pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluating representations by the complexity of learning low-loss predictors
Authors: William F. Whitney, Min Jae Song, David Brandfonbrener, Jaan Altosaar, Kyunghyun Cho
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00

We consider the problem of evaluating representations of data for use in solving a downstream task. We propose to measure the quality of a representation by the complexity of learning a predictor on top of the representation that achieves low loss on a task of interest, and introduce two methods, surplus description length (SDL) and $\varepsilon$ sample complexity ($\varepsilon$SC). In contrast to prior methods, which measure the amount of information about the optimal predictor that is present in a specific amount of data, our methods measure the amount of information needed from the data to recover an approximation of the optimal predictor up to a specified tolerance. We present a framework to compare these methods based on plotting the validation loss versus evaluation dataset size (the "loss-data" curve). Existing measures, such as mutual information and minimum description length probes, correspond to slices and integrals along the data axis of the loss-data curve, while ours correspond to slices and integrals along the loss axis. We provide experiments on real data to compare the behavior of each of these methods over datasets of varying size along with a high performance open source library for representation evaluation at https://github.com/willwhitney/reprieve.
Classifying the Equation of State from Rotating Core Collapse Gravitational Waves with Deep Learning
Authors: Matthew C. Edwards
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In this paper, we seek to answer the question "given a rotating core collapse gravitational wave signal, can we determine its nuclear equation of state?". To answer this question, we employ deep convolutional neural networks to learn visual and temporal patterns embedded within rotating core collapse gravitational wave (GW) signals in order to predict the nuclear equation of state (EOS). Using the 1824 rotating core collapse GW simulations by Richers et al. (2017), which has 18 different nuclear EOS, we consider this to be a classic multi-class image classification and sequence classification problem. We attain up to 72\% correct classifications in the test set, and if we consider the "top 5" most probable labels, this increases to up to 97\%, demonstrating that there is a moderate and measurable dependence of the rotating core collapse GW signal on the nuclear EOS.
Fast semantic parsing with well-typedness guarantees
Authors: Matthias Lindemann, Jonas Groschwitz, Alexander Koller
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Semantic Parsing

AM dependency parsing is a linguistically principled method for neural semantic parsing with high accuracy across multiple graphbanks. It relies on a type system that models semantic valency but makes existing parsers slow. We describe an A* parser and a transition-based parser for AM dependency parsing which guarantee well-typedness and improve parsing speed by up to 3 orders of magnitude, while maintaining or improving accuracy.
An information theoretic view on selecting linguistic probes
Authors: Zining Zhu, Frank Rudzicz
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Diagnostic, General Classification, valid

There is increasing interest in assessing the linguistic knowledge encoded in neural representations. A popular approach is to attach a diagnostic classifier -- or "probe" -- to perform supervised classification from internal representations. However, how to select a good probe is in debate. Hewitt and Liang (2019) showed that a high performance on diagnostic classification itself is insufficient, because it can be attributed to either "the representation being rich in knowledge", or "the probe learning the task", which Pimentel et al. (2020) challenged. We show this dichotomy is valid information-theoretically. In addition, we find that the methods to construct and select good probes proposed by the two papers, *control task* (Hewitt and Liang, 2019) and *control function* (Pimentel et al., 2020), are equivalent -- the errors of their approaches are identical (modulo irrelevant terms). Empirically, these two selection criteria lead to results that highly agree with each other.
Advancing the Scientific Frontier with Increasingly Autonomous Systems
Authors: Rashied Amini, Abigail Azari, Shyam Bhaskaran, Patricia Beauchamp, Julie Castillo-Rogez, Rebecca Castano, Seung Chung, John Day, Richard Doyle, Martin Feather, Lorraine Fesq, Jeremy Frank, P. Michael Furlong, Michel Ingham, Brian Kennedy, Ksenia Kolcio, Issa Nesnas, Robert Rasmussen, Glenn Reeves, Cristina Sorice, Bethany Theiling, Jay Wyatt
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: scientific discovery

A close partnership between people and partially autonomous machines has enabled decades of space exploration. But to further expand our horizons, our systems must become more capable. Increasing the nature and degree of autonomy - allowing our systems to make and act on their own decisions as directed by mission teams - enables new science capabilities and enhances science return. The 2011 Planetary Science Decadal Survey (PSDS) and on-going pre-Decadal mission studies have identified increased autonomy as a core technology required for future missions. However, even as scientific discovery has necessitated the development of autonomous systems and past flight demonstrations have been successful, institutional barriers have limited its maturation and infusion on existing planetary missions. Consequently, the authors and endorsers of this paper recommend that new programmatic pathways be developed to infuse autonomy, infrastructure for support autonomous systems be invested in, new practices be adopted, and the cost-saving value of autonomy for operations be studied.
General DeepLCP model for disease prediction : Case of Lung Cancer
Authors: Mayssa Ben Kahla, Dalel Kanzari, Ahmed Maalel
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Disease Prediction

According to GHO (Global Health Observatory (GHO), the high prevalence of a large variety of diseases such as Ischaemic heart disease, stroke, lung cancer disease and lower respiratory infections have remained the top killers during the past decade. The growth in the number of mortalities caused by these disease is due to the very delayed symptoms'detection. Since in the early stages, the symptoms are insignificant and similar to those of benign diseases (e.g. the flu ), and we can only detect the disease at an advanced stage. In addition, The high frequency of improper practices that are harmful to health, the hereditary factors, and the stressful living conditions can increase the death rates. Many researches dealt with these fatal disease, and most of them applied advantage machine learning models to deal with image diagnosis. However the drawback is that imagery permit only to detect disease at a very delayed stage and then patient can hardly be saved. In this Paper we present our new approach "DeepLCP" to predict fatal diseases that threaten people's lives. It's mainly based on raw and heterogeneous data of the concerned (or under-tested) person. "DeepLCP" results of a combination combination of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the deep learning paradigm.The experimental results of the proposed model in the case of Lung cancer prediction have approved high accuracy and a low loss data rate during the validation of the disease prediction.
Constrained Labeling for Weakly Supervised Learning
Authors: Chidubem Arachie, Bert Huang
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Weakly-supervised Learning

Curation of large fully supervised datasets has become one of the major roadblocks for machine learning. Weak supervision provides an alternative to supervised learning by training with cheap, noisy, and possibly correlated labeling functions from varying sources. The key challenge in weakly supervised learning is combining the different weak supervision signals while navigating misleading correlations in their errors. In this paper, we propose a simple data-free approach for combining weak supervision signals by defining a constrained space for the possible labels of the weak signals and training with a random labeling within this constrained space. Our method is efficient and stable, converging after a few iterations of gradient descent. We prove theoretical conditions under which the worst-case error of the randomized label decreases with the rank of the linear constraints. We show experimentally that our method outperforms other weak supervision methods on various text- and image-classification tasks.
Federated Dynamic GNN with Secure Aggregation
Authors: Meng Jiang, Taeho Jung, Ryan Karl, Tong Zhao
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Graph Neural Network

Given video data from multiple personal devices or street cameras, can we exploit the structural and dynamic information to learn dynamic representation of objects for applications such as distributed surveillance, without storing data at a central server that leads to a violation of user privacy? In this work, we introduce Federated Dynamic Graph Neural Network (Feddy), a distributed and secured framework to learn the object representations from multi-user graph sequences: i) It aggregates structural information from nearby objects in the current graph as well as dynamic information from those in the previous graph. It uses a self-supervised loss of predicting the trajectories of objects. ii) It is trained in a federated learning manner. The centrally located server sends the model to user devices. Local models on the respective user devices learn and periodically send their learning to the central server without ever exposing the user's data to server. iii) Studies showed that the aggregated parameters could be inspected though decrypted when broadcast to clients for model synchronizing, after the server performed a weighted average. We design an appropriate aggregation mechanism of secure aggregation primitives that can protect the security and privacy in federated learning with scalability. Experiments on four video camera datasets (in four different scenes) as well as simulation demonstrate that Feddy achieves great effectiveness and security.
Recurrent autoencoder with sequence-aware encoding
Authors: Robert Susik
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) received a vast amount of attention last decade. Recently, the architectures of Recurrent AutoEncoders (RAE) found many applications in practice. RAE can extract the semantically valuable information, called context that represents a latent space useful for further processing. Nevertheless, recurrent autoencoders are hard to train, and the training process takes much time. In this paper, we propose an autoencoder architecture with sequence-aware encoding, which employs 1D convolutional layer to improve its performance in terms of model training time. We prove that the recurrent autoencoder with sequence-aware encoding outperforms a standard RAE in terms of training speed in most cases. The preliminary results show that the proposed solution dominates over the standard RAE, and the training process is order of magnitude faster.
Reinforcement Learning for Strategic Recommendations
Authors: Georgios Theocharous, Yash Chandak, Philip S. Thomas, Frits de Nijs
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Strategic recommendations (SR) refer to the problem where an intelligent agent observes the sequential behaviors and activities of users and decides when and how to interact with them to optimize some long-term objectives, both for the user and the business. These systems are in their infancy in the industry and in need of practical solutions to some fundamental research challenges. At Adobe research, we have been implementing such systems for various use-cases, including points of interest recommendations, tutorial recommendations, next step guidance in multi-media editing software, and ad recommendation for optimizing lifetime value. There are many research challenges when building these systems, such as modeling the sequential behavior of users, deciding when to intervene and offer recommendations without annoying the user, evaluating policies offline with high confidence, safe deployment, non-stationarity, building systems from passive data that do not contain past recommendations, resource constraint optimization in multi-user systems, scaling to large and dynamic actions spaces, and handling and incorporating human cognitive biases. In this paper we cover various use-cases and research challenges we solved to make these systems practical.
Comparison of Spatiotemporal Networks for Learning Video Related Tasks
Authors: Logan Courtney, Ramavarapu Sreenivas
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00

Many methods for learning from video sequences involve temporally processing 2D CNN features from the individual frames or directly utilizing 3D convolutions within high-performing 2D CNN architectures. The focus typically remains on how to incorporate the temporal processing within an already stable spatial architecture. This work constructs an MNIST-based video dataset with parameters controlling relevant facets of common video-related tasks: classification, ordering, and speed estimation. Models trained on this dataset are shown to differ in key ways depending on the task and their use of 2D convolutions, 3D convolutions, or convolutional LSTMs. An empirical analysis indicates a complex, interdependent relationship between the spatial and temporal dimensions with design choices having a large impact on a network's ability to learn the appropriate spatiotemporal features.
Video captioning with stacked attention and semantic hard pull
Authors: Md. Mushfiqur Rahman, Thasin Abedin, Khondokar S. S. Prottoy, Ayana Moshruba, Fazlul Hasan Siddiqui
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Video Captioning

Video captioning, i.e. the task of generating captions from video sequences creates a bridge between the Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision domains of computer science. The task of generating a semantically accurate description of a video is quite complex. Considering the complexity, of the problem, the results obtained in recent research works are praiseworthy. However, there is plenty of scope for further investigation. This paper addresses this scope and proposes a novel solution. Most video captioning models comprise two sequential/recurrent layers - one as a video-to-context encoder and the other as a context-to-caption decoder. This paper proposes a novel architecture, namely Semantically Sensible Video Captioning (SSVC) which modifies the context generation mechanism by using two novel approaches - "stacked attention" and "spatial hard pull". As there are no exclusive metrics for evaluating video captioning models, we emphasize both quantitative and qualitative analysis of our model. Hence, we have used the BLEU scoring metric for quantitative analysis and have proposed a human evaluation metric for qualitative analysis, namely the Semantic Sensibility (SS) scoring metric. SS Score overcomes the shortcomings of common automated scoring metrics. This paper reports that the use of the aforementioned novelties improves the performance of state-of-the-art architectures.
Training neural networks under physical constraints using a stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach
Authors: Alp Dener, Marco Andres Miller, Randy Michael Churchill, Todd Munson, Choong-Seock Chang
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

We investigate the physics-constrained training of an encoder-decoder neural network for approximating the Fokker-Planck-Landau collision operator in the 5-dimensional kinetic fusion simulation in XGC. To train this network, we propose a stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach that utilizes pyTorch's native stochastic gradient descent method to solve the inner unconstrained minimization subproblem, paired with a heuristic update for the penalty factor and Lagrange multipliers in the outer augmented Lagrangian loop. Our training results for a single ion species case, with self-collisions and collision against electrons, show that the proposed stochastic augmented Lagrangian approach can achieve higher model prediction accuracy than training with a fixed penalty method for our application problem, with the accuracy high enough for practical applications in kinetic simulations.
Generative models with kernel distance in data space
Authors: Szymon Knop, Marcin Mazur, Przemysław Spurek, Jacek Tabor, Igor Podolak
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00

Generative models dealing with modeling a~joint data distribution are generally either autoencoder or GAN based. Both have their pros and cons, generating blurry images or being unstable in training or prone to mode collapse phenomenon, respectively. The objective of this paper is to construct a~model situated between above architectures, one that does not inherit their main weaknesses. The proposed LCW generator (Latent Cramer-Wold generator) resembles a classical GAN in transforming Gaussian noise into data space. What is of utmost importance, instead of a~discriminator, LCW generator uses kernel distance. No adversarial training is utilized, hence the name generator. It is trained in two phases. First, an autoencoder based architecture, using kernel measures, is built to model a manifold of data. We propose a Latent Trick mapping a Gaussian to latent in order to get the final model. This results in very competitive FID values.
Cascaded Models for Better Fine-Grained Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Parul Awasthy, Taesun Moon, Jian Ni, Radu Florian
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation Extraction

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an essential precursor task for many natural language applications, such as relation extraction or event extraction. Much of the NER research has been done on datasets with few classes of entity types (e.g. PER, LOC, ORG, MISC), but many real world applications (disaster relief, complex event extraction, law enforcement) can benefit from a larger NER typeset. More recently, datasets were created that have hundreds to thousands of types of entities, sparking new lines of research (Sekine, 2008;Ling and Weld, 2012; Gillick et al., 2014; Choiet al., 2018). In this paper we present a cascaded approach to labeling fine-grained NER, applying to a newly released fine-grained NER dataset that was used in the TAC KBP 2019 evaluation (Ji et al., 2019), inspired by the fact that training data is available for some of the coarse labels. Using a combination of transformer networks, we show that performance can be improved by about 20 F1 absolute, as compared with the straightforward model built on the full fine-grained types, and show that, surprisingly, using course-labeled data in three languages leads to an improvement in the English data.
Simultaneous Machine Translation with Visual Context
Authors: Ozan Caglayan, Julia Ive, Veneta Haralampieva, Pranava Madhyastha, Loïc Barrault, Lucia Specia
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) aims to translate a continuous input text stream into another language with the lowest latency and highest quality possible. The translation thus has to start with an incomplete source text, which is read progressively, creating the need for anticipation. In this paper, we seek to understand whether the addition of visual information can compensate for the missing source context. To this end, we analyse the impact of different multimodal approaches and visual features on state-of-the-art SiMT frameworks. Our results show that visual context is helpful and that visually-grounded models based on explicit object region information are much better than commonly used global features, reaching up to 3 BLEU points improvement under low latency scenarios. Our qualitative analysis illustrates cases where only the multimodal systems are able to translate correctly from English into gender-marked languages, as well as deal with differences in word order, such as adjective-noun placement between English and French.
Scaffold-constrained molecular generation
Authors: Maxime Langevin, Herve Minoux, Maximilien Levesque, Marc Bianciotto
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design, Drug Discovery

One of the major applications of generative models for drug Discovery targets the lead-optimization phase. During the optimization of a lead series, it is common to have scaffold constraints imposed on the structure of the molecules designed. Without enforcing such constraints, the probability of generating molecules with the required scaffold is extremely low and hinders the practicality of generative models for de-novo drug design. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new algorithm to perform scaffold-constrained in-silico molecular design. We build on the well-known SMILES-based Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) generative model, with a modified sampling procedure to achieve scaffold-constrained generation. We directly benefit from the associated reinforcement Learning methods, allowing to design molecules optimized for different properties while exploring only the relevant chemical space. We showcase the method's ability to perform scaffold-constrained generation on various tasks: designing novel molecules around scaffolds extracted from SureChEMBL chemical series, generating novel active molecules on the Dopamine Receptor D2 (DRD2) target, and, finally, designing predicted actives on the MMP-12 series, an industrial lead-optimization project.
Contrastive Cross-site Learning with Redesigned Net for COVID-19 CT Classification
Authors: Zhao Wang, Quande Liu, Qi Dou
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis, General Classification

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has lead to a global public health crisis spreading hundreds of countries. With the continuous growth of new infections, developing automated tools for COVID-19 identification with CT image is highly desired to assist the clinical diagnosis and reduce the tedious workload of image interpretation. To enlarge the datasets for developing machine learning methods, it is essentially helpful to aggregate the cases from different medical systems for learning robust and generalizable models. This paper proposes a novel joint learning framework to perform accurate COVID-19 identification by effectively learning with heterogeneous datasets with distribution discrepancy. We build a powerful backbone by redesigning the recently proposed COVID-Net in aspects of network architecture and learning strategy to improve the prediction accuracy and learning efficiency. On top of our improved backbone, we further explicitly tackle the cross-site domain shift by conducting separate feature normalization in latent space. Moreover, we propose to use a contrastive training objective to enhance the domain invariance of semantic embeddings for boosting the classification performance on each dataset. We develop and evaluate our method with two public large-scale COVID-19 diagnosis datasets made up of CT images. Extensive experiments show that our approach consistently improves the performances on both datasets, outperforming the original COVID-Net trained on each dataset by 12.16% and 14.23% in AUC respectively, also exceeding existing state-of-the-art multi-site learning methods.