pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Detecting Transaction-based Tax Evasion Activities on Social Media Platforms Using Multi-modal Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Lelin Zhang, Xi Nan, Eva Huang, Sidong Liu
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

Social media platforms now serve billions of users by providing convenient means of communication, content sharing and even payment between different users. Due to such convenient and anarchic nature, they have also been used rampantly to promote and conduct business activities between unregistered market participants without paying taxes. Tax authorities worldwide face difficulties in regulating these hidden economy activities by traditional regulatory means. This paper presents a machine learning based Regtech tool for international tax authorities to detect transaction-based tax evasion activities on social media platforms. To build such a tool, we collected a dataset of 58,660 Instagram posts and manually labelled 2,081 sampled posts with multiple properties related to transaction-based tax evasion activities. Based on the dataset, we developed a multi-modal deep neural network to automatically detect suspicious posts. The proposed model combines comments, hashtags and image modalities to produce the final output. As shown by our experiments, the combined model achieved an AUC of 0.808 and F1 score of 0.762, outperforming any single modality models. This tool could help tax authorities to identify audit targets in an efficient and effective manner, and combat social e-commerce tax evasion in scale.
The Effect of Wearing a Mask on Face Recognition Performance: an Exploratory Study
Authors: Naser Damer, Jonas Henry Grebe, Cong Chen, Fadi Boutros, Florian Kirchbuchner, Arjan Kuijper
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Face recognition has become essential in our daily lives as a convenient and contactless method of accurate identity verification. Process such as identity verification at automatic border control gates or the secure login to electronic devices are increasingly dependant on such technologies. The recent COVID-19 pandemic have increased the value of hygienic and contactless identity verification. However, the pandemic led to the wide use of face masks, essential to keep the pandemic under control. The effect of wearing a mask on face recognition in a collaborative environment is currently sensitive yet understudied issue. We address that by presenting a specifically collected database containing three session, each with three different capture instructions, to simulate realistic use cases. We further study the effect of masked face probes on the behaviour of three top-performing face recognition systems, two academic solutions and one commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system.
FedML: A Research Library and Benchmark for Federated Machine Learning
Authors: Chaoyang He, Songze Li, Jinhyun So, Xiao Zeng, Mi Zhang, Hongyi Wang, Xiaoyang Wang, Praneeth Vepakomma, Abhishek Singh, Hang Qiu, Xinghua Zhu, Jianzong Wang, Li Shen, Peilin Zhao, Yan Kang, Yang Liu, Ramesh Raskar, Qiang Yang, Murali Annavaram, Salman Avestimehr
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Distributed Computing, Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a rapidly growing research field in machine learning. However, existing FL libraries cannot adequately support diverse algorithmic development; inconsistent dataset and model usage make fair algorithm comparison challenging. In this work, we introduce FedML, an open research library and benchmark to facilitate FL algorithm development and fair performance comparison. FedML supports three computing paradigms: on-device training for edge devices, distributed computing, and single-machine simulation. FedML also promotes diverse algorithmic research with flexible and generic API design and comprehensive reference baseline implementations (optimizer, models, and datasets). We hope FedML could provide an efficient and reproducible means for developing and evaluating FL algorithms that would benefit the FL research community. We maintain the source code, documents, and user community at https://fedml.ai.
Evidence of Task-Independent Person-Specific Signatures in EEG using Subspace Techniques
Authors: Mari Ganesh Kumar, Shrikanth Narayanan, Mriganka Sur, Hema A. Murthy
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Speaker Recognition, Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are promising as alternatives to other biometrics owing to their protection against spoofing. Previous studies have focused on capturing individual variability by analyzing task/condition-specific EEG. This work attempts to model biometric signatures independent of task/condition by normalizing the associated variance. Toward this goal, the paper extends ideas from subspace-based text-independent speaker recognition and proposes novel modifications for modeling multi-channel EEG data. The proposed techniques assume that biometric information is present in the entire EEG signal and accumulate statistics across time in a high dimensional space. These high dimensional statistics are then projected to a lower dimensional space where the biometric information is preserved. The lower dimensional embeddings obtained using the proposed approach are shown to be task-independent. The best subspace system identifies individuals with accuracies of 86.4% and 35.9% on datasets with 30 and 920 subjects, respectively, using just nine EEG channels. The paper also provides insights into the subspace model's scalability to unseen tasks and individuals during training and the number of channels needed for subspace modeling.
Receptive-Field Regularized CNNs for Music Classification and Tagging
Authors: Khaled Koutini, Hamid Eghbal-zadeh, Verena Haunschmid, Paul Primus, Shreyan Chowdhury, Gerhard Widmer
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Information Retrieval, Music Classification, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been successfully used in various Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks, both as end-to-end models and as feature extractors for more complex systems. However, the MIR field is still dominated by the classical VGG-based CNN architecture variants, often in combination with more complex modules such as attention, and/or techniques such as pre-training on large datasets. Deeper models such as ResNet -- which surpassed VGG by a large margin in other domains -- are rarely used in MIR. One of the main reasons for this, as we will show, is the lack of generalization of deeper CNNs in the music domain. In this paper, we present a principled way to make deep architectures like ResNet competitive for music-related tasks, based on well-designed regularization strategies. In particular, we analyze the recently introduced Receptive-Field Regularization and Shake-Shake, and show that they significantly improve the generalization of deep CNNs on music-related tasks, and that the resulting deep CNNs can outperform current more complex models such as CNNs augmented with pre-training and attention. We demonstrate this on two different MIR tasks and two corresponding datasets, thus offering our deep regularized CNNs as a new baseline for these datasets, which can also be used as a feature-extracting module in future, more complex approaches.
Deep Multi-Task Learning for Cooperative NOMA: System Design and Principles
Authors: Yuxin Lu, Peng Cheng, Zhuo Chen, Wai Ho Mow, Yonghui Li, Branka Vucetic
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Envisioned as a promising component of the future wireless Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique can support massive connectivity with a significantly increased spectral efficiency. Cooperative NOMA is able to further improve the communication reliability of users under poor channel conditions. However, the conventional system design suffers from several inherent limitations and is not optimized from the bit error rate (BER) perspective. In this paper, we develop a novel deep cooperative NOMA scheme, drawing upon the recent advances in deep learning (DL). We develop a novel hybrid-cascaded deep neural network (DNN) architecture such that the entire system can be optimized in a holistic manner. On this basis, we construct multiple loss functions to quantify the BER performance and propose a novel multi-task oriented two-stage training method to solve the end-to-end training problem in a self-supervised manner. The learning mechanism of each DNN module is then analyzed based on information theory, offering insights into the proposed DNN architecture and its corresponding training method. We also adapt the proposed scheme to handle the power allocation (PA) mismatch between training and inference and incorporate it with channel coding to combat signal deterioration. Simulation results verify its advantages over orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and the conventional cooperative NOMA scheme in various scenarios.
A regime switching on Covid19 analysis and prediction in Romania
Authors: Marian Petrica, Radu D. Stochitoiu, Marius Leordeanu, Ionel Popescu
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

In this paper we propose a three stages analysis of the evolution of Covid19 in Romania. There are two main issues when it comes to pandemic prediction. The first one is the fact that the numbers reported of infected and recovered are unreliable, however the number of deaths is more accurate. The second issue is that there were many factors which affected the evolution of the pandemic. In this paper we propose an analysis in three stages. The first stage is based on the classical SIR model which we do using a neural network. This provides a first set of daily parameters. In the second stage we propose a refinement of the SIR model in which we separate the deceased into a distinct category. By using the first estimate and a grid search, we give a daily estimation of the parameters. The third stage is used to define a notion of turning points (local extremes) for the parameters. We call a regime the time between these points. We outline a general way based on time varying parameters of SIRD to make predictions.
Benchmarking Meta-heuristic Optimization
Authors: Mona Nasr, Omar Farouk, Ahmed Mohamedeen, Ali Elrafie, Marwan Bedeir, Ali Khaled
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Evolutionary Algorithms

Solving an optimization task in any domain is a very challenging problem, especially when dealing with nonlinear problems and non-convex functions. Many meta-heuristic algorithms are very efficient when solving nonlinear functions. A meta-heuristic algorithm is a problem-independent technique that can be applied to a broad range of problems. In this experiment, some of the evolutionary algorithms will be tested, evaluated, and compared with each other. We will go through the Genetic Algorithm\, Differential Evolution, Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm, Grey Wolf Optimizer, and Simulated Annealing. They will be evaluated against the performance from many points of view like how the algorithm performs throughout generations and how the algorithm's result is close to the optimal result. Other points of evaluation are discussed in depth in later sections.
Identity-Guided Human Semantic Parsing for Person Re-Identification
Authors: Kuan Zhu, Haiyun Guo, Zhiwei Liu, Ming Tang, Jinqiao Wang
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Clustering, Human Parsing, Person Re-Identification, Retrieval, Semantic Parsing

Existing alignment-based methods have to employ the pretrained human parsing models to achieve the pixel-level alignment, and cannot identify the personal belongings (e.g., backpacks and reticule) which are crucial to person re-ID. In this paper, we propose the identity-guided human semantic parsing approach (ISP) to locate both the human body parts and personal belongings at pixel-level for aligned person re-ID only with person identity labels. We design the cascaded clustering on feature maps to generate the pseudo-labels of human parts. Specifically, for the pixels of all images of a person, we first group them to foreground or background and then group the foreground pixels to human parts. The cluster assignments are subsequently used as pseudo-labels of human parts to supervise the part estimation and ISP iteratively learns the feature maps and groups them. Finally, local features of both human body parts and personal belongings are obtained according to the selflearned part estimation, and only features of visible parts are utilized for the retrieval. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets validate the superiority of ISP over lots of state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/ISP-reID.
Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Phoneme Segmentation
Authors: Felix Kreuk, Joseph Keshet, Yossi Adi
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

We propose a self-supervised representation learning model for the task of unsupervised phoneme boundary detection. The model is a convolutional neural network that operates directly on the raw waveform. It is optimized to identify spectral changes in the signal using the Noise-Contrastive Estimation principle. At test time, a peak detection algorithm is applied over the model outputs to produce the final boundaries. As such, the proposed model is trained in a fully unsupervised manner with no manual annotations in the form of target boundaries nor phonetic transcriptions. We compare the proposed approach to several unsupervised baselines using both TIMIT and Buckeye corpora. Results suggest that our approach surpasses the baseline models and reaches state-of-the-art performance on both data sets. Furthermore, we experimented with expanding the training set with additional examples from the Librispeech corpus. We evaluated the resulting model on distributions and languages that were not seen during the training phase (English, Hebrew and German) and showed that utilizing additional untranscribed data is beneficial for model performance.
How Robust are the Estimated Effects of Nonpharmaceutical Interventions against COVID-19?
Authors: Mrinank Sharma, Sören Mindermann, Jan Markus Brauner, Gavin Leech, Anna B. Stephenson, Tomáš Gavenčiak, Jan Kulveit, Yee Whye Teh, Leonid Chindelevitch, Yarin Gal
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

To what extent are effectiveness estimates of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19 influenced by the assumptions our models make? To answer this question, we investigate 2 state-of-the-art NPI effectiveness models and propose 6 variants that make different structural assumptions. In particular, we investigate how well NPI effectiveness estimates generalise to unseen countries, and their sensitivity to unobserved factors. Models that account for noise in disease transmission compare favourably. We further evaluate how robust estimates are to different choices of epidemiological parameters and data. Focusing on models that assume transmission noise, we find that previously published results are remarkably robust across these variables. Finally, we mathematically ground the interpretation of NPI effectiveness estimates when certain common assumptions do not hold.
EagerNet: Early Predictions of Neural Networks for Computationally Efficient Intrusion Detection
Authors: Fares Meghdouri, Maximilian Bachl, Tanja Zseby
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

Fully Connected Neural Networks (FCNNs) have been the core of most state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) applications in recent years and also have been widely used for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). Experimental results from the last years show that generally deeper neural networks with more layers perform better than shallow models. Nonetheless, with the growing number of layers, obtaining fast predictions with less resources has become a difficult task despite the use of special hardware such as GPUs. We propose a new architecture to detect network attacks with minimal resources. The architecture is able to deal with either binary or multiclass classification problems and trades prediction speed for the accuracy of the network. We evaluate our proposal with two different network intrusion detection datasets. Results suggest that it is possible to obtain comparable accuracies to simple FCNNs without evaluating all layers for the majority of samples, thus obtaining early predictions and saving energy and computational efforts.
Fast active learning for pure exploration in reinforcement learning
Authors: Pierre Ménard, Omar Darwiche Domingues, Anders Jonsson, Emilie Kaufmann, Edouard Leurent, Michal Valko
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on exploring efficiently. The exploration remains a challenge while it has been addressed with many hand-tuned heuristics with different levels of generality on one side, and a few theoretically-backed exploration strategies on the other. Many of them are incarnated by intrinsic motivation and in particular explorations bonuses. A common rule of thumb for exploration bonuses is to use $1/\sqrt{n}$ bonus that is added to the empirical estimates of the reward, where $n$ is a number of times this particular state (or a state-action pair) was visited. We show that, surprisingly, for a pure-exploration objective of reward-free exploration, bonuses that scale with $1/n$ bring faster learning rates, improving the known upper bounds with respect to the dependence on the horizon $H$. Furthermore, we show that with an improved analysis of the stopping time, we can improve by a factor $H$ the sample complexity in the best-policy identification setting, which is another pure-exploration objective, where the environment provides rewards but the agent is not penalized for its behavior during the exploration phase.
Towards Multi-Language Recipe Personalisation and Recommendation
Authors: Niall Twomey, Mikhail Fain, Andrey Ponikar, Nadine Sarraf
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Multi-language recipe personalisation and recommendation is an under-explored field of information retrieval in academic and production systems. The existing gaps in our current understanding are numerous, even on fundamental questions such as whether consistent and high-quality recipe recommendation can be delivered across languages. In this paper, we introduce the multi-language recipe recommendation setting and present grounding results that will help to establish the potential and absolute value of future work in this area. Our work draws on several billion events from millions of recipes and users from Arabic, English, Indonesian, Russian, and Spanish. We represent recipes using a combination of normalised ingredients, standardised skills and image embeddings obtained without human intervention. In modelling, we take a classical approach based on optimising an embedded bi-linear user-item metric space towards the interactions that most strongly elicit cooking intent. For users without interaction histories, a bespoke content-based cold-start model that predicts context and recipe affinity is introduced. We show that our approach to personalisation is stable and easily scales to new languages. A robust cross-validation campaign is employed and consistently rejects baseline models and representations, strongly favouring those we propose. Our results are presented in a language-oriented (as opposed to model-oriented) fashion to emphasise the language-based goals of this work. We believe that this is the first large-scale work that comprehensively considers the value and potential of multi-language recipe recommendation and personalisation as well as delivering scalable and reliable models.
Water Quality Prediction on a Sigfox-compliant IoT Device: The Road Ahead of WaterS
Authors: Pietro Boccadoro, Vitanio Daniele, Pietro Di Gennaro, Domenico Lofù, Pietro Tedeschi
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Water pollution is a critical issue that can affects humans' health and the entire ecosystem thus inducing economical and social concerns. In this paper, we focus on an Internet of Things water quality prediction system, namely WaterS, that can remotely communicate the gathered measurements leveraging Low-Power Wide Area Network technologies. The solution addresses the water pollution problem while taking into account the peculiar Internet of Things constraints such as energy efficiency and autonomy as the platform is equipped with a photovoltaic cell. At the base of our solution, there is a Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network used for time series prediction. It results as an efficient solution to predict water quality parameters such as pH, conductivity, oxygen, and temperature. The water quality parameters measurements involved in this work are referred to the Tiziano Project dataset in a reference time period spanning from 2007 to 2012. The LSTM applied to predict the water quality parameters achieves high accuracy and a low Mean Absolute Error of 0.20, a Mean Square Error of 0.092, and finally a Cosine Proximity of 0.94. The obtained results were widely analyzed in terms of protocol suitability and network scalability of the current architecture towards large-scale deployments. From a networking perspective, with an increasing number of Sigfox-enabling end-devices, the Packet Error Rate increases as well up to 4% with the largest envisioned deployment. Finally, the source code of WaterS ecosystem has been released as open-source, to encourage and promote research activities from both Industry and Academia.
Label-Consistency based Graph Neural Networks for Semi-supervised Node Classification
Authors: Bingbing Xu, Jun-Jie Huang, Liang Hou, Hua-Wei Shen, Jinhua Gao, Xue-Qi Cheng
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Graph Neural Network, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve remarkable success in graph-based semi-supervised node classification, leveraging the information from neighboring nodes to improve the representation learning of target node. The success of GNNs at node classification depends on the assumption that connected nodes tend to have the same label. However, such an assumption does not always work, limiting the performance of GNNs at node classification. In this paper, we propose label-consistency based graph neural network(LC-GNN), leveraging node pairs unconnected but with the same labels to enlarge the receptive field of nodes in GNNs. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the proposed LC-GNN outperforms traditional GNNs in graph-based semi-supervised node classification.We further show the superiority of LC-GNN in sparse scenarios with only a handful of labeled nodes.