pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Improved Two-Archive Evolutionary Algorithm for Constrained Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Xinyu Shan, Ke Li
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Constrained multi-objective optimization problems (CMOPs) are ubiquitous in real-world engineering optimization scenarios. A key issue in constrained multi-objective optimization is to strike a balance among convergence, diversity and feasibility. A recently proposed two-archive evolutionary algorithm for constrained multi-objective optimization (C-TAEA) has be shown as a latest algorithm. However, due to its simple implementation of the collaboration mechanism between its two co-evolving archives, C-TAEA is struggling when solving problems whose \textit{pseudo} Pareto-optimal front, which does not take constraints into consideration, dominates the \textit{feasible} Pareto-optimal front. In this paper, we propose an improved version C-TAEA, dubbed C-TAEA-II, featuring an improved update mechanism of two co-evolving archives and an adaptive mating selection mechanism to promote a better collaboration between co-evolving archives. Empirical results demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed C-TAEA-II in comparison with five representative constrained evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithms.
Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning based Multi-Microgrid System Optimisation Problem
Authors: Jiangjiao Xu, Ke Li, Mohammad Abusara
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, Management, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Microgrids with energy storage systems and distributed renewable energy sources play a crucial role in reducing the consumption from traditional power sources and the emission of $CO_2$. Connecting multi microgrid to a distribution power grid can facilitate a more robust and reliable operation to increase the security and privacy of the system. The proposed model consists of three layers, smart grid layer, independent system operator (ISO) layer and power grid layer. Each layer aims to maximise its benefit. To achieve these objectives, an intelligent multi-microgrid energy management method is proposed based on the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) techniques, leading to a Pareto optimal set. A non-dominated solution is selected to implement a fair design in order not to favour any particular participant. The simulation results demonstrate the performance of the MORL and verify the viability of the proposed approach.
Disentangled Representation Learning for Astronomical Chemical Tagging
Authors: Damien de Mijolla, Melissa Ness, Serena Viti, Adam Wheeler
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Modern astronomical surveys are observing spectral data for millions of stars. These spectra contain chemical information that can be used to trace the Galaxy's formation and chemical enrichment history. However, extracting the information from spectra, and making precise and accurate chemical abundance measurements are challenging. Here, we present a data-driven method for isolating the chemical factors of variation in stellar spectra from those of other parameters (i.e. \teff, \logg, \feh). This enables us to build a spectral projection for each star with these parameters removed. We do this with no ab initio knowledge of elemental abundances themselves, and hence bypass the uncertainties and systematics associated with modeling that rely on synthetic stellar spectra. To remove known non-chemical factors of variation, we develop and implement a neural network architecture that learns a disentangled spectral representation. We simulate our recovery of chemically identical stars using the disentangled spectra in a synthetic APOGEE-like dataset. We show that this recovery declines as a function of the signal to noise ratio, but that our neural network architecture outperforms simpler modeling choices. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of data-driven abundance-free chemical tagging.
Functional Collection Programming with Semi-Ring Dictionaries
Authors: Amir Shaikhha, Mathieu Huot, Jaclyn Smith, Dan Olteanu
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00

This paper introduces semi-ring dictionaries, a powerful class of compositional and purely functional collections that subsume other collection types such as sets, multisets, arrays, vectors, and matrices. We developed SDQL, a statically typed language that can express relational algebra with aggregations, linear algebra, and functional collections over data such as relations and matrices using semi-ring dictionaries. Furthermore, thanks to the algebraic structure behind these dictionaries, SDQL unifies a wide range of optimizations commonly used in databases (DB) and linear algebra (LA). As a result, SDQL enables efficient processing of hybrid DB and LA workloads, by putting together optimizations that are otherwise confined to either DB systems or LA frameworks. We show experimentally that a handful of DB and LA workloads can take advantage of the SDQL language and optimizations. SDQL can be competitive with or outperforms a host of systems that are state of the art in their own domain: in-memory DB systems Typer and Tectorwise for (flat, not nested) relational data; SciPy for LA workloads; sparse tensor compiler taco; the Trance nested relational engine; and the in-database machine learning engines LMFAO and Morpheus for hybrid DB/LA workloads over relational data.
Hard Attention Control By Mutual Information Maximization
Authors: Himanshu Sahni, Charles Isbell
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Hard Attention, Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning

Biological agents have adopted the principle of attention to limit the rate of incoming information from the environment. One question that arises is if an artificial agent has access to only a limited view of its surroundings, how can it control its attention to effectively solve tasks? We propose an approach for learning how to control a hard attention window by maximizing the mutual information between the environment state and the attention location at each step. The agent employs an internal world model to make predictions about its state and focuses attention towards where the predictions may be wrong. Attention is trained jointly with a dynamic memory architecture that stores partial observations and keeps track of the unobserved state. We demonstrate that our approach is effective in predicting the full state from a sequence of partial observations. We also show that the agent's internal representation of the surroundings, a live mental map, can be used for control in two partially observable reinforcement learning tasks. Videos of the trained agent can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/hard-attention-control.
Causal-aware Safe Policy Improvement for Task-oriented dialogue
Authors: Govardana Sachithanandam Ramachandran, Kazuma Hashimoto, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Management, Management, Text Generation

The recent success of reinforcement learning's (RL) in solving complex tasks is most often attributed to its capacity to explore and exploit an environment where it has been trained. Sample efficiency is usually not an issue since cheap simulators are available to sample data on-policy. On the other hand, task oriented dialogues are usually learnt from offline data collected using human demonstrations. Collecting diverse demonstrations and annotating them is expensive. Unfortunately, use of RL methods trained on off-policy data are prone to issues of bias and generalization, which are further exacerbated by stochasticity in human response and non-markovian belief state of a dialogue management system. To this end, we propose a batch RL framework for task oriented dialogue policy learning: causal aware safe policy improvement (CASPI). This method gives guarantees on dialogue policy's performance and also learns to shape rewards according to intentions behind human responses, rather than just mimicking demonstration data; this couple with batch-RL helps overall with sample efficiency of the framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework on a dialogue-context-to-text Generation and end-to-end dialogue task of the Multiwoz2.0 dataset. The proposed method outperforms the current state of the art on these metrics, in both case. In the end-to-end case, our method trained only on 10\% of the data was able to out perform current state in three out of four evaluation metrics.
Structure-From-Motion and RGBD Depth Fusion
Authors: Akash Chandrashekar, John Papadakis, Andrew Willis, Jamie Gantert
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

This article describes a technique to augment a typical RGBD sensor by integrating depth estimates obtained via Structure-from-Motion (SfM) with sensor depth measurements. Limitations in the RGBD depth sensing technology prevent capturing depth measurements in four important contexts: (1) distant surfaces (>5m), (2) dark surfaces, (3) brightly lit indoor scenes and (4) sunlit outdoor scenes. SfM technology computes depth via multi-view reconstruction from the RGB image sequence alone. As such, SfM depth estimates do not suffer the same limitations and may be computed in all four of the previously listed circumstances. This work describes a novel fusion of RGBD depth data and SfM-estimated depths to generate an improved depth stream that may be processed by one of many important downstream applications such as robotic localization and mapping, as well as object recognition and tracking.
User-centered Evaluation of Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems
Authors: Himan Abdollahpouri, Masoud Mansoury, Robin Burke, Bamshad Mobasher, Edward Malthouse
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommendation and ranking systems are known to suffer from popularity bias; the tendency of the algorithm to favor a few popular items while under-representing the majority of other items. Prior research has examined various approaches for mitigating popularity bias and enhancing the recommendation of long-tail, less popular, items. The effectiveness of these approaches is often assessed using different metrics to evaluate the extent to which over-concentration on popular items is reduced. However, not much attention has been given to the user-centered evaluation of this bias; how different users with different levels of interest towards popular items are affected by such algorithms. In this paper, we show the limitations of the existing metrics to evaluate popularity bias mitigation when we want to assess these algorithms from the users' perspective and we propose a new metric that can address these limitations. In addition, we present an effective approach that mitigates popularity bias from the user-centered point of view. Finally, we investigate several state-of-the-art approaches proposed in recent years to mitigate popularity bias and evaluate their performances using the existing metrics and also from the users' perspective. Our experimental results using two publicly-available datasets show that existing popularity bias mitigation techniques ignore the users' tolerance towards popular items. Our proposed user-centered method can tackle popularity bias effectively for different users while also improving the existing metrics.
A Computed Tomography Vertebral Segmentation Dataset with Anatomical Variations and Multi-Vendor Scanner Data
Authors: Hans Liebl, David Schinz, Anjany Sekuboyina, Luca Malagutti, Maximilian T. Löffler, Amirhossein Bayat, Malek El Husseini, Giles Tetteh, Katharina Grau, Eva Niederreiter, Thomas Baum, Benedikt Wiestler, Bjoern Menze, Rickmer Braren, Claus Zimmer, Jan S. Kirschke
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Benchmarking, Computed Tomography (CT), Segmentation

With the advent of deep learning algorithms, fully automated radiological image analysis is within reach. In spine imaging, several atlas- and shape-based as well as deep learning segmentation algorithms have been proposed, allowing for subsequent automated analysis of morphology and pathology. The first Large Scale Vertebrae Segmentation Challenge (VerSe 2019) showed that these perform well on normal anatomy, but fail in variants not frequently present in the training dataset. Building on that experience, we report on the largely increased VerSe 2020 dataset and results from the second iteration of the VerSe challenge (MICCAI 2020, Lima, Peru). VerSe 2020 comprises annotated spine computed tomography (CT) images from 300 subjects with 4142 fully visualized and annotated vertebrae, collected across multiple centres from four different scanner manufacturers, enriched with cases that exhibit anatomical variants such as enumeration abnormalities (n=77) and transitional vertebrae (n=161). Metadata includes vertebral labelling information, voxel-level segmentation masks obtained with a human-machine hybrid algorithm and anatomical ratings, to enable the development and benchmarking of robust and accurate segmentation algorithms.
ReportAGE: Automatically extracting the exact age of Twitter users based on self-reports in tweets
Authors: Ari Z. Klein, Arjun Magge, Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-class Classification

Advancing the utility of social media data for research applications requires methods for automatically detecting demographic information about social media study populations, including users' age. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a method that automatically identifies the exact age of users based on self-reports in their tweets. Our end-to-end automatic natural language processing (NLP) pipeline, ReportAGE, includes query patterns to retrieve tweets that potentially mention an age, a classifier to distinguish retrieved tweets that self-report the user's exact age ("age" tweets) and those that do not ("no age" tweets), and rule-based extraction to identify the age. To develop and evaluate ReportAGE, we manually annotated 11,000 tweets that matched the query patterns. Based on 1000 tweets that were annotated by all five annotators, inter-annotator agreement (Fleiss' kappa) was 0.80 for distinguishing "age" and "no age" tweets, and 0.95 for identifying the exact age among the "age" tweets on which the annotators agreed. A deep neural network classifier, based on a RoBERTa-Large pretrained model, achieved the highest F1-score of 0.914 (precision = 0.905, recall = 0.942) for the "age" class. When the age extraction was evaluated using the classifier's predictions, it achieved an F1-score of 0.855 (precision = 0.805, recall = 0.914) for the "age" class. When it was evaluated directly on the held-out test set, it achieved an F1-score of 0.931 (precision = 0.873, recall = 0.998) for the "age" class. We deployed ReportAGE on more than 1.2 billion tweets posted by 245,927 users, and predicted ages for 132,637 (54%) of them. Scaling the detection of exact age to this large number of users can advance the utility of social media data for research applications that do not align with the predefined age groupings of extant binary or multi-class classification approaches.
Identifying ARDS using the Hierarchical Attention Network with Sentence Objectives Framework
Authors: Kevin Lybarger, Linzee Mabrey, Matthew Thau, Pavan K. Bhatraju, Mark Wurfel, Meliha Yetisgen
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Classification, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a life-threatening condition that is often undiagnosed or diagnosed late. ARDS is especially prominent in those infected with COVID-19. We explore the automatic identification of ARDS indicators and confounding factors in free-text chest radiograph reports. We present a new annotated corpus of chest radiograph reports and introduce the Hierarchical Attention Network with Sentence Objectives (HANSO) text classification framework. HANSO utilizes fine-grained annotations to improve document classification performance. HANSO can extract ARDS-related information with high performance by leveraging relation annotations, even if the annotated spans are noisy. Using annotated chest radiograph images as a gold standard, HANSO identifies bilateral infiltrates, an indicator of ARDS, in chest radiograph reports with performance (0.87 F1) comparable to human annotations (0.84 F1). This algorithm could facilitate more efficient and expeditious identification of ARDS by clinicians and researchers and contribute to the development of new therapies to improve patient care.
Continual Semantic Segmentation via Repulsion-Attraction of Sparse and Disentangled Latent Representations
Authors: Umberto Michieli, Pietro Zanuttigh
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Continual Learning, Continual Semantic Segmentation, Contrastive Learning, Disjoint 10-1, Disjoint 15-1, Disjoint 15-5, Overlapped 10-1, Overlapped 15-1, Overlapped 15-5, Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural networks suffer from the major limitation of catastrophic forgetting old tasks when learning new ones. In this paper we focus on class incremental continual learning in semantic segmentation, where new categories are made available over time while previous training data is not retained. The proposed continual learning scheme shapes the latent space to reduce forgetting whilst improving the recognition of novel classes. Our framework is driven by three novel components which we also combine on top of existing techniques effortlessly. First, prototypes matching enforces latent space consistency on old classes, constraining the encoder to produce similar latent representation for previously seen classes in the subsequent steps. Second, features sparsification allows to make room in the latent space to accommodate novel classes. Finally, contrastive learning is employed to cluster features according to their semantics while tearing apart those of different classes. Extensive evaluation on the Pascal VOC2012 and ADE20K datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Enhancing VMAF through New Feature Integration and Model Combination
Authors: Fan Zhang, Angeliki Katsenou, Christos Bampis, Lukas Krasula, Zhi Li, David Bull
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Video Quality Assessment

VMAF is a machine learning based video quality assessment method, originally designed for streaming applications, which combines multiple quality metrics and video features through SVM regression. It offers higher correlation with subjective opinions compared to many conventional quality assessment methods. In this paper we propose enhancements to VMAF through the integration of new video features and alternative quality metrics (selected from a diverse pool) alongside multiple model combination. The proposed combination approach enables training on multiple databases with varying content and distortion characteristics. Our enhanced VMAF method has been evaluated on eight HD video databases, and consistently outperforms the original VMAF model (0.6.1) and other benchmark quality metrics, exhibiting higher correlation with subjective ground truth data.
Unified Pre-training for Program Understanding and Generation
Authors: Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Saikat Chakraborty, Baishakhi Ray, Kai-Wei Chang
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Clone Detection, Code Generation, Code Summarization, Code Translation, Denoising, Program Repair, Source Code Summarization, Text Generation, Translation

Code summarization and generation empower conversion between programming language (PL) and natural language (NL), while code translation avails the migration of legacy code from one PL to another. This paper introduces PLBART, a sequence-to-sequence model capable of performing a broad spectrum of program and language understanding and generation tasks. PLBART is pre-trained on an extensive collection of Java and Python functions and associated NL text via denoising autoencoding. Experiments on code summarization in the English language, code generation, and code translation in seven programming languages show that PLBART outperforms or rivals state-of-the-art models. Moreover, experiments on discriminative tasks, e.g., program repair, clone detection, and vulnerable code detection, demonstrate PLBART's effectiveness in program understanding. Furthermore, analysis reveals that PLBART learns program syntax, style (e.g., identifier naming convention), logical flow (e.g., if block inside an else block is equivalent to else if block) that are crucial to program semantics and thus excels even with limited annotations.
Hurdles to Progress in Long-form Question Answering
Authors: Kalpesh Krishna, Aurko Roy, Mohit Iyyer
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Form, Long Form Question Answering, Open-Domain Dialog, Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, Text Generation

The task of long-form question answering (LFQA) involves retrieving documents relevant to a given question and using them to generate a paragraph-length answer. While many models have recently been proposed for LFQA, we show in this paper that the task formulation raises fundamental challenges regarding evaluation and dataset creation that currently preclude meaningful modeling progress. To demonstrate these challenges, we first design a new system that relies on sparse attention and contrastive retriever learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ELI5 LFQA dataset. While our system tops the public leaderboard, a detailed analysis reveals several troubling trends: (1) our system's generated answers are not actually grounded in the documents that it retrieves; (2) ELI5 contains significant train / validation overlap, as at least 81% of ELI5 validation questions occur in paraphrased form in the training set; (3) ROUGE-L is not an informative metric of generated answer quality and can be easily gamed; and (4) human evaluations used for other text generation tasks are unreliable for LFQA. We offer suggestions to mitigate each of these issues, which we hope will lead to more rigorous LFQA research and meaningful progress in the future.
Face Images as Jigsaw Puzzles: Compositional Perception of Human Faces for Machines Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Mahla Abdolahnejad, Peter Xiaoping Liu
Date: 2021-03-10 00:00:00

An important goal in human-robot-interaction (HRI) is for machines to achieve a close to human level of face perception. One of the important differences between machine learning and human intelligence is the lack of compositionality. This paper introduces a new scheme to enable generative adversarial networks to learn the distribution of face images composed of smaller parts. This results in a more flexible machine face perception and easier generalization to outside training examples. We demonstrate that this model is able to produce realistic high-quality face images by generating and piecing together the parts. Additionally, we demonstrate that this model learns the relations between the facial parts and their distributions. Therefore, the specific facial parts are interchangeable between generated face images.