pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Continual Learning for Fake Audio Detection
Authors: Haoxin Ma, Jiangyan Yi, JianHua Tao, Ye Bai, Zhengkun Tian, Chenglong Wang
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Speaker Verification

Fake audio attack becomes a major threat to the speaker verification system. Although current detection approaches have achieved promising results on dataset-specific scenarios, they encounter difficulties on unseen spoofing data. Fine-tuning and retraining from scratch have been applied to incorporate new data. However, fine-tuning leads to performance degradation on previous data. Retraining takes a lot of time and computation resources. Besides, previous data are unavailable due to privacy in some situations. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes detecting fake without forgetting, a continual-learning-based method, to make the model learn new spoofing attacks incrementally. A knowledge distillation loss is introduced to loss function to preserve the memory of original model. Supposing the distribution of genuine voice is consistent among different scenarios, an extra embedding similarity loss is used as another constraint to further do a positive sample alignment. Experiments are conducted on the ASVspoof2019 dataset. The results show that our proposed method outperforms fine-tuning by the relative reduction of average equal error rate up to 81.62%.
Towards end-to-end F0 voice conversion based on Dual-GAN with convolutional wavelet kernels
Authors: Clément Le Moine Veillon, Nicolas Obin, Axel Roebel
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Conversion

This paper presents a end-to-end framework for the F0 transformation in the context of expressive voice conversion. A single neural network is proposed, in which a first module is used to learn F0 representation over different temporal scales and a second adversarial module is used to learn the transformation from one emotion to another. The first module is composed of a convolution layer with wavelet kernels so that the various temporal scales of F0 variations can be efficiently encoded. The single decomposition/transformation network allows to learn in a end-to-end manner the F0 decomposition that are optimal with respect to the transformation, directly from the raw F0 signal.
NeuSE: A Neural Snapshot Ensemble Method for Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Dongsheng Li, Haodong Liu, Chao Chen, Yingying Zhao, Stephen M. Chu, Bo Yang
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Ensemble Learning

In collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms, the optimal models are usually learned by globally minimizing the empirical risks averaged over all the observed data. However, the global models are often obtained via a performance tradeoff among users/items, i.e., not all users/items are perfectly fitted by the global models due to the hard non-convex optimization problems in CF algorithms. Ensemble learning can address this issue by learning multiple diverse models but usually suffer from efficiency issue on large datasets or complex algorithms. In this paper, we keep the intermediate models obtained during global model learning as the snapshot models, and then adaptively combine the snapshot models for individual user-item pairs using a memory network-based method. Empirical studies on three real-world datasets show that the proposed method can extensively and significantly improve the accuracy (up to 15.9% relatively) when applied to a variety of existing collaborative filtering methods.
Iterative Alignment Flows
Authors: Zeyu Zhou, Ziyu Gong, Pradeep Ravikumar, David I. Inouye
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The unsupervised task of aligning two or more distributions in a shared latent space has many applications including fair representations, batch effect mitigation, and unsupervised domain adaptation. Existing flow-based approaches estimate multiple flows independently, which is equivalent to learning multiple full generative models. Other approaches require adversarial learning, which can be computationally expensive and challenging to optimize. Thus, we aim to jointly align multiple distributions while avoiding adversarial learning. Inspired by efficient alignment algorithms from optimal transport (OT) theory for univariate distributions, we develop a simple iterative method to build deep and expressive flows. Our method decouples each iteration into two subproblems: 1) form a variational approximation of a distribution divergence and 2) minimize this variational approximation via closed-form invertible alignment maps based on known OT results. Our empirical results give evidence that this iterative algorithm achieves competitive distribution alignment at low computational cost while being able to naturally handle more than two distributions.
State and Topology Estimation for Unobservable Distribution Systems using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Behrouz Azimian, Reetam Sen Biswas, Shiva Moshtagh, Anamitra Pal, Lang Tong, Gautam Dasarathy
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

Time-synchronized state estimation for reconfigurable distribution networks is challenging because of limited real-time observability. This paper addresses this challenge by formulating a deep learning (DL)-based approach for topology identification (TI) and unbalanced three-phase distribution system state estimation (DSSE). Two deep neural networks (DNNs) are trained for time-synchronized DNN-based TI and DSSE, respectively, for systems that are incompletely observed by synchrophasor measurement devices (SMDs) in real-time. A data-driven approach for judicious SMD placement to facilitate reliable TI and DSSE is also provided. Robustness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by considering non-Gaussian noise in the SMD measurements. A comparison of the DNN-based DSSE with more conventional approaches indicates that the DL-based approach gives better accuracy with smaller number of SMDs.
Coarse- and fine-scale geometric information content of Multiclass Classification and implied Data-driven Intelligence
Authors: Fushing Hsieh, Xiaodong Wang
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00

Under any Multiclass Classification (MCC) setting defined by a collection of labeled point-cloud specified by a feature-set, we extract only stochastic partial orderings from all possible triplets of point-cloud without explicitly measuring the three cloud-to-cloud distances. We demonstrate that such a collective of partial ordering can efficiently compute a label embedding tree geometry on the Label-space. This tree in turn gives rise to a predictive graph, or a network with precisely weighted linkages. Such two multiscale geometries are taken as the coarse scale information content of MCC. They indeed jointly shed lights on explainable knowledge on why and how labeling comes about and facilitates error-free prediction with potential multiple candidate labels supported by data. For revealing within-label heterogeneity, we further undergo labeling naturally found clusters within each point-cloud, and likewise derive multiscale geometry as its fine-scale information content contained in data. This fine-scale endeavor shows that our computational proposal is indeed scalable to a MCC setting having a large label-space. Overall the computed multiscale collective of data-driven patterns and knowledge will serve as a basis for constructing visible and explainable subject matter intelligence regarding the system of interest.
Evaluating Standard Feature Sets Towards Increased Generalisability and Explainability of ML-based Network Intrusion Detection
Authors: Mohanad Sarhan, Siamak Layeghy, Marius Portmann
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

Machine Learning (ML)-based network intrusion detection systems bring many benefits for enhancing the cybersecurity posture of an organisation. Many systems have been designed and developed in the research community, often achieving a close to perfect detection rate when evaluated using synthetic datasets. However, the high number of academic research has not often translated into practical deployments. There are several causes contributing towards the wide gap between research and production, such as the limited ability of comprehensive evaluation of ML models and lack of understanding of internal ML operations. This paper tightens the gap by evaluating the generalisability of a common feature set to different network environments and attack scenarios. Therefore, two feature sets (NetFlow and CICFlowMeter) have been evaluated in terms of detection accuracy across three key datasets, i.e., CSE-CIC-IDS2018, BoT-IoT, and ToN-IoT. The results show the superiority of the NetFlow feature set in enhancing the ML models detection accuracy of various network attacks. In addition, due to the complexity of the learning models, SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), an explainable AI methodology, has been adopted to explain and interpret the classification decisions of ML models. The Shapley values of two common feature sets have been analysed across multiple datasets to determine the influence contributed by each feature towards the final ML prediction.
Data-driven Actuator Selection for Artificial Muscle-Powered Robots
Authors: Taylor West Henderson, Yuheng Zhi, Angela Liu, Michael C. Yip
Date: 2021-04-15 00:00:00

Even though artificial muscles have gained popularity due to their compliant, flexible, and compact properties, there currently does not exist an easy way of making informed decisions on the appropriate actuation strategy when designing a muscle-powered robot; thus limiting the transition of such technologies into broader applications. What's more, when a new muscle actuation technology is developed, it is difficult to compare it against existing robot muscles. To accelerate the development of artificial muscle applications, we propose a data driven approach for robot muscle actuator selection using Support Vector Machines (SVM). This first-of-its-kind method gives users gives users insight into which actuators fit their specific needs and actuation performance criteria, making it possible for researchers and engineer with little to no prior knowledge of artificial muscles to focus on application design. It also provides a platform to benchmark existing, new, or yet-to-be-discovered artificial muscle technologies. We test our method on unseen existing robot muscle designs to prove its usability on real-world applications. We provide an open-access, web-searchable interface for easy access to our models that will additionally allow for continuous contribution of new actuator data from groups around the world to enhance and expand these models.
Annealing Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Aref Jafari, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Pranav Sharma, Ali Ghodsi
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

Significant memory and computational requirements of large deep neural networks restrict their application on edge devices. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a prominent model compression technique for deep neural networks in which the knowledge of a trained large teacher model is transferred to a smaller student model. The success of knowledge distillation is mainly attributed to its training objective function, which exploits the soft-target information (also known as "dark knowledge") besides the given regular hard labels in a training set. However, it is shown in the literature that the larger the gap between the teacher and the student networks, the more difficult is their training using knowledge distillation. To address this shortcoming, we propose an improved knowledge distillation method (called Annealing-KD) by feeding the rich information provided by the teacher's soft-targets incrementally and more efficiently. Our Annealing-KD technique is based on a gradual transition over annealed soft-targets generated by the teacher at different temperatures in an iterative process, and therefore, the student is trained to follow the annealed teacher output in a step-by-step manner. This paper includes theoretical and empirical evidence as well as practical experiments to support the effectiveness of our Annealing-KD method. We did a comprehensive set of experiments on different tasks such as image classification (CIFAR-10 and 100) and NLP language inference with BERT-based models on the GLUE benchmark and consistently got superior results.
On the Design of Deep Priors for Unsupervised Audio Restoration
Authors: Vivek Sivaraman Narayanaswamy, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Andreas Spanias
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Denoising, Denoising

Unsupervised deep learning methods for solving audio restoration problems extensively rely on carefully tailored neural architectures that carry strong inductive biases for defining priors in the time or spectral domain. In this context, lot of recent success has been achieved with sophisticated convolutional network constructions that recover audio signals in the spectral domain. However, in practice, audio priors require careful engineering of the convolutional kernels to be effective at solving ill-posed restoration tasks, while also being easy to train. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new U-Net based prior that does not impact either the network complexity or convergence behavior of existing convolutional architectures, yet leads to significantly improved restoration. In particular, we advocate the use of carefully designed dilation schedules and dense connections in the U-Net architecture to obtain powerful audio priors. Using empirical studies on standard benchmarks and a variety of ill-posed restoration tasks, such as audio denoising, in-painting and source separation, we demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms widely adopted audio prior architectures.
Disentangling Representations of Text by Masking Transformers
Authors: Xiongyi Zhang, Jan-Willem van de Meent, Byron C. Wallace
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Disentanglement

Representations from large pretrained models such as BERT encode a range of features into monolithic vectors, affording strong predictive accuracy across a multitude of downstream tasks. In this paper we explore whether it is possible to learn disentangled representations by identifying existing subnetworks within pretrained models that encode distinct, complementary aspect representations. Concretely, we learn binary masks over transformer weights or hidden units to uncover subsets of features that correlate with a specific factor of variation; this eliminates the need to train a disentangled model from scratch for a particular task. We evaluate this method with respect to its ability to disentangle representations of sentiment from genre in movie reviews, "toxicity" from dialect in Tweets, and syntax from semantics. By combining masking with magnitude pruning we find that we can identify sparse subnetworks within BERT that strongly encode particular aspects (e.g., toxicity) while only weakly encoding others (e.g., race). Moreover, despite only learning masks, we find that disentanglement-via-masking performs as well as -- and often better than -- previously proposed methods based on variational autoencoders and adversarial training.
When and Whom to Collaborate with in a Changing Environment: A Collaborative Dynamic Bandit Solution
Authors: Chuanhao Li, Qingyun Wu, Hongning Wang
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Collaborative Filtering, Interactive Recommendation, Model Selection, Recommendation Systems, Thompson Sampling

Collaborative bandit learning, i.e., bandit algorithms that utilize collaborative filtering techniques to improve sample efficiency in online interactive recommendation, has attracted much research attention as it enjoys the best of both worlds. However, all existing collaborative bandit learning solutions impose a stationary assumption about the environment, i.e., both user preferences and the dependency among users are assumed static over time. Unfortunately, this assumption hardly holds in practice due to users' ever-changing interests and dependence relations, which inevitably costs a recommender system sub-optimal performance in practice. In this work, we develop a collaborative dynamic bandit solution to handle a changing environment for recommendation. We explicitly model the underlying changes in both user preferences and their dependency relation as a stochastic process. Individual user's preference is modeled by a mixture of globally shared contextual bandit models with a Dirichlet Process prior. Collaboration among users is thus achieved via Bayesian inference over the global bandit models. Model selection and arm selection for each user are done via Thompson sampling to balance exploitation and exploration. Our solution is proved to maintain a standard $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ sublinear regret even in such a challenging environment. And extensive empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets further confirmed the necessity of modeling a changing environment and our algorithm's practical advantages against several state-of-the-art online learning solutions.
An Interpretability Illusion for BERT
Authors: Tolga Bolukbasi, Adam Pearce, Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, Emily Reif, Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00

We describe an "interpretability illusion" that arises when analyzing the BERT model. Activations of individual neurons in the network may spuriously appear to encode a single, simple concept, when in fact they are encoding something far more complex. The same effect holds for linear combinations of activations. We trace the source of this illusion to geometric properties of BERT's embedding space as well as the fact that common text corpora represent only narrow slices of possible English sentences. We provide a taxonomy of model-learned concepts and discuss methodological implications for interpretability research, especially the importance of testing hypotheses on multiple data sets.
On the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of products of intervals in $\mathbb{R}^d$
Authors: Alirio Gómez Gómez, Pedro L. Kaufmann
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00

We study combinatorial complexity of certain classes of products of intervals in $\mathbb{R}^d$, from the point of view of Vapnik-Chervonenkis geometry. As a consequence of the obtained results, we conclude that the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of the set of balls in $\ell_\infty^d$ -- which denotes $\R^d$ equipped with the sup norm -- equals $\lfloor (3d+1)/2\rfloor$.
Audio feature ranking for sound-based COVID-19 patient detection
Authors: Julia A. Meister, Khuong An Nguyen, Zhiyuan Luo
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Classification, General Classification

Audio classification using breath and cough samples has recently emerged as a low-cost, non-invasive, and accessible COVID-19 screening method. However, a comprehensive survey shows that no application has been approved for official use at the time of writing, due to the stringent reliability and accuracy requirements of the critical healthcare setting. To support the development of Machine Learning classification models, we performed an extensive comparative investigation and ranking of 15 audio features, including less well-known ones. The results were verified on two independent COVID-19 sound datasets. By using the identified top-performing features, we have increased COVID-19 classification accuracy by up to 17% on the Cambridge dataset and up to 10% on the Coswara dataset compared to the original baseline accuracies without our feature ranking.
Grouped Variable Selection with Discrete Optimization: Computational and Statistical Perspectives
Authors: Hussein Hazimeh, Rahul Mazumder, Peter Radchenko
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sparse Learning, Variable Selection

We present a new algorithmic framework for grouped variable selection that is based on discrete mathematical optimization. While there exist several appealing approaches based on convex relaxations and nonconvex heuristics, we focus on optimal solutions for the $\ell_0$-regularized formulation, a problem that is relatively unexplored due to computational challenges. Our methodology covers both high-dimensional linear regression and nonparametric sparse additive modeling with smooth components. Our algorithmic framework consists of approximate and exact algorithms. The approximate algorithms are based on coordinate descent and local search, with runtimes comparable to popular sparse learning algorithms. Our exact algorithm is based on a standalone branch-and-bound (BnB) framework, which can solve the associated mixed integer programming (MIP) problem to certified optimality. By exploiting the problem structure, our custom BnB algorithm can solve to optimality problem instances with $5 \times 10^6$ features and $10^3$ observations in minutes to hours -- over $1000$ times larger than what is currently possible using state-of-the-art commercial MIP solvers. We also explore statistical properties of the $\ell_0$-based estimators. We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, that our proposed estimators have an edge over popular group-sparse estimators in terms of statistical performance in various regimes. We provide an open-source implementation of our proposed framework.
Unsupervised low-rank representations for speech emotion recognition
Authors: Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Efthymios Tzinis, Nikolaos Ellinas, Theodoros Giannakopoulos, Alexandros Potamianos
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Emotion Recognition, General Classification, Speech Emotion Recognition

We examine the use of linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction algorithms for extracting low-rank feature representations for speech emotion recognition. Two feature sets are used, one based on low-level descriptors and their aggregations (IS10) and one modeling recurrence dynamics of speech (RQA), as well as their fusion. We report speech emotion recognition (SER) results for learned representations on two databases using different classification methods. Classification with low-dimensional representations yields performance improvement in a variety of settings. This indicates that dimensionality reduction is an effective way to combat the curse of dimensionality for SER. Visualization of features in two dimensions provides insight into discriminatory abilities of reduced feature sets.
Exact and Approximate Hierarchical Clustering Using A*
Authors: Craig S. Greenberg, Sebastian Macaluso, Nicholas Monath, Avinava Dubey, Patrick Flaherty, Manzil Zaheer, Amr Ahmed, Kyle Cranmer, Andrew McCallum
Date: 2021-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Combinatorial Optimization

Hierarchical clustering is a critical task in numerous domains. Many approaches are based on heuristics and the properties of the resulting clusterings are studied post hoc. However, in several applications, there is a natural cost function that can be used to characterize the quality of the clustering. In those cases, hierarchical clustering can be seen as a combinatorial optimization problem. To that end, we introduce a new approach based on A* search. We overcome the prohibitively large search space by combining A* with a novel \emph{trellis} data structure. This combination results in an exact algorithm that scales beyond previous state of the art, from a search space with $10^{12}$ trees to $10^{15}$ trees, and an approximate algorithm that improves over baselines, even in enormous search spaces that contain more than $10^{1000}$ trees. We empirically demonstrate that our method achieves substantially higher quality results than baselines for a particle physics use case and other clustering benchmarks. We describe how our method provides significantly improved theoretical bounds on the time and space complexity of A* for clustering.