pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sparse network asymptotics for logistic regression
Authors: Bryan S. Graham
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Consider a bipartite network where $N$ consumers choose to buy or not to buy $M$ different products. This paper considers the properties of the logistic regression of the $N\times M$ array of i-buys-j purchase decisions, $\left[Y_{ij}\right]_{1\leq i\leq N,1\leq j\leq M}$, onto known functions of consumer and product attributes under asymptotic sequences where (i) both $N$ and $M$ grow large and (ii) the average number of products purchased per consumer is finite in the limit. This latter assumption implies that the network of purchases is sparse: only a (very) small fraction of all possible purchases are actually made (concordant with many real-world settings). Under sparse network asymptotics, the first and last terms in an extended Hoeffding-type variance decomposition of the score of the logit composite log-likelihood are of equal order. In contrast, under dense network asymptotics, the last term is asymptotically negligible. Asymptotic normality of the logistic regression coefficients is shown using a martingale central limit theorem (CLT) for triangular arrays. Unlike in the dense case, the normality result derived here also holds under degeneracy of the network graphon. Relatedly, when there happens to be no dyadic dependence in the dataset in hand, it specializes to recently derived results on the behavior of logistic regression with rare events and iid data. Sparse network asymptotics may lead to better inference in practice since they suggest variance estimators which (i) incorporate additional sources of sampling variation and (ii) are valid under varying degrees of dyadic dependence.
Robust Isometric Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion
Authors: Shaifali Parashar, Adrien Bartoli, Daniel Pizarro
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion (NRSfM) reconstructs a deformable 3D object from the correspondences established between monocular 2D images. Current NRSfM methods lack statistical robustness, which is the ability to cope with correspondence errors.This prevents one to use automatically established correspondences, which are prone to errors, thereby strongly limiting the scope of NRSfM. We propose a three-step automatic pipeline to solve NRSfM robustly by exploiting isometry. Step 1 computes the optical flow from correspondences, step 2 reconstructs each 3D point's normal vector using multiple reference images and integrates them to form surfaces with the best reference and step 3 rejects the 3D points that break isometry in their local neighborhood. Importantly, each step is designed to discard or flag erroneous correspondences. Our contributions include the robustification of optical flow by warp estimation, new fast analytic solutions to local normal reconstruction and their robustification, and a new scale-independent measure of 3D local isometric coherence. Experimental results show that our robust NRSfM method consistently outperforms existing methods on both synthetic and real datasets.
LaND: Learning to Navigate from Disengagements
Authors: Gregory Kahn, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Imitation Learning, Navigate, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Consistently testing autonomous mobile robots in real world scenarios is a necessary aspect of developing autonomous navigation systems. Each time the human safety monitor disengages the robot's autonomy system due to the robot performing an undesirable maneuver, the autonomy developers gain insight into how to improve the autonomy system. However, we believe that these disengagements not only show where the system fails, which is useful for troubleshooting, but also provide a direct learning signal by which the robot can learn to navigate. We present a reinforcement learning approach for learning to navigate from disengagements, or LaND. LaND learns a neural network model that predicts which actions lead to disengagements given the current sensory observation, and then at test time plans and executes actions that avoid disengagements. Our results demonstrate LaND can successfully learn to navigate in diverse, real world sidewalk environments, outperforming both imitation learning and reinforcement learning approaches. Videos, code, and other material are available on our website https://sites.google.com/view/sidewalk-learning
A Series of Unfortunate Counterfactual Events: the Role of Time in Counterfactual Explanations
Authors: Andrea Ferrario, Michele Loi
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Explainable artificial intelligence

Counterfactual explanations are a prominent example of post-hoc interpretability methods in the explainable Artificial Intelligence research domain. They provide individuals with alternative scenarios and a set of recommendations to achieve a sought-after machine learning model outcome. Recently, the literature has identified desiderata of counterfactual explanations, such as feasibility, actionability and sparsity that should support their applicability in real-world contexts. However, we show that the literature has neglected the problem of the time dependency of counterfactual explanations. We argue that, due to their time dependency and because of the provision of recommendations, even feasible, actionable and sparse counterfactual explanations may not be appropriate in real-world applications. This is due to the possible emergence of what we call "unfortunate counterfactual events." These events may occur due to the retraining of machine learning models whose outcomes have to be explained via counterfactual explanation. Series of unfortunate counterfactual events frustrate the efforts of those individuals who successfully implemented the recommendations of counterfactual explanations. This negatively affects people's trust in the ability of institutions to provide machine learning-supported decisions consistently. We introduce an approach to address the problem of the emergence of unfortunate counterfactual events that makes use of histories of counterfactual explanations. In the final part of the paper we propose an ethical analysis of two distinct strategies to cope with the challenge of unfortunate counterfactual events. We show that they respond to an ethically responsible imperative to preserve the trustworthiness of credit lending organizations, the decision models they employ, and the social-economic function of credit lending.
Smooth Variational Graph Embeddings for Efficient Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Jovita Lukasik, David Friede, Arber Zela, Frank Hutter, Margret Keuper
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Bayesian Optimization, Graph Neural Network, Neural Architecture Search

Neural architecture search (NAS) has recently been addressed from various directions, including discrete, sampling-based methods and efficient differentiable approaches. While the former are notoriously expensive, the latter suffer from imposing strong constraints on the search space. Architecture optimization from a learned embedding space for example through graph neural network based variational autoencoders builds a middle ground and leverages advantages from both sides. Such approaches have recently shown good performance on several benchmarks. Yet, their stability and predictive power heavily depends on their capacity to reconstruct networks from the embedding space. In this paper, we propose a two-sided variational graph autoencoder, which allows to smoothly encode and accurately reconstruct neural architectures from various search spaces. We evaluate the proposed approach on neural architectures defined by the ENAS approach, the NAS-Bench-101 and the NAS-Bench-201 search space and show that our smooth embedding space allows to directly extrapolate the performance prediction to architectures outside the seen domain (e.g. with more operations). Thus, it facilitates to predict good network architectures even without expensive Bayesian optimization or reinforcement learning.
Concurrent Alternating Least Squares for multiple simultaneous Canonical Polyadic Decompositions
Authors: Christos Psarras, Lars Karlsson, Rasmus Bro, Paolo Bientinesi
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Tensor decompositions, such as CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP), are widely used in a variety of applications, such as chemometrics, signal processing, and machine learning. A broadly used method for computing such decompositions relies on the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) algorithm. When the number of components is small, regardless of its implementation, ALS exhibits low arithmetic intensity, which severely hinders its performance and makes GPU offloading ineffective. We observe that, in practice, experts often have to compute multiple decompositions of the same tensor, each with a small number of components (typically fewer than 20), to ultimately find the best ones to use for the application at hand. In this paper, we illustrate how multiple decompositions of the same tensor can be fused together at the algorithmic level to increase the arithmetic intensity. Therefore, it becomes possible to make efficient use of GPUs for further speedups; at the same time the technique is compatible with many enhancements typically used in ALS, such as line search, extrapolation, and non-negativity constraints. We introduce the Concurrent ALS algorithm and library, which offers an interface to Matlab, and a mechanism to effectively deal with the issue that decompositions complete at different times. Experimental results on artificial and real datasets demonstrate a shorter time to completion due to increased arithmetic intensity.
A Clustering-Based Method for Automatic Educational Video Recommendation Using Deep Face-Features of Lecturers
Authors: Paulo R. C. Mendes, Eduardo S. Vieira, Álan L. V. Guedes, Antonio J. G. Busson, Sérgio Colcher
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Diversity, Face Clustering, Recommendation Systems, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Discovering and accessing specific content within educational video bases is a challenging task, mainly because of the abundance of video content and its diversity. Recommender systems are often used to enhance the ability to find and select content. But, recommendation mechanisms, especially those based on textual information, exhibit some limitations, such as being error-prone to manually created keywords or due to imprecise speech recognition. This paper presents a method for generating educational video recommendation using deep face-features of lecturers without identifying them. More precisely, we use an unsupervised face clustering mechanism to create relations among the videos based on the lecturer's presence. Then, for a selected educational video taken as a reference, we recommend the ones where the presence of the same lecturers is detected. Moreover, we rank these recommended videos based on the amount of time the referenced lecturers were present. For this task, we achieved a mAP value of 99.165%.
Learning Context-Free Languages with Nondeterministic Stack RNNs
Authors: Brian DuSell, David Chiang
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2020

We present a differentiable stack data structure that simultaneously and tractably encodes an exponential number of stack configurations, based on Lang's algorithm for simulating nondeterministic pushdown automata. We call the combination of this data structure with a recurrent neural network (RNN) controller a Nondeterministic Stack RNN. We compare our model against existing stack RNNs on various formal languages, demonstrating that our model converges more reliably to algorithmic behavior on deterministic tasks, and achieves lower cross-entropy on inherently nondeterministic tasks.
Scaling Systematic Literature Reviews with Machine Learning Pipelines
Authors: Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Alexander Robertson, Jasmina Lazic, Theodora Tsouloufi, Louise Donnison, Karen Smyth
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (sdp) 2020 11
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Binary Classification

Systematic reviews, which entail the extraction of data from large numbers of scientific documents, are an ideal avenue for the application of machine learning. They are vital to many fields of science and philanthropy, but are very time-consuming and require experts. Yet the three main stages of a systematic review are easily done automatically: searching for documents can be done via APIs and scrapers, selection of relevant documents can be done via binary classification, and extraction of data can be done via sequence-labelling classification. Despite the promise of automation for this field, little research exists that examines the various ways to automate each of these tasks. We construct a pipeline that automates each of these aspects, and experiment with many human-time vs. system quality trade-offs. We test the ability of classifiers to work well on small amounts of data and to generalise to data from countries not represented in the training data. We test different types of data extraction with varying difficulty in annotation, and five different neural architectures to do the extraction. We find that we can get surprising accuracy and generalisability of the whole pipeline system with only 2 weeks of human-expert annotation, which is only 15% of the time it takes to do the whole review manually and can be repeated and extended to new data with no additional effort.
Physical invariance in neural networks for subgrid-scale scalar flux modeling
Authors: Hugo Frezat, Guillaume Balarac, Julien Le Sommer, Ronan Fablet, Redouane Lguensat
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00

In this paper we present a new strategy to model the subgrid-scale scalar flux in a three-dimensional turbulent incompressible flow using physics-informed neural networks (NNs). When trained from direct numerical simulation (DNS) data, state-of-the-art neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks, may not preserve well known physical priors, which may in turn question their application to real case-studies. To address this issue, we investigate hard and soft constraints into the model based on classical transformation invariances and symmetries derived from physical laws. From simulation-based experiments, we show that the proposed transformation-invariant NN model outperforms both purely data-driven ones as well as parametric state-of-the-art subgrid-scale models. The considered invariances are regarded as regularizers on physical metrics during the a priori evaluation and constrain the distribution tails of the predicted subgrid-scale term to be closer to the DNS. They also increase the stability and performance of the model when used as a surrogate during a large-eddy simulation. Moreover, the transformation-invariant NN is shown to generalize to regimes that have not been seen during the training phase.
Using Graph Neural Networks for Mass Spectrometry Prediction
Authors: Hao Zhu, LiPing Liu, Soha Hassoun
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Detecting and quantifying products of cellular metabolism using Mass Spectrometry (MS) has already shown great promise in many biological and biomedical applications. The biggest challenge in metabolomics is annotation, where measured spectra are assigned chemical identities. Despite advances, current methods provide limited annotation for measured spectra. Here, we explore using graph neural networks (GNNs) to predict the spectra. The input to our model is a molecular graph. The model is trained and tested on the NIST 17 LC-MS dataset. We compare our results to NEIMS, a neural network model that utilizes molecular fingerprints as inputs. Our results show that GNN-based models offer higher performance than NEIMS. Importantly, we show that ranking results heavily depend on the candidate set size and on the similarity of the candidates to the target molecule, thus highlighting the need for consistent, well-characterized evaluation protocols for this domain.
Case Study: Deontological Ethics in NLP
Authors: Shrimai Prabhumoye, Brendon Boldt, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Alan W Black
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Ethics

Recent work in natural language processing (NLP) has focused on ethical challenges such as understanding and mitigating bias in data and algorithms; identifying objectionable content like hate speech, stereotypes and offensive language; and building frameworks for better system design and data handling practices. However, there has been little discussion about the ethical foundations that underlie these efforts. In this work, we study one ethical theory, namely deontological ethics, from the perspective of NLP. In particular, we focus on the generalization principle and the respect for autonomy through informed consent. We provide four case studies to demonstrate how these principles can be used with NLP systems. We also recommend directions to avoid the ethical issues in these systems.
Towards Social HRI for Improving Children's Healthcare Experiences
Authors: Mary Ellen Foster, Ronald P. A. Petrick
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00

This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop a social robot designed to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. While robots have previously been trialled for this task, with promising initial results, the systems have tended to be teleoperated, limiting their flexibility and robustness. This project will use epistemic planning techniques as a core component for action selection in the robot system, in order to generate plans that include physical, sensory, and social actions for interacting with humans. The robot will operate in a task environment where appropriate and safe interaction with children, parents/caregivers, and healthcare professionals is required. In addition to addressing the core technical challenge of building an autonomous social robot, the project will incorporate co-design techniques involving all participant groups, and the final robot system will be evaluated in a two-site clinical trial.
Learning Invariant Representations and Risks for Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Bo Li, Yezhen Wang, Shanghang Zhang, Dongsheng Li, Trevor Darrell, Kurt Keutzer, Han Zhao
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, regression, Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, valid

The success of supervised learning hinges on the assumption that the training and test data come from the same underlying distribution, which is often not valid in practice due to potential distribution shift. In light of this, most existing methods for unsupervised domain adaptation focus on achieving domain-invariant representations and small source domain error. However, recent works have shown that this is not sufficient to guarantee good generalization on the target domain, and in fact, is provably detrimental under label distribution shift. Furthermore, in many real-world applications it is often feasible to obtain a small amount of labeled data from the target domain and use them to facilitate model training with source data. Inspired by the above observations, in this paper we propose the first method that aims to simultaneously learn invariant representations and risks under the setting of semi-supervised domain adaptation (Semi-DA). First, we provide a finite sample bound for both classification and regression problems under Semi-DA. The bound suggests a principled way to obtain target generalization, i.e. by aligning both the marginal and conditional distributions across domains in feature space. Motivated by this, we then introduce the LIRR algorithm for jointly \textbf{L}earning \textbf{I}nvariant \textbf{R}epresentations and \textbf{R}isks. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted on both classification and regression tasks, which demonstrates LIRR consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance and significant improvements compared with the methods that only learn invariant representations or invariant risks.
Deep RL With Information Constrained Policies: Generalization in Continuous Control
Authors: Tyler Malloy, Chris R. Sims, Tim Klinger, Miao Liu, Matthew Riemer, Gerald Tesauro
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Biological agents learn and act intelligently in spite of a highly limited capacity to process and store information. Many real-world problems involve continuous control, which represents a difficult task for artificial intelligence agents. In this paper we explore the potential learning advantages a natural constraint on information flow might confer onto artificial agents in continuous control tasks. We focus on the model-free reinforcement learning (RL) setting and formalize our approach in terms of an information-theoretic constraint on the complexity of learned policies. We show that our approach emerges in a principled fashion from the application of rate-distortion theory. We implement a novel Capacity-Limited Actor-Critic (CLAC) algorithm and situate it within a broader family of RL algorithms such as the Soft Actor Critic (SAC) and Mutual Information Reinforcement Learning (MIRL) algorithm. Our experiments using continuous control tasks show that compared to alternative approaches, CLAC offers improvements in generalization between training and modified test environments. This is achieved in the CLAC model while displaying the high sample efficiency of similar methods.
Torch-Points3D: A Modular Multi-Task Frameworkfor Reproducible Deep Learning on 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Thomas Chaton, Nicolas Chaulet, Sofiane Horache, Loic Landrieu
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00

We introduce Torch-Points3D, an open-source framework designed to facilitate the use of deep networks on3D data. Its modular design, efficient implementation, and user-friendly interfaces make it a relevant tool for research and productization alike. Beyond multiple quality-of-life features, our goal is to standardize a higher level of transparency and reproducibility in 3D deep learning research, and to lower its barrier to entry. In this paper, we present the design principles of Torch-Points3D, as well as extensive benchmarks of multiple state-of-the-art algorithms and inference schemes across several datasets and tasks. The modularity of Torch-Points3D allows us to design fair and rigorous experimental protocols in which all methods are evaluated in the same conditions. The Torch-Points3D repository :https://github.com/nicolas-chaulet/torch-points3d
High-order Semantic Role Labeling
Authors: Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao, Rui Wang, Kevin Parnow
Date: 2020-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Semantic Role Labeling, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Semantic role labeling is primarily used to identify predicates, arguments, and their semantic relationships. Due to the limitations of modeling methods and the conditions of pre-identified predicates, previous work has focused on the relationships between predicates and arguments and the correlations between arguments at most, while the correlations between predicates have been neglected for a long time. High-order features and structure learning were very common in modeling such correlations before the neural network era. In this paper, we introduce a high-order graph structure for the neural semantic role labeling model, which enables the model to explicitly consider not only the isolated predicate-argument pairs but also the interaction between the predicate-argument pairs. Experimental results on 7 languages of the CoNLL-2009 benchmark show that the high-order structural learning techniques are beneficial to the strong performing SRL models and further boost our baseline to achieve new state-of-the-art results.