pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Hierarchical Patch VAE-GAN: Generating Diverse Videos from a Single Sample
Authors: Shir Gur, Sagie Benaim, Lior Wolf
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Diversity, Video Generation

We consider the task of generating diverse and novel videos from a single video sample. Recently, new hierarchical patch-GAN based approaches were proposed for generating diverse images, given only a single sample at training time. Moving to videos, these approaches fail to generate diverse samples, and often collapse into generating samples similar to the training video. We introduce a novel patch-based variational autoencoder (VAE) which allows for a much greater diversity in generation. Using this tool, a new hierarchical video generation scheme is constructed: at coarse scales, our patch-VAE is employed, ensuring samples are of high diversity. Subsequently, at finer scales, a patch-GAN renders the fine details, resulting in high quality videos. Our experiments show that the proposed method produces diverse samples in both the image domain, and the more challenging video domain.
Machine Learning in Heliophysics and Space Weather Forecasting: A White Paper of Findings and Recommendations
Authors: Gelu Nita, Manolis Georgoulis, Irina Kitiashvili, Viacheslav Sadykov, Enrico Camporeale, Alexander Kosovichev, Haimin Wang, Vincent Oria, Jason Wang, Rafal Angryk, Berkay Aydin, Azim Ahmadzadeh, Xiaoli Bai, Timothy Bastian, Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi, Bin Chen, Alisdair Davey, Sheldon Fereira, Gregory Fleishman, Dale Gary, Andrew Gerrard, Gregory Hellbourg, Katherine Herbert, Jack Ireland, Egor Illarionov, Natsuha Kuroda, Qin Li, Chang Liu, Yuexin Liu, Hyomin Kim, Dustin Kempton, Ruizhe Ma, Petrus Martens, Ryan McGranaghan, Edward Semones, John Stefan, Andrey Stejko, Yaireska Collado-Vega, Meiqi Wang, Yan Xu, Sijie Yu
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Weather Forecasting

The authors of this white paper met on 16-17 January 2020 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, for a 2-day workshop that brought together a group of heliophysicists, data providers, expert modelers, and computer/data scientists. Their objective was to discuss critical developments and prospects of the application of machine and/or deep learning techniques for data analysis, modeling and forecasting in Heliophysics, and to shape a strategy for further developments in the field. The workshop combined a set of plenary sessions featuring invited introductory talks interleaved with a set of open discussion sessions. The outcome of the discussion is encapsulated in this white paper that also features a top-level list of recommendations agreed by participants.
Facial Expression Editing with Continuous Emotion Labels
Authors: Alexandra Lindt, Pablo Barros, Henrique Siqueira, Stefan Wermter
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00

Recently deep generative models have achieved impressive results in the field of automated facial expression editing. However, the approaches presented so far presume a discrete representation of human emotions and are therefore limited in the modelling of non-discrete emotional expressions. To overcome this limitation, we explore how continuous emotion representations can be used to control automated expression editing. We propose a deep generative model that can be used to manipulate facial expressions in facial images according to continuous two-dimensional emotion labels. One dimension represents an emotion's valence, the other represents its degree of arousal. We demonstrate the functionality of our model with a quantitative analysis using classifier networks as well as with a qualitative analysis.
Text Recognition in Real Scenarios with a Few Labeled Samples
Authors: Jinghuang Lin, Zhanzhan Cheng, Fan Bai, Yi Niu, ShiLiang Pu, Shuigeng Zhou
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Scene Text Recognition

Scene text recognition (STR) is still a hot research topic in computer vision field due to its various applications. Existing works mainly focus on learning a general model with a huge number of synthetic text images to recognize unconstrained scene texts, and have achieved substantial progress. However, these methods are not quite applicable in many real-world scenarios where 1) high recognition accuracy is required, while 2) labeled samples are lacked. To tackle this challenging problem, this paper proposes a few-shot adversarial sequence domain adaptation (FASDA) approach to build sequence adaptation between the synthetic source domain (with many synthetic labeled samples) and a specific target domain (with only some or a few real labeled samples). This is done by simultaneously learning each character's feature representation with an attention mechanism and establishing the corresponding character-level latent subspace with adversarial learning. Our approach can maximize the character-level confusion between the source domain and the target domain, thus achieves the sequence-level adaptation with even a small number of labeled samples in the target domain. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the finetuning scheme, and obtains comparable performance to the state-of-the-art STR methods.
Telescoping Density-Ratio Estimation
Authors: Benjamin Rhodes, Kai Xu, Michael U. Gutmann
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Density Ratio Estimation, Mutual Information Estimation, Representation Learning

Density-ratio estimation via classification is a cornerstone of unsupervised learning. It has provided the foundation for state-of-the-art methods in representation learning and generative modelling, with the number of use-cases continuing to proliferate. However, it suffers from a critical limitation: it fails to accurately estimate ratios p/q for which the two densities differ significantly. Empirically, we find this occurs whenever the KL divergence between p and q exceeds tens of nats. To resolve this limitation, we introduce a new framework, telescoping density-ratio estimation (TRE), that enables the estimation of ratios between highly dissimilar densities in high-dimensional spaces. Our experiments demonstrate that TRE can yield substantial improvements over existing single-ratio methods for mutual information estimation, representation learning and energy-based modelling.
Neural networks adapting to datasets: learning network size and topology
Authors: Romuald A. Janik, Aleksandra Nowak
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00

We introduce a flexible setup allowing for a neural network to learn both its size and topology during the course of a standard gradient-based training. The resulting network has the structure of a graph tailored to the particular learning task and dataset. The obtained networks can also be trained from scratch and achieve virtually identical performance. We explore the properties of the network architectures for a number of datasets of varying difficulty observing systematic regularities. The obtained graphs can be therefore understood as encoding nontrivial characteristics of the particular classification tasks.
Potential customer mining application of smart home products based on LightGBM PU learning and Spark ML algorithm practice
Authors: Duan Zhihua, Wang JiaLin
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Marketing

This paper studies the case of big data-based intelligent product potential customer mining internal competition in China Telecom Shanghai Company. Huge amounts of data based on big data table, the use of machine Learning and data analysis technology, using the algorithm of LightGBM, PySpark machine Learning algorithms, Positive Unlabeled Learning algorithm, and predict whether customers buy whole house product, precision marketing into artificial intelligence for the customer, large data capacity, promote the development of intelligent products of the company.
Examination of Community Sentiment Dynamics due to COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study from A State in Australia
Authors: Jianlong Zhou, Shuiqiao Yang, Chun Xiao, Fang Chen
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

The outbreak of the novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused unprecedented impacts to people's daily life around the world. Various measures and policies such as lockdown and social-distancing are implemented by governments to combat the disease during the pandemic period. These measures and policies as well as virus itself may cause different mental health issues to people such as depression, anxiety, sadness, etc. In this paper, we exploit the massive text data posted by Twitter users to analyse the sentiment dynamics of people living in the state of New South Wales (NSW) in Australia during the pandemic period. Different from the existing work that mostly focuses the country-level and static sentiment analysis, we analyse the sentiment dynamics at the fine-grained local government areas (LGAs). Based on the analysis of around 94 million tweets that posted by around 183 thousand users located at different LGAs in NSW in five months, we found that people in NSW showed an overall positive sentimental polarity and the COVID-19 pandemic decreased the overall positive sentimental polarity during the pandemic period. The fine-grained analysis of sentiment in LGAs found that despite the dominant positive sentiment most of days during the study period, some LGAs experienced significant sentiment changes from positive to negative. This study also analysed the sentimental dynamics delivered by the hot topics in Twitter such as government policies (e.g. the Australia's JobKeeper program, lockdown, social-distancing) as well as the focused social events (e.g. the Ruby Princess Cruise). The results showed that the policies and events did affect people's overall sentiment, and they affected people's overall sentiment differently at different stages.
Hierarchical Inter-Message Passing for Learning on Molecular Graphs
Authors: Matthias Fey, Jan-Gin Yuen, Frank Weichert
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00

We present a hierarchical neural message passing architecture for learning on molecular graphs. Our model takes in two complementary graph representations: the raw molecular graph representation and its associated junction tree, where nodes represent meaningful clusters in the original graph, e.g., rings or bridged compounds. We then proceed to learn a molecule's representation by passing messages inside each graph, and exchange messages between the two representations using a coarse-to-fine and fine-to-coarse information flow. Our method is able to overcome some of the restrictions known from classical GNNs, like detecting cycles, while still being very efficient to train. We validate its performance on the ZINC dataset and datasets stemming from the MoleculeNet benchmark collection.
Bidirectionally Self-Normalizing Neural Networks
Authors: Yao Lu, Stephen Gould, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00

The problem of vanishing and exploding gradients has been a long-standing obstacle that hinders the effective training of neural networks. Despite various tricks and techniques that have been employed to alleviate the problem in practice, there still lacks satisfactory theories or provable solutions. In this paper, we address the problem from the perspective of high-dimensional probability theory. We provide a rigorous result that shows, under mild conditions, how the vanishing/exploding gradients problem disappears with high probability if the neural networks have sufficient width. Our main idea is to constrain both forward and backward signal propagation in a nonlinear neural network through a new class of activation functions, namely Gaussian-Poincar\'e normalized functions, and orthogonal weight matrices. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data validate our theory and confirm its effectiveness on very deep neural networks when applied in practice.
Open Source Software for Efficient and Transparent Reviews
Authors: Rens van de Schoot, Jonathan de Bruin, Raoul Schram, Parisa Zahedi, Jan de Boer, Felix Weijdema, Bianca Kramer, Martijn Huijts, Maarten Hoogerwerf, Gerbrich Ferdinands, Albert Harkema, Joukje Willemsen, Yongchao Ma, Qixiang Fang, Sybren Hindriks, Lars Tummers, Daniel Oberski
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, BIG-bench Machine Learning

To help researchers conduct a systematic review or meta-analysis as efficiently and transparently as possible, we designed a tool (ASReview) to accelerate the step of screening titles and abstracts. For many tasks - including but not limited to systematic reviews and meta-analyses - the scientific literature needs to be checked systematically. Currently, scholars and practitioners screen thousands of studies by hand to determine which studies to include in their review or meta-analysis. This is error prone and inefficient because of extremely imbalanced data: only a fraction of the screened studies is relevant. The future of systematic reviewing will be an interaction with machine learning algorithms to deal with the enormous increase of available text. We therefore developed an open source machine learning-aided pipeline applying active learning: ASReview. We demonstrate by means of simulation studies that ASReview can yield far more efficient reviewing than manual reviewing, while providing high quality. Furthermore, we describe the options of the free and open source research software and present the results from user experience tests. We invite the community to contribute to open source projects such as our own that provide measurable and reproducible improvements over current practice.
First Steps Towards a Runtime Analysis When Starting With a Good Solution
Authors: Denis Antipov, Maxim Buzdalov, Benjamin Doerr
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

The mathematical runtime analysis of evolutionary algorithms traditionally regards the time an algorithm needs to find a solution of a certain quality when initialized with a random population. In practical applications it may be possible to guess solutions that are better than random ones. We start a mathematical runtime analysis for such situations. We observe that different algorithms profit to a very different degree from a better initialization. We also show that the optimal parameterization of the algorithm can depend strongly on the quality of the initial solutions. To overcome this difficulty, self-adjusting and randomized heavy-tailed parameter choices can be profitable. Finally, we observe a larger gap between the performance of the best evolutionary algorithm we found and the corresponding black-box complexity. This could suggest that evolutionary algorithms better exploiting good initial solutions are still to be found. These first findings stem from analyzing the performance of the $(1+1)$ evolutionary algorithm and the static, self-adjusting, and heavy-tailed $(1 + (\lambda,\lambda))$ GA on the OneMax benchmark. We are optimistic that the question how to profit from good initial solutions is interesting beyond these first examples.
Logarithmic Pruning is All You Need
Authors: Laurent Orseau, Marcus Hutter, Omar Rivasplata
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: All

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis is a conjecture that every large neural network contains a subnetwork that, when trained in isolation, achieves comparable performance to the large network. An even stronger conjecture has been proven recently: Every sufficiently overparameterized network contains a subnetwork that, at random initialization, but without training, achieves comparable accuracy to the trained large network. This latter result, however, relies on a number of strong assumptions and guarantees a polynomial factor on the size of the large network compared to the target function. In this work, we remove the most limiting assumptions of this previous work while providing significantly tighter bounds:the overparameterized network only needs a logarithmic factor (in all variables but depth) number of neurons per weight of the target subnetwork.
Neural Cellular Automata Manifold
Authors: Alejandro Hernandez Ruiz, Armand Vilalta, Francesc Moreno-Noguer
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Generation

Very recently, the Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) has been proposed to simulate the morphogenesis process with deep networks. NCA learns to grow an image starting from a fixed single pixel. In this work, we show that the neural network (NN) architecture of the NCA can be encapsulated in a larger NN. This allows us to propose a new model that encodes a manifold of NCA, each of them capable of generating a distinct image. Therefore, we are effectively learning an embedding space of CA, which shows generalization capabilities. We accomplish this by introducing dynamic convolutions inside an Auto-Encoder architecture, for the first time used to join two different sources of information, the encoding and cells environment information. In biological terms, our approach would play the role of the transcription factors, modulating the mapping of genes into specific proteins that drive cellular differentiation, which occurs right before the morphogenesis. We thoroughly evaluate our approach in a dataset of synthetic emojis and also in real images of CIFAR10. Our model introduces a general-purpose network, which can be used in a broad range of problems beyond image generation.
Generating Annotated High-Fidelity Images Containing Multiple Coherent Objects
Authors: Bryan G. Cardenas, Devanshu Arya, Deepak K. Gupta
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Layout-to-Image Generation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Recent developments related to generative models have made it possible to generate diverse high-fidelity images. In particular, layout-to-image generation models have gained significant attention due to their capability to generate realistic complex images containing distinct objects. These models are generally conditioned on either semantic layouts or textual descriptions. However, unlike natural images, providing auxiliary information can be extremely hard in domains such as biomedical imaging and remote sensing. In this work, we propose a multi-object generation framework that can synthesize images with multiple objects without explicitly requiring their contextual information during the generation process. Based on a vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) backbone, our model learns to preserve spatial coherency within an image as well as semantic coherency between the objects and the background through two powerful autoregressive priors: PixelSNAIL and LayoutPixelSNAIL. While the PixelSNAIL learns the distribution of the latent encodings of the VQ-VAE, the LayoutPixelSNAIL is used to specifically learn the semantic distribution of the objects. An implicit advantage of our approach is that the generated samples are accompanied by object-level annotations. We demonstrate how coherency and fidelity are preserved with our method through experiments on the Multi-MNIST and CLEVR datasets; thereby outperforming state-of-the-art multi-object generative methods. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated through application on medical imaging datasets, where we show that augmenting the training set with generated samples using our approach improves the performance of existing models.
ReCO: A Large Scale Chinese Reading Comprehension Dataset on Opinion
Authors: BingningWang, Ting Yao, Qi Zhang, Jingfang Xu, Xiaochuan Wang
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Chinese Reading Comprehension, Logical Reasoning, Machine Reading Comprehension, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

This paper presents the ReCO, a human-curated ChineseReading Comprehension dataset on Opinion. The questions in ReCO are opinion based queries issued to the commercial search engine. The passages are provided by the crowdworkers who extract the support snippet from the retrieved documents. Finally, an abstractive yes/no/uncertain answer was given by the crowdworkers. The release of ReCO consists of 300k questions that to our knowledge is the largest in Chinese reading comprehension. A prominent characteristic of ReCO is that in addition to the original context paragraph, we also provided the support evidence that could be directly used to answer the question. Quality analysis demonstrates the challenge of ReCO that requires various types of reasoning skills, such as causal inference, logical reasoning, etc. Current QA models that perform very well on many question answering problems, such as BERT, only achieve 77% accuracy on this dataset, a large margin behind humans nearly 92% performance, indicating ReCO presents a good challenge for machine reading comprehension. The codes, datasets are freely available at https://github.com/benywon/ReCO.
High-Precision Digital Traffic Recording with Multi-LiDAR Infrastructure Sensor Setups
Authors: Laurent Kloeker, Christian Geller, Amarin Kloeker, Lutz Eckstein
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Large driving datasets are a key component in the current development and safeguarding of automated driving functions. Various methods can be used to collect such driving data records. In addition to the use of sensor equipped research vehicles or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the use of infrastructure sensor technology offers another alternative. To minimize object occlusion during data collection, it is crucial to record the traffic situation from several perspectives in parallel. A fusion of all raw sensor data might create better conditions for multi-object detection and tracking (MODT) compared to the use of individual raw sensor data. So far, no sufficient studies have been conducted to sufficiently confirm this approach. In our work we investigate the impact of fused LiDAR point clouds compared to single LiDAR point clouds. We model different urban traffic scenarios with up to eight 64-layer LiDARs in simulation and in reality. We then analyze the properties of the resulting point clouds and perform MODT for all emerging traffic participants. The evaluation of the extracted trajectories shows that a fused infrastructure approach significantly increases the tracking results and reaches accuracies within a few centimeters.
Rapid Structural Pruning of Neural Networks with Set-based Task-Adaptive Meta-Pruning
Authors: Minyoung Song, Jaehong Yoon, Eunho Yang, Sung Ju Hwang
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Network Pruning

As deep neural networks are growing in size and being increasingly deployed to more resource-limited devices, there has been a recent surge of interest in network pruning methods, which aim to remove less important weights or activations of a given network. A common limitation of most existing pruning techniques, is that they require pre-training of the network at least once before pruning, and thus we can benefit from reduction in memory and computation only at the inference time. However, reducing the training cost of neural networks with rapid structural pruning may be beneficial either to minimize monetary cost with cloud computing or to enable on-device learning on a resource-limited device. Recently introduced random-weight pruning approaches can eliminate the needs of pretraining, but they often obtain suboptimal performance over conventional pruning techniques and also does not allow for faster training since they perform unstructured pruning. To overcome their limitations, we propose Set-based Task-Adaptive Meta Pruning (STAMP), which task-adaptively prunes a network pretrained on a large reference dataset by generating a pruning mask on it as a function of the target dataset. To ensure maximum performance improvements on the target task, we meta-learn the mask generator over different subsets of the reference dataset, such that it can generalize well to any unseen datasets within a few gradient steps of training. We validate STAMP against recent advanced pruning methods on benchmark datasets, on which it not only obtains significantly improved compression rates over the baselines at similar accuracy, but also orders of magnitude faster training speed.