pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning of Structurally Unambiguous Probabilistic Grammars
Authors: Dolav Nitay, Dana Fisman, Michal Ziv-Ukelson
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00

The problem of identifying a probabilistic context free grammar has two aspects: the first is determining the grammar's topology (the rules of the grammar) and the second is estimating probabilistic weights for each rule. Given the hardness results for learning context-free grammars in general, and probabilistic grammars in particular, most of the literature has concentrated on the second problem. In this work we address the first problem. We restrict attention to structurally unambiguous weighted context-free grammars (SUWCFG) and provide a query learning algorithm for structurally unambiguous probabilistic context-free grammars (SUPCFG). We show that SUWCFG can be represented using co-linear multiplicity tree automata (CMTA), and provide a polynomial learning algorithm that learns CMTAs. We show that the learned CMTA can be converted into a probabilistic grammar, thus providing a complete algorithm for learning a structurally unambiguous probabilistic context free grammar (both the grammar topology and the probabilistic weights) using structured membership queries and structured equivalence queries. We demonstrate the usefulness of our algorithm in learning PCFGs over genomic data.
An efficient label-free analyte detection algorithm for time-resolved spectroscopy
Authors: Stefano Rini, Hirotsugu Hiramatsu
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Time-resolved spectral techniques play an important analysis tool in many contexts, from physical chemistry to biomedicine. Customarily, the label-free detection of analytes is manually performed by experts through the aid of classic dimensionality-reduction methods, such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). This fundamental reliance on expert analysis for unknown analyte detection severely hinders the applicability and the throughput of these such techniques. For this reason, in this paper, we formulate this detection problem as an unsupervised learning problem and propose a novel machine learning algorithm for label-free analyte detection. To show the effectiveness of the proposed solution, we consider the problem of detecting the amino-acids in Liquid Chromatography coupled with Raman spectroscopy (LC-Raman).
Continuous Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks: Novel Empirical Losses and Label Input Mechanisms
Authors: Xin Ding, Yongwei Wang, Zuheng Xu, William J. Welch, Z. Jane Wang
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, regression

This work proposes the continuous conditional generative adversarial network (CcGAN), the first generative model for image generation conditional on continuous, scalar conditions (termed regression labels). Existing conditional GANs (cGANs) are mainly designed for categorical conditions (eg, class labels); conditioning on regression labels is mathematically distinct and raises two fundamental problems:(P1) Since there may be very few (even zero) real images for some regression labels, minimizing existing empirical versions of cGAN losses (aka empirical cGAN losses) often fails in practice;(P2) Since regression labels are scalar and infinitely many, conventional label input methods are not applicable. The proposed CcGAN solves the above problems, respectively, by (S1) reformulating existing empirical cGAN losses to be appropriate for the continuous scenario; and (S2) proposing a naive label input (NLI) method and an improved label input (ILI) method to incorporate regression labels into the generator and the discriminator. The reformulation in (S1) leads to two novel empirical discriminator losses, termed the hard vicinal discriminator loss (HVDL) and the soft vicinal discriminator loss (SVDL) respectively, and a novel empirical generator loss. The error bounds of a discriminator trained with HVDL and SVDL are derived under mild assumptions in this work. Two new benchmark datasets (RC-49 and Cell-200) and a novel evaluation metric (Sliding Fr\'echet Inception Distance) are also proposed for this continuous scenario. Our experiments on the Circular 2-D Gaussians, RC-49, UTKFace, Cell-200, and Steering Angle datasets show that CcGAN is able to generate diverse, high-quality samples from the image distribution conditional on a given regression label. Moreover, in these experiments, CcGAN substantially outperforms cGAN both visually and quantitatively.
Predictive Coding, Variational Autoencoders, and Biological Connections
Authors: Joseph Marino
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop Neuro_AI 2019 12
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This paper reviews predictive coding, from theoretical neuroscience, and variational autoencoders, from machine learning, identifying the common origin and mathematical framework underlying both areas. As each area is prominent within its respective field, more firmly connecting these areas could prove useful in the dialogue between neuroscience and machine learning. After reviewing each area, we discuss two possible correspondences implied by this perspective: cortical pyramidal dendrites as analogous to (non-linear) deep networks and lateral inhibition as analogous to normalizing flows. These connections may provide new directions for further investigations in each field.
Direct Classification of Emotional Intensity
Authors: Jacob Ouyang, Isaac R Galatzer-Levy, Vidya Koesmahargyo, Li Zhang
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

In this paper, we present a model that can directly predict emotion intensity score from video inputs, instead of deriving from action units. Using a 3d DNN incorporated with dynamic emotion information, we train a model using videos of different people smiling that outputs an intensity score from 0-10. Each video is labeled framewise using a normalized action-unit based intensity score. Our model then employs an adaptive learning technique to improve performance when dealing with new subjects. Compared to other models, our model excels in generalization between different people as well as provides a new framework to directly classify emotional intensity.
Deep-RLS: A Model-Inspired Deep Learning Approach to Nonlinear PCA
Authors: Zahra Esmaeilbeig, Shahin Khobahi, Mojtaba Soltanalian
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: blind source separation, Deep Learning

In this work, we consider the application of model-based deep learning in nonlinear principal component analysis (PCA). Inspired by the deep unfolding methodology, we propose a task-based deep learning approach, referred to as Deep-RLS, that unfolds the iterations of the well-known recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm into the layers of a deep neural network in order to perform nonlinear PCA. In particular, we formulate the nonlinear PCA for the blind source separation (BSS) problem and show through numerical analysis that Deep-RLS results in a significant improvement in the accuracy of recovering the source signals in BSS when compared to the traditional RLS algorithm.
Molecular Mechanics-Driven Graph Neural Network with Multiplex Graph for Molecular Structures
Authors: Shuo Zhang, Yang Liu, Lei Xie
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Formation Energy, Graph Neural Network

The prediction of physicochemical properties from molecular structures is a crucial task for artificial intelligence aided molecular design. A growing number of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been proposed to address this challenge. These models improve their expressive power by incorporating auxiliary information in molecules while inevitably increase their computational complexity. In this work, we aim to design a GNN which is both powerful and efficient for molecule structures. To achieve such goal, we propose a molecular mechanics-driven approach by first representing each molecule as a two-layer multiplex graph, where one layer contains only local connections that mainly capture the covalent interactions and another layer contains global connections that can simulate non-covalent interactions. Then for each layer, a corresponding message passing module is proposed to balance the trade-off of expression power and computational complexity. Based on these two modules, we build Multiplex Molecular Graph Neural Network (MXMNet). When validated by the QM9 dataset for small molecules and PDBBind dataset for large protein-ligand complexes, MXMNet achieves superior results to the existing state-of-the-art models under restricted resources.
Debiasing Convolutional Neural Networks via Meta Orthogonalization
Authors: Kurtis Evan David, Qiang Liu, Ruth Fong
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

While deep learning models often achieve strong task performance, their successes are hampered by their inability to disentangle spurious correlations from causative factors, such as when they use protected attributes (e.g., race, gender, etc.) to make decisions. In this work, we tackle the problem of debiasing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in such instances. Building off of existing work on debiasing word embeddings and model interpretability, our Meta Orthogonalization method encourages the CNN representations of different concepts (e.g., gender and class labels) to be orthogonal to one another in activation space while maintaining strong downstream task performance. Through a variety of experiments, we systematically test our method and demonstrate that it significantly mitigates model bias and is competitive against current adversarial debiasing methods.
Coresets for Robust Training of Neural Networks against Noisy Labels
Authors: Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Kaidi Cao, Jure Leskovec
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification

Modern neural networks have the capacity to overfit noisy labels frequently found in real-world datasets. Although great progress has been made, existing techniques are limited in providing theoretical guarantees for the performance of the neural networks trained with noisy labels. Here we propose a novel approach with strong theoretical guarantees for robust training of deep networks trained with noisy labels. The key idea behind our method is to select weighted subsets (coresets) of clean data points that provide an approximately low-rank Jacobian matrix. We then prove that gradient descent applied to the subsets do not overfit the noisy labels. Our extensive experiments corroborate our theory and demonstrate that deep networks trained on our subsets achieve a significantly superior performance compared to state-of-the art, e.g., 6% increase in accuracy on CIFAR-10 with 80% noisy labels, and 7% increase in accuracy on mini Webvision.
Online Ensemble Model Compression using Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Devesh Walawalkar, Zhiqiang Shen, Marios Savvides
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, model, Model Compression

This paper presents a novel knowledge distillation based model compression framework consisting of a student ensemble. It enables distillation of simultaneously learnt ensemble knowledge onto each of the compressed student models. Each model learns unique representations from the data distribution due to its distinct architecture. This helps the ensemble generalize better by combining every model's knowledge. The distilled students and ensemble teacher are trained simultaneously without requiring any pretrained weights. Moreover, our proposed method can deliver multi-compressed students with single training, which is efficient and flexible for different scenarios. We provide comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art classification models to validate our framework's effectiveness. Notably, using our framework a 97% compressed ResNet110 student model managed to produce a 10.64% relative accuracy gain over its individual baseline training on CIFAR100 dataset. Similarly a 95% compressed DenseNet-BC(k=12) model managed a 8.17% relative accuracy gain.
Echo-CGC: A Communication-Efficient Byzantine-tolerant Distributed Machine Learning Algorithm in Single-Hop Radio Network
Authors: Qinzi Zhang, Lewis Tseng
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this paper, we focus on a popular DML framework -- the parameter server computation paradigm and iterative learning algorithms that proceed in rounds. We aim to reduce the communication complexity of Byzantine-tolerant DML algorithms in the single-hop radio network. Inspired by the CGC filter developed by Gupta and Vaidya, PODC 2020, we propose a gradient descent-based algorithm, Echo-CGC. Our main novelty is a mechanism to utilize the broadcast properties of the radio network to avoid transmitting the raw gradients (full $d$-dimensional vectors). In the radio network, each worker is able to overhear previous gradients that were transmitted to the parameter server. Roughly speaking, in Echo-CGC, if a worker "agrees" with a combination of prior gradients, it will broadcast the "echo message" instead of the its raw local gradient. The echo message contains a vector of coefficients (of size at most $n$) and the ratio of the magnitude between two gradients (a float). In comparison, the traditional approaches need to send $n$ local gradients in each round, where each gradient is typically a vector in an ultra-high dimensional space ($d\gg n$). The improvement on communication complexity of our algorithm depends on multiple factors, including number of nodes, number of faulty workers in an execution, and the cost function. We numerically analyze the improvement, and show that with a large number of nodes, Echo-CGC reduces $80\%$ of the communication under standard assumptions.
Improving Speech Enhancement Performance by Leveraging Contextual Broad Phonetic Class Information
Authors: Yen-Ju Lu, Chia-Yu Chang, Cheng Yu, Ching-Feng Liu, Jeih-weih Hung, Shinji Watanabe, Yu Tsao
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Denoising, Multi-Task Learning, Speech Denoising, Speech Dereverberation, Speech Enhancement, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Previous studies have confirmed that by augmenting acoustic features with the place/manner of articulatory features, the speech enhancement (SE) process can be guided to consider the broad phonetic properties of the input speech when performing enhancement to attain performance improvements. In this paper, we explore the contextual information of articulatory attributes as additional information to further benefit SE. More specifically, we propose to improve the SE performance by leveraging losses from an end-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E-ASR) model that predicts the sequence of broad phonetic classes (BPCs). We also developed multi-objective training with ASR and perceptual losses to train the SE system based on a BPC-based E2E-ASR. Experimental results from speech denoising, speech dereverberation, and impaired speech enhancement tasks confirmed that contextual BPC information improves SE performance. Moreover, the SE model trained with the BPC-based E2E-ASR outperforms that with the phoneme-based E2E-ASR. The results suggest that objectives with misclassification of phonemes by the ASR system may lead to imperfect feedback, and BPC could be a potentially better choice. Finally, it is noted that combining the most-confusable phonetic targets into the same BPC when calculating the additional objective can effectively improve the SE performance.
Efficient Variational Inference for Sparse Deep Learning with Theoretical Guarantee
Authors: Jincheng Bai, Qifan Song, Guang Cheng
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Deep Learning, Uncertainty Quantification, Variable Selection, Variational Inference

Sparse deep learning aims to address the challenge of huge storage consumption by deep neural networks, and to recover the sparse structure of target functions. Although tremendous empirical successes have been achieved, most sparse deep learning algorithms are lacking of theoretical support. On the other hand, another line of works have proposed theoretical frameworks that are computationally infeasible. In this paper, we train sparse deep neural networks with a fully Bayesian treatment under spike-and-slab priors, and develop a set of computationally efficient variational inferences via continuous relaxation of Bernoulli distribution. The variational posterior contraction rate is provided, which justifies the consistency of the proposed variational Bayes method. Notably, our empirical results demonstrate that this variational procedure provides uncertainty quantification in terms of Bayesian predictive distribution and is also capable to accomplish consistent variable selection by training a sparse multi-layer neural network.
Functorial Manifold Learning
Authors: Dan Shiebler
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction

We adapt previous research on category theory and topological unsupervised learning to develop a functorial perspective on manifold learning, also known as nonlinear dimensionality reduction. We first characterize manifold learning algorithms as functors that map pseudometric spaces to optimization objectives and that factor through hierarchical clustering functors. We then use this characterization to prove refinement bounds on manifold learning loss functions and construct a hierarchy of manifold learning algorithms based on their equivariants. We express several popular manifold learning algorithms as functors at different levels of this hierarchy, including Metric Multidimensional Scaling, IsoMap, and UMAP. Next, we use interleaving distance to study the stability of a broad class of manifold learning algorithms. We present bounds on how closely the embeddings these algorithms produce from noisy data approximate the embeddings they would learn from noiseless data. Finally, we use our framework to derive a set of novel manifold learning algorithms, which we experimentally demonstrate are competitive with the state of the art.
Target Guided Emotion Aware Chat Machine
Authors: Wei Wei, Jiayi Liu, Xianling Mao, Guibin Guo, Feida Zhu, Pan Zhou, Yuchong Hu, Shanshan Feng
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00

The consistency of a response to a given post at semantic-level and emotional-level is essential for a dialogue system to deliver human-like interactions. However, this challenge is not well addressed in the literature, since most of the approaches neglect the emotional information conveyed by a post while generating responses. This article addresses this problem by proposing a unifed end-to-end neural architecture, which is capable of simultaneously encoding the semantics and the emotions in a post and leverage target information for generating more intelligent responses with appropriately expressed emotions. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both content coherence and emotion appropriateness.
Enhance Gender and Identity Preservation in Face Aging Simulation for Infants and Toddlers
Authors: Yao Xiao, Yijun Zhao
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00

Realistic age-progressed photos provide invaluable biometric information in a wide range of applications. In recent years, deep learning-based approaches have made remarkable progress in modeling the aging process of the human face. Nevertheless, it remains a challenging task to generate accurate age-progressed faces from infant or toddler photos. In particular, the lack of visually detectable gender characteristics and the drastic appearance changes in early life contribute to the difficulty of the task. We propose a new deep learning method inspired by the successful Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder (CAAE, 2017) model. In our approach, we extend the CAAE architecture to 1) incorporate gender information, and 2) augment the model's overall architecture with an identity-preserving component based on facial features. We trained our model using the publicly available UTKFace dataset and evaluated our model by simulating up to 100 years of aging on 1,156 male and 1,207 female infant and toddler face photos. Compared to the CAAE approach, our new model demonstrates noticeable visual improvements. Quantitatively, our model exhibits an overall gain of 77.0% (male) and 13.8% (female) in gender fidelity measured by a gender classifier for the simulated photos across the age spectrum. Our model also demonstrates a 22.4% gain in identity preservation measured by a facial recognition neural network.
Audio-Visual Event Recognition through the lens of Adversary
Authors: Juncheng B Li, Kaixin Ma, Shuhui Qu, Po-Yao Huang, Florian Metze
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00

As audio/visual classification models are widely deployed for sensitive tasks like content filtering at scale, it is critical to understand their robustness along with improving the accuracy. This work aims to study several key questions related to multimodal learning through the lens of adversarial noises: 1) The trade-off between early/middle/late fusion affecting its robustness and accuracy 2) How do different frequency/time domain features contribute to the robustness? 3) How do different neural modules contribute to the adversarial noise? In our experiment, we construct adversarial examples to attack state-of-the-art neural models trained on Google AudioSet. We compare how much attack potency in terms of adversarial perturbation of size $\epsilon$ using different $L_p$ norms we would need to "deactivate" the victim model. Using adversarial noise to ablate multimodal models, we are able to provide insights into what is the best potential fusion strategy to balance the model parameters/accuracy and robustness trade-off and distinguish the robust features versus the non-robust features that various neural networks model tend to learn.
Dynamic backdoor attacks against federated learning
Authors: Anbu Huang
Date: 2020-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Federated Learning, Meta-Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a new machine learning framework, which enables millions of participants to collaboratively train machine learning model without compromising data privacy and security. Due to the independence and confidentiality of each client, FL does not guarantee that all clients are honest by design, which makes it vulnerable to adversarial attack naturally. In this paper, we focus on dynamic backdoor attacks under FL setting, where the goal of the adversary is to reduce the performance of the model on targeted tasks while maintaining a good performance on the main task, current existing studies are mainly focused on static backdoor attacks, that is the poison pattern injected is unchanged, however, FL is an online learning framework, and adversarial targets can be changed dynamically by attacker, traditional algorithms require learning a new targeted task from scratch, which could be computationally expensive and require a large number of adversarial training examples, to avoid this, we bridge meta-learning and backdoor attacks under FL setting, in which case we can learn a versatile model from previous experiences, and fast adapting to new adversarial tasks with a few of examples. We evaluate our algorithm on different datasets, and demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve good results with respect to dynamic backdoor attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that focus on dynamic backdoor attacks research under FL setting.