pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BS-Net: learning COVID-19 pneumonia severity on a large Chest X-Ray dataset
Authors: Alberto Signoroni, Mattia Savardi, Sergio Benini, Nicola Adami, Riccardo Leonardi, Paolo Gibellini, Filippo Vaccher, Marco Ravanelli, Andrea Borghesi, Roberto Maroldi, Davide Farina
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Weakly-supervised Learning

In this work we design an end-to-end deep learning architecture for predicting, on Chest X-rays images (CXR), a multi-regional score conveying the degree of lung compromise in COVID-19 patients. Such semi-quantitative scoring system, namely Brixia~score, is applied in serial monitoring of such patients, showing significant prognostic value, in one of the hospitals that experienced one of the highest pandemic peaks in Italy. To solve such a challenging visual task, we adopt a weakly supervised learning strategy structured to handle different tasks (segmentation, spatial alignment, and score estimation) trained with a "from-the-part-to-the-whole" procedure involving different datasets. In particular, we exploit a clinical dataset of almost 5,000 CXR annotated images collected in the same hospital. Our BS-Net demonstrates self-attentive behavior and a high degree of accuracy in all processing stages. Through inter-rater agreement tests and a gold standard comparison, we show that our solution outperforms single human annotators in rating accuracy and consistency, thus supporting the possibility of using this tool in contexts of computer-assisted monitoring. Highly resolved (super-pixel level) explainability maps are also generated, with an original technique, to visually help the understanding of the network activity on the lung areas. We also consider other scores proposed in literature and provide a comparison with a recently proposed non-specific approach. We eventually test the performance robustness of our model on an assorted public COVID-19 dataset, for which we also provide Brixia~score annotations, observing good direct generalization and fine-tuning capabilities that highlight the portability of BS-Net in other clinical settings. The CXR dataset along with the source code and the trained model are publicly released for research purposes.
Disparate Impact of Artificial Intelligence Bias in Ridehailing Economy's Price Discrimination Algorithms
Authors: Akshat Pandey, Aylin Caliskan
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

Ridehailing applications that collect mobility data from individuals to inform smart city planning predict each trip's fare pricing with automated algorithms that rely on artificial intelligence (AI). This type of AI algorithm, namely a price discrimination algorithm, is widely used in the industry's black box systems for dynamic individualized pricing. Lacking transparency, studying such AI systems for fairness and disparate impact has not been possible without access to data used in generating the outcomes of price discrimination algorithms. Recently, in an effort to enhance transparency in city planning, the city of Chicago regulation mandated that transportation providers publish anonymized data on ridehailing. As a result, we present the first large-scale measurement of the disparate impact of price discrimination algorithms used by ridehailing applications. The application of random effects models from the meta-analysis literature combines the city-level effects of AI bias on fare pricing from census tract attributes, aggregated from the American Community Survey. An analysis of 100 million ridehailing samples from the city of Chicago indicates a significant disparate impact in fare pricing of neighborhoods due to AI bias learned from ridehailing utilization patterns associated with demographic attributes. Neighborhoods with larger non-white populations, higher poverty levels, younger residents, and high education levels are significantly associated with higher fare prices, with combined effect sizes, measured in Cohen's d, of -0.32, -0.28, 0.69, and 0.24 for each demographic, respectively. Further, our methods hold promise for identifying and addressing the sources of disparate impact in AI algorithms learning from datasets that contain U.S. geolocations.
WaveNODE: A Continuous Normalizing Flow for Speech Synthesis
Authors: Hyeongju Kim, Hyeonseung Lee, Woo Hyun Kang, Sung Jun Cheon, Byoung Jin Choi, Nam Soo Kim
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis

In recent years, various flow-based generative models have been proposed to generate high-fidelity waveforms in real-time. However, these models require either a well-trained teacher network or a number of flow steps making them memory-inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model called WaveNODE which exploits a continuous normalizing flow for speech synthesis. Unlike the conventional models, WaveNODE places no constraint on the function used for flow operation, thus allowing the usage of more flexible and complex functions. Moreover, WaveNODE can be optimized to maximize the likelihood without requiring any teacher network or auxiliary loss terms. We experimentally show that WaveNODE achieves comparable performance with fewer parameters compared to the conventional flow-based vocoders.
CS-Embed at SemEval-2020 Task 9: The effectiveness of code-switched word embeddings for sentiment analysis
Authors: Frances Adriana Laureano De Leon, Florimond Guéniat, Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020
Tasks: Multilingual Word Embeddings, Sentiment Analysis, Word Embeddings

The growing popularity and applications of sentiment analysis of social media posts has naturally led to sentiment analysis of posts written in multiple languages, a practice known as code-switching. While recent research into code-switched posts has focused on the use of multilingual word embeddings, these embeddings were not trained on code-switched data. In this work, we present word-embeddings trained on code-switched tweets, specifically those that make use of Spanish and English, known as Spanglish. We explore the embedding space to discover how they capture the meanings of words in both languages. We test the effectiveness of these embeddings by participating in SemEval 2020 Task 9: ~\emph{Sentiment Analysis on Code-Mixed Social Media Text}. We utilised them to train a sentiment classifier that achieves an F-1 score of 0.722. This is higher than the baseline for the competition of 0.656, with our team (codalab username \emph{francesita}) ranking 14 out of 29 participating teams, beating the baseline.
Learning disconnected manifolds: a no GANs land
Authors: Ugo Tanielian, Thibaut Issenhuth, Elvis Dohmatob, Jeremie Mary
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00

Typical architectures of Generative AdversarialNetworks make use of a unimodal latent distribution transformed by a continuous generator. Consequently, the modeled distribution always has connected support which is cumbersome when learning a disconnected set of manifolds. We formalize this problem by establishing a no free lunch theorem for the disconnected manifold learning stating an upper bound on the precision of the targeted distribution. This is done by building on the necessary existence of a low-quality region where the generator continuously samples data between two disconnected modes. Finally, we derive a rejection sampling method based on the norm of generators Jacobian and show its efficiency on several generators including BigGAN.
Softwarization, Virtualization, & Machine Learning For Intelligent & Effective V2X Communications
Authors: Abdallah Moubayed, Abdallah Shami
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Edge-computing

The concept of the fifth generation (5G) mobile network system has emerged in recent years as telecommunication operators and service providers look to upgrade their infrastructure and delivery modes to meet the growing demand. Concepts such as softwarization, virtualization, and machine learning will be key components as innovative and flexible enablers of such networks. In particular, paradigms such as software-defined networks, software-defined perimeter, cloud & edge computing, and network function virtualization will play a major role in addressing several 5G networks' challenges, especially in terms of flexibility, programmability, scalability, and security. In this work, the role and potential of these paradigms in the context of V2X communication is discussed. To do so, the paper starts off by providing an overview and background of V2X communications. Then, the paper discusses in more details the various challenges facing V2X communications and some of the previous literature work done to tackle them. Furthermore, the paper describes how softwarization, virtualization, and machine learning can be adapted to tackle the challenges of such networks.
ARIANN: Low-Interaction Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning via Function Secret Sharing
Authors: Théo Ryffel, Pierre Tholoniat, David Pointcheval, Francis Bach
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Federated Learning, GPU, Privacy Preserving, Privacy Preserving Deep Learning

We propose AriaNN, a low-interaction privacy-preserving framework for private neural network training and inference on sensitive data. Our semi-honest 2-party computation protocol (with a trusted dealer) leverages function secret sharing, a recent lightweight cryptographic protocol that allows us to achieve an efficient online phase. We design optimized primitives for the building blocks of neural networks such as ReLU, MaxPool and BatchNorm. For instance, we perform private comparison for ReLU operations with a single message of the size of the input during the online phase, and with preprocessing keys close to 4X smaller than previous work. Last, we propose an extension to support n-party private federated learning. We implement our framework as an extensible system on top of PyTorch that leverages CPU and GPU hardware acceleration for cryptographic and machine learning operations. We evaluate our end-to-end system for private inference between distant servers on standard neural networks such as AlexNet, VGG16 or ResNet18, and for private training on smaller networks like LeNet. We show that computation rather than communication is the main bottleneck and that using GPUs together with reduced key size is a promising solution to overcome this barrier.
EDCompress: Energy-Aware Model Compression for Dataflows
Authors: Zhehui Wang, Tao Luo, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Rick Siow Mong Goh
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, model, Model Compression

Edge devices demand low energy consumption, cost and small form factor. To efficiently deploy convolutional neural network (CNN) models on edge device, energy-aware model compression becomes extremely important. However, existing work did not study this problem well because the lack of considering the diversity of dataflow types in hardware architectures. In this paper, we propose EDCompress, an Energy-aware model compression method for various Dataflows. It can effectively reduce the energy consumption of various edge devices, with different dataflow types. Considering the very nature of model compression procedures, we recast the optimization process to a multi-step problem, and solve it by reinforcement learning algorithms. Experiments show that EDCompress could improve 20X, 17X, 37X energy efficiency in VGG-16, MobileNet, LeNet-5 networks, respectively, with negligible loss of accuracy. EDCompress could also find the optimal dataflow type for specific neural networks in terms of energy consumption, which can guide the deployment of CNN models on hardware systems.
X-SHAP: towards multiplicative explainability of Machine Learning
Authors: Luisa Bouneder, Yannick Léo, Aimé Lachapelle
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Feature Importance

This paper introduces X-SHAP, a model-agnostic method that assesses multiplicative contributions of variables for both local and global predictions. This method theoretically and operationally extends the so-called additive SHAP approach. It proves useful underlying multiplicative interactions of factors, typically arising in sectors where Generalized Linear Models are traditionally used, such as in insurance or biology. We test the method on various datasets and propose a set of techniques based on individual X-SHAP contributions to build aggregated multiplicative contributions and to capture multiplicative feature importance, that we compare to traditional techniques.
Parameter-Efficient Person Re-identification in the 3D Space
Authors: Zhedong Zheng, Nenggan Zheng, Yi Yang
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, 3D Point Cloud Classification, Person Re-Identification, Point Cloud Classification, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

People live in a 3D world. However, existing works on person re-identification (re-id) mostly consider the semantic representation learning in a 2D space, intrinsically limiting the understanding of people. In this work, we address this limitation by exploring the prior knowledge of the 3D body structure. Specifically, we project 2D images to a 3D space and introduce a novel parameter-efficient Omni-scale Graph Network (OG-Net) to learn the pedestrian representation directly from 3D point clouds. OG-Net effectively exploits the local information provided by sparse 3D points and takes advantage of the structure and appearance information in a coherent manner. With the help of 3D geometry information, we can learn a new type of deep re-id feature free from noisy variants, such as scale and viewpoint. To our knowledge, we are among the first attempts to conduct person re-identification in the 3D space. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that the proposed method (1) eases the matching difficulty in the traditional 2D space, (2) exploits the complementary information of 2D appearance and 3D structure, (3) achieves competitive results with limited parameters on four large-scale person re-id datasets, and (4) has good scalability to unseen datasets. Our code, models and generated 3D human data are publicly available at https://github.com/layumi/person-reid-3d .
Towards an Argument Mining Pipeline Transforming Texts to Argument Graphs
Authors: Mirko Lenz, Premtim Sahitaj, Sean Kallenberg, Christopher Coors, Lorik Dumani, Ralf Schenkel, Ralph Bergmann
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Argument Mining

This paper targets the automated extraction of components of argumentative information and their relations from natural language text. Moreover, we address a current lack of systems to provide complete argumentative structure from arbitrary natural language text for general usage. We present an argument mining pipeline as a universally applicable approach for transforming German and English language texts to graph-based argument representations. We also introduce new methods for evaluating the results based on existing benchmark argument structures. Our results show that the generated argument graphs can be beneficial to detect new connections between different statements of an argumentative text. Our pipeline implementation is publicly available on GitHub.
Data-driven topology design using a deep generative model
Authors: Shintaro Yamasaki, Kentaro Yaji, Kikuo Fujita
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a sensitivity-free and multi-objective structural design methodology called data-driven topology design. It is schemed to obtain high-performance material distributions from initially given material distributions in a given design domain. Its basic idea is to iterate the following processes: (i) selecting material distributions from a dataset of material distributions according to eliteness, (ii) generating new material distributions using a deep generative model trained with the selected elite material distributions, and (iii) merging the generated material distributions with the dataset. Because of the nature of a deep generative model, the generated material distributions are diverse and inherit features of the training data, that is, the elite material distributions. Therefore, it is expected that some of the generated material distributions are superior to the current elite material distributions, and by merging the generated material distributions with the dataset, the performances of the newly selected elite material distributions are improved. The performances are further improved by iterating the above processes. The usefulness of data-driven topology design is demonstrated through numerical examples.
FastSpeech 2: Fast and High-Quality End-to-End Text to Speech
Authors: Yi Ren, Chenxu Hu, Xu Tan, Tao Qin, Sheng Zhao, Zhou Zhao, Tie-Yan Liu
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

Non-autoregressive text to speech (TTS) models such as FastSpeech can synthesize speech significantly faster than previous autoregressive models with comparable quality. The training of FastSpeech model relies on an autoregressive teacher model for duration prediction (to provide more information as input) and knowledge distillation (to simplify the data distribution in output), which can ease the one-to-many mapping problem (i.e., multiple speech variations correspond to the same text) in TTS. However, FastSpeech has several disadvantages: 1) the teacher-student distillation pipeline is complicated and time-consuming, 2) the duration extracted from the teacher model is not accurate enough, and the target mel-spectrograms distilled from teacher model suffer from information loss due to data simplification, both of which limit the voice quality. In this paper, we propose FastSpeech 2, which addresses the issues in FastSpeech and better solves the one-to-many mapping problem in TTS by 1) directly training the model with ground-truth target instead of the simplified output from teacher, and 2) introducing more variation information of speech (e.g., pitch, energy and more accurate duration) as conditional inputs. Specifically, we extract duration, pitch and energy from speech waveform and directly take them as conditional inputs in training and use predicted values in inference. We further design FastSpeech 2s, which is the first attempt to directly generate speech waveform from text in parallel, enjoying the benefit of fully end-to-end inference. Experimental results show that 1) FastSpeech 2 achieves a 3x training speed-up over FastSpeech, and FastSpeech 2s enjoys even faster inference speed; 2) FastSpeech 2 and 2s outperform FastSpeech in voice quality, and FastSpeech 2 can even surpass autoregressive models. Audio samples are available at https://speechresearch.github.io/fastspeech2/.
FibeR-CNN: Expanding Mask R-CNN to Improve Image-Based Fiber Analysis
Authors: Max Frei, Frank Einar Kruis
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Fiber-shaped materials (e.g. carbon nano tubes) are of great relevance, due to their unique properties but also the health risk they can impose. Unfortunately, image-based analysis of fibers still involves manual annotation, which is a time-consuming and costly process. We therefore propose the use of region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs) to automate this task. Mask R-CNN, the most widely used R-CNN for semantic segmentation tasks, is prone to errors when it comes to the analysis of fiber-shaped objects. Hence, a new architecture - FibeR-CNN - is introduced and validated. FibeR-CNN combines two established R-CNN architectures (Mask and Keypoint R-CNN) and adds additional network heads for the prediction of fiber widths and lengths. As a result, FibeR-CNN is able to surpass the mean average precision of Mask R-CNN by 33 % (11 percentage points) on a novel test data set of fiber images.
A Variational View on Bootstrap Ensembles as Bayesian Inference
Authors: Dimitrios Milios, Pietro Michiardi, Maurizio Filippone
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, valid

In this paper, we employ variational arguments to establish a connection between ensemble methods for Neural Networks and Bayesian inference. We consider an ensemble-based scheme where each model/particle corresponds to a perturbation of the data by means of parametric bootstrap and a perturbation of the prior. We derive conditions under which any optimization steps of the particles makes the associated distribution reduce its divergence to the posterior over model parameters. Such conditions do not require any particular form for the approximation and they are purely geometrical, giving insights on the behavior of the ensemble on a number of interesting models such as Neural Networks with ReLU activations. Experiments confirm that ensemble methods can be a valid alternative to approximate Bayesian inference; the theoretical developments in the paper seek to explain this behavior.
Ethical Considerations and Statistical Analysis of Industry Involvement in Machine Learning Research
Authors: Thilo Hagendorff, Kristof Meding
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Diversity

Industry involvement in the machine learning (ML) community seems to be increasing. However, the quantitative scale and ethical implications of this influence are rather unknown. For this purpose, we have not only carried out an informed ethical analysis of the field, but have inspected all papers of the main ML conferences NeurIPS, CVPR, and ICML of the last 5 years - almost 11,000 papers in total. Our statistical approach focuses on conflicts of interest, innovation and gender equality. We have obtained four main findings: (1) Academic-corporate collaborations are growing in numbers. At the same time, we found that conflicts of interest are rarely disclosed. (2) Industry publishes papers about trending ML topics on average two years earlier than academia does. (3) Industry papers are not lagging behind academic papers in regard to social impact considerations. (4) Finally, we demonstrate that industrial papers fall short of their academic counterparts with respect to the ratio of gender diversity. We believe that this work is a starting point for an informed debate within and outside of the ML community.
Evaluation of Similarity-based Explanations
Authors: Kazuaki Hanawa, Sho Yokoi, Satoshi Hara, Kentaro Inui
Date: 2020-06-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

Explaining the predictions made by complex machine learning models helps users to understand and accept the predicted outputs with confidence. One promising way is to use similarity-based explanation that provides similar instances as evidence to support model predictions. Several relevance metrics are used for this purpose. In this study, we investigated relevance metrics that can provide reasonable explanations to users. Specifically, we adopted three tests to evaluate whether the relevance metrics satisfy the minimal requirements for similarity-based explanation. Our experiments revealed that the cosine similarity of the gradients of the loss performs best, which would be a recommended choice in practice. In addition, we showed that some metrics perform poorly in our tests and analyzed the reasons of their failure. We expect our insights to help practitioners in selecting appropriate relevance metrics and also aid further researches for designing better relevance metrics for explanations.