pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Distributed Variational Bayesian Algorithms Over Sensor Networks
Authors: Junhao Hua, Chunguang Li
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Distributed inference/estimation in Bayesian framework in the context of sensor networks has recently received much attention due to its broad applicability. The variational Bayesian (VB) algorithm is a technique for approximating intractable integrals arising in Bayesian inference. In this paper, we propose two novel distributed VB algorithms for general Bayesian inference problem, which can be applied to a very general class of conjugate-exponential models. In the first approach, the global natural parameters at each node are optimized using a stochastic natural gradient that utilizes the Riemannian geometry of the approximation space, followed by an information diffusion step for cooperation with the neighbors. In the second method, a constrained optimization formulation for distributed estimation is established in natural parameter space and solved by alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). An application of the distributed inference/estimation of a Bayesian Gaussian mixture model is then presented, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Simulations on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms have excellent performance, which are almost as good as the corresponding centralized VB algorithm relying on all data available in a fusion center.
Multi-objective Neural Architecture Search with Almost No Training
Authors: Shengran Hu, Ran Cheng, Cheng He, Zhichao Lu
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search, Transfer Learning

In the recent past, neural architecture search (NAS) has attracted increasing attention from both academia and industries. Despite the steady stream of impressive empirical results, most existing NAS algorithms are computationally prohibitive to execute due to the costly iterations of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) training. In this work, we propose an effective alternative, dubbed Random-Weight Evaluation (RWE), to rapidly estimate the performance of network architectures. By just training the last linear classification layer, RWE reduces the computational cost of evaluating an architecture from hours to seconds. When integrated within an evolutionary multi-objective algorithm, RWE obtains a set of efficient architectures with state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10 with less than two hours' searching on a single GPU card. Ablation studies on rank-order correlations and transfer learning experiments to ImageNet have further validated the effectiveness of RWE.
Road Scene Graph: A Semantic Graph-Based Scene Representation Dataset for Intelligent Vehicles
Authors: Yafu Tian, Alexander Carballo, Ruifeng Li, Kazuya Takeda
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Rich semantic information extraction plays a vital role on next-generation intelligent vehicles. Currently there is great amount of research focusing on fundamental applications such as 6D pose detection, road scene semantic segmentation, etc. And this provides us a great opportunity to think about how shall these data be organized and exploited. In this paper we propose road scene graph,a special scene-graph for intelligent vehicles. Different to classical data representation, this graph provides not only object proposals but also their pair-wise relationships. By organizing them in a topological graph, these data are explainable, fully-connected, and could be easily processed by GCNs (Graph Convolutional Networks). Here we apply scene graph on roads using our Road Scene Graph dataset, including the basic graph prediction model. This work also includes experimental evaluations using the proposed model.
Representation of 2D frame less visual space as a neural manifold and its information geometric interpretation
Authors: Debasis Mazumdar
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

Representation of 2D frame less visual space as neural manifold and its modelling in the frame work of information geometry is presented. Origin of hyperbolic nature of the visual space is investigated using evidences from neuroscience. Based on the results we propose that the processing of spatial information, particularly estimation of distance, perceiving geometrical curves etc. in the human brain can be modeled in a parametric probability space endowed with Fisher-Rao metric. Compactness, convexity and differentiability of the space is analysed and found that they obey the axioms of G space, proposed by Busemann. Further it is shown that it can be considered as a homogeneous Riemannian space of constant negative curvature. It is therefore ensured that the space yields geodesics into it. Computer simulation of geodesics representing a number of visual phenomena and advocating the hyperbolic structure of visual space is carried out. Comparison of the simulated results with the published experimental data is presented.
Improving Layer-wise Adaptive Rate Methods using Trust Ratio Clipping
Authors: Jeffrey Fong, Siwei Chen, Kaiqi Chen
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Training neural networks with large batch is of fundamental significance to deep learning. Large batch training remarkably reduces the amount of training time but has difficulties in maintaining accuracy. Recent works have put forward optimization methods such as LARS and LAMB to tackle this issue through adaptive layer-wise optimization using trust ratios. Though prevailing, such methods are observed to still suffer from unstable and extreme trust ratios which degrades performance. In this paper, we propose a new variant of LAMB, called LAMBC, which employs trust ratio clipping to stabilize its magnitude and prevent extreme values. We conducted experiments on image classification tasks such as ImageNet and CIFAR-10 and our empirical results demonstrate promising improvements across different batch sizes.
An Ethical Highlighter for People-Centric Dataset Creation
Authors: Margot Hanley, Apoorv Khandelwal, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Noah Snavely, Helen Nissenbaum
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

Important ethical concerns arising from computer vision datasets of people have been receiving significant attention, and a number of datasets have been withdrawn as a result. To meet the academic need for people-centric datasets, we propose an analytical framework to guide ethical evaluation of existing datasets and to serve future dataset creators in avoiding missteps. Our work is informed by a review and analysis of prior works and highlights where such ethical challenges arise.
A Sheaf and Topology Approach to Generating Local Branch Numbers in Digital Images
Authors: Chuan-Shen Hu, Yu-Min Chung
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Topological Data Analysis

This paper concerns a theoretical approach that combines topological data analysis (TDA) and sheaf theory. Topological data analysis, a rising field in mathematics and computer science, concerns the shape of the data and has been proven effective in many scientific disciplines. Sheaf theory, a mathematics subject in algebraic geometry, provides a framework for describing the local consistency in geometric objects. Persistent homology (PH) is one of the main driving forces in TDA, and the idea is to track changes of geometric objects at different scales. The persistence diagram (PD) summarizes the information of PH in the form of a multi-set. While PD provides useful information about the underlying objects, it lacks fine relations about the local consistency of specific pairs of generators in PD, such as the merging relation between two connected components in the PH. The sheaf structure provides a novel point of view for describing the merging relation of local objects in PH. It is the goal of this paper to establish a theoretic framework that utilizes the sheaf theory to uncover finer information from the PH. We also show that the proposed theory can be applied to identify the branch numbers of local objects in digital images.
A survey of benchmarking frameworks for reinforcement learning
Authors: Belinda Stapelberg, Katherine M. Malan
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Survey

Reinforcement learning has recently experienced increased prominence in the machine learning community. There are many approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems with new techniques developed constantly. When solving problems using reinforcement learning, there are various difficult challenges to overcome. To ensure progress in the field, benchmarks are important for testing new algorithms and comparing with other approaches. The reproducibility of results for fair comparison is therefore vital in ensuring that improvements are accurately judged. This paper provides an overview of different contributions to reinforcement learning benchmarking and discusses how they can assist researchers to address the challenges facing reinforcement learning. The contributions discussed are the most used and recent in the literature. The paper discusses the contributions in terms of implementation, tasks and provided algorithm implementations with benchmarks. The survey aims to bring attention to the wide range of reinforcement learning benchmarking tasks available and to encourage research to take place in a standardised manner. Additionally, this survey acts as an overview for researchers not familiar with the different tasks that can be used to develop and test new reinforcement learning algorithms.
Learning Relation Prototype from Unlabeled Texts for Long-tail Relation Extraction
Authors: Yixin Cao, Jun Kuang, Ming Gao, Aoying Zhou, Yonggang Wen, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction, Transfer Learning

Relation Extraction (RE) is a vital step to complete Knowledge Graph (KG) by extracting entity relations from texts.However, it usually suffers from the long-tail issue. The training data mainly concentrates on a few types of relations, leading to the lackof sufficient annotations for the remaining types of relations. In this paper, we propose a general approach to learn relation prototypesfrom unlabeled texts, to facilitate the long-tail relation extraction by transferring knowledge from the relation types with sufficient trainingdata. We learn relation prototypes as an implicit factor between entities, which reflects the meanings of relations as well as theirproximities for transfer learning. Specifically, we construct a co-occurrence graph from texts, and capture both first-order andsecond-order entity proximities for embedding learning. Based on this, we further optimize the distance from entity pairs tocorresponding prototypes, which can be easily adapted to almost arbitrary RE frameworks. Thus, the learning of infrequent or evenunseen relation types will benefit from semantically proximate relations through pairs of entities and large-scale textual information.We have conducted extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets: New York Times and Google Distant Supervision.Compared with eight state-of-the-art baselines, our proposed model achieves significant improvements (4.1% F1 on average). Furtherresults on long-tail relations demonstrate the effectiveness of the learned relation prototypes. We further conduct an ablation study toinvestigate the impacts of varying components, and apply it to four basic relation extraction models to verify the generalization ability.Finally, we analyze several example cases to give intuitive impressions as qualitative analysis. Our codes will be released later.
Chinese Medical Question Answer Matching Based on Interactive Sentence Representation Learning
Authors: Xiongtao Cui, Jungang Han
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Sentence

Chinese medical question-answer matching is more challenging than the open-domain question answer matching in English. Even though the deep learning method has performed well in improving the performance of question answer matching, these methods only focus on the semantic information inside sentences, while ignoring the semantic association between questions and answers, thus resulting in performance deficits. In this paper, we design a series of interactive sentence representation learning models to tackle this problem. To better adapt to Chinese medical question-answer matching and take the advantages of different neural network structures, we propose the Crossed BERT network to extract the deep semantic information inside the sentence and the semantic association between question and answer, and then combine with the multi-scale CNNs network or BiGRU network to take the advantage of different structure of neural networks to learn more semantic features into the sentence representation. The experiments on the cMedQA V2.0 and cMedQA V1.0 dataset show that our model significantly outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art models of Chinese medical question answer matching.
Analyzing Unaligned Multimodal Sequence via Graph Convolution and Graph Pooling Fusion
Authors: Sijie Mai, Songlong Xing, Jiaxuan He, Ying Zeng, Haifeng Hu
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

In this paper, we study the task of multimodal sequence analysis which aims to draw inferences from visual, language and acoustic sequences. A majority of existing works generally focus on aligned fusion, mostly at word level, of the three modalities to accomplish this task, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. To overcome this issue, we seek to address the task of multimodal sequence analysis on unaligned modality sequences which is still relatively underexplored and also more challenging. Recurrent neural network (RNN) and its variants are widely used in multimodal sequence analysis, but they are susceptible to the issues of gradient vanishing/explosion and high time complexity due to its recurrent nature. Therefore, we propose a novel model, termed Multimodal Graph, to investigate the effectiveness of graph neural networks (GNN) on modeling multimodal sequential data. The graph-based structure enables parallel computation in time dimension and can learn longer temporal dependency in long unaligned sequences. Specifically, our Multimodal Graph is hierarchically structured to cater to two stages, i.e., intra- and inter-modal dynamics learning. For the first stage, a graph convolutional network is employed for each modality to learn intra-modal dynamics. In the second stage, given that the multimodal sequences are unaligned, the commonly considered word-level fusion does not pertain. To this end, we devise a graph pooling fusion network to automatically learn the associations between various nodes from different modalities. Additionally, we define multiple ways to construct the adjacency matrix for sequential data. Experimental results suggest that our graph-based model reaches state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.
Deep Active Learning for Sequence Labeling Based on Diversity and Uncertainty in Gradient
Authors: Yekyung Kim
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: AACL (lifelongnlp) 2020 12
Tasks: Active Learning, Diversity

Recently, several studies have investigated active learning (AL) for natural language processing tasks to alleviate data dependency. However, for query selection, most of these studies mainly rely on uncertainty-based sampling, which generally does not exploit the structural information of the unlabeled data. This leads to a sampling bias in the batch active learning setting, which selects several samples at once. In this work, we demonstrate that the amount of labeled training data can be reduced using active learning when it incorporates both uncertainty and diversity in the sequence labeling task. We examined the effects of our sequence-based approach by selecting weighted diverse in the gradient embedding approach across multiple tasks, datasets, models, and consistently outperform classic uncertainty-based sampling and diversity-based sampling.
Joint Extraction of Entity and Relation with Information Redundancy Elimination
Authors: Yuanhao Shen, Jungang Han
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation, Relation Classification, Relation Extraction

To solve the problem of redundant information and overlapping relations of the entity and relation extraction model, we propose a joint extraction model. This model can directly extract multiple pairs of related entities without generating unrelated redundant information. We also propose a recurrent neural network named Encoder-LSTM that enhances the ability of recurrent units to model sentences. Specifically, the joint model includes three sub-modules: the Named Entity Recognition sub-module consisted of a pre-trained language model and an LSTM decoder layer, the Entity Pair Extraction sub-module which uses Encoder-LSTM network to model the order relationship between related entity pairs, and the Relation Classification sub-module including Attention mechanism. We conducted experiments on the public datasets ADE and CoNLL04 to evaluate the effectiveness of our model. The results show that the proposed model achieves good performance in the task of entity and relation extraction and can greatly reduce the amount of redundant information.
SocialGuard: An Adversarial Example Based Privacy-Preserving Technique for Social Images
Authors: Mingfu Xue, Shichang Sun, Zhiyu Wu, Can He, Jian Wang, Weiqiang Liu
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Privacy Preserving

The popularity of various social platforms has prompted more people to share their routine photos online. However, undesirable privacy leakages occur due to such online photo sharing behaviors. Advanced deep neural network (DNN) based object detectors can easily steal users' personal information exposed in shared photos. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial example based privacy-preserving technique for social images against object detectors based privacy stealing. Specifically, we develop an Object Disappearance Algorithm to craft two kinds of adversarial social images. One can hide all objects in the social images from being detected by an object detector, and the other can make the customized sensitive objects be incorrectly classified by the object detector. The Object Disappearance Algorithm constructs perturbation on a clean social image. After being injected with the perturbation, the social image can easily fool the object detector, while its visual quality will not be degraded. We use two metrics, privacy-preserving success rate and privacy leakage rate, to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that, the proposed method can effectively protect the privacy of social images. The privacy-preserving success rates of the proposed method on MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC 2007 datasets are high up to 96.1% and 99.3%, respectively, and the privacy leakage rates on these two datasets are as low as 0.57% and 0.07%, respectively. In addition, compared with existing image processing methods (low brightness, noise, blur, mosaic and JPEG compression), the proposed method can achieve much better performance in privacy protection and image visual quality maintenance.
Protein model quality assessment using rotation-equivariant, hierarchical neural networks
Authors: Stephan Eismann, Patricia Suriana, Bowen Jing, Raphael J. L. Townshend, Ron O. Dror
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

Proteins are miniature machines whose function depends on their three-dimensional (3D) structure. Determining this structure computationally remains an unsolved grand challenge. A major bottleneck involves selecting the most accurate structural model among a large pool of candidates, a task addressed in model quality assessment. Here, we present a novel deep learning approach to assess the quality of a protein model. Our network builds on a point-based representation of the atomic structure and rotation-equivariant convolutions at different levels of structural resolution. These combined aspects allow the network to learn end-to-end from entire protein structures. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in scoring protein models submitted to recent rounds of CASP, a blind prediction community experiment. Particularly striking is that our method does not use physics-inspired energy terms and does not rely on the availability of additional information (beyond the atomic structure of the individual protein model), such as sequence alignments of multiple proteins.
Eco-Routing Using Open Street Maps
Authors: R K Ghosh, Vinay R, Arnab Bhattacharyya
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

A vehicle's fuel consumption depends on its type, the speed, the condition, and the gradients of the road on which it is moving. We developed a Routing Engine for finding an eco-route (one with low fuel consumption) between a source and a destination. Open Street Maps has data on road conditions. We used CGIAR-CSI road elevation data 16[4] to integrate the road gradients into the proposed route-finding algorithm that modifies Open Street Routing Machine (OSRM). It allowed us to dynamically predict a vehicle's velocity, considering both the conditions and the road segment's slope. Using Highway EneRgy Assessment (HERA) methodology, we calculated the fuel consumed by a vehicle given its type and velocity. We have created both web and mobile interfaces through which users can specify Geo coordinates or human-readable addresses of a source and a destination. The user interface graphically displays the route obtained from the proposed Routing Engine with a detailed travel itinerary.
Association: Remind Your GAN not to Forget
Authors: Yi Gu, Jie Li, Yuting Gao, Ruoxin Chen, Chentao Wu, Feiyang Cai, Chao Wang, Zirui Zhang
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Image Reconstruction, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Neural networks are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. They fail to preserve previously acquired knowledge when adapting to new tasks. Inspired by human associative memory system, we propose a brain-like approach that imitates the associative learning process to achieve continual learning. We design a heuristics mechanism to potentiatively stimulate the model, which guides the model to recall the historical episodes based on the current circumstance and obtained association experience. Besides, a distillation measure is added to depressively alter the efficacy of synaptic transmission, which dampens the feature reconstruction learning for new task. The framework is mediated by potentiation and depression stimulation that play opposing roles in directing synaptic and behavioral plasticity. It requires no access to the original data and is more similar to human cognitive process. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in alleviating catastrophic forgetting on image-to-image translation tasks.