. We conduct extensive experiments and show that the proposed framework is able to improve the model robustness by up to 22% while maintaining competitive accuracy on benign samples compared with other feature selection methods.
KDLSQ-BERT: A Quantized Bert Combining Knowledge Distillation with Learned Step Size Quantization
Authors: Jing Jin, Cai Liang, Tiancheng Wu, Liqin Zou, Zhiliang Gan
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Language Modelling, Quantization

Recently, transformer-based language models such as BERT have shown tremendous performance improvement for a range of natural language processing tasks. However, these language models usually are computation expensive and memory intensive during inference. As a result, it is difficult to deploy them on resource-restricted devices. To improve the inference performance, as well as reduce the model size while maintaining the model accuracy, we propose a novel quantization method named KDLSQ-BERT that combines knowledge distillation (KD) with learned step size quantization (LSQ) for language model quantization. The main idea of our method is that the KD technique is leveraged to transfer the knowledge from a "teacher" model to a "student" model when exploiting LSQ to quantize that "student" model during the quantization training process. Extensive experiment results on GLUE benchmark and SQuAD demonstrate that our proposed KDLSQ-BERT not only performs effectively when doing different bit (e.g. 2-bit $\sim$ 8-bit) quantization, but also outperforms the existing BERT quantization methods, and even achieves comparable performance as the full-precision base-line model while obtaining 14.9x compression ratio. Our code will be public available.
Neural Attention Distillation: Erasing Backdoor Triggers from Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Yige Li, Xixiang Lyu, Nodens Koren, Lingjuan Lyu, Bo Li, Xingjun Ma
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known vulnerable to backdoor attacks, a training time attack that injects a trigger pattern into a small proportion of training data so as to control the model's prediction at the test time. Backdoor attacks are notably dangerous since they do not affect the model's performance on clean examples, yet can fool the model to make incorrect prediction whenever the trigger pattern appears during testing. In this paper, we propose a novel defense framework Neural Attention Distillation (NAD) to erase backdoor triggers from backdoored DNNs. NAD utilizes a teacher network to guide the finetuning of the backdoored student network on a small clean subset of data such that the intermediate-layer attention of the student network aligns with that of the teacher network. The teacher network can be obtained by an independent finetuning process on the same clean subset. We empirically show, against 6 state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, NAD can effectively erase the backdoor triggers using only 5\% clean training data without causing obvious performance degradation on clean examples. Code is available in https://github.com/bboylyg/NAD.
A practical test for a planted community in heterogeneous networks
Authors: Mingao Yuan, Qian Wen
Date: 2021-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Spam detection

One of the fundamental task in graph data mining is to find a planted community(dense subgraph), which has wide application in biology, finance, spam detection and so on. For a real network data, the existence of a dense subgraph is generally unknown. Statistical tests have been devised to testing the existence of dense subgraph in a homogeneous random graph. However, many networks present extreme heterogeneity, that is, the degrees of nodes or vertexes don't concentrate on a typical value. The existing tests designed for homogeneous random graph are not straightforwardly applicable to the heterogeneous case. Recently, scan test was proposed for detecting a dense subgraph in heterogeneous(inhomogeneous) graph(\cite{BCHV19}). However, the computational complexity of the scan test is generally not polynomial in the graph size, which makes the test impractical for large or moderate networks. In this paper, we propose a polynomial-time test that has the standard normal distribution as the null limiting distribution. The power of the test is theoretically investigated and we evaluate the performance of the test by simulation and real data example.