pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Saliency Prediction with External Knowledge
Authors: Yifeng Zhang, Ming Jiang, Qi Zhao
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Prediction, Saliency Prediction

The last decades have seen great progress in saliency prediction, with the success of deep neural networks that are able to encode high-level semantics. Yet, while humans have the innate capability in leveraging their knowledge to decide where to look (e.g. people pay more attention to familiar faces such as celebrities), saliency prediction models have only been trained with large eye-tracking datasets. This work proposes to bridge this gap by explicitly incorporating external knowledge for saliency models as humans do. We develop networks that learn to highlight regions by incorporating prior knowledge of semantic relationships, be it general or domain-specific, depending on the task of interest. At the core of the method is a new Graph Semantic Saliency Network (GraSSNet) that constructs a graph that encodes semantic relationships learned from external knowledge. A Spatial Graph Attention Network is then developed to update saliency features based on the learned graph. Experiments show that the proposed model learns to predict saliency from the external knowledge and outperforms the state-of-the-art on four saliency benchmarks.
Learned Pre-Processing for Automatic Diabetic Retinopathy Detection on Eye Fundus Images
Authors: Asim Smailagic, Anupma Sharan, Pedro Costa, Adrian Galdran, Alex Gaudio, Aurélio Campilho
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diabetic Retinopathy Detection, Image Dehazing, Shadow Removal

Diabetic Retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in the working-age population of the world. The main aim of this paper is to improve the accuracy of Diabetic Retinopathy detection by implementing a shadow removal and color correction step as a preprocessing stage from eye fundus images. For this, we rely on recent findings indicating that application of image dehazing on the inverted intensity domain amounts to illumination compensation. Inspired by this work, we propose a Shadow Removal Layer that allows us to learn the pre-processing function for a particular task. We show that learning the pre-processing function improves the performance of the network on the Diabetic Retinopathy detection task.
Adaptive LiDAR Sampling and Depth Completion using Ensemble Variance
Authors: Eyal Gofer, Shachar Praisler, Guy Gilboa
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Depth Completion, Depth Estimation

This work considers the problem of depth completion, with or without image data, where an algorithm may measure the depth of a prescribed limited number of pixels. The algorithmic challenge is to choose pixel positions strategically and dynamically to maximally reduce overall depth estimation error. This setting is realized in daytime or nighttime depth completion for autonomous vehicles with a programmable LiDAR. Our method uses an ensemble of predictors to define a sampling probability over pixels. This probability is proportional to the variance of the predictions of ensemble members, thus highlighting pixels that are difficult to predict. By additionally proceeding in several prediction phases, we effectively reduce redundant sampling of similar pixels. Our ensemble-based method may be implemented using any depth-completion learning algorithm, such as a state-of-the-art neural network, treated as a black box. In particular, we also present a simple and effective Random Forest-based algorithm, and similarly use its internal ensemble in our design. We conduct experiments on the KITTI dataset, using the neural network algorithm of Ma et al. and our Random Forest based learner for implementing our method. The accuracy of both implementations exceeds the state of the art. Compared with a random or grid sampling pattern, our method allows a reduction by a factor of 4-10 in the number of measurements required to attain the same accuracy.
Chest X-ray Report Generation through Fine-Grained Label Learning
Authors: Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, Ken C. L. Wong, Yaniv Gur, Joy T. Wu, Ashutosh Jadhav, Satyananda Kashyap, Alexandros Karargyris, Anup Pillai, Arjun Sharma, Ali Bin Syed, Orest Boyko, Mehdi Moradi
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

Obtaining automated preliminary read reports for common exams such as chest X-rays will expedite clinical workflows and improve operational efficiencies in hospitals. However, the quality of reports generated by current automated approaches is not yet clinically acceptable as they cannot ensure the correct detection of a broad spectrum of radiographic findings nor describe them accurately in terms of laterality, anatomical location, severity, etc. In this work, we present a domain-aware automatic chest X-ray radiology report generation algorithm that learns fine-grained description of findings from images and uses their pattern of occurrences to retrieve and customize similar reports from a large report database. We also develop an automatic labeling algorithm for assigning such descriptors to images and build a novel deep learning network that recognizes both coarse and fine-grained descriptions of findings. The resulting report generation algorithm significantly outperforms the state of the art using established score metrics.
On using Product-Specific Schema.org from Web Data Commons: An Empirical Set of Best Practices
Authors: Ravi Kiran Selvam, Mayank Kejriwal
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

Schema.org has experienced high growth in recent years. Structured descriptions of products embedded in HTML pages are now not uncommon, especially on e-commerce websites. The Web Data Commons (WDC) project has extracted schema.org data at scale from webpages in the Common Crawl and made it available as an RDF `knowledge graph' at scale. The portion of this data that specifically describes products offers a golden opportunity for researchers and small companies to leverage it for analytics and downstream applications. Yet, because of the broad and expansive scope of this data, it is not evident whether the data is usable in its raw form. In this paper, we do a detailed empirical study on the product-specific schema.org data made available by WDC. Rather than simple analysis, the goal of our study is to devise an empirically grounded set of best practices for using and consuming WDC product-specific schema.org data. Our studies reveal six best practices, each of which is justified by experimental data and analysis.
Large Scale Subject Category Classification of Scholarly Papers with Deep Attentive Neural Networks
Authors: Bharath Kandimalla, Shaurya Rohatgi, Jian Wu, C. Lee Giles
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Sentence

Subject categories of scholarly papers generally refer to the knowledge domain(s) to which the papers belong, examples being computer science or physics. Subject category information can be used for building faceted search for digital library search engines. This can significantly assist users in narrowing down their search space of relevant documents. Unfortunately, many academic papers do not have such information as part of their metadata. Existing methods for solving this task usually focus on unsupervised learning that often relies on citation networks. However, a complete list of papers citing the current paper may not be readily available. In particular, new papers that have few or no citations cannot be classified using such methods. Here, we propose a deep attentive neural network (DANN) that classifies scholarly papers using only their abstracts. The network is trained using 9 million abstracts from Web of Science (WoS). We also use the WoS schema that covers 104 subject categories. The proposed network consists of two bi-directional recurrent neural networks followed by an attention layer. We compare our model against baselines by varying the architecture and text representation. Our best model achieves micro-F1 measure of 0.76 with F1 of individual subject categories ranging from 0.50-0.95. The results showed the importance of retraining word embedding models to maximize the vocabulary overlap and the effectiveness of the attention mechanism. The combination of word vectors with TFIDF outperforms character and sentence level embedding models. We discuss imbalanced samples and overlapping categories and suggest possible strategies for mitigation. We also determine the subject category distribution in CiteSeerX by classifying a random sample of one million academic papers.
CPAS: the UK's National Machine Learning-based Hospital Capacity Planning System for COVID-19
Authors: Zhaozhi Qian, Ahmed M. Alaa, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic poses the threat of overwhelming healthcare systems with unprecedented demands for intensive care resources. Managing these demands cannot be effectively conducted without a nationwide collective effort that relies on data to forecast hospital demands on the national, regional, hospital and individual levels. To this end, we developed the COVID-19 Capacity Planning and Analysis System (CPAS) - a machine learning-based system for hospital resource planning that we have successfully deployed at individual hospitals and across regions in the UK in coordination with NHS Digital. In this paper, we discuss the main challenges of deploying a machine learning-based decision support system at national scale, and explain how CPAS addresses these challenges by (1) defining the appropriate learning problem, (2) combining bottom-up and top-down analytical approaches, (3) using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, (4) integrating heterogeneous data sources, and (5) presenting the result with an interactive and transparent interface. CPAS is one of the first machine learning-based systems to be deployed in hospitals on a national scale to address the COVID-19 pandemic - we conclude the paper with a summary of the lessons learned from this experience.
Deep Learning for DOA Estimation in MIMO Radar Systems via Emulation of Large Antenna Arrays
Authors: Aya Mostafa Ahmed, Udaya Sampath K. P. Miriya Thanthrige, Aly El Gamal, Aydin Sezgin
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Direction of Arrival Estimation

We present a MUSIC-based Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation strategy using small antenna arrays, via employing deep learning for reconstructing the signals of a virtual large antenna array. Not only does the proposed strategy deliver significantly better performance than simply plugging the incoming signals into MUSIC, but surprisingly, the performance is also better than directly using an actual large antenna array with MUSIC for high angle ranges and low test SNR values. We further analyze the best choice for the training SNR as a function of the test SNR, and observe dramatic changes in the behavior of this function for different angle ranges.
Multi-Level Local SGD for Heterogeneous Hierarchical Networks
Authors: Timothy Castiglia, Anirban Das, Stacy Patterson
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

We propose Multi-Level Local SGD, a distributed gradient method for learning a smooth, non-convex objective in a heterogeneous multi-level network. Our network model consists of a set of disjoint sub-networks, with a single hub and multiple worker nodes; further, worker nodes may have different operating rates. The hubs exchange information with one another via a connected, but not necessarily complete communication network. In our algorithm, sub-networks execute a distributed SGD algorithm, using a hub-and-spoke paradigm, and the hubs periodically average their models with neighboring hubs. We first provide a unified mathematical framework that describes the Multi-Level Local SGD algorithm. We then present a theoretical analysis of the algorithm; our analysis shows the dependence of the convergence error on the worker node heterogeneity, hub network topology, and the number of local, sub-network, and global iterations. We back up our theoretical results via simulation-based experiments using both convex and non-convex objectives.
Corner Proposal Network for Anchor-free, Two-stage Object Detection
Authors: Kaiwen Duan, Lingxi Xie, Honggang Qi, Song Bai, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

The goal of object detection is to determine the class and location of objects in an image. This paper proposes a novel anchor-free, two-stage framework which first extracts a number of object proposals by finding potential corner keypoint combinations and then assigns a class label to each proposal by a standalone classification stage. We demonstrate that these two stages are effective solutions for improving recall and precision, respectively, and they can be integrated into an end-to-end network. Our approach, dubbed Corner Proposal Network (CPN), enjoys the ability to detect objects of various scales and also avoids being confused by a large number of false-positive proposals. On the MS-COCO dataset, CPN achieves an AP of 49.2% which is competitive among state-of-the-art object detection methods. CPN also fits the scenario of computational efficiency, which achieves an AP of 41.6%/39.7% at 26.2/43.3 FPS, surpassing most competitors with the same inference speed. Code is available at https://github.com/Duankaiwen/CPNDet
Efficient minimum word error rate training of RNN-Transducer for end-to-end speech recognition
Authors: Jinxi Guo, Gautam Tiwari, Jasha Droppo, Maarten Van Segbroeck, Che-Wei Huang, Andreas Stolcke, Roland Maas
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In this work, we propose a novel and efficient minimum word error rate (MWER) training method for RNN-Transducer (RNN-T). Unlike previous work on this topic, which performs on-the-fly limited-size beam-search decoding and generates alignment scores for expected edit-distance computation, in our proposed method, we re-calculate and sum scores of all the possible alignments for each hypothesis in N-best lists. The hypothesis probability scores and back-propagated gradients are calculated efficiently using the forward-backward algorithm. Moreover, the proposed method allows us to decouple the decoding and training processes, and thus we can perform offline parallel-decoding and MWER training for each subset iteratively. Experimental results show that this proposed semi-on-the-fly method can speed up the on-the-fly method by 6 times and result in a similar WER improvement (3.6%) over a baseline RNN-T model. The proposed MWER training can also effectively reduce high-deletion errors (9.2% WER-reduction) introduced by RNN-T models when EOS is added for endpointer. Further improvement can be achieved if we use a proposed RNN-T rescoring method to re-rank hypotheses and use external RNN-LM to perform additional rescoring. The best system achieves a 5% relative improvement on an English test-set of real far-field recordings and a 11.6% WER reduction on music-domain utterances.
Linguistic Taboos and Euphemisms in Nepali
Authors: Nobal B. Niraula, Saurab Dulal, Diwa Koirala
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

Languages across the world have words, phrases, and behaviors -- the taboos -- that are avoided in public communication considering them as obscene or disturbing to the social, religious, and ethical values of society. However, people deliberately use these linguistic taboos and other language constructs to make hurtful, derogatory, and obscene comments. It is nearly impossible to construct a universal set of offensive or taboo terms because offensiveness is determined entirely by different factors such as socio-physical setting, speaker-listener relationship, and word choices. In this paper, we present a detailed corpus-based study of offensive language in Nepali. We identify and describe more than 18 different categories of linguistic offenses including politics, religion, race, and sex. We discuss 12 common euphemisms such as synonym, metaphor and circumlocution. In addition, we introduce a manually constructed data set of over 1000 offensive and taboo terms popular among contemporary speakers. This in-depth study of offensive language and resource will provide a foundation for several downstream tasks such as offensive language detection and language learning.
Neural Temporal Point Processes For Modelling Electronic Health Records
Authors: Joseph Enguehard, Dan Busbridge, Adam Bozson, Claire Woodcock, Nils Y. Hammerla
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Processes

The modelling of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has the potential to drive more efficient allocation of healthcare resources, enabling early intervention strategies and advancing personalised healthcare. However, EHRs are challenging to model due to their realisation as noisy, multi-modal data occurring at irregular time intervals. To address their temporal nature, we treat EHRs as samples generated by a Temporal Point Process (TPP), enabling us to model what happened in an event with when it happened in a principled way. We gather and propose neural network parameterisations of TPPs, collectively referred to as Neural TPPs. We perform evaluations on synthetic EHRs as well as on a set of established benchmarks. We show that TPPs significantly outperform their non-TPP counterparts on EHRs. We also show that an assumption of many Neural TPPs, that the class distribution is conditionally independent of time, reduces performance on EHRs. Finally, our proposed attention-based Neural TPP performs favourably compared to existing models, whilst aligning with real world interpretability requirements, an important step towards a component of clinical decision support systems.
Deep Learning Gauss-Manin Connections
Authors: Kathryn Heal, Avinash Kulkarni, Emre Can Sertöz
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The Gauss-Manin connection of a family of hypersurfaces governs the change of the period matrix along the family. This connection can be complicated even when the equations defining the family look simple. When this is the case, it is computationally expensive to compute the period matrices of varieties in the family via homotopy continuation. We train neural networks that can quickly and reliably guess the complexity of the Gauss-Manin connection of a pencil of hypersurfaces. As an application, we compute the periods of 96% of smooth quartic surfaces in projective 3-space whose defining equation is a sum of five monomials; from the periods of these quartic surfaces, we extract their Picard numbers and the endomorphism fields of their transcendental lattices.
A Machine Learning Approach to Online Fault Classification in HPC Systems
Authors: Alessio Netti, Zeynep Kiziltan, Ozalp Babaoglu, Alina Sirbu, Andrea Bartolini, Andrea Borghesi
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, General Classification, Management

As High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems strive towards the exascale goal, failure rates both at the hardware and software levels will increase significantly. Thus, detecting and classifying faults in HPC systems as they occur and initiating corrective actions before they can transform into failures becomes essential for continued operation. Central to this objective is fault injection, which is the deliberate triggering of faults in a system so as to observe their behavior in a controlled environment. In this paper, we propose a fault classification method for HPC systems based on machine learning. The novelty of our approach rests with the fact that it can be operated on streamed data in an online manner, thus opening the possibility to devise and enact control actions on the target system in real-time. We introduce a high-level, easy-to-use fault injection tool called FINJ, with a focus on the management of complex experiments. In order to train and evaluate our machine learning classifiers, we inject faults to an in-house experimental HPC system using FINJ, and generate a fault dataset which we describe extensively. Both FINJ and the dataset are publicly available to facilitate resiliency research in the HPC systems field. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach allows almost perfect classification accuracy to be reached for different fault types with low computational overhead and minimal delay.
Complex Robotic Manipulation via Graph-Based Hindsight Goal Generation
Authors: Zhenshan Bing, Matthias Brucker, Fabrice O. Morin, Kai Huang, Alois Knoll
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as hindsight experience replay (HER) and hindsight goal generation (HGG) have been able to solve challenging robotic manipulation tasks in multi-goal settings with sparse rewards. HER achieves its training success through hindsight replays of past experience with heuristic goals, but under-performs in challenging tasks in which goals are difficult to explore. HGG enhances HER by selecting intermediate goals that are easy to achieve in the short term and promising to lead to target goals in the long term. This guided exploration makes HGG applicable to tasks in which target goals are far away from the object's initial position. However, HGG is not applicable to manipulation tasks with obstacles because the euclidean metric used for HGG is not an accurate distance metric in such environments. In this paper, we propose graph-based hindsight goal generation (G-HGG), an extension of HGG selecting hindsight goals based on shortest distances in an obstacle-avoiding graph, which is a discrete representation of the environment. We evaluated G-HGG on four challenging manipulation tasks with obstacles, where significant enhancements in both sample efficiency and overall success rate are shown over HGG and HER. Videos can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/view/demos-g-hgg/.
A Review on Computational Intelligence Techniques in Cloud and Edge Computing
Authors: Muhammad Asim, Yong Wang, Kezhi Wang, Pei-Qiu Huang
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Edge-computing, Scheduling

Cloud computing (CC) is a centralized computing paradigm that accumulates resources centrally and provides these resources to users through Internet. Although CC holds a large number of resources, it may not be acceptable by real-time mobile applications, as it is usually far away from users geographically. On the other hand, edge computing (EC), which distributes resources to the network edge, enjoys increasing popularity in the applications with low-latency and high-reliability requirements. EC provides resources in a decentralized manner, which can respond to users' requirements faster than the normal CC, but with limited computing capacities. As both CC and EC are resource-sensitive, several big issues arise, such as how to conduct job scheduling, resource allocation, and task offloading, which significantly influence the performance of the whole system. To tackle these issues, many optimization problems have been formulated. These optimization problems usually have complex properties, such as non-convexity and NP-hardness, which may not be addressed by the traditional convex optimization-based solutions. Computational intelligence (CI), consisting of a set of nature-inspired computational approaches, recently exhibits great potential in addressing these optimization problems in CC and EC. This paper provides an overview of research problems in CC and EC and recent progresses in addressing them with the help of CI techniques. Informative discussions and future research trends are also presented, with the aim of offering insights to the readers and motivating new research directions.