pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Artificial Neural Network Based Breast Cancer Screening: A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Subrato Bharati, Prajoy Podder, M. Rubaiyat Hossain Mondal
Date: 2020-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Breast Cancer Detection, Prognosis

Breast cancer is a common fatal disease for women. Early diagnosis and detection is necessary in order to improve the prognosis of breast cancer affected people. For predicting breast cancer, several automated systems are already developed using different medical imaging modalities. This paper provides a systematic review of the literature on artificial neural network (ANN) based models for the diagnosis of breast cancer via mammography. The advantages and limitations of different ANN models including spiking neural network (SNN), deep belief network (DBN), convolutional neural network (CNN), multilayer neural network (MLNN), stacked autoencoders (SAE), and stacked de-noising autoencoders (SDAE) are described in this review. The review also shows that the studies related to breast cancer detection applied different deep learning models to a number of publicly available datasets. For comparing the performance of the models, different metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, etc. were used in the existing studies. It is found that the best performance was achieved by residual neural network (ResNet)-50 and ResNet-101 models of CNN algorithm.
Fast and automated biomarker detection in breath samples with machine learning
Authors: Angelika Skarysz, Dahlia Salman, Michael Eddleston, Martin Sykora, Eugenie Hunsicker, William H. Nailon, Kareen Darnley, Duncan B McLaren, C L Paul Thomas, Andrea Soltoggio
Date: 2020-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Specificity

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in human breath can reveal a large spectrum of health conditions and can be used for fast, accurate and non-invasive diagnostics. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) is used to measure VOCs, but its application is limited by expert-driven data analysis that is time-consuming, subjective and may introduce errors. We propose a system to perform GC-MS data analysis that exploits deep learning pattern recognition ability to learn and automatically detect VOCs directly from raw data, thus bypassing expert-led processing. The new proposed approach showed to outperform the expert-led analysis by detecting a significantly higher number of VOCs in just a fraction of time while maintaining high specificity. These results suggest that the proposed method can help the large-scale deployment of breath-based diagnosis by reducing time and cost, and increasing accuracy and consistency.
Geometric Graph Representations and Geometric Graph Convolutions for Deep Learning on Three-Dimensional (3D) Graphs
Authors: Daniel T. Chang
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization

The geometry of three-dimensional (3D) graphs, consisting of nodes and edges, plays a crucial role in many important applications. An excellent example is molecular graphs, whose geometry influences important properties of a molecule including its reactivity and biological activity. To facilitate the incorporation of geometry in deep learning on 3D graphs, we define three types of geometric graph representations: positional, angle-geometric and distance-geometric. For proof of concept, we use the distance-geometric graph representation for geometric graph convolutions. Further, to utilize standard graph convolution networks, we employ a simple edge weight / edge distance correlation scheme, whose parameters can be fixed using reference values or determined through Bayesian hyperparameter optimization. The results of geometric graph convolutions, for the ESOL and Freesol datasets, show significant improvement over those of standard graph convolutions. Our work demonstrates the feasibility and promise of incorporating geometry, using the distance-geometric graph representation, in deep learning on 3D graphs.
A probabilistic generative model for semi-supervised training of coarse-grained surrogates and enforcing physical constraints through virtual observables
Authors: Maximilian Rixner, Phaedon-Stelios Koutsourelakis
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

The data-centric construction of inexpensive surrogates for fine-grained, physical models has been at the forefront of computational physics due to its significant utility in many-query tasks such as uncertainty quantification. Recent efforts have taken advantage of the enabling technologies from the field of machine learning (e.g. deep neural networks) in combination with simulation data. While such strategies have shown promise even in higher-dimensional problems, they generally require large amounts of training data even though the construction of surrogates is by definition a Small Data problem. Rather than employing data-based loss functions, it has been proposed to make use of the governing equations (in the simplest case at collocation points) in order to imbue domain knowledge in the training of the otherwise black-box-like interpolators. The present paper provides a flexible, probabilistic framework that accounts for physical structure and information both in the training objectives as well as in the surrogate model itself. We advocate a probabilistic (Bayesian) model in which equalities that are available from the physics (e.g. residuals, conservation laws) can be introduced as virtual observables and can provide additional information through the likelihood. We further advocate a generative model i.e. one that attempts to learn the joint density of inputs and outputs that is capable of making use of unlabeled data (i.e. only inputs) in a semi-supervised fashion in order to promote the discovery of lower-dimensional embeddings which are nevertheless predictive of the fine-grained model's output.
Object-Independent Human-to-Robot Handovers using Real Time Robotic Vision
Authors: Patrick Rosenberger, Akansel Cosgun, Rhys Newbury, Jun Kwan, Valerio Ortenzi, Peter Corke, Manfred Grafinger
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation

We present an approach for safe and object-independent human-to-robot handovers using real time robotic vision and manipulation. We aim for general applicability with a generic object detector, a fast grasp selection algorithm and by using a single gripper-mounted RGB-D camera, hence not relying on external sensors. The robot is controlled via visual servoing towards the object of interest. Putting a high emphasis on safety, we use two perception modules: human body part segmentation and hand/finger segmentation. Pixels that are deemed to belong to the human are filtered out from candidate grasp poses, hence ensuring that the robot safely picks the object without colliding with the human partner. The grasp selection and perception modules run concurrently in real-time, which allows monitoring of the progress. In experiments with 13 objects, the robot was able to successfully take the object from the human in 81.9% of the trials.
Age-Based Coded Computation for Bias Reduction in Distributed Learning
Authors: Emre Ozfatura, Baturalp Buyukates, Deniz Gunduz, Sennur Ulukus
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00

Coded computation can be used to speed up distributed learning in the presence of straggling workers. Partial recovery of the gradient vector can further reduce the computation time at each iteration; however, this can result in biased estimators, which may slow down convergence, or even cause divergence. Estimator bias will be particularly prevalent when the straggling behavior is correlated over time, which results in the gradient estimators being dominated by a few fast servers. To mitigate biased estimators, we design a $timely$ dynamic encoding framework for partial recovery that includes an ordering operator that changes the codewords and computation orders at workers over time. To regulate the recovery frequencies, we adopt an $age$ metric in the design of the dynamic encoding scheme. We show through numerical results that the proposed dynamic encoding strategy increases the timeliness of the recovered computations, which as a result, reduces the bias in model updates, and accelerates the convergence compared to the conventional static partial recovery schemes.
Epileptic seizure prediction using Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient of a linear classifier from generalized Gaussian modeling
Authors: Antonio Quintero-Rincon, Carlos D'Giano, Marcelo Risk
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Seizure Detection, Seizure prediction, Specificity

To predict an epileptic event means the ability to determine in advance the time of the seizure with the highest possible accuracy. A correct prediction benchmark for epilepsy events in clinical applications is a typical problem in biomedical signal processing that helps to an appropriate diagnosis and treatment of this disease. In this work, we use Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient from generalized Gaussian distribution parameters coupled with a linear-based classifier to predict between seizure and non-seizure events in epileptic EEG signals. The performance in 36 epileptic events from 9 patients showing good performance with 100% of effectiveness for sensitivity and specificity greater than 83% for seizures events in all brain rhythms. Pearson's test suggests that all brain rhythms are highly correlated in non-seizure events but no during the seizure events. This suggests that our model can be scaled with the Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient for the detection of epileptic seizures.
Hyperparameter Selection for Subsampling Bootstraps
Authors: Yingying Ma, Hansheng Wang
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

Massive data analysis becomes increasingly prevalent, subsampling methods like BLB (Bag of Little Bootstraps) serves as powerful tools for assessing the quality of estimators for massive data. However, the performance of the subsampling methods are highly influenced by the selection of tuning parameters ( e.g., the subset size, number of resamples per subset ). In this article we develop a hyperparameter selection methodology, which can be used to select tuning parameters for subsampling methods. Specifically, by a careful theoretical analysis, we find an analytically simple and elegant relationship between the asymptotic efficiency of various subsampling estimators and their hyperparameters. This leads to an optimal choice of the hyperparameters. More specifically, for an arbitrarily specified hyperparameter set, we can improve it to be a new set of hyperparameters with no extra CPU time cost, but the resulting estimator's statistical efficiency can be much improved. Both simulation studies and real data analysis demonstrate the superior advantage of our method.
Outlier-Resilient Web Service QoS Prediction
Authors: Fanghua Ye, Zhiwei Lin, Chuan Chen, Zibin Zheng, Hong Huang
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

The proliferation of Web services makes it difficult for users to select the most appropriate one among numerous functionally identical or similar service candidates. Quality-of-Service (QoS) describes the non-functional characteristics of Web services, and it has become the key differentiator for service selection. However, users cannot invoke all Web services to obtain the corresponding QoS values due to high time cost and huge resource overhead. Thus, it is essential to predict unknown QoS values. Although various QoS prediction methods have been proposed, few of them have taken outliers into consideration, which may dramatically degrade the prediction performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose an outlier-resilient QoS prediction method in this paper. Our method utilizes Cauchy loss to measure the discrepancy between the observed QoS values and the predicted ones. Owing to the robustness of Cauchy loss, our method is resilient to outliers. We further extend our method to provide time-aware QoS prediction results by taking the temporal information into consideration. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both static and dynamic datasets. The results demonstrate that our method is able to achieve better performance than state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Question Answering on Scholarly Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Mohamad Yaser Jaradeh, Markus Stocker, Sören Auer
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Knowledge Base Question Answering, Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering

Answering questions on scholarly knowledge comprising text and other artifacts is a vital part of any research life cycle. Querying scholarly knowledge and retrieving suitable answers is currently hardly possible due to the following primary reason: machine inactionable, ambiguous and unstructured content in publications. We present JarvisQA, a BERT based system to answer questions on tabular views of scholarly knowledge graphs. Such tables can be found in a variety of shapes in the scholarly literature (e.g., surveys, comparisons or results). Our system can retrieve direct answers to a variety of different questions asked on tabular data in articles. Furthermore, we present a preliminary dataset of related tables and a corresponding set of natural language questions. This dataset is used as a benchmark for our system and can be reused by others. Additionally, JarvisQA is evaluated on two datasets against other baselines and shows an improvement of two to three folds in performance compared to related methods.
Automatic Discovery of Novel Intents & Domains from Text Utterances
Authors: Nikhita Vedula, Rahul Gupta, Aman Alok, Mukund Sridhar
Date: 2020-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Natural Language Understanding, Transfer Learning

One of the primary tasks in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is to recognize the intents as well as domains of users' spoken and written language utterances. Most existing research formulates this as a supervised classification problem with a closed-world assumption, i.e. the domains or intents to be identified are pre-defined or known beforehand. Real-world applications however increasingly encounter dynamic, rapidly evolving environments with newly emerging intents and domains, about which no information is known during model training. We propose a novel framework, ADVIN, to automatically discover novel domains and intents from large volumes of unlabeled data. We first employ an open classification model to identify all utterances potentially consisting of a novel intent. Next, we build a knowledge transfer component with a pairwise margin loss function. It learns discriminative deep features to group together utterances and discover multiple latent intent categories within them in an unsupervised manner. We finally hierarchically link mutually related intents into domains, forming an intent-domain taxonomy. ADVIN significantly outperforms baselines on three benchmark datasets, and real user utterances from a commercial voice-powered agent.
Scalable Top-k Query on Information Networks with Hierarchical Inheritance Relations
Authors: Fubao Wu, Lixin Gao
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00

Graph query, pattern mining and knowledge discovery become challenging on large-scale heterogeneous information networks (HINs). State-of-the-art techniques involving path propagation mainly focus on the inference on nodes labels and neighborhood structures. However, entity links in the real world also contain rich hierarchical inheritance relations. For example, the vulnerability of a product version is likely to be inherited from its older versions. Taking advantage of the hierarchical inheritances can potentially improve the quality of query results. Motivated by this, we explore hierarchical inheritance relations between entities and formulate the problem of graph query on HINs with hierarchical inheritance relations. We propose a graph query search algorithm by decomposing the original query graph into multiple star queries and apply a star query algorithm to each star query. Further candidates from each star query result are then constructed for final top-k query answers to the original query. To efficiently obtain the graph query result from a large-scale HIN, we design a bound-based pruning technique by using uniform cost search to prune search spaces. We implement our algorithm in GraphX to test the effectiveness and efficiency on synthetic and real-world datasets. Compared with two common graph query algorithms, our algorithm can effectively obtain more accurate results and competitive performances.
A Pairwise Probe for Understanding BERT Fine-Tuning on Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Jie Cai, Zhengzhou Zhu, Ping Nie, Qian Liu
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Pre-trained models have brought significant improvements to many NLP tasks and have been extensively analyzed. But little is known about the effect of fine-tuning on specific tasks. Intuitively, people may agree that a pre-trained model already learns semantic representations of words (e.g. synonyms are closer to each other) and fine-tuning further improves its capabilities which require more complicated reasoning (e.g. coreference resolution, entity boundary detection, etc). However, how to verify these arguments analytically and quantitatively is a challenging task and there are few works focus on this topic. In this paper, inspired by the observation that most probing tasks involve identifying matched pairs of phrases (e.g. coreference requires matching an entity and a pronoun), we propose a pairwise probe to understand BERT fine-tuning on the machine reading comprehension (MRC) task. Specifically, we identify five phenomena in MRC. According to pairwise probing tasks, we compare the performance of each layer's hidden representation of pre-trained and fine-tuned BERT. The proposed pairwise probe alleviates the problem of distraction from inaccurate model training and makes a robust and quantitative comparison. Our experimental analysis leads to highly confident conclusions: (1) Fine-tuning has little effect on the fundamental and low-level information and general semantic tasks. (2) For specific abilities required for downstream tasks, fine-tuned BERT is better than pre-trained BERT and such gaps are obvious after the fifth layer.
An Empirical Methodology for Detecting and Prioritizing Needs during Crisis Events
Authors: M. Janina Sarol, Ly Dinh, Rezvaneh Rezapour, Chieh-Li Chin, Pingjing Yang, Jana Diesner
Date: 2020-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Task 2

In times of crisis, identifying the essential needs is a crucial step to providing appropriate resources and services to affected entities. Social media platforms such as Twitter contain vast amount of information about the general public's needs. However, the sparsity of the information as well as the amount of noisy content present a challenge to practitioners to effectively identify shared information on these platforms. In this study, we propose two novel methods for two distinct but related needs detection tasks: the identification of 1) a list of resources needed ranked by priority, and 2) sentences that specify who-needs-what resources. We evaluated our methods on a set of tweets about the COVID-19 crisis. For task 1 (detecting top needs), we compared our results against two given lists of resources and achieved 64% precision. For task 2 (detecting who-needs-what), we compared our results on a set of 1,000 annotated tweets and achieved a 68% F1-score.
High-quality Panorama Stitching based on Asymmetric Bidirectional Optical Flow
Authors: Mingyuan Meng, Shaojun Liu
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Optical Flow Estimation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In this paper, we propose a panorama stitching algorithm based on asymmetric bidirectional optical flow. This algorithm expects multiple photos captured by fisheye lens cameras as input, and then, through the proposed algorithm, these photos can be merged into a high-quality 360-degree spherical panoramic image. For photos taken from a distant perspective, the parallax among them is relatively small, and the obtained panoramic image can be nearly seamless and undistorted. For photos taken from a close perspective or with a relatively large parallax, a seamless though partially distorted panoramic image can also be obtained. Besides, with the help of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), this algorithm can complete the whole stitching process at a very fast speed: typically, it only takes less than 30s to obtain a panoramic image of 9000-by-4000 pixels, which means our panorama stitching algorithm is of high value in many real-time applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/MungoMeng/Panorama-OpticalFlow.
Multi-view Deep Features for Robust Facial Kinship Verification
Authors: Oualid Laiadi, Abdelmalik Ouamane, Abdelhamid Benakcha, Abdelmalik Taleb-Ahmed, Abdenour Hadid
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Kinship Verification, Metric Learning

Automatic kinship verification from facial images is an emerging research topic in machine learning community. In this paper, we proposed an effective facial features extraction model based on multi-view deep features. Thus, we used four pre-trained deep learning models using eight features layers (FC6 and FC7 layers of each VGG-F, VGG-M, VGG-S and VGG-Face models) to train the proposed Multilinear Side-Information based Discriminant Analysis integrating Within Class Covariance Normalization (MSIDA+WCCN) method. Furthermore, we show that how can metric learning methods based on WCCN method integration improves the Simple Scoring Cosine similarity (SSC) method. We refer that we used the SSC method in RFIW'20 competition using the eight deep features concatenation. Thus, the integration of WCCN in the metric learning methods decreases the intra-class variations effect introduced by the deep features weights. We evaluate our proposed method on two kinship benchmarks namely KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II databases using four Parent-Child relations (Father-Son, Father-Daughter, Mother-Son and Mother-Daughter). Thus, the proposed MSIDA+WCCN method improves the SSC method with 12.80% and 14.65% on KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II databases, respectively. The results obtained are positively compared with some modern methods, including those that rely on deep learning.
Two-hand Global 3D Pose Estimation Using Monocular RGB
Authors: Fanqing Lin, Connor Wilhelm, Tony Martinez
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Canonical Hand Pose Estimation, 3D Hand Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, Hand Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

We tackle the challenging task of estimating global 3D joint locations for both hands via only monocular RGB input images. We propose a novel multi-stage convolutional neural network based pipeline that accurately segments and locates the hands despite occlusion between two hands and complex background noise and estimates the 2D and 3D canonical joint locations without any depth information. Global joint locations with respect to the camera origin are computed using the hand pose estimations and the actual length of the key bone with a novel projection algorithm. To train the CNNs for this new task, we introduce a large-scale synthetic 3D hand pose dataset. We demonstrate that our system outperforms previous works on 3D canonical hand pose estimation benchmark datasets with RGB-only information. Additionally, we present the first work that achieves accurate global 3D hand tracking on both hands using RGB-only inputs and provide extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation.