pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Private Facial Diagnosis as an Edge Service for Parkinson's DBS Treatment Valuation
Authors: Richard Jiang, Paul Chazot, Danny Crookes, Ahmed Bouridane, M Emre Celebi
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis, Privacy Preserving

Facial phenotyping has recently been successfully exploited for medical diagnosis as a novel way to diagnose a range of diseases, where facial biometrics has been revealed to have rich links to underlying genetic or medical causes. In this paper, taking Parkinson's Diseases (PD) as a case study, we proposed an Artificial-Intelligence-of-Things (AIoT) edge-oriented privacy-preserving facial diagnosis framework to analyze the treatment of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) on PD patients. In the proposed framework, a new edge-based information theoretically secure framework is proposed to implement private deep facial diagnosis as a service over a privacy-preserving AIoT-oriented multi-party communication scheme, where partial homomorphic encryption (PHE) is leveraged to enable privacy-preserving deep facial diagnosis directly on encrypted facial patterns. In our experiments with a collected facial dataset from PD patients, for the first time, we demonstrated that facial patterns could be used to valuate the improvement of PD patients undergoing DBS treatment. We further implemented a privacy-preserving deep facial diagnosis framework that can achieve the same accuracy as the non-encrypted one, showing the potential of our privacy-preserving facial diagnosis as an trustworthy edge service for grading the severity of PD in patients.
DRAS-CQSim: A Reinforcement Learning based Framework for HPC Cluster Scheduling
Authors: Yuping Fan, Zhiling Lan
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

For decades, system administrators have been striving to design and tune cluster scheduling policies to improve the performance of high performance computing (HPC) systems. However, the increasingly complex HPC systems combined with highly diverse workloads make such manual process challenging, time-consuming, and error-prone. We present a reinforcement learning based HPC scheduling framework named DRAS-CQSim to automatically learn optimal scheduling policy. DRAS-CQSim encapsulates simulation environments, agents, hyperparameter tuning options, and different reinforcement learning algorithms, which allows the system administrators to quickly obtain customized scheduling policies.
Graph-Free Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Xiang Deng, Zhongfei Zhang
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from a teacher network to a student by enforcing the student to mimic the outputs of the pretrained teacher on training data. However, data samples are not always accessible in many cases due to large data sizes, privacy, or confidentiality. Many efforts have been made on addressing this problem for convolutional neural networks (CNNs) whose inputs lie in a grid domain within a continuous space such as images and videos, but largely overlook graph neural networks (GNNs) that handle non-grid data with different topology structures within a discrete space. The inherent differences between their inputs make these CNN-based approaches not applicable to GNNs. In this paper, we propose to our best knowledge the first dedicated approach to distilling knowledge from a GNN without graph data. The proposed graph-free KD (GFKD) learns graph topology structures for knowledge transfer by modeling them with multivariate Bernoulli distribution. We then introduce a gradient estimator to optimize this framework. Essentially, the gradients w.r.t. graph structures are obtained by only using GNN forward-propagation without back-propagation, which means that GFKD is compatible with modern GNN libraries such as DGL and Geometric. Moreover, we provide the strategies for handling different types of prior knowledge in the graph data or the GNNs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GFKD achieves the state-of-the-art performance for distilling knowledge from GNNs without training data.
Decision Making with Differential Privacy under a Fairness Lens
Authors: Ferdinando Fioretto, Cuong Tran, Pascal Van Hentenryck
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness, Privacy Preserving

Agencies, such as the U.S. Census Bureau, release data sets and statistics about groups of individuals that are used as input to a number of critical decision processes. To conform to privacy and confidentiality requirements, these agencies are often required to release privacy-preserving versions of the data. This paper studies the release of differentially private data sets and analyzes their impact on some critical resource allocation tasks under a fairness perspective. {The paper shows that, when the decisions take as input differentially private data}, the noise added to achieve privacy disproportionately impacts some groups over others. The paper analyzes the reasons for these disproportionate impacts and proposes guidelines to mitigate these effects. The proposed approaches are evaluated on critical decision problems that use differentially private census data.
Substitutional Neural Image Compression
Authors: Xiao Wang, Wei Jiang, Wei Wang, Shan Liu, Brian Kulis, Peter Chin
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

We describe Substitutional Neural Image Compression (SNIC), a general approach for enhancing any neural image compression model, that requires no data or additional tuning of the trained model. It boosts compression performance toward a flexible distortion metric and enables bit-rate control using a single model instance. The key idea is to replace the image to be compressed with a substitutional one that outperforms the original one in a desired way. Finding such a substitute is inherently difficult for conventional codecs, yet surprisingly favorable for neural compression models thanks to their fully differentiable structures. With gradients of a particular loss backpropogated to the input, a desired substitute can be efficiently crafted iteratively. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SNIC, when combined with various neural compression models and target metrics, in improving compression quality and performing bit-rate control measured by rate-distortion curves. Empirical results of control precision and generation speed are also discussed.
Doc2Dict: Information Extraction as Text Generation
Authors: Benjamin Townsend, Eamon Ito-Fisher, Lily Zhang, Madison May
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Typically, information extraction (IE) requires a pipeline approach: first, a sequence labeling model is trained on manually annotated documents to extract relevant spans; then, when a new document arrives, a model predicts spans which are then post-processed and standardized to convert the information into a database entry. We replace this labor-intensive workflow with a transformer language model trained on existing database records to directly generate structured JSON. Our solution removes the workload associated with producing token-level annotations and takes advantage of a data source which is generally quite plentiful (e.g. database records). As long documents are common in information extraction tasks, we use gradient checkpointing and chunked encoding to apply our method to sequences of up to 32,000 tokens on a single GPU. Our Doc2Dict approach is competitive with more complex, hand-engineered pipelines and offers a simple but effective baseline for document-level information extraction. We release our Doc2Dict model and code to reproduce our experiments and facilitate future work.
Abstraction, Validation, and Generalization for Explainable Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Scott Cheng-Hsin Yang, Tomas Folke, Patrick Shafto
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Neural network architectures are achieving superhuman performance on an expanding range of tasks. To effectively and safely deploy these systems, their decision-making must be understandable to a wide range of stakeholders. Methods to explain AI have been proposed to answer this challenge, but a lack of theory impedes the development of systematic abstractions which are necessary for cumulative knowledge gains. We propose Bayesian Teaching as a framework for unifying explainable AI (XAI) by integrating machine learning and human learning. Bayesian Teaching formalizes explanation as a communication act of an explainer to shift the beliefs of an explainee. This formalization decomposes any XAI method into four components: (1) the inference to be explained, (2) the explanatory medium, (3) the explainee model, and (4) the explainer model. The abstraction afforded by Bayesian Teaching to decompose any XAI method elucidates the invariances among them. The decomposition of XAI systems enables modular validation, as each of the first three components listed can be tested semi-independently. This decomposition also promotes generalization through recombination of components from different XAI systems, which facilitates the generation of novel variants. These new variants need not be evaluated one by one provided that each component has been validated, leading to an exponential decrease in development time. Finally, by making the goal of explanation explicit, Bayesian Teaching helps developers to assess how suitable an XAI system is for its intended real-world use case. Thus, Bayesian Teaching provides a theoretical framework that encourages systematic, scientific investigation of XAI.
Uncertainty in Minimum Cost Multicuts for Image and Motion Segmentation
Authors: Amirhossein Kardoost, Margret Keuper
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Segmentation, Multiple Object Tracking, Object Tracking, Segmentation

The minimum cost lifted multicut approach has proven practically good performance in a wide range of applications such as image decomposition, mesh segmentation, multiple object tracking, and motion segmentation. It addresses such problems in a graph-based model, where real-valued costs are assigned to the edges between entities such that the minimum cut decomposes the graph into an optimal number of segments. Driven by a probabilistic formulation of minimum cost multicuts, we provide a measure for the uncertainties of the decisions made during the optimization. We argue that access to such uncertainties is crucial for many practical applications and conduct an evaluation by means of sparsifications on three different, widely used datasets in the context of image decomposition (BSDS-500) and motion segmentation (DAVIS2016 and FBMS59) in terms of variation of information (VI) and Rand index (RI).
Few-NERD: A Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset
Authors: Ning Ding, Guangwei Xu, Yulin Chen, Xiaobin Wang, Xu Han, Pengjun Xie, Hai-Tao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Few-shot NER, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of a two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. We make Few-NERD public at https://ningding97.github.io/fewnerd/.
Sparse to Dense Dynamic 3D Facial Expression Generation
Authors: Naima Otberdout, Claudio Ferrari, Mohamed Daoudi, Stefano Berretti, Alberto del Bimbo
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Face Animation, Decoder, Face Generation, Facial expression generation

In this paper, we propose a solution to the task of generating dynamic 3D facial expressions from a neutral 3D face and an expression label. This involves solving two sub-problems: (i)modeling the temporal dynamics of expressions, and (ii) deforming the neutral mesh to obtain the expressive counterpart. We represent the temporal evolution of expressions using the motion of a sparse set of 3D landmarks that we learn to generate by training a manifold-valued GAN (Motion3DGAN). To better encode the expression-induced deformation and disentangle it from the identity information, the generated motion is represented as per-frame displacement from a neutral configuration. To generate the expressive meshes, we train a Sparse2Dense mesh Decoder (S2D-Dec) that maps the landmark displacements to a dense, per-vertex displacement. This allows us to learn how the motion of a sparse set of landmarks influences the deformation of the overall face surface, independently from the identity. Experimental results on the CoMA and D3DFACS datasets show that our solution brings significant improvements with respect to previous solutions in terms of both dynamic expression generation and mesh reconstruction, while retaining good generalization to unseen data. The code and the pretrained model will be made publicly available.
How Can Robots Trust Each Other For Better Cooperation? A Relative Needs Entropy Based Robot-Robot Trust Assessment Model
Authors: Qin Yang, Ramviyas Parasuraman
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00

Cooperation in multi-agent and multi-robot systems can help agents build various formations, shapes, and patterns presenting corresponding functions and purposes adapting to different situations. Relationships between agents such as their spatial proximity and functional similarities could play a crucial role in cooperation between agents. Trust level between agents is an essential factor in evaluating their relationships' reliability and stability, much as people do. This paper proposes a new model called Relative Needs Entropy (RNE) to assess trust between robotic agents. RNE measures the distance of needs distribution between individual agents or groups of agents. To exemplify its utility, we implement and demonstrate our trust model through experiments simulating a heterogeneous multi-robot grouping task in a persistent urban search and rescue mission consisting of tasks at two levels of difficulty. The results suggest that RNE trust-Based grouping of robots can achieve better performance and adaptability for diverse task execution compared to the state-of-the-art energy-based or distance-based grouping models.
Curiosity-driven Intuitive Physics Learning
Authors: Tejas Gaikwad, Romi Banerjee
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00

Biological infants are naturally curious and try to comprehend their physical surroundings by interacting, in myriad multisensory ways, with different objects - primarily macroscopic solid objects - around them. Through their various interactions, they build hypotheses and predictions, and eventually learn, infer and understand the nature of the physical characteristics and behavior of these objects. Inspired thus, we propose a model for curiosity-driven learning and inference for real-world AI agents. This model is based on the arousal of curiosity, deriving from observations along discontinuities in the fundamental macroscopic solid-body physics parameters, i.e., shape constancy, spatial-temporal continuity, and object permanence. We use the term body-budget to represent the perceived fundamental properties of solid objects. The model aims to support the emulation of learning from scratch followed by substantiation through experience, irrespective of domain, in real-world AI agents.
Resource Planning for Hospitals Under Special Consideration of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Optimization and Sensitivity Analysis
Authors: Thomas Bartz-Beielstein, Marcel Dröscher, Alpar Gür, Alexander Hinterleitner, Olaf Mersmann, Dessislava Peeva, Lennard Reese, Nicolas Rehbach, Frederik Rehbach, Amrita Sen, Aleksandr Subbotin, Martin Zaefferer
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic pose a serious challenge to health-care institutions. They need to plan the resources required for handling the increased load, for instance, hospital beds and ventilators. To support the resource planning of local health authorities from the Cologne region, BaBSim.Hospital, a tool for capacity planning based on discrete event simulation, was created. The predictive quality of the simulation is determined by 29 parameters. Reasonable default values of these parameters were obtained in detailed discussions with medical professionals. We aim to investigate and optimize these parameters to improve BaBSim.Hospital. First approaches with "out-of-the-box" optimization algorithms failed. Implementing a surrogate-based optimization approach generated useful results in a reasonable time. To understand the behavior of the algorithm and to get valuable insights into the fitness landscape, an in-depth sensitivity analysis was performed. The sensitivity analysis is crucial for the optimization process because it allows focusing the optimization on the most important parameters. We illustrate how this reduces the problem dimension without compromising the resulting accuracy. The presented approach is applicable to many other real-world problems, e.g., the development of new elevator systems to cover the last mile or simulation of student flow in academic study periods.
Robust optimal policies for team Markov games
Authors: Feng Huang, Ming Cao, Long Wang
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

In stochastic dynamic environments, team Markov games have emerged as a versatile paradigm for studying sequential decision-making problems of fully cooperative multi-agent systems. However, the optimality of the derived policies is usually sensitive to model parameters, which are typically unknown and required to be estimated from noisy data in practice. To mitigate the sensitivity of optimal policies to these uncertain parameters, we propose a robust model of team Markov games in this paper, where agents utilize robust optimization approaches to update strategies. This model extends team Markov games to the scenario of incomplete information and meanwhile provides an alternative solution concept of robust team optimality. To seek such a solution, we develop a robust iterative learning algorithm of team policies and prove its convergence. This algorithm, compared with robust dynamic programming, not only possesses a faster convergence rate, but also allows for using approximation calculations to alleviate the curse of dimensionality. Moreover, some numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm by generalizing the game model of sequential social dilemmas to uncertain scenarios.
Uncertainty Measurement of Basic Probability Assignment Integrity Based on Approximate Entropy in Evidence Theory
Authors: Tianxiang Zhan, Yuanpeng He, Hanwen Li, Fuyuan Xiao
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Evidence theory is that the extension of probability can better deal with unknowns and inaccurate information. Uncertainty measurement plays a vital role in both evidence theory and probability theory. Approximate Entropy (ApEn) is proposed by Pincus to describe the irregularities of complex systems. The more irregular the time series, the greater the approximate entropy. The ApEn of the network represents the ability of a network to generate new nodes, or the possibility of undiscovered nodes. Through the association of network characteristics and basic probability assignment (BPA) , a measure of the uncertainty of BPA regarding completeness can be obtained. The main contribution of paper is to define the integrity of the basic probability assignment then the approximate entropy of the BPA is proposed to measure the uncertainty of the integrity of the BPA. The proposed method is based on the logical network structure to calculate the uncertainty of BPA in evidence theory. The uncertainty based on the proposed method represents the uncertainty of integrity of BPA and contributes to the identification of the credibility of BPA.
Order Effects in Bayesian Updates
Authors: Catarina Moreira, Jose Acacio de Barros
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00

Order effects occur when judgments about a hypothesis's probability given a sequence of information do not equal the probability of the same hypothesis when the information is reversed. Different experiments have been performed in the literature that supports evidence of order effects. We proposed a Bayesian update model for order effects where each question can be thought of as a mini-experiment where the respondents reflect on their beliefs. We showed that order effects appear, and they have a simple cognitive explanation: the respondent's prior belief that two questions are correlated. The proposed Bayesian model allows us to make several predictions: (1) we found certain conditions on the priors that limit the existence of order effects; (2) we show that, for our model, the QQ equality is not necessarily satisfied (due to symmetry assumptions); and (3) the proposed Bayesian model has the advantage of possessing fewer parameters than its quantum counterpart.
Model-Based Offline Planning with Trajectory Pruning
Authors: Xianyuan Zhan, Xiangyu Zhu, Haoran Xu
Date: 2021-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The recent offline reinforcement learning (RL) studies have achieved much progress to make RL usable in real-world systems by learning policies from pre-collected datasets without environment interaction. Unfortunately, existing offline RL methods still face many practical challenges in real-world system control tasks, such as computational restriction during agent training and the requirement of extra control flexibility. The model-based planning framework provides an attractive alternative. However, most model-based planning algorithms are not designed for offline settings. Simply combining the ingredients of offline RL with existing methods either provides over-restrictive planning or leads to inferior performance. We propose a new light-weighted model-based offline planning framework, namely MOPP, which tackles the dilemma between the restrictions of offline learning and high-performance planning. MOPP encourages more aggressive trajectory rollout guided by the behavior policy learned from data, and prunes out problematic trajectories to avoid potential out-of-distribution samples. Experimental results show that MOPP provides competitive performance compared with existing model-based offline planning and RL approaches.