pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Multimodal VAEs through Mutual Supervision
Authors: Tom Joy, Yuge Shi, Philip H. S. Torr, Tom Rainforth, Sebastian M. Schmon, N. Siddharth
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

Multimodal VAEs seek to model the joint distribution over heterogeneous data (e.g.\ vision, language), whilst also capturing a shared representation across such modalities. Prior work has typically combined information from the modalities by reconciling idiosyncratic representations directly in the recognition model through explicit products, mixtures, or other such factorisations. Here we introduce a novel alternative, the MEME, that avoids such explicit combinations by repurposing semi-supervised VAEs to combine information between modalities implicitly through mutual supervision. This formulation naturally allows learning from partially-observed data where some modalities can be entirely missing -- something that most existing approaches either cannot handle, or do so to a limited extent. We demonstrate that MEME outperforms baselines on standard metrics across both partial and complete observation schemes on the MNIST-SVHN (image-image) and CUB (image-text) datasets. We also contrast the quality of the representations learnt by mutual supervision against standard approaches and observe interesting trends in its ability to capture relatedness between data.
Weisfeiler and Lehman Go Cellular: CW Networks
Authors: Cristian Bodnar, Fabrizio Frasca, Nina Otter, Yu Guang Wang, Pietro Liò, Guido Montúfar, Michael Bronstein
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Graph Classification, Graph Property Prediction, Graph Regression

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are limited in their expressive power, struggle with long-range interactions and lack a principled way to model higher-order structures. These problems can be attributed to the strong coupling between the computational graph and the input graph structure. The recently proposed Message Passing Simplicial Networks naturally decouple these elements by performing message passing on the clique complex of the graph. Nevertheless, these models can be severely constrained by the rigid combinatorial structure of Simplicial Complexes (SCs). In this work, we extend recent theoretical results on SCs to regular Cell Complexes, topological objects that flexibly subsume SCs and graphs. We show that this generalisation provides a powerful set of graph "lifting" transformations, each leading to a unique hierarchical message passing procedure. The resulting methods, which we collectively call CW Networks (CWNs), are strictly more powerful than the WL test and not less powerful than the 3-WL test. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of one such scheme, based on rings, when applied to molecular graph problems. The proposed architecture benefits from provably larger expressivity than commonly used GNNs, principled modelling of higher-order signals and from compressing the distances between nodes. We demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on a variety of molecular datasets.
The Neurally-Guided Shape Parser: Grammar-based Labeling of 3D Shape Regions with Approximate Inference
Authors: R. Kenny Jones, Aalia Habib, Rana Hanocka, Daniel Ritchie
Date: 2021-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

We propose the Neurally-Guided Shape Parser (NGSP), a method that learns how to assign fine-grained semantic labels to regions of a 3D shape. NGSP solves this problem via MAP inference, modeling the posterior probability of a label assignment conditioned on an input shape with a learned likelihood function. To make this search tractable, NGSP employs a neural guide network that learns to approximate the posterior. NGSP finds high-probability label assignments by first sampling proposals with the guide network and then evaluating each proposal under the full likelihood. We evaluate NGSP on the task of fine-grained semantic segmentation of manufactured 3D shapes from PartNet, where shapes have been decomposed into regions that correspond to part instance over-segmentations. We find that NGSP delivers significant performance improvements over comparison methods that (i) use regions to group per-point predictions, (ii) use regions as a self-supervisory signal or (iii) assign labels to regions under alternative formulations. Further, we show that NGSP maintains strong performance even with limited labeled data or noisy input shape regions. Finally, we demonstrate that NGSP can be directly applied to CAD shapes found in online repositories and validate its effectiveness with a perceptual study.
ABCD: A Graph Framework to Convert Complex Sentences to a Covering Set of Simple Sentences
Authors: Yanjun Gao, Ting-Hao, Huang, Rebecca J. Passonneau
Date: 2021-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Argument Mining, Decoder, Discourse Parsing, EDIT Task, graph construction, Question Answering, Sentence

Atomic clauses are fundamental text units for understanding complex sentences. Identifying the atomic sentences within complex sentences is important for applications such as summarization, argument mining, discourse analysis, discourse parsing, and question answering. Previous work mainly relies on rule-based methods dependent on parsing. We propose a new task to decompose each complex sentence into simple sentences derived from the tensed clauses in the source, and a novel problem formulation as a graph edit task. Our neural model learns to Accept, Break, Copy or Drop elements of a graph that combines word adjacency and grammatical dependencies. The full processing pipeline includes modules for graph construction, graph editing, and sentence generation from the output graph. We introduce DeSSE, a new dataset designed to train and evaluate complex sentence decomposition, and MinWiki, a subset of MinWikiSplit. ABCD achieves comparable performance as two parsing baselines on MinWiki. On DeSSE, which has a more even balance of complex sentence types, our model achieves higher accuracy on the number of atomic sentences than an encoder-decoder baseline. Results include a detailed error analysis.
Pure Exploration in Kernel and Neural Bandits
Authors: Yinglun Zhu, Dongruo Zhou, Ruoxi Jiang, Quanquan Gu, Rebecca Willett, Robert Nowak
Date: 2021-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

We study pure exploration in bandits, where the dimension of the feature representation can be much larger than the number of arms. To overcome the curse of dimensionality, we propose to adaptively embed the feature representation of each arm into a lower-dimensional space and carefully deal with the induced model misspecification. Our approach is conceptually very different from existing works that can either only handle low-dimensional linear bandits or passively deal with model misspecification. We showcase the application of our approach to two pure exploration settings that were previously under-studied: (1) the reward function belongs to a possibly infinite-dimensional Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space, and (2) the reward function is nonlinear and can be approximated by neural networks. Our main results provide sample complexity guarantees that only depend on the effective dimension of the feature spaces in the kernel or neural representations. Extensive experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our methods.
It's All in the Heads: Using Attention Heads as a Baseline for Cross-Lingual Transfer in Commonsense Reasoning
Authors: Alexey Tikhonov, Max Ryabinin
Date: 2021-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Cross-Lingual Transfer

Commonsense reasoning is one of the key problems in natural language processing, but the relative scarcity of labeled data holds back the progress for languages other than English. Pretrained cross-lingual models are a source of powerful language-agnostic representations, yet their inherent reasoning capabilities are still actively studied. In this work, we design a simple approach to commonsense reasoning which trains a linear classifier with weights of multi-head attention as features. To evaluate this approach, we create a multilingual Winograd Schema corpus by processing several datasets from prior work within a standardized pipeline and measure cross-lingual generalization ability in terms of out-of-sample performance. The method performs competitively with recent supervised and unsupervised approaches for commonsense reasoning, even when applied to other languages in a zero-shot manner. Also, we demonstrate that most of the performance is given by the same small subset of attention heads for all studied languages, which provides evidence of universal reasoning capabilities in multilingual encoders.
NodePiece: Compositional and Parameter-Efficient Representations of Large Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Mikhail Galkin, Etienne Denis, Jiapeng Wu, William L. Hamilton
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Relation, Relation Prediction, Representation Learning

Conventional representation learning algorithms for knowledge graphs (KG) map each entity to a unique embedding vector. Such a shallow lookup results in a linear growth of memory consumption for storing the embedding matrix and incurs high computational costs when working with real-world KGs. Drawing parallels with subword tokenization commonly used in NLP, we explore the landscape of more parameter-efficient node embedding strategies with possibly sublinear memory requirements. To this end, we propose NodePiece, an anchor-based approach to learn a fixed-size entity vocabulary. In NodePiece, a vocabulary of subword/sub-entity units is constructed from anchor nodes in a graph with known relation types. Given such a fixed-size vocabulary, it is possible to bootstrap an encoding and embedding for any entity, including those unseen during training. Experiments show that NodePiece performs competitively in node classification, link prediction, and relation prediction tasks while retaining less than 10% of explicit nodes in a graph as anchors and often having 10x fewer parameters. To this end, we show that a NodePiece-enabled model outperforms existing shallow models on a large OGB WikiKG 2 graph having 70x fewer parameters.
Closed-Form, Provable, and Robust PCA via Leverage Statistics and Innovation Search
Authors: Mostafa Rahmani, Ping Li
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Form, Outlier Detection

The idea of Innovation Search, which was initially proposed for data clustering, was recently used for outlier detection. In the application of Innovation Search for outlier detection, the directions of innovation were utilized to measure the innovation of the data points. We study the Innovation Values computed by the Innovation Search algorithm under a quadratic cost function and it is proved that Innovation Values with the new cost function are equivalent to Leverage Scores. This interesting connection is utilized to establish several theoretical guarantees for a Leverage Score based robust PCA method and to design a new robust PCA method. The theoretical results include performance guarantees with different models for the distribution of outliers and the distribution of inliers. In addition, we demonstrate the robustness of the algorithms against the presence of noise. The numerical and theoretical studies indicate that while the presented approach is fast and closed-form, it can outperform most of the existing algorithms.
groupShapley: Efficient prediction explanation with Shapley values for feature groups
Authors: Martin Jullum, Annabelle Redelmeier, Kjersti Aas
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00

Shapley values has established itself as one of the most appropriate and theoretically sound frameworks for explaining predictions from complex machine learning models. The popularity of Shapley values in the explanation setting is probably due to its unique theoretical properties. The main drawback with Shapley values, however, is that its computational complexity grows exponentially in the number of input features, making it unfeasible in many real world situations where there could be hundreds or thousands of features. Furthermore, with many (dependent) features, presenting/visualizing and interpreting the computed Shapley values also becomes challenging. The present paper introduces groupShapley: a conceptually simple approach for dealing with the aforementioned bottlenecks. The idea is to group the features, for example by type or dependence, and then compute and present Shapley values for these groups instead of for all individual features. Reducing hundreds or thousands of features to half a dozen or so, makes precise computations practically feasible and the presentation and knowledge extraction greatly simplified. We prove that under certain conditions, groupShapley is equivalent to summing the feature-wise Shapley values within each feature group. Moreover, we provide a simulation study exemplifying the differences when these conditions are not met. We illustrate the usability of the approach in a real world car insurance example, where groupShapley is used to provide simple and intuitive explanations.
ParK: Sound and Efficient Kernel Ridge Regression by Feature Space Partitions
Authors: Luigi Carratino, Stefano Vigogna, Daniele Calandriello, Lorenzo Rosasco
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: regression

We introduce ParK, a new large-scale solver for kernel ridge regression. Our approach combines partitioning with random projections and iterative optimization to reduce space and time complexity while provably maintaining the same statistical accuracy. In particular, constructing suitable partitions directly in the feature space rather than in the input space, we promote orthogonality between the local estimators, thus ensuring that key quantities such as local effective dimension and bias remain under control. We characterize the statistical-computational tradeoff of our model, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by numerical experiments on large-scale datasets.
Improved Acyclicity Reasoning for Bayesian Network Structure Learning with Constraint Programming
Authors: Fulya Trösser, Simon de Givry, George Katsirelos
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC

Bayesian networks are probabilistic graphical models with a wide range of application areas including gene regulatory networks inference, risk analysis and image processing. Learning the structure of a Bayesian network (BNSL) from discrete data is known to be an NP-hard task with a superexponential search space of directed acyclic graphs. In this work, we propose a new polynomial time algorithm for discovering a subset of all possible cluster cuts, a greedy algorithm for approximately solving the resulting linear program, and a generalised arc consistency algorithm for the acyclicity constraint. We embed these in the constraint programmingbased branch-and-bound solver CPBayes and show that, despite being suboptimal, they improve performance by orders of magnitude. The resulting solver also compares favourably with GOBNILP, a state-of-the-art solver for the BNSL problem which solves an NP-hard problem to discover each cut and solves the linear program exactly.
Calibrating the Lee-Carter and the Poisson Lee-Carter models via Neural Networks
Authors: Salvatore Scognamiglio
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: All

This paper introduces a neural network approach for fitting the Lee-Carter and the Poisson Lee-Carter model on multiple populations. We develop some neural networks that replicate the structure of the individual LC models and allow their joint fitting by analysing the mortality data of all the considered populations simultaneously. The neural network architecture is specifically designed to calibrate each individual model using all available information instead of using a population-specific subset of data as in the traditional estimation schemes. A large set of numerical experiments performed on all the countries of the Human Mortality Database (HMD) shows the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, the resulting parameter estimates appear smooth and less sensitive to the random fluctuations often present in the mortality rates' data, especially for low-population countries. In addition, the forecasting performance results significantly improved as well.
Co-advise: Cross Inductive Bias Distillation
Authors: Sucheng Ren, Zhengqi Gao, Tianyu Hua, Zihui Xue, Yonglong Tian, Shengfeng He, Hang Zhao
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Transformers recently are adapted from the community of natural language processing as a promising substitute of convolution-based neural networks for visual learning tasks. However, its supremacy degenerates given an insufficient amount of training data (e.g., ImageNet). To make it into practical utility, we propose a novel distillation-based method to train vision transformers. Unlike previous works, where merely heavy convolution-based teachers are provided, we introduce lightweight teachers with different architectural inductive biases (e.g., convolution and involution) to co-advise the student transformer. The key is that teachers with different inductive biases attain different knowledge despite that they are trained on the same dataset, and such different knowledge compounds and boosts the student's performance during distillation. Equipped with this cross inductive bias distillation method, our vision transformers (termed as CivT) outperform all previous transformers of the same architecture on ImageNet.
Innovations Autoencoder and its Application in One-class Anomalous Sequence Detection
Authors: Xinyi Wang, Lang Tong
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Gaussian Processes, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

An innovations sequence of a time series is a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables with which the original time series has a causal representation. The innovation at a time is statistically independent of the history of the time series. As such, it represents the new information contained at present but not in the past. Because of its simple probability structure, an innovations sequence is the most efficient signature of the original. Unlike the principle or independent component analysis representations, an innovations sequence preserves not only the complete statistical properties but also the temporal order of the original time series. An long-standing open problem is to find a computationally tractable way to extract an innovations sequence of non-Gaussian processes. This paper presents a deep learning approach, referred to as Innovations Autoencoder (IAE), that extracts innovations sequences using a causal convolutional neural network. An application of IAE to the one-class anomalous sequence detection problem with unknown anomaly and anomaly-free models is also presented.
Alias-Free Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Tero Karras, Miika Aittala, Samuli Laine, Erik Härkönen, Janne Hellsten, Jaakko Lehtinen, Timo Aila
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Image Generation

We observe that despite their hierarchical convolutional nature, the synthesis process of typical generative adversarial networks depends on absolute pixel coordinates in an unhealthy manner. This manifests itself as, e.g., detail appearing to be glued to image coordinates instead of the surfaces of depicted objects. We trace the root cause to careless signal processing that causes aliasing in the generator network. Interpreting all signals in the network as continuous, we derive generally applicable, small architectural changes that guarantee that unwanted information cannot leak into the hierarchical synthesis process. The resulting networks match the FID of StyleGAN2 but differ dramatically in their internal representations, and they are fully equivariant to translation and rotation even at subpixel scales. Our results pave the way for generative models better suited for video and animation.
Classifying Textual Data with Pre-trained Vision Models through Transfer Learning and Data Transformations
Authors: Charaf Eddine Benarab
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification, Transfer Learning

Knowledge is acquired by humans through experience, and no boundary is set between the kinds of knowledge or skill levels we can achieve on different tasks at the same time. When it comes to Neural Networks, that is not the case. The breakthroughs in the field are extremely task and domain-specific. Vision and language are dealt with in separate manners, using separate methods and different datasets. Current text classification methods, mostly rely on obtaining contextual embeddings for input text samples, then training a classifier on the embedded dataset. Transfer learning in Language-related tasks in general, is heavily used in obtaining the contextual text embeddings for the input samples. In this work, we propose to use the knowledge acquired by benchmark Vision Models which are trained on ImageNet to help a much smaller architecture learn to classify text. A data transformation technique is used to create a new image dataset, where each image represents a sentence embedding from the last six layers of BERT, projected on a 2D plane using a t-SNE based method. We trained five models containing early layers sliced from vision models which are pretrained on ImageNet, on the created image dataset for the IMDB dataset embedded with the last six layers of BERT. Despite the challenges posed by the very different datasets, experimental results achieved by this approach which links large pretrained models on both language and vision, are very promising, without employing compute resources. Specifically, Sentiment Analysis is achieved by five different models on the same image dataset obtained after BERT embeddings are transformed into gray scale images. Index Terms: BERT, Convolutional Neural Networks, Domain Adaptation, image classification, Natural Language Processing, t-SNE, text classification, Transfer Learning
Adapting Off-the-Shelf Source Segmenter for Target Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xiaofeng Liu, Fangxu Xing, Chao Yang, Georges El Fakhri, Jonghye Woo
Date: 2021-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled and unseen target domain, which is usually trained on data from both domains. Access to the source domain data at the adaptation stage, however, is often limited, due to data storage or privacy issues. To alleviate this, in this work, we target source free UDA for segmentation, and propose to adapt an ``off-the-shelf" segmentation model pre-trained in the source domain to the target domain, with an adaptive batch-wise normalization statistics adaptation framework. Specifically, the domain-specific low-order batch statistics, i.e., mean and variance, are gradually adapted with an exponential momentum decay scheme, while the consistency of domain shareable high-order batch statistics, i.e., scaling and shifting parameters, is explicitly enforced by our optimization objective. The transferability of each channel is adaptively measured first from which to balance the contribution of each channel. Moreover, the proposed source free UDA framework is orthogonal to unsupervised learning methods, e.g., self-entropy minimization, which can thus be simply added on top of our framework. Extensive experiments on the BraTS 2018 database show that our source free UDA framework outperformed existing source-relaxed UDA methods for the cross-subtype UDA segmentation task and yielded comparable results for the cross-modality UDA segmentation task, compared with a supervised UDA methods with the source data.