pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Revocable Deep Reinforcement Learning with Affinity Regularization for Outlier-Robust Graph Matching
Authors: Chang Liu, Zetian Jiang, Runzhong Wang, Junchi Yan, Lingxiao Huang, Pinyan Lu
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Graph Matching, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Graph matching (GM) has been a building block in various areas including computer vision and pattern recognition. Despite recent impressive progress, existing deep GM methods often have obvious difficulty in handling outliers, which are ubiquitous in practice. We propose a deep reinforcement learning based approach RGM, whose sequential node matching scheme naturally fits the strategy for selective inlier matching against outliers. A revocable action framework is devised to improve the agent's flexibility against the complex constrained GM. Moreover, we propose a quadratic approximation technique to regularize the affinity score, in the presence of outliers. As such, the agent can finish inlier matching timely when the affinity score stops growing, for which otherwise an additional parameter i.e. the number of inliers is needed to avoid matching outliers. In this paper, we focus on learning the back-end solver under the most general form of GM: the Lawler's QAP, whose input is the affinity matrix. Especially, our approach can also boost existing GM methods that use such input. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate its performance regarding both accuracy and robustness.
Scenario-aware and Mutual-based approach for Multi-scenario Recommendation in E-Commerce
Authors: Yuting Chen, Yanshi Wang, Yabo Ni, An-Xiang Zeng, Lanfen Lin
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems (RSs) are essential for e-commerce platforms to help meet the enormous needs of users. How to capture user interests and make accurate recommendations for users in heterogeneous e-commerce scenarios is still a continuous research topic. However, most existing studies overlook the intrinsic association of the scenarios: the log data collected from platforms can be naturally divided into different scenarios (e.g., country, city, culture). We observed that the scenarios are heterogeneous because of the huge differences among them. Therefore, a unified model is difficult to effectively capture complex correlations (e.g., differences and similarities) between multiple scenarios thus seriously reducing the accuracy of recommendation results. In this paper, we target the problem of multi-scenario recommendation in e-commerce, and propose a novel recommendation model named Scenario-aware Mutual Learning (SAML) that leverages the differences and similarities between multiple scenarios. We first introduce scenario-aware feature representation, which transforms the embedding and attention modules to map the features into both global and scenario-specific subspace in parallel. Then we introduce an auxiliary network to model the shared knowledge across all scenarios, and use a multi-branch network to model differences among specific scenarios. Finally, we employ a novel mutual unit to adaptively learn the similarity between various scenarios and incorporate it into multi-branch network. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, empirical results show that SAML consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Adversarial Permutation Guided Node Representations for Link Prediction
Authors: Indradyumna Roy, Abir De, Soumen Chakrabarti
Date: 2020-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Prediction

After observing a snapshot of a social network, a link prediction (LP) algorithm identifies node pairs between which new edges will likely materialize in future. Most LP algorithms estimate a score for currently non-neighboring node pairs, and rank them by this score. Recent LP systems compute this score by comparing dense, low dimensional vector representations of nodes. Graph neural networks (GNNs), in particular graph convolutional networks (GCNs), are popular examples. For two nodes to be meaningfully compared, their embeddings should be indifferent to reordering of their neighbors. GNNs typically use simple, symmetric set aggregators to ensure this property, but this design decision has been shown to produce representations with limited expressive power. Sequence encoders are more expressive, but are permutation sensitive by design. Recent efforts to overcome this dilemma turn out to be unsatisfactory for LP tasks. In response, we propose PermGNN, which aggregates neighbor features using a recurrent, order-sensitive aggregator and directly minimizes an LP loss while it is `attacked' by adversarial generator of neighbor permutations. By design, PermGNN{} has more expressive power compared to earlier symmetric aggregators. Next, we devise an optimization framework to map PermGNN's node embeddings to a suitable locality-sensitive hash, which speeds up reporting the top-$K$ most likely edges for the LP task. Our experiments on diverse datasets show that \our outperforms several state-of-the-art link predictors by a significant margin, and can predict the most likely edges fast.
Visually Grounding Language Instruction for History-Dependent Manipulation
Authors: Hyemin Ahn, Obin Kwon, Kyoungdo Kim, Jaeyeon Jeong, Howoong Jun, Hongjung Lee, Dongheui Lee, Songhwai Oh
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00

This paper emphasizes the importance of a robot's ability to refer to its task history, especially when it executes a series of pick-and-place manipulations by following language instructions given one by one. The advantage of referring to the manipulation history can be categorized into two folds: (1) the language instructions omitting details but using expressions referring to the past can be interpreted, and (2) the visual information of objects occluded by previous manipulations can be inferred. For this, we introduce a history-dependent manipulation task which objective is to visually ground a series of language instructions for proper pick-and-place manipulations by referring to the past. We also suggest a relevant dataset and model which can be a baseline, and show that our model trained with the proposed dataset can also be applied to the real world based on the CycleGAN. Our dataset and code are publicly available on the project website: https://sites.google.com/view/history-dependent-manipulation.
An Embedding Learning Framework for Numerical Features in CTR Prediction
Authors: Huifeng Guo, Bo Chen, Ruiming Tang, Weinan Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Xiuqiang He
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Feature Engineering, Recommendation Systems

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is critical for industrial recommender systems, where most deep CTR models follow an Embedding \& Feature Interaction paradigm. However, the majority of methods focus on designing network architectures to better capture feature interactions while the feature embedding, especially for numerical features, has been overlooked. Existing approaches for numerical features are difficult to capture informative knowledge because of the low capacity or hard discretization based on the offline expertise feature engineering. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding learning framework for numerical features in CTR prediction (AutoDis) with high model capacity, end-to-end training and unique representation properties preserved. AutoDis consists of three core components: meta-embeddings, automatic discretization and aggregation. Specifically, we propose meta-embeddings for each numerical field to learn global knowledge from the perspective of field with a manageable number of parameters. Then the differentiable automatic discretization performs soft discretization and captures the correlations between the numerical features and meta-embeddings. Finally, distinctive and informative embeddings are learned via an aggregation function. Comprehensive experiments on two public and one industrial datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of AutoDis. Moreover, AutoDis has been deployed onto a mainstream advertising platform, where online A/B test demonstrates the improvement over the base model by 2.1% and 2.7% in terms of CTR and eCPM, respectively. In addition, the code of our framework is publicly available in MindSpore(https://gitee.com/mindspore/mindspore/tree/master/model_zoo/research/recommend/autodis).
Using Meta-Knowledge Mined from Identifiers to Improve Intent Recognition in Neuro-Symbolic Algorithms
Authors: Claudio Pinhanez, Paulo Cavalin, Victor Ribeiro, Heloisa Candello, Julio Nogima, Ana Appel, Mauro Pichiliani, Maira Gatti de Bayser, Melina Guerra, Henrique Ferreira, Gabriel Malfatti
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Intent Recognition

In this paper we explore the use of meta-knowledge embedded in intent identifiers to improve intent recognition in conversational systems. As evidenced by the analysis of thousands of real-world chatbots and in interviews with professional chatbot curators, developers and domain experts tend to organize the set of chatbot intents by identifying them using proto-taxonomies, i.e., meta-knowledge connecting high-level, symbolic concepts shared across different intents. By using neuro-symbolic algorithms able to incorporate such proto-taxonomies to expand intent representation, we show that such mined meta-knowledge can improve accuracy in intent recognition. In a dataset with intents and example utterances from hundreds of professional chatbots, we saw improvements of more than 10% in the equal error rate (EER) in almost a third of the chatbots when we apply those algorithms in comparison to a baseline of the same algorithms without the meta-knowledge. The meta-knowledge proved to be even more relevant in detecting out-of-scope utterances, decreasing the false acceptance rate (FAR) in more than 20\% in about half of the chatbots. The experiments demonstrate that such symbolic meta-knowledge structures can be effectively mined and used by neuro-symbolic algorithms, apparently by incorporating into the learning process higher-level structures of the problem being solved. Based on these results, we also discuss how the use of mined meta-knowledge can be an answer for the challenge of knowledge acquisition in neuro-symbolic algorithms.
An Assessment of the Usability of Machine Learning Based Tools for the Security Operations Center
Authors: Sean Oesch, Robert Bridges, Jared Smith, Justin Beaver, John Goodall, Kelly Huffer, Craig Miles, Dan Scofield
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Gartner, a large research and advisory company, anticipates that by 2024 80% of security operation centers (SOCs) will use machine learning (ML) based solutions to enhance their operations. In light of such widespread adoption, it is vital for the research community to identify and address usability concerns. This work presents the results of the first in situ usability assessment of ML-based tools. With the support of the US Navy, we leveraged the national cyber range, a large, air-gapped cyber testbed equipped with state-of-the-art network and user emulation capabilities, to study six US Naval SOC analysts' usage of two tools. Our analysis identified several serious usability issues, including multiple violations of established usability heuristics form user interface design. We also discovered that analysts lacked a clear mental model of how these tools generate scores, resulting in mistrust and/or misuse of the tools themselves. Surprisingly, we found no correlation between analysts' level of education or years of experience and their performance with either tool, suggesting that other factors such as prior background knowledge or personality play a significant role in ML-based tool usage. Our findings demonstrate that ML-based security tool vendors must put a renewed focus on working with analysts, both experienced and inexperienced, to ensure that their systems are usable and useful in real-world security operations settings.
AdjointBackMap: Reconstructing Effective Decision Hypersurfaces from CNN Layers Using Adjoint Operators
Authors: Qing Wan, Yoonsuck Choe
Date: 2020-12-16 00:00:00

There are several effective methods in explaining the inner workings of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, in general, finding the inverse of the function performed by CNNs as a whole is an ill-posed problem. In this paper, we propose a method based on adjoint operators to reconstruct, given an arbitrary unit in the CNN (except for the first convolutional layer), its effective hypersurface in the input space that replicates that unit's decision surface conditioned on a particular input image. Our results show that the hypersurface reconstructed this way, when multiplied by the original input image, would give nearly the exact output value of that unit. We find that the CNN unit's decision surface is largely conditioned on the input, and this may explain why adversarial inputs can effectively deceive CNNs.
A Differential Model of the Complex Cell
Authors: Miles Hansard, Radu Horaud
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: model

The receptive fields of simple cells in the visual cortex can be understood as linear filters. These filters can be modelled by Gabor functions, or by Gaussian derivatives. Gabor functions can also be combined in an `energy model' of the complex cell response. This paper proposes an alternative model of the complex cell, based on Gaussian derivatives. It is most important to account for the insensitivity of the complex response to small shifts of the image. The new model uses a linear combination of the first few derivative filters, at a single position, to approximate the first derivative filter, at a series of adjacent positions. The maximum response, over all positions, gives a signal that is insensitive to small shifts of the image. This model, unlike previous approaches, is based on the scale space theory of visual processing. In particular, the complex cell is built from filters that respond to the \twod\ differential structure of the image. The computational aspects of the new model are studied in one and two dimensions, using the steerability of the Gaussian derivatives. The response of the model to basic images, such as edges and gratings, is derived formally. The response to natural images is also evaluated, using statistical measures of shift insensitivity. The relevance of the new model to the cortical image representation is discussed.
A Data Driven Method for Computing Quasipotentials
Authors: Bo Lin, Qianxiao Li, Weiqing Ren
Date: 2020-12-13 00:00:00

The quasipotential is a natural generalization of the concept of energy functions to non-equilibrium systems. In the analysis of rare events in stochastic dynamics, it plays a central role in characterizing the statistics of transition events and the likely transition paths. However, computing the quasipotential is challenging, especially in high dimensional dynamical systems where a global landscape is sought. Traditional methods based on the dynamic programming principle or path space minimization tend to suffer from the curse of dimensionality. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient machine learning method to resolve this problem. The key idea is to learn an orthogonal decomposition of the vector field that drives the dynamics, from which one can identify the quasipotential. We demonstrate on various example systems that our method can effectively compute quasipotential landscapes without requiring spatial discretization or solving path-space optimization problems. Moreover, the method is purely data driven in the sense that only observed trajectories of the dynamics are required for the computation of the quasipotential. These properties make it a promising method to enable the general application of quasipotential analysis to dynamical systems away from equilibrium.
Towards robust and speculation-reduction real estate pricing models based on a data-driven strategy
Authors: Vladimir Vargas-Calderón, Jorge E. Camargo
Date: 2020-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

In many countries, real estate appraisal is based on conventional methods that rely on appraisers' abilities to collect data, interpret it and model the price of a real estate property. With the increasing use of real estate online platforms and the large amount of information found therein, there exists the possibility of overcoming many drawbacks of conventional pricing models such as subjectivity, cost, unfairness, among others. In this paper we propose a data-driven real estate pricing model based on machine learning methods to estimate prices reducing human bias. We test the model with 178,865 flats listings from Bogot\'a, collected from 2016 to 2020. Results show that the proposed state-of-the-art model is robust and accurate in estimating real estate prices. This case study serves as an incentive for local governments from developing countries to discuss and build real estate pricing models based on large data sets that increases fairness for all the real estate market stakeholders and reduces price speculation.
Personal Mental Health Navigator: Harnessing the Power of Data, Personal Models, and Health Cybernetics to Promote Psychological Well-being
Authors: Amir M. Rahmani, Jocelyn Lai, Salar Jafarlou, Asal Yunusova, Alex. P. Rivera, Sina Labbaf, Sirui Hu, Arman Anzanpour, Nikil Dutt, Ramesh Jain, Jessica L. Borelli
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Sociology

Traditionally, the regime of mental healthcare has followed an episodic psychotherapy model wherein patients seek care from a provider through a prescribed treatment plan developed over multiple provider visits. Recent advances in wearable and mobile technology have generated increased interest in digital mental healthcare that enables individuals to address episodic mental health symptoms. However, these efforts are typically reactive and symptom-focused and do not provide comprehensive, wrap-around, customized treatments that capture an individual's holistic mental health model as it unfolds over time. Recognizing that each individual is unique, we present the notion of Personalized Mental Health Navigation (MHN): a therapist-in-the-loop, cybernetic goal-based system that deploys a continuous cyclic loop of measurement, estimation, guidance, to steer the individual's mental health state towards a healthy zone. We outline the major components of MHN that is premised on the development of an individual's personal mental health state, holistically represented by a high-dimensional cover of multiple knowledge layers such as emotion, biological patterns, sociology, behavior, and cognition. We demonstrate the feasibility of the personalized MHN approach via a 12-month pilot case study for holistic stress management in college students and highlight an instance of a therapist-in-the-loop intervention using MHN for monitoring, estimating, and proactively addressing moderately severe depression over a sustained period of time. We believe MHN paves the way to transform mental healthcare from the current passive, episodic, reactive process (where individuals seek help to address symptoms that have already manifested) to a continuous and navigational paradigm that leverages a personalized model of the individual, promising to deliver timely interventions to individuals in a holistic manner.
Multi-agent navigation based on deep reinforcement learning and traditional pathfinding algorithm
Authors: Hongda Qiu
Date: 2020-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We develop a new framework for multi-agent collision avoidance problem. The framework combined traditional pathfinding algorithm and reinforcement learning. In our approach, the agents learn whether to be navigated or to take simple actions to avoid their partners via a deep neural network trained by reinforcement learning at each time step. This framework makes it possible for agents to arrive terminal points in abstract new scenarios. In our experiments, we use Unity3D and Tensorflow to build the model and environment for our scenarios. We analyze the results and modify the parameters to approach a well-behaved strategy for our agents. Our strategy could be attached in different environments under different cases, especially when the scale is large.
End-to-end Generative Floor-plan and Layout with Attributes and Relation Graph
Authors: Xinhan Di, Pengqian Yu, Danfeng Yang, Hong Zhu, Changyu Sun, YinDong Liu
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Layout Generation, Relation

In this paper, we propose an end-end model for producing furniture layout for interior scene synthesis from the random vector. This proposed model is aimed to support professional interior designers to produce the interior decoration solutions more quickly. The proposed model combines a conditional floor-plan module of the room, a conditional graphical floor-plan module of the room and a conditional layout module. As compared with the prior work on scene synthesis, our proposed three modules enhance the ability of auto-layout generation given the dimensional category of the room. We conduct our experiments on the proposed real-world interior layout dataset that contains $191208$ designs from the professional designers. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed model yields higher-quality layouts in comparison with the state-of-the-art model. The dataset and code are released \href{https://github.com/CODE-SUBMIT/dataset3}{Dataset,Code}
Pose Error Reduction for Focus Enhancement in Thermal Synthetic Aperture Visualization
Authors: Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, Oliver Bimber
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

Airborne optical sectioning, an effective aerial synthetic aperture imaging technique for revealing artifacts occluded by forests, requires precise measurements of drone poses. In this article we present a new approach for reducing pose estimation errors beyond the possibilities of conventional Perspective-n-Point solutions by considering the underlying optimization as a focusing problem. We present an efficient image integration technique, which also reduces the parameter search space to achieve realistic processing times, and improves the quality of resulting synthetic integral images.
Post-Hurricane Damage Assessment Using Satellite Imagery and Geolocation Features
Authors: Quoc Dung Cao, Youngjun Choe
Date: 2020-12-15 00:00:00

Gaining timely and reliable situation awareness after hazard events such as a hurricane is crucial to emergency managers and first responders. One effective way to achieve that goal is through damage assessment. Recently, disaster researchers have been utilizing imagery captured through satellites or drones to quantify the number of flooded/damaged buildings. In this paper, we propose a mixed data approach, which leverages publicly available satellite imagery and geolocation features of the affected area to identify damaged buildings after a hurricane. The method demonstrated significant improvement from performing a similar task using only imagery features, based on a case study of Hurricane Harvey affecting Greater Houston area in 2017. This result opens door to a wide range of possibilities to unify the advancement in computer vision algorithms such as convolutional neural networks and traditional methods in damage assessment, for example, using flood depth or bare-earth topology. In this work, a creative choice of the geolocation features was made to provide extra information to the imagery features, but it is up to the users to decide which other features can be included to model the physical behavior of the events, depending on their domain knowledge and the type of disaster. The dataset curated in this work is made openly available (DOI: 10.17603/ds2-3cca-f398).