pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Event-guided Deblurring of Unknown Exposure Time Videos
Authors: Taewoo Kim, Jeongmin Lee, Lin Wang, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring

Motion deblurring is a highly ill-posed problem due to the loss of motion information in the blur degradation process. Since event cameras can capture apparent motion with a high temporal resolution, several attempts have explored the potential of events for guiding deblurring. These methods generally assume that the exposure time is the same as the reciprocal of the video frame rate. However, this is not true in real situations, and the exposure time might be unknown and dynamically varies depending on the video shooting environment(e.g., illumination condition). In this paper, we address the event-guided motion deblurring assuming dynamically variable unknown exposure time of the frame-based camera. To this end, we first derive a new formulation for event-guided motion deblurring by considering the exposure and readout time in the video frame acquisition process. We then propose a novel end-to-end learning framework for event-guided motion deblurring. In particular, we design a novel Exposure Time-based Event Selection(ETES) module to selectively use event features by estimating the cross-modal correlation between the features from blurred frames and the events. Moreover, we propose a feature fusion module to fuse the selected features from events and blur frames effectively. We conduct extensive experiments on various datasets and demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Exploring Latent Dimensions of Crowd-sourced Creativity
Authors: Umut Kocasari, Alperen Bag, Efehan Atici, Pinar Yanardag
Date: 2021-12-13 00:00:00

Recently, the discovery of interpretable directions in the latent spaces of pre-trained GANs has become a popular topic. While existing works mostly consider directions for semantic image manipulations, we focus on an abstract property: creativity. Can we manipulate an image to be more or less creative? We build our work on the largest AI-based creativity platform, Artbreeder, where users can generate images using pre-trained GAN models. We explore the latent dimensions of images generated on this platform and present a novel framework for manipulating images to make them more creative. Our code and dataset are available at http://github.com/catlab-team/latentcreative.
Learning Connectivity-Maximizing Network Configurations
Authors: Daniel Mox, Vijay Kumar, Alejandro Ribeiro
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Unity

In this letter we propose a data-driven approach to optimizing the algebraic connectivity of a team of robots. While a considerable amount of research has been devoted to this problem, we lack a method that scales in a manner suitable for online applications for more than a handful of agents. To that end, we propose a supervised learning approach with a convolutional neural network (CNN) that learns to place communication agents from an expert that uses an optimization-based strategy. We demonstrate the performance of our CNN on canonical line and ring topologies, 105k randomly generated test cases, and larger teams not seen during training. We also show how our system can be applied to dynamic robot teams through a Unity-based simulation. After training, our system produces connected configurations over an order of magnitude faster than the optimization-based scheme for teams of 10-20 agents.
On the Use of External Data for Spoken Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Ankita Pasad, Felix Wu, Suwon Shon, Karen Livescu, Kyu J. Han
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding, Transfer Learning

Spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks involve mapping from speech audio signals to semantic labels. Given the complexity of such tasks, good performance might be expected to require large labeled datasets, which are difficult to collect for each new task and domain. However, recent advances in self-supervised speech representations have made it feasible to consider learning SLU models with limited labeled data. In this work we focus on low-resource spoken named entity recognition (NER) and address the question: Beyond self-supervised pre-training, how can we use external speech and/or text data that are not annotated for the task? We draw on a variety of approaches, including self-training, knowledge distillation, and transfer learning, and consider their applicability to both end-to-end models and pipeline (speech recognition followed by text NER model) approaches. We find that several of these approaches improve performance in resource-constrained settings beyond the benefits from pre-trained representations alone. Compared to prior work, we find improved F1 scores of up to 16%. While the best baseline model is a pipeline approach, the best performance when using external data is ultimately achieved by an end-to-end model. We provide detailed comparisons and analyses, showing for example that end-to-end models are able to focus on the more NER-specific words.
Training Multi-Layer Over-Parametrized Neural Network in Subquadratic Time
Authors: Zhao Song, Lichen Zhang, Ruizhe Zhang
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00

We consider the problem of training a multi-layer over-parametrized neural network to minimize the empirical risk induced by a loss function. In the typical setting of over-parametrization, the network width $m$ is much larger than the data dimension $d$ and the number of training samples $n$ ($m=\mathrm{poly}(n,d)$), which induces a prohibitive large weight matrix $W\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times m}$ per layer. Naively, one has to pay $O(m^2)$ time to read the weight matrix and evaluate the neural network function in both forward and backward computation. In this work, we show how to reduce the training cost per iteration. Specifically, we propose a framework that uses $m^2$ cost only in the initialization phase and achieves \emph{a truly subquadratic cost per iteration} in terms of $m$, i.e., $m^{2-\Omega(1)}$ per iteration. Our result has implications beyond standard over-parametrization theory, as it can be viewed as designing an efficient data structure on top of a pre-trained large model to further speed up the fine-tuning process, a core procedure to deploy large language models (LLM).
Robust Graph Neural Networks via Probabilistic Lipschitz Constraints
Authors: Raghu Arghal, Eric Lei, Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently been demonstrated to perform well on a variety of network-based tasks such as decentralized control and resource allocation, and provide computationally efficient methods for these tasks which have traditionally been challenging in that regard. However, like many neural-network based systems, GNNs are susceptible to shifts and perturbations on their inputs, which can include both node attributes and graph structure. In order to make them more useful for real-world applications, it is important to ensure their robustness post-deployment. Motivated by controlling the Lipschitz constant of GNN filters with respect to the node attributes, we propose to constrain the frequency response of the GNN's filter banks. We extend this formulation to the dynamic graph setting using a continuous frequency response constraint, and solve a relaxed variant of the problem via the scenario approach. This allows for the use of the same computationally efficient algorithm on sampled constraints, which provides PAC-style guarantees on the stability of the GNN using results in scenario optimization. We also highlight an important connection between this setup and GNN stability to graph perturbations, and provide experimental results which demonstrate the efficacy and broadness of our approach.
Multi-treatment Effect Estimation from Biomedical Data
Authors: Raquel Aoki, Yizhou Chen, Martin Ester
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

This work proposes the M3E2, a multi-task learning neural network model to estimate the effect of multiple treatments. In contrast to existing methods, M3E2 can handle multiple treatment effects applied simultaneously to the same unit, continuous and binary treatments, and many covariates. We compared M3E2 with three baselines in three synthetic benchmark datasets: two with multiple treatments and one with one treatment. Our analysis showed that our method has superior performance, making more assertive estimations of the multiple treatment effects.
Epigenomic language models powered by Cerebras
Authors: Meredith V. Trotter, Cuong Q. Nguyen, Stephen Young, Rob T. Woodruff, Kim M. Branson
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Transfer Learning

Large scale self-supervised pre-training of Transformer language models has advanced the field of Natural Language Processing and shown promise in cross-application to the biological `languages' of proteins and DNA. Learning effective representations of DNA sequences using large genomic sequence corpuses may accelerate the development of models of gene regulation and function through transfer learning. However, to accurately model cell type-specific gene regulation and function, it is necessary to consider not only the information contained in DNA nucleotide sequences, which is mostly invariant between cell types, but also how the local chemical and structural `epigenetic state' of chromosomes varies between cell types. Here, we introduce a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model that learns representations based on both DNA sequence and paired epigenetic state inputs, which we call Epigenomic BERT (or EBERT). We pre-train EBERT with a masked language model objective across the entire human genome and across 127 cell types. Training this complex model with a previously prohibitively large dataset was made possible for the first time by a partnership with Cerebras Systems, whose CS-1 system powered all pre-training experiments. We show EBERT's transfer learning potential by demonstrating strong performance on a cell type-specific transcription factor binding prediction task. Our fine-tuned model exceeds state of the art performance on 4 of 13 evaluation datasets from ENCODE-DREAM benchmarks and earns an overall rank of 3rd on the challenge leaderboard. We explore how the inclusion of epigenetic data and task specific feature augmentation impact transfer learning performance.
Anti-Money Laundering Alert Optimization Using Machine Learning with Graphs
Authors: Ahmad Naser Eddin, Jacopo Bono, David Aparício, David Polido, João Tiago Ascensão, Pedro Bizarro, Pedro Ribeiro
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Money laundering is a global problem that concerns legitimizing proceeds from serious felonies (1.7-4 trillion euros annually) such as drug dealing, human trafficking, or corruption. The anti-money laundering systems deployed by financial institutions typically comprise rules aligned with regulatory frameworks. Human investigators review the alerts and report suspicious cases. Such systems suffer from high false-positive rates, undermining their effectiveness and resulting in high operational costs. We propose a machine learning triage model, which complements the rule-based system and learns to predict the risk of an alert accurately. Our model uses both entity-centric engineered features and attributes characterizing inter-entity relations in the form of graph-based features. We leverage time windows to construct the dynamic graph, optimizing for time and space efficiency. We validate our model on a real-world banking dataset and show how the triage model can reduce the number of false positives by 80% while detecting over 90% of true positives. In this way, our model can significantly improve anti-money laundering operations.
Pruning Coherent Integrated Photonic Neural Networks Using the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
Authors: Sanmitra Banerjee, Mahdi Nikdast, Sudeep Pasricha, Krishnendu Chakrabarty
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00

Singular-value-decomposition-based coherent integrated photonic neural networks (SC-IPNNs) have a large footprint, suffer from high static power consumption for training and inference, and cannot be pruned using conventional DNN pruning techniques. We leverage the lottery ticket hypothesis to propose the first hardware-aware pruning method for SC-IPNNs that alleviates these challenges by minimizing the number of weight parameters. We prune a multi-layer perceptron-based SC-IPNN and show that up to 89% of the phase angles, which correspond to weight parameters in SC-IPNNs, can be pruned with a negligible accuracy loss (smaller than 5%) while reducing the static power consumption by up to 86%.
Triangulation candidates for Bayesian optimization
Authors: Robert B. Gramacy, Annie Sauer, Nathan Wycoff
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Bayesian optimization involves "inner optimization" over a new-data acquisition criterion which is non-convex/highly multi-modal, may be non-differentiable, or may otherwise thwart local numerical optimizers. In such cases it is common to replace continuous search with a discrete one over random candidates. Here we propose using candidates based on a Delaunay triangulation of the existing input design. We detail the construction of these "tricands" and demonstrate empirically how they outperform both numerically optimized acquisitions and random candidate-based alternatives, and are well-suited for hybrid schemes, on benchmark synthetic and real simulation experiments.
Measuring Fairness with Biased Rulers: A Survey on Quantifying Biases in Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Pieter Delobelle, Ewoenam Kwaku Tokpo, Toon Calders, Bettina Berendt
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness, Survey

An increasing awareness of biased patterns in natural language processing resources, like BERT, has motivated many metrics to quantify `bias' and `fairness'. But comparing the results of different metrics and the works that evaluate with such metrics remains difficult, if not outright impossible. We survey the existing literature on fairness metrics for pretrained language models and experimentally evaluate compatibility, including both biases in language models as in their downstream tasks. We do this by a mixture of traditional literature survey and correlation analysis, as well as by running empirical evaluations. We find that many metrics are not compatible and highly depend on (i) templates, (ii) attribute and target seeds and (iii) the choice of embeddings. These results indicate that fairness or bias evaluation remains challenging for contextualized language models, if not at least highly subjective. To improve future comparisons and fairness evaluations, we recommend avoiding embedding-based metrics and focusing on fairness evaluations in downstream tasks.
Bayesian Learning of Play Styles in Multiplayer Video Games
Authors: Aline Normoyle, Shane T. Jensen
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, regression

The complexity of game play in online multiplayer games has generated strong interest in modeling the different play styles or strategies used by players for success. We develop a hierarchical Bayesian regression approach for the online multiplayer game Battlefield 3 where performance is modeled as a function of the roles, game type, and map taken on by that player in each of their matches. We use a Dirichlet process prior that enables the clustering of players that have similar player-specific coefficients in our regression model, which allows us to discover common play styles amongst our sample of Battlefield 3 players. This Bayesian semi-parametric clustering approach has several advantages: the number of common play styles do not need to be specified, players can move between multiple clusters, and the resulting groupings often have a straight-forward interpretations. We examine the most common play styles among Battlefield 3 players in detail and find groups of players that exhibit overall high performance, as well as groupings of players that perform particularly well in specific game types, maps and roles. We are also able to differentiate between players that are stable members of a particular play style from hybrid players that exhibit multiple play styles across their matches. Modeling this landscape of different play styles will aid game developers in developing specialized tutorials for new participants as well as improving the construction of complementary teams in their online matching queues.
Graph Kernel Neural Networks
Authors: Luca Cosmo, Giorgia Minello, Alessandro Bicciato, Michael Bronstein, Emanuele Rodolà, Luca Rossi, Andrea Torsello
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification

The convolution operator at the core of many modern neural architectures can effectively be seen as performing a dot product between an input matrix and a filter. While this is readily applicable to data such as images, which can be represented as regular grids in the Euclidean space, extending the convolution operator to work on graphs proves more challenging, due to their irregular structure. In this paper, we propose to use graph kernels, i.e. kernel functions that compute an inner product on graphs, to extend the standard convolution operator to the graph domain. This allows us to define an entirely structural model that does not require computing the embedding of the input graph. Our architecture allows to plug-in any type of graph kernels and has the added benefit of providing some interpretability in terms of the structural masks that are learned during the training process, similarly to what happens for convolutional masks in traditional convolutional neural networks. We perform an extensive ablation study to investigate the model hyper-parameters' impact and show that our model achieves competitive performance on standard graph classification and regression datasets.
Exploring the Limits of Natural Language Inference Based Setup for Few-Shot Intent Detection
Authors: Ayush Kumar, Vijit Malik, Jithendra Vepa
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Generalized Few-Shot Learning, Goal-Oriented Dialog, Intent Detection, Natural Language Inference, Natural Language Understanding, Spoken Language Understanding

Intent Detection is one of the core tasks of dialog systems. Few-shot Intent Detection is challenging due to limited number of annotated utterances for novel classes. Generalized Few-shot intent detection is more realistic but challenging setup which aims to discriminate the joint label space of both novel intents which have few examples each and existing intents consisting of enough labeled data. Large label spaces and fewer number of shots increase the complexity of the task. In this work, we employ a simple and effective method based on Natural Language Inference that leverages the semantics in the class-label names to learn and predict the novel classes. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on 1-shot and 5-shot intent detection task with gains ranging from 2-8\% points in F1 score on four benchmark datasets. Our method also outperforms existing approaches on a more practical setting of generalized few-shot intent detection with gains up to 20% F1 score. We show that the suggested approach performs well across single and multi domain datasets with the number of class labels from as few as 7 to as high as 150.
Branching Time Active Inference with Bayesian Filtering
Authors: Théophile Champion, Marek Grześ, Howard Bowman
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00

Branching Time Active Inference (Champion et al., 2021b,a) is a framework proposing to look at planning as a form of Bayesian model expansion. Its root can be found in Active Inference (Friston et al., 2016; Da Costa et al., 2020; Champion et al., 2021c), a neuroscientific framework widely used for brain modelling, as well as in Monte Carlo Tree Search (Browne et al., 2012), a method broadly applied in the Reinforcement Learning literature. Up to now, the inference of the latent variables was carried out by taking advantage of the flexibility offered by Variational Message Passing (Winn and Bishop, 2005), an iterative process that can be understood as sending messages along the edges of a factor graph (Forney, 2001). In this paper, we harness the efficiency of an alternative method for inference called Bayesian Filtering (Fox et al., 2003), which does not require the iteration of the update equations until convergence of the Variational Free Energy. Instead, this scheme alternates between two phases: integration of evidence and prediction of future states. Both of those phases can be performed efficiently and this provides a seventy times speed up over the state-of-the-art.
Robustifying automatic speech recognition by extracting slowly varying features
Authors: Matías Pizarro, Dorothea Kolossa, Asja Fischer
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In the past few years, it has been shown that deep learning systems are highly vulnerable under attacks with adversarial examples. Neural-network-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are no exception. Targeted and untargeted attacks can modify an audio input signal in such a way that humans still recognise the same words, while ASR systems are steered to predict a different transcription. In this paper, we propose a defense mechanism against targeted adversarial attacks consisting in removing fast-changing features from the audio signals, either by applying slow feature analysis, a low-pass filter, or both, before feeding the input to the ASR system. We perform an empirical analysis of hybrid ASR models trained on data pre-processed in such a way. While the resulting models perform quite well on benign data, they are significantly more robust against targeted adversarial attacks: Our final, proposed model shows a performance on clean data similar to the baseline model, while being more than four times more robust.
SCORE: Approximating Curvature Information under Self-Concordant Regularization
Authors: Adeyemi D. Adeoye, Alberto Bemporad
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Second-order methods

Optimization problems that include regularization functions in their objectives are regularly solved in many applications. When one seeks second-order methods for such problems, it may be desirable to exploit specific properties of some of these regularization functions when accounting for curvature information in the solution steps to speed up convergence. In this paper, we propose the SCORE (self-concordant regularization) framework for unconstrained minimization problems which incorporates second-order information in the Newton-decrement framework for convex optimization. We propose the generalized Gauss-Newton with Self-Concordant Regularization (GGN-SCORE) algorithm that updates the minimization variables each time it receives a new input batch. The proposed algorithm exploits the structure of the second-order information in the Hessian matrix, thereby reducing computational overhead. GGN-SCORE demonstrates how to speed up convergence while also improving model generalization for problems that involve regularized minimization under the proposed SCORE framework. Numerical experiments show the efficiency of our method and its fast convergence, which compare favorably against baseline first-order and quasi-Newton methods. Additional experiments involving non-convex (overparameterized) neural network training problems show that the proposed method is promising for non-convex optimization.