pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Transformations in Learned Image Compression from a Modulation Perspective
Authors: Youneng Bao, Fangyang Meng, Wen Tan, Chao Li, Yonghong Tian, Yongsheng Liang
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Quantization

In this paper, a unified transformation method in learned image compression(LIC) is proposed from the perspective of modulation. Firstly, the quantization in LIC is considered as a generalized channel with additive uniform noise. Moreover, the LIC is interpreted as a particular communication system according to the consistency in structures and optimization objectives. Thus, the technology of communication systems can be applied to guide the design of modules in LIC. Furthermore, a unified transform method based on signal modulation (TSM) is defined. In the view of TSM, the existing transformation methods are mathematically reduced to a linear modulation. A series of transformation methods, e.g. TPM and TJM, are obtained by extending to nonlinear modulation. The experimental results on various datasets and backbone architectures verify that the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. More importantly, it further confirms the feasibility of guiding LIC design from a communication perspective. For example, when backbone architecture is hyperprior combining context model, our method achieves 3.52$\%$ BD-rate reduction over GDN on Kodak dataset without increasing complexity.
Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback
Authors: Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll L. Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, John Schulman, Jacob Hilton, Fraser Kelton, Luke Miller, Maddie Simens, Amanda Askell, Peter Welinder, Paul Christiano, Jan Leike, Ryan Lowe
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user's intent. For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user. In other words, these models are not aligned with their users. In this paper, we show an avenue for aligning language models with user intent on a wide range of tasks by fine-tuning with human feedback. Starting with a set of labeler-written prompts and prompts submitted through the OpenAI API, we collect a dataset of labeler demonstrations of the desired model behavior, which we use to fine-tune GPT-3 using supervised learning. We then collect a dataset of rankings of model outputs, which we use to further fine-tune this supervised model using reinforcement learning from human feedback. We call the resulting models InstructGPT. In human evaluations on our prompt distribution, outputs from the 1.3B parameter InstructGPT model are preferred to outputs from the 175B GPT-3, despite having 100x fewer parameters. Moreover, InstructGPT models show improvements in truthfulness and reductions in toxic output generation while having minimal performance regressions on public NLP datasets. Even though InstructGPT still makes simple mistakes, our results show that fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.
Time-aware Graph Neural Networks for Entity Alignment between Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Chengjin Xu, Fenglong Su, Jens Lehmann
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Alignment, Knowledge Graphs

Entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entity pairs between different knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, the availability of temporal KGs (TKGs) that contain time information created the need for reasoning over time in such TKGs. Existing embedding-based entity alignment approaches disregard time information that commonly exists in many large-scale KGs, leaving much room for improvement. In this paper, we focus on the task of aligning entity pairs between TKGs and propose a novel Time-aware Entity Alignment approach based on Graph Neural Networks (TEA-GNN). We embed entities, relations and timestamps of different KGs into a vector space and use GNNs to learn entity representations. To incorporate both relation and time information into the GNN structure of our model, we use a time-aware attention mechanism which assigns different weights to different nodes with orthogonal transformation matrices computed from embeddings of the relevant relations and timestamps in a neighborhood. Experimental results on multiple real-world TKG datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods due to the inclusion of time information.
3D endoscopic depth estimation using 3D surface-aware constraints
Authors: Shang Zhao, Ce Wang, Qiyuan Wang, Yanzhe Liu, S Kevin Zhou
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Image Reconstruction, valid

Robotic-assisted surgery allows surgeons to conduct precise surgical operations with stereo vision and flexible motor control. However, the lack of 3D spatial perception limits situational awareness during procedures and hinders mastering surgical skills in the narrow abdominal space. Depth estimation, as a representative perception task, is typically defined as an image reconstruction problem. In this work, we show that depth estimation can be reformed from a 3D surface perspective. We propose a loss function for depth estimation that integrates the surface-aware constraints, leading to a faster and better convergence with the valid information from spatial information. In addition, camera parameters are incorporated into the training pipeline to increase the control and transparency of the depth estimation. We also integrate a specularity removal module to recover more buried image information. Quantitative experimental results on endoscopic datasets and user studies with medical professionals demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Abuse and Fraud Detection in Streaming Services Using Heuristic-Aware Machine Learning
Authors: Soheil Esmaeilzadeh, Negin Salajegheh, Amir Ziai, Jeff Boote
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Abuse Detection, Anomaly Detection, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Binary Classification, Classification, Feature Importance, Fraud Detection, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, One-Class Classification, Supervised Anomaly Detection

This work presents a fraud and abuse detection framework for streaming services by modeling user streaming behavior. The goal is to discover anomalous and suspicious incidents and scale the investigation efforts by creating models that characterize the user behavior. We study the use of semi-supervised as well as supervised approaches for anomaly detection. In the semi-supervised approach, by leveraging only a set of authenticated anomaly-free data samples, we show the use of one-class classification algorithms as well as autoencoder deep neural networks for anomaly detection. In the supervised anomaly detection task, we present a so-called heuristic-aware data labeling strategy for creating labeled data samples. We carry out binary classification as well as multi-class multi-label classification tasks for not only detecting the anomalous samples but also identifying the underlying anomaly behavior(s) associated with each one. Finally, using a systematic feature importance study we provide insights into the underlying set of features that characterize different streaming fraud categories. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to use machine learning methods for fraud and abuse detection in real-world scale streaming services.
Detecting Offensive Language on Social Networks: An End-to-end Detection Method based on Graph Attention Networks
Authors: Zhenxiong Miao, Xingshu Chen, Haizhou Wang, Rui Tang, Zhou Yang, Wenyi Tang
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention

The pervasiveness of offensive language on the social network has caused adverse effects on society, such as abusive behavior online. It is urgent to detect offensive language and curb its spread. Existing research shows that methods with community structure features effectively improve the performance of offensive language detection. However, the existing models deal with community structure independently, which seriously affects the effectiveness of detection models. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end method based on community structure and text features for offensive language detection (CT-OLD). Specifically, the community structure features are directly captured by the graph attention network layer, and the text embeddings are taken from the last hidden layer of BERT. Attention mechanisms and position encoding are used to fuse these features. Meanwhile, we add user opinion to the community structure for representing user features. The user opinion is represented by user historical behavior information, which outperforms that represented by text information. Besides the above point, the distribution of users and tweets is unbalanced in the popular datasets, which limits the generalization ability of the model. To address this issue, we construct and release a dataset with reasonable user distribution. Our method outperforms baselines with the F1 score of 89.94%. The results show that the end-to-end model effectively learns the potential information of community structure and text, and user historical behavior information is more suitable for user opinion representation.
GraspARL: Dynamic Grasping via Adversarial Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Tianhao Wu, Fangwei Zhong, Yiran Geng, Hongchen Wang, Yongjian Zhu, Yizhou Wang, Hao Dong
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Grasping moving objects, such as goods on a belt or living animals, is an important but challenging task in robotics. Conventional approaches rely on a set of manually defined object motion patterns for training, resulting in poor generalization to unseen object trajectories. In this work, we introduce an adversarial reinforcement learning framework for dynamic grasping, namely GraspARL. To be specific. we formulate the dynamic grasping problem as a 'move-and-grasp' game, where the robot is to pick up the object on the mover and the adversarial mover is to find a path to escape it. Hence, the two agents play a min-max game and are trained by reinforcement learning. In this way, the mover can auto-generate diverse moving trajectories while training. And the robot trained with the adversarial trajectories can generalize to various motion patterns. Empirical results on the simulator and real-world scenario demonstrate the effectiveness of each and good generalization of our method.
In the Service of Online Order: Tackling Cyber-Bullying with Machine Learning and Affect Analysis
Authors: Michal Ptaszynski, Pawel Dybala, Tatsuaki Matsuba, Fumito Masui, Rafal Rzepka, Kenji Araki, Yoshio Momouchi
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

One of the burning problems lately in Japan has been cyber-bullying, or slandering and bullying people online. The problem has been especially noticed on unofficial Web sites of Japanese schools. Volunteers consisting of school personnel and PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) members have started Online Patrol to spot malicious contents within Web forums and blogs. In practise, Online Patrol assumes reading through the whole Web contents, which is a task difficult to perform manually. With this paper we introduce a research intended to help PTA members perform Online Patrol more efficiently. We aim to develop a set of tools that can automatically detect malicious entries and report them to PTA members. First, we collected cyber-bullying data from unofficial school Web sites. Then we performed analysis of this data in two ways. Firstly, we analysed the entries with a multifaceted affect analysis system in order to find distinctive features for cyber-bullying and apply them to a machine learning classifier. Secondly, we applied a SVM based machine learning method to train a classifier for detection of cyber-bullying. The system was able to classify cyber-bullying entries with 88.2% of balanced F-score.
Towards Benchmarking and Evaluating Deepfake Detection
Authors: Chenhao Lin, Jingyi Deng, Pengbin Hu, Chao Shen, Qian Wang, Qi Li
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

Deepfake detection automatically recognizes the manipulated medias through the analysis of the difference between manipulated and non-altered videos. It is natural to ask which are the top performers among the existing deepfake detection approaches to identify promising research directions and provide practical guidance. Unfortunately, it's difficult to conduct a sound benchmarking comparison of existing detection approaches using the results in the literature because evaluation conditions are inconsistent across studies. Our objective is to establish a comprehensive and consistent benchmark, to develop a repeatable evaluation procedure, and to measure the performance of a range of detection approaches so that the results can be compared soundly. A challenging dataset consisting of the manipulated samples generated by more than 13 different methods has been collected, and 11 popular detection approaches (9 algorithms) from the existing literature have been implemented and evaluated with 6 fair-minded and practical evaluation metrics. Finally, 92 models have been trained and 644 experiments have been performed for the evaluation. The results along with the shared data and evaluation methodology constitute a benchmark for comparing deepfake detection approaches and measuring progress.
Teaching Robots to Span the Space of Functional Expressive Motion
Authors: Arjun Sripathy, Andreea Bobu, Zhongyu Li, Koushil Sreenath, Daniel S. Brown, Anca D. Dragan
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00

Our goal is to enable robots to perform functional tasks in emotive ways, be it in response to their users' emotional states, or expressive of their confidence levels. Prior work has proposed learning independent cost functions from user feedback for each target emotion, so that the robot may optimize it alongside task and environment specific objectives for any situation it encounters. However, this approach is inefficient when modeling multiple emotions and unable to generalize to new ones. In this work, we leverage the fact that emotions are not independent of each other: they are related through a latent space of Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD). Our key idea is to learn a model for how trajectories map onto VAD with user labels. Considering the distance between a trajectory's mapping and a target VAD allows this single model to represent cost functions for all emotions. As a result 1) all user feedback can contribute to learning about every emotion; 2) the robot can generate trajectories for any emotion in the space instead of only a few predefined ones; and 3) the robot can respond emotively to user-generated natural language by mapping it to a target VAD. We introduce a method that interactively learns to map trajectories to this latent space and test it in simulation and in a user study. In experiments, we use a simple vacuum robot as well as the Cassie biped.
An Efficient Subpopulation-based Membership Inference Attack
Authors: Shahbaz Rezaei, Xin Liu
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Inference Attack, Membership Inference Attack

Membership inference attacks allow a malicious entity to predict whether a sample is used during training of a victim model or not. State-of-the-art membership inference attacks have shown to achieve good accuracy which poses a great privacy threat. However, majority of SOTA attacks require training dozens to hundreds of shadow models to accurately infer membership. This huge computation cost raises questions about practicality of these attacks on deep models. In this paper, we introduce a fundamentally different MI attack approach which obviates the need to train hundreds of shadow models. Simply put, we compare the victim model output on the target sample versus the samples from the same subpopulation (i.e., semantically similar samples), instead of comparing it with the output of hundreds of shadow models. The intuition is that the model response should not be significantly different between the target sample and its subpopulation if it was not a training sample. In cases where subpopulation samples are not available to the attacker, we show that training only a single generative model can fulfill the requirement. Hence, we achieve the state-of-the-art membership inference accuracy while significantly reducing the training computation cost.
User-Level Membership Inference Attack against Metric Embedding Learning
Authors: Guoyao Li, Shahbaz Rezaei, Xin Liu
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Inference Attack, Membership Inference Attack, Person Re-Identification

Membership inference (MI) determines if a sample was part of a victim model training set. Recent development of MI attacks focus on record-level membership inference which limits their application in many real-world scenarios. For example, in the person re-identification task, the attacker (or investigator) is interested in determining if a user's images have been used during training or not. However, the exact training images might not be accessible to the attacker. In this paper, we develop a user-level MI attack where the goal is to find if any sample from the target user has been used during training even when no exact training sample is available to the attacker. We focus on metric embedding learning due to its dominance in person re-identification, where user-level MI attack is more sensible. We conduct an extensive evaluation on several datasets and show that our approach achieves high accuracy on user-level MI task.
Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning
Authors: Weixin Liang, Yuhui Zhang, Yongchan Kwon, Serena Yeung, James Zou
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Fairness, Representation Learning, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

We present modality gap, an intriguing geometric phenomenon of the representation space of multi-modal models. Specifically, we show that different data modalities (e.g. images and text) are embedded at arm's length in their shared representation in multi-modal models such as CLIP. Our systematic analysis demonstrates that this gap is caused by a combination of model initialization and contrastive learning optimization. In model initialization, we show empirically and theoretically that the representation of a common deep neural network is restricted to a narrow cone. As a consequence, in a multi-modal model with two encoders, the representations of the two modalities are clearly apart when the model is initialized. During optimization, contrastive learning keeps the different modalities separate by a certain distance, which is influenced by the temperature parameter in the loss function. Our experiments further demonstrate that varying the modality gap distance has a significant impact in improving the model's downstream zero-shot classification performance and fairness. Our code and data are available at https://modalitygap.readthedocs.io/
Interventions, Where and How? Experimental Design for Causal Models at Scale
Authors: Panagiotis Tigas, Yashas Annadani, Andrew Jesson, Bernhard Schölkopf, Yarin Gal, Stefan Bauer
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Experimental Design

Causal discovery from observational and interventional data is challenging due to limited data and non-identifiability: factors that introduce uncertainty in estimating the underlying structural causal model (SCM). Selecting experiments (interventions) based on the uncertainty arising from both factors can expedite the identification of the SCM. Existing methods in experimental design for causal discovery from limited data either rely on linear assumptions for the SCM or select only the intervention target. This work incorporates recent advances in Bayesian causal discovery into the Bayesian optimal experimental design framework, allowing for active causal discovery of large, nonlinear SCMs while selecting both the interventional target and the value. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method on synthetic graphs (Erdos-R\`enyi, Scale Free) for both linear and nonlinear SCMs as well as on the \emph{in-silico} single-cell gene regulatory network dataset, DREAM.
DIME: Fine-grained Interpretations of Multimodal Models via Disentangled Local Explanations
Authors: Yiwei Lyu, Paul Pu Liang, Zihao Deng, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Disentanglement, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The ability for a human to understand an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model's decision-making process is critical in enabling stakeholders to visualize model behavior, perform model debugging, promote trust in AI models, and assist in collaborative human-AI decision-making. As a result, the research fields of interpretable and explainable AI have gained traction within AI communities as well as interdisciplinary scientists seeking to apply AI in their subject areas. In this paper, we focus on advancing the state-of-the-art in interpreting multimodal models - a class of machine learning methods that tackle core challenges in representing and capturing interactions between heterogeneous data sources such as images, text, audio, and time-series data. Multimodal models have proliferated numerous real-world applications across healthcare, robotics, multimedia, affective computing, and human-computer interaction. By performing model disentanglement into unimodal contributions (UC) and multimodal interactions (MI), our proposed approach, DIME, enables accurate and fine-grained analysis of multimodal models while maintaining generality across arbitrary modalities, model architectures, and tasks. Through a comprehensive suite of experiments on both synthetic and real-world multimodal tasks, we show that DIME generates accurate disentangled explanations, helps users of multimodal models gain a deeper understanding of model behavior, and presents a step towards debugging and improving these models for real-world deployment. Code for our experiments can be found at https://github.com/lvyiwei1/DIME.
Learning Time-optimized Path Tracking with or without Sensory Feedback
Authors: Jonas C. Kiemel, Torsten Kröger
Date: 2022-03-03 00:00:00

In this paper, we present a learning-based approach that allows a robot to quickly follow a reference path defined in joint space without exceeding limits on the position, velocity, acceleration and jerk of each robot joint. Contrary to offline methods for time-optimal path parameterization, the reference path can be changed during motion execution. In addition, our approach can utilize sensory feedback, for instance, to follow a reference path with a bipedal robot without losing balance. With our method, the robot is controlled by a neural network that is trained via reinforcement learning using data generated by a physics simulator. From a mathematical perspective, the problem of tracking a reference path in a time-optimized manner is formalized as a Markov decision process. Each state includes a fixed number of waypoints specifying the next part of the reference path. The action space is designed in such a way that all resulting motions comply with the specified kinematic joint limits. The reward function finally reflects the trade-off between the execution time, the deviation from the desired reference path and optional additional objectives like balancing. We evaluate our approach with and without additional objectives and show that time-optimized path tracking can be successfully learned for both industrial and humanoid robots. In addition, we demonstrate that networks trained in simulation can be successfully transferred to a real robot.