pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Uncorrelated Semi-paired Subspace Learning
Authors: Li Wang, Lei-Hong Zhang, Chungen Shen, Ren-cang Li
Date: 2020-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: MULTI-VIEW LEARNING

Multi-view datasets are increasingly collected in many real-world applications, and we have seen better learning performance by existing multi-view learning methods than by conventional single-view learning methods applied to each view individually. But, most of these multi-view learning methods are built on the assumption that at each instance no view is missing and all data points from all views must be perfectly paired. Hence they cannot handle unpaired data but ignore them completely from their learning process. However, unpaired data can be more abundant in reality than paired ones and simply ignoring all unpaired data incur tremendous waste in resources. In this paper, we focus on learning uncorrelated features by semi-paired subspace learning, motivated by many existing works that show great successes of learning uncorrelated features. Specifically, we propose a generalized uncorrelated multi-view subspace learning framework, which can naturally integrate many proven learning criteria on the semi-paired data. To showcase the flexibility of the framework, we instantiate five new semi-paired models for both unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. We also design a successive alternating approximation (SAA) method to solve the resulting optimization problem and the method can be combined with the powerful Krylov subspace projection technique if needed. Extensive experimental results on multi-view feature extraction and multi-modality classification show that our proposed models perform competitively to or better than the baselines.
Predictive process mining by network of classifiers and clusterers: the PEDF model
Authors: Amir Mohammad Esmaieeli Sikaroudi, Md Habibor Rahman
Date: 2020-11-22 00:00:00

In this research, a model is proposed to learn from event log and predict future events of a system. The proposed PEDF model learns based on events' sequences, durations, and extra features. The PEDF model is built by a network made of standard clusterers and classifiers, and it has high flexibility to update the model iteratively. The model requires to extract two sets of data from log files i.e., transition differences, and cumulative features. The model has one layer of memory which means that each transition is dependent on both the current event and the previous event. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, it is compared to the Recurrent Neural Network and Sequential Prediction models, and it outperforms them. Since there is missing performance measure for event log prediction models, three measures are proposed.
On the Convergence of Continuous Constrained Optimization for Structure Learning
Authors: Ignavier Ng, Sébastien Lachapelle, Nan Rosemary Ke, Simon Lacoste-Julien, Kun Zhang
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00

Recently, structure learning of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) has been formulated as a continuous optimization problem by leveraging an algebraic characterization of acyclicity. The constrained problem is solved using the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) which is often preferred to the quadratic penalty method (QPM) by virtue of its standard convergence result that does not require the penalty coefficient to go to infinity, hence avoiding ill-conditioning. However, the convergence properties of these methods for structure learning, including whether they are guaranteed to return a DAG solution, remain unclear, which might limit their practical applications. In this work, we examine the convergence of ALM and QPM for structure learning in the linear, nonlinear, and confounded cases. We show that the standard convergence result of ALM does not hold in these settings, and demonstrate empirically that its behavior is akin to that of the QPM which is prone to ill-conditioning. We further establish the convergence guarantee of QPM to a DAG solution, under mild conditions. Lastly, we connect our theoretical results with existing approaches to help resolve the convergence issue, and verify our findings in light of an empirical comparison of them.
LaHAR: Latent Human Activity Recognition using LDA
Authors: Zeyd Boukhers, Danniene Wete, Steffen Staab
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Clustering, Human Activity Recognition

Processing sequential multi-sensor data becomes important in many tasks due to the dramatic increase in the availability of sensors that can acquire sequential data over time. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one of the fields which are actively benefiting from this availability. Unlike most of the approaches addressing HAR by considering predefined activity classes, this paper proposes a novel approach to discover the latent HAR patterns in sequential data. To this end, we employed Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is initially a topic modelling approach used in text analysis. To make the data suitable for LDA, we extract the so-called "sensory words" from the sequential data. We carried out experiments on a challenging HAR dataset, demonstrating that LDA is capable of uncovering underlying structures in sequential data, which provide a human-understandable representation of the data. The extrinsic evaluations reveal that LDA is capable of accurately clustering HAR data sequences compared to the labelled activities.
LINDT: Tackling Negative Federated Learning with Local Adaptation
Authors: Hong Lin, Lidan Shou, Ke Chen, Gang Chen, Sai Wu
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning paradigm, which allows a number of data owners (also called clients) to collaboratively learn a shared model without disclosing each client's data. However, FL may fail to proceed properly, amid a state that we call negative federated learning (NFL). This paper addresses the problem of negative federated learning. We formulate a rigorous definition of NFL and analyze its essential cause. We propose a novel framework called LINDT for tackling NFL in run-time. The framework can potentially work with any neural-network-based FL systems for NFL detection and recovery. Specifically, we introduce a metric for detecting NFL from the server. On occasion of NFL recovery, the framework makes adaptation to the federated model on each client's local data by learning a Layer-wise Intertwined Dual-model. Experiment results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the performance of FL on local data in various scenarios of NFL.
On InstaHide, Phase Retrieval, and Sparse Matrix Factorization
Authors: Sitan Chen, Xiaoxiao Li, Zhao Song, Danyang Zhuo
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

In this work, we examine the security of InstaHide, a scheme recently proposed by [Huang, Song, Li and Arora, ICML'20] for preserving the security of private datasets in the context of distributed learning. To generate a synthetic training example to be shared among the distributed learners, InstaHide takes a convex combination of private feature vectors and randomly flips the sign of each entry of the resulting vector with probability 1/2. A salient question is whether this scheme is secure in any provable sense, perhaps under a plausible hardness assumption and assuming the distributions generating the public and private data satisfy certain properties. We show that the answer to this appears to be quite subtle and closely related to the average-case complexity of a new multi-task, missing-data version of the classic problem of phase retrieval. Motivated by this connection, we design a provable algorithm that can recover private vectors using only the public vectors and synthetic vectors generated by InstaHide, under the assumption that the private and public vectors are isotropic Gaussian.
Integrating Deep Learning in Domain Sciences at Exascale
Authors: Rick Archibald, Edmond Chow, Eduardo D'Azevedo, Jack Dongarra, Markus Eisenbach, Rocco Febbo, Florent Lopez, Daniel Nichols, Stanimire Tomov, Kwai Wong, Junqi Yin
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Management

This paper presents some of the current challenges in designing deep learning artificial intelligence (AI) and integrating it with traditional high-performance computing (HPC) simulations. We evaluate existing packages for their ability to run deep learning models and applications on large-scale HPC systems efficiently, identify challenges, and propose new asynchronous parallelization and optimization techniques for current large-scale heterogeneous systems and upcoming exascale systems. These developments, along with existing HPC AI software capabilities, have been integrated into MagmaDNN, an open-source HPC deep learning framework. Many deep learning frameworks are targeted at data scientists and fall short in providing quality integration into existing HPC workflows. This paper discusses the necessities of an HPC deep learning framework and how those needs can be provided (e.g., as in MagmaDNN) through a deep integration with existing HPC libraries, such as MAGMA and its modular memory management, MPI, CuBLAS, CuDNN, MKL, and HIP. Advancements are also illustrated through the use of algorithmic enhancements in reduced- and mixed-precision, as well as asynchronous optimization methods. Finally, we present illustrations and potential solutions for enhancing traditional compute- and data-intensive applications at ORNL and UTK with AI. The approaches and future challenges are illustrated in materials science, imaging, and climate applications.
The Emerging Trends of Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Weiwei Liu, Haobo Wang, Xiaobo Shen, Ivor W. Tsang
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Extreme Multi-Label Classification, General Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-Label Learning

Exabytes of data are generated daily by humans, leading to the growing need for new efforts in dealing with the grand challenges for multi-label learning brought by big data. For example, extreme multi-label classification is an active and rapidly growing research area that deals with classification tasks with an extremely large number of classes or labels; utilizing massive data with limited supervision to build a multi-label classification model becomes valuable for practical applications, etc. Besides these, there are tremendous efforts on how to harvest the strong learning capability of deep learning to better capture the label dependencies in multi-label learning, which is the key for deep learning to address real-world classification tasks. However, it is noted that there has been a lack of systemic studies that focus explicitly on analyzing the emerging trends and new challenges of multi-label learning in the era of big data. It is imperative to call for a comprehensive survey to fulfill this mission and delineate future research directions and new applications.
Balance Regularized Neural Network Models for Causal Effect Estimation
Authors: Mehrdad Farajtabar, Andrew Lee, Yuanjian Feng, Vishal Gupta, Peter Dolan, Harish Chandran, Martin Szummer
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Estimating individual and average treatment effects from observational data is an important problem in many domains such as healthcare and e-commerce. In this paper, we advocate balance regularization of multi-head neural network architectures. Our work is motivated by representation learning techniques to reduce differences between treated and untreated distributions that potentially arise due to confounding factors. We further regularize the model by encouraging it to predict control outcomes for individuals in the treatment group that are similar to control outcomes in the control group. We empirically study the bias-variance trade-off between different weightings of the regularizers, as well as between inductive and transductive inference.
Effectiveness of MPC-friendly Softmax Replacement
Authors: Marcel Keller, Ke Sun
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00

Softmax is widely used in deep learning to map some representation to a probability distribution. As it is based on exp/log functions that are relatively expensive in multi-party computation, Mohassel and Zhang (2017) proposed a simpler replacement based on ReLU to be used in secure computation. However, we could not reproduce the accuracy they reported for training on MNIST with three fully connected layers. Later works (e.g., Wagh et al., 2019 and 2021) used the softmax replacement not for computing the output probability distribution but for approximating the gradient in back-propagation. In this work, we analyze the two uses of the replacement and compare them to softmax, both in terms of accuracy and cost in multi-party computation. We found that the replacement only provides a significant speed-up for a one-layer network while it always reduces accuracy, sometimes significantly. Thus we conclude that its usefulness is limited and one should use the original softmax function instead.
Geometry-Aware Universal Mirror-Prox
Authors: Reza Babanezhad, Simon Lacoste-Julien
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00

Mirror-prox (MP) is a well-known algorithm to solve variational inequality (VI) problems. VI with a monotone operator covers a large group of settings such as convex minimization, min-max or saddle point problems. To get a convergent algorithm, the step-size of the classic MP algorithm relies heavily on the problem dependent knowledge of the operator such as its smoothness parameter which is hard to estimate. Recently, a universal variant of MP for smooth/bounded operators has been introduced that depends only on the norm of updates in MP. In this work, we relax the dependence to evaluating the norm of updates to Bregman divergence between updates. This relaxation allows us to extends the analysis of universal MP to the settings where the operator is not smooth or bounded. Furthermore, we analyse the VI problem with a stochastic monotone operator in different settings and obtain an optimal rate up to a logarithmic factor.
Detection and Classification of mental illnesses on social media using RoBERTa
Authors: Ankit Murarka, Balaji Radhakrishnan, Sushma Ravichandran
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Given the current social distancing regulations across the world, social media has become the primary mode of communication for most people. This has resulted in the isolation of many people suffering from mental illnesses who are unable to receive assistance in person. They have increasingly turned to social media to express themselves and to look for guidance in dealing with their illnesses. Keeping this in mind, we propose a solution to detect and classify mental illness posts on social media thereby enabling users to seek appropriate help. In this work, we detect and classify five prominent kinds of mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD and PTSD by analyzing unstructured user data on social media platforms. In addition, we are sharing a new high-quality dataset to drive research on this topic. We believe that our work is the first multi-class model that uses a Transformer-based architecture such as RoBERTa to analyze people's emotions and psychology. We also demonstrate how we stress-test our model using behavioral testing. With this research, we hope to be able to contribute to the public health system by automating some of the detection and classification process.
An Empirical Study of Representation Learning for Reinforcement Learning in Healthcare
Authors: Taylor W. Killian, Haoran Zhang, Jayakumar Subramanian, Mehdi Fatemi, Marzyeh Ghassemi
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Ended Question Answering, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has recently been applied to sequential estimation and prediction problems identifying and developing hypothetical treatment strategies for septic patients, with a particular focus on offline learning with observational data. In practice, successful RL relies on informative latent states derived from sequential observations to develop optimal treatment strategies. To date, how best to construct such states in a healthcare setting is an open question. In this paper, we perform an empirical study of several information encoding architectures using data from septic patients in the MIMIC-III dataset to form representations of a patient state. We evaluate the impact of representation dimension, correlations with established acuity scores, and the treatment policies derived from them. We find that sequentially formed state representations facilitate effective policy learning in batch settings, validating a more thoughtful approach to representation learning that remains faithful to the sequential and partial nature of healthcare data.
Learning Hidden Markov Models from Aggregate Observations
Authors: Rahul Singh, Qinsheng Zhang, Yongxin Chen
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for estimating the parameters of a time-homogeneous hidden Markov model from aggregate observations. This problem arises when only the population level counts of the number of individuals at each time step are available, from which one seeks to learn the individual hidden Markov model. Our algorithm is built upon expectation-maximization and the recently proposed aggregate inference algorithm, the Sinkhorn belief propagation. As compared with existing methods such as expectation-maximization with non-linear belief propagation, our algorithm exhibits convergence guarantees. Moreover, our learning framework naturally reduces to the standard Baum-Welch learning algorithm when observations corresponding to a single individual are recorded. We further extend our learning algorithm to handle HMMs with continuous observations. The efficacy of our algorithm is demonstrated on a variety of datasets.
Learning Quantized Neural Nets by Coarse Gradient Method for Non-linear Classification
Authors: Ziang Long, Penghang Yin, Jack Xin
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Quantized or low-bit neural networks are attractive due to their inference efficiency. However, training deep neural networks with quantized activations involves minimizing a discontinuous and piecewise constant loss function. Such a loss function has zero gradients almost everywhere (a.e.), which makes the conventional gradient-based algorithms inapplicable. To this end, we study a novel class of \emph{biased} first-order oracle, termed coarse gradient, for overcoming the vanished gradient issue. A coarse gradient is generated by replacing the a.e. zero derivatives of quantized (i.e., stair-case) ReLU activation composited in the chain rule with some heuristic proxy derivative called straight-through estimator (STE). Although having been widely used in training quantized networks empirically, fundamental questions like when and why the ad-hoc STE trick works, still lacks theoretical understanding. In this paper, we propose a class of STEs with certain monotonicity, and consider their applications to the training of a two-linear-layer network with quantized activation functions for non-linear multi-category classification. We establish performance guarantees for the proposed STEs by showing that the corresponding coarse gradient methods converge to the global minimum, which leads to a perfect classification. Lastly, we present experimental results on synthetic data as well as MNIST dataset to verify our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed STEs.
Federated learning with class imbalance reduction
Authors: Miao Yang, Akitanoshou Wong, Hongbin Zhu, Haifeng Wang, Hua Qian
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a promising technique that enables a large amount of edge computing devices to collaboratively train a global learning model. Due to privacy concerns, the raw data on devices could not be available for centralized server. Constrained by the spectrum limitation and computation capacity, only a subset of devices can be engaged to train and transmit the trained model to centralized server for aggregation. Since the local data distribution varies among all devices, class imbalance problem arises along with the unfavorable client selection, resulting in a slow converge rate of the global model. In this paper, an estimation scheme is designed to reveal the class distribution without the awareness of raw data. Based on the scheme, a device selection algorithm towards minimal class imbalance is proposed, thus can improve the convergence performance of the global model. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
IC Neuron: An Efficient Unit to Construct Neural Networks
Authors: Junyi An, Fengshan Liu, Jian Zhao, Furao Shen
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00

As a popular machine learning method, neural networks can be used to solve many complex tasks. Their strong generalization ability comes from the representation ability of the basic neuron model. The most popular neuron is the MP neuron, which uses a linear transformation and a non-linear activation function to process the input successively. Inspired by the elastic collision model in physics, we propose a new neuron model that can represent more complex distributions. We term it Inter-layer collision (IC) neuron. The IC neuron divides the input space into multiple subspaces used to represent different linear transformations. This operation enhanced non-linear representation ability and emphasizes some useful input features for the given task. We build the IC networks by integrating the IC neurons into the fully-connected (FC), convolutional, and recurrent structures. The IC networks outperform the traditional networks in a wide range of experiments. We believe that the IC neuron can be a basic unit to build network structures.
AutoGraph: Automated Graph Neural Network
Authors: Yaoman Li, Irwin King
Date: 2020-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Graph Neural Network, Node Classification

Graphs play an important role in many applications. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved promising results in graph analysis tasks. Some state-of-the-art GNN models have been proposed, e.g., Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), Graph Attention Networks (GATs), etc. Despite these successes, most of the GNNs only have shallow structure. This causes the low expressive power of the GNNs. To fully utilize the power of the deep neural network, some deep GNNs have been proposed recently. However, the design of deep GNNs requires significant architecture engineering. In this work, we propose a method to automate the deep GNNs design. In our proposed method, we add a new type of skip connection to the GNNs search space to encourage feature reuse and alleviate the vanishing gradient problem. We also allow our evolutionary algorithm to increase the layers of GNNs during the evolution to generate deeper networks. We evaluate our method in the graph node classification task. The experiments show that the GNNs generated by our method can obtain state-of-the-art results in Cora, Citeseer, Pubmed and PPI datasets.