pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sub-Seasonal Climate Forecasting via Machine Learning: Challenges, Analysis, and Advances
Authors: Sijie He, Xinyan Li, Timothy DelSole, Pradeep Ravikumar, Arindam Banerjee
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Feature Importance, Management

Sub-seasonal climate forecasting (SSF) focuses on predicting key climate variables such as temperature and precipitation in the 2-week to 2-month time scales. Skillful SSF would have immense societal value, in areas such as agricultural productivity, water resource management, transportation and aviation systems, and emergency planning for extreme weather events. However, SSF is considered more challenging than either weather prediction or even seasonal prediction. In this paper, we carefully study a variety of machine learning (ML) approaches for SSF over the US mainland. While atmosphere-land-ocean couplings and the limited amount of good quality data makes it hard to apply black-box ML naively, we show that with carefully constructed feature representations, even linear regression models, e.g., Lasso, can be made to perform well. Among a broad suite of 10 ML approaches considered, gradient boosting performs the best, and deep learning (DL) methods show some promise with careful architecture choices. Overall, suitable ML methods are able to outperform the climatological baseline, i.e., predictions based on the 30-year average at a given location and time. Further, based on studying feature importance, ocean (especially indices based on climatic oscillations such as El Nino) and land (soil moisture) covariates are found to be predictive, whereas atmospheric covariates are not considered helpful.
All-or-nothing statistical and computational phase transitions in sparse spiked matrix estimation
Authors: Jean Barbier, Nicolas Macris, Cynthia Rush
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: All

We determine statistical and computational limits for estimation of a rank-one matrix (the spike) corrupted by an additive gaussian noise matrix, in a sparse limit, where the underlying hidden vector (that constructs the rank-one matrix) has a number of non-zero components that scales sub-linearly with the total dimension of the vector, and the signal-to-noise ratio tends to infinity at an appropriate speed. We prove explicit low-dimensional variational formulas for the asymptotic mutual information between the spike and the observed noisy matrix and analyze the approximate message passing algorithm in the sparse regime. For Bernoulli and Bernoulli-Rademacher distributed vectors, and when the sparsity and signal strength satisfy an appropriate scaling relation, we find all-or-nothing phase transitions for the asymptotic minimum and algorithmic mean-square errors. These jump from their maximum possible value to zero, at well defined signal-to-noise thresholds whose asymptotic values we determine exactly. In the asymptotic regime the statistical-to-algorithmic gap diverges indicating that sparse recovery is hard for approximate message passing.
Tackling Morpion Solitaire with AlphaZero-likeRanked Reward Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hui Wang, Mike Preuss, Michael Emmerich, Aske Plaat
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Game of Go, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Self-Learning, Solitaire

Morpion Solitaire is a popular single player game, performed with paper and pencil. Due to its large state space (on the order of the game of Go) traditional search algorithms, such as MCTS, have not been able to find good solutions. A later algorithm, Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation, was able to find a new record of 82 steps, albeit with large computational resources. After achieving this record, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no further progress reported, for about a decade. In this paper we take the recent impressive performance of deep self-learning reinforcement learning approaches from AlphaGo/AlphaZero as inspiration to design a searcher for Morpion Solitaire. A challenge of Morpion Solitaire is that the state space is sparse, there are few win/loss signals. Instead, we use an approach known as ranked reward to create a reinforcement learning self-play framework for Morpion Solitaire. This enables us to find medium-quality solutions with reasonable computational effort. Our record is a 67 steps solution, which is very close to the human best (68) without any other adaptation to the problem than using ranked reward. We list many further avenues for potential improvement.
Coordinated Control of UAVs for Human-Centered Active Sensing of Wildfires
Authors: Esmaeil Seraj, Matthew Gombolay
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00

Fighting wildfires is a precarious task, imperiling the lives of engaging firefighters and those who reside in the fire's path. Firefighters need online and dynamic observation of the firefront to anticipate a wildfire's unknown characteristics, such as size, scale, and propagation velocity, and to plan accordingly. In this paper, we propose a distributed control framework to coordinate a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for a human-centered active sensing of wildfires. We develop a dual-criterion objective function based on Kalman uncertainty residual propagation and weighted multi-agent consensus protocol, which enables the UAVs to actively infer the wildfire dynamics and parameters, track and monitor the fire transition, and safely manage human firefighters on the ground using acquired information. We evaluate our approach relative to prior work, showing significant improvements by reducing the environment's cumulative uncertainty residual by more than $ 10^2 $ and $ 10^5 $ times in firefront coverage performance to support human-robot teaming for firefighting. We also demonstrate our method on physical robots in a mock firefighting exercise.
Relational reasoning and generalization using non-symbolic neural networks
Authors: Atticus Geiger, Alexandra Carstensen, Michael C. Frank, Christopher Potts
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Relational Reasoning, Zero-shot Generalization

The notion of equality (identity) is simple and ubiquitous, making it a key case study for broader questions about the representations supporting abstract relational reasoning. Previous work suggested that neural networks were not suitable models of human relational reasoning because they could not represent mathematically identity, the most basic form of equality. We revisit this question. In our experiments, we assess out-of-sample generalization of equality using both arbitrary representations and representations that have been pretrained on separate tasks to imbue them with structure. We find neural networks are able to learn (1) basic equality (mathematical identity), (2) sequential equality problems (learning ABA-patterned sequences) with only positive training instances, and (3) a complex, hierarchical equality problem with only basic equality training instances ("zero-shot'" generalization). In the two latter cases, our models perform tasks proposed in previous work to demarcate human-unique symbolic abilities. These results suggest that essential aspects of symbolic reasoning can emerge from data-driven, non-symbolic learning processes.
Meta Approach to Data Augmentation Optimization
Authors: Ryuichiro Hataya, Jan Zdenek, Kazuki Yoshizoe, Hideki Nakayama
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Data augmentation policies drastically improve the performance of image recognition tasks, especially when the policies are optimized for the target data and tasks. In this paper, we propose to optimize image recognition models and data augmentation policies simultaneously to improve the performance using gradient descent. Unlike prior methods, our approach avoids using proxy tasks or reducing search space, and can directly improve the validation performance. Our method achieves efficient and scalable training by approximating the gradient of policies by implicit gradient with Neumann series approximation. We demonstrate that our approach can improve the performance of various image classification tasks, including ImageNet classification and fine-grained recognition, without using dataset-specific hyperparameter tuning.
An efficient algorithm for three-component key index construction
Authors: Alexander B. Veretennikov
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00

In this paper, proximity full-text searches in large text arrays are considered. A search query consists of several words. The search result is a list of documents containing these words. In a modern search system, documents that contain search query words that are near each other are more relevant than documents that do not share this trait. To solve this task, for each word in each indexed document, we need to store a record in the index. In this case, the query search time is proportional to the number of occurrences of the queried words in the indexed documents. Consequently, it is common for search systems to evaluate queries that contain frequently occurring words much more slowly than queries that contain less frequently occurring, ordinary words. For each word in the text, we use additional indexes to store information about nearby words at distances from the given word of less than or equal to MaxDistance, which is a parameter. This parameter can take a value of 5, 7, or even more. Three-component key indexes can be created for faster query execution. Previously, we presented the results of experiments showing that when queries contain very frequently occurring words, the average time of the query execution with three-component key indexes is 94.7 times less than that required when using ordinary inverted indexes. In the current work, we describe a new three-component key index building algorithm and demonstrate the correctness of the algorithm. We present the results of experiments creating such an index that is dependent on the value of MaxDistance.
Nonasymptotic Guarantees for Spiked Matrix Recovery with Generative Priors
Authors: Jorio Cocola, Paul Hand, Vladislav Voroninski
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: global-optimization

Many problems in statistics and machine learning require the reconstruction of a rank-one signal matrix from noisy data. Enforcing additional prior information on the rank-one component is often key to guaranteeing good recovery performance. One such prior on the low-rank component is sparsity, giving rise to the sparse principal component analysis problem. Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that this problem suffers from a computational-to-statistical gap, which may be fundamental. In this work, we study an alternative prior where the low-rank component is in the range of a trained generative network. We provide a non-asymptotic analysis with optimal sample complexity, up to logarithmic factors, for rank-one matrix recovery under an expansive-Gaussian network prior. Specifically, we establish a favorable global optimization landscape for a nonlinear least squares objective, provided the number of samples is on the order of the dimensionality of the input to the generative model. This result suggests that generative priors have no computational-to-statistical gap for structured rank-one matrix recovery in the finite data, nonasymptotic regime. We present this analysis in the case of both the Wishart and Wigner spiked matrix models.
TURB-Rot. A large database of 3d and 2d snapshots from turbulent rotating flows
Authors: L. Biferale, F. Bonaccorso, M. Buzzicotti, P. Clark di Leoni
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00

We present TURB-Rot, a new open database of 3d and 2d snapshots of turbulent velocity fields, obtained by Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of the original Navier-Stokes equations in the presence of rotation. The aim is to provide the community interested in data-assimilation and/or computer vision with a new testing-ground made of roughly 300K complex images and fields. TURB-Rot data are characterized by multi-scales strongly non-Gaussian features and rough, non-differentiable, fields over almost two decades of scales. In addition, coming from fully resolved numerical simulations of the original partial differential equations, they offer the possibility to apply a wide range of approaches, from equation-free to physics-based models. TURB-Rot data are reachable at http://smart-turb.roma2.infn.it
Adversarial Attacks and Detection on Reinforcement Learning-Based Interactive Recommender Systems
Authors: Yuanjiang Cao, Xiaocong Chen, Lina Yao, Xianzhi Wang, Wei Emma Zhang
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Interactive Recommendation, Recommendation Systems, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Adversarial attacks pose significant challenges for detecting adversarial attacks at an early stage. We propose attack-agnostic detection on reinforcement learning-based interactive recommendation systems. We first craft adversarial examples to show their diverse distributions and then augment recommendation systems by detecting potential attacks with a deep learning-based classifier based on the crafted data. Finally, we study the attack strength and frequency of adversarial examples and evaluate our model on standard datasets with multiple crafting methods. Our extensive experiments show that most adversarial attacks are effective, and both attack strength and attack frequency impact the attack performance. The strategically-timed attack achieves comparative attack performance with only 1/3 to 1/2 attack frequency. Besides, our black-box detector trained with one crafting method has the generalization ability over several crafting methods.
Global Convergence of Sobolev Training for Overparameterized Neural Networks
Authors: Jorio Cocola, Paul Hand
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00

Sobolev loss is used when training a network to approximate the values and derivatives of a target function at a prescribed set of input points. Recent works have demonstrated its successful applications in various tasks such as distillation or synthetic gradient prediction. In this work we prove that an overparameterized two-layer relu neural network trained on the Sobolev loss with gradient flow from random initialization can fit any given function values and any given directional derivatives, under a separation condition on the input data.
UWSpeech: Speech to Speech Translation for Unwritten Languages
Authors: Chen Zhang, Xu Tan, Yi Ren, Tao Qin, Ke-jun Zhang, Tie-Yan Liu
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Speech Translation, Translation

Existing speech to speech translation systems heavily rely on the text of target language: they usually translate source language either to target text and then synthesize target speech from text, or directly to target speech with target text for auxiliary training. However, those methods cannot be applied to unwritten target languages, which have no written text or phoneme available. In this paper, we develop a translation system for unwritten languages, named as UWSpeech, which converts target unwritten speech into discrete tokens with a converter, and then translates source-language speech into target discrete tokens with a translator, and finally synthesizes target speech from target discrete tokens with an inverter. We propose a method called XL-VAE, which enhances vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) with cross-lingual (XL) speech recognition, to train the converter and inverter of UWSpeech jointly. Experiments on Fisher Spanish-English conversation translation dataset show that UWSpeech outperforms direct translation and VQ-VAE baseline by about 16 and 10 BLEU points respectively, which demonstrate the advantages and potentials of UWSpeech.
Robust Recursive Partitioning for Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Hyun-Suk Lee, Yao Zhang, William Zame, Cong Shen, Jang-Won Lee, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Uncertainty Quantification

Subgroup analysis of treatment effects plays an important role in applications from medicine to public policy to recommender systems. It allows physicians (for example) to identify groups of patients for whom a given drug or treatment is likely to be effective and groups of patients for which it is not. Most of the current methods of subgroup analysis begin with a particular algorithm for estimating individualized treatment effects (ITE) and identify subgroups by maximizing the difference across subgroups of the average treatment effect in each subgroup. These approaches have several weaknesses: they rely on a particular algorithm for estimating ITE, they ignore (in)homogeneity within identified subgroups, and they do not produce good confidence estimates. This paper develops a new method for subgroup analysis, R2P, that addresses all these weaknesses. R2P uses an arbitrary, exogenously prescribed algorithm for estimating ITE and quantifies the uncertainty of the ITE estimation, using a construction that is more robust than other methods. Experiments using synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets (based on real data) demonstrate that R2P constructs partitions that are simultaneously more homogeneous within groups and more heterogeneous across groups than the partitions produced by other methods. Moreover, because R2P can employ any ITE estimator, it also produces much narrower confidence intervals with a prescribed coverage guarantee than other methods.
Categorical anomaly detection in heterogeneous data using minimum description length clustering
Authors: James Cheney, Xavier Gombau, Ghita Berrada, Sidahmed Benabderrahmane
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Clustering, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Fast and effective unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms have been proposed for categorical data based on the minimum description length (MDL) principle. However, they can be ineffective when detecting anomalies in heterogeneous datasets representing a mixture of different sources, such as security scenarios in which system and user processes have distinct behavior patterns. We propose a meta-algorithm for enhancing any MDL-based anomaly detection model to deal with heterogeneous data by fitting a mixture model to the data, via a variant of k-means clustering. Our experimental results show that using a discrete mixture model provides competitive performance relative to two previous anomaly detection algorithms, while mixtures of more sophisticated models yield further gains, on both synthetic datasets and realistic datasets from a security scenario.
Fake Reviews Detection through Ensemble Learning
Authors: Luis Gutierrez-Espinoza, Faranak Abri, Akbar Siami Namin, Keith S. Jones, David R. W. Sears
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Ensemble Learning

Customers represent their satisfactions of consuming products by sharing their experiences through the utilization of online reviews. Several machine learning-based approaches can automatically detect deceptive and fake reviews. Recently, there have been studies reporting the performance of ensemble learning-based approaches in comparison to conventional machine learning techniques. Motivated by the recent trends in ensemble learning, this paper evaluates the performance of ensemble learning-based approaches to identify bogus online information. The application of a number of ensemble learning-based approaches to a collection of fake restaurant reviews that we developed show that these ensemble learning-based approaches detect deceptive information better than conventional machine learning algorithms.
Loss Rate Forecasting Framework Based on Macroeconomic Changes: Application to US Credit Card Industry
Authors: Sajjad Taghiyeh, David C Lengacher, Robert B Handfield
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00

A major part of the balance sheets of the largest US banks consists of credit card portfolios. Hence, managing the charge-off rates is a vital task for the profitability of the credit card industry. Different macroeconomic conditions affect individuals' behavior in paying down their debts. In this paper, we propose an expert system for loss forecasting in the credit card industry using macroeconomic indicators. We select the indicators based on a thorough review of the literature and experts' opinions covering all aspects of the economy, consumer, business, and government sectors. The state of the art machine learning models are used to develop the proposed expert system framework. We develop two versions of the forecasting expert system, which utilize different approaches to select between the lags added to each indicator. Among 19 macroeconomic indicators that were used as the input, six were used in the model with optimal lags, and seven indicators were selected by the model using all lags. The features that were selected by each of these models covered all three sectors of the economy. Using the charge-off data for the top 100 US banks ranked by assets from the first quarter of 1985 to the second quarter of 2019, we achieve mean squared error values of 1.15E-03 and 1.04E-03 using the model with optimal lags and the model with all lags, respectively. The proposed expert system gives a holistic view of the economy to the practitioners in the credit card industry and helps them to see the impact of different macroeconomic conditions on their future loss.
Leveraging Multimodal Behavioral Analytics for Automated Job Interview Performance Assessment and Feedback
Authors: Anumeha Agrawal, Rosa Anil George, Selvan Sunitha Ravi, Sowmya Kamath S, Anand Kumar M
Date: 2020-06-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7

Behavioral cues play a significant part in human communication and cognitive perception. In most professional domains, employee recruitment policies are framed such that both professional skills and personality traits are adequately assessed. Hiring interviews are structured to evaluate expansively a potential employee's suitability for the position - their professional qualifications, interpersonal skills, ability to perform in critical and stressful situations, in the presence of time and resource constraints, etc. Therefore, candidates need to be aware of their positive and negative attributes and be mindful of behavioral cues that might have adverse effects on their success. We propose a multimodal analytical framework that analyzes the candidate in an interview scenario and provides feedback for predefined labels such as engagement, speaking rate, eye contact, etc. We perform a comprehensive analysis that includes the interviewee's facial expressions, speech, and prosodic information, using the video, audio, and text transcripts obtained from the recorded interview. We use these multimodal data sources to construct a composite representation, which is used for training machine learning classifiers to predict the class labels. Such analysis is then used to provide constructive feedback to the interviewee for their behavioral cues and body language. Experimental validation showed that the proposed methodology achieved promising results.