pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning from Label Proportions by Learning with Label Noise
Authors: Jianxin Zhang, Yutong Wang, Clayton Scott
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Weakly Supervised Classification

Learning from label proportions (LLP) is a weakly supervised classification problem where data points are grouped into bags, and the label proportions within each bag are observed instead of the instance-level labels. The task is to learn a classifier to predict the individual labels of future individual instances. Prior work on LLP for multi-class data has yet to develop a theoretically grounded algorithm. In this work, we provide a theoretically grounded approach to LLP based on a reduction to learning with label noise, using the forward correction (FC) loss of \citet{Patrini2017MakingDN}. We establish an excess risk bound and generalization error analysis for our approach, while also extending the theory of the FC loss which may be of independent interest. Our approach demonstrates improved empirical performance in deep learning scenarios across multiple datasets and architectures, compared to the leading existing methods.
Better Supervisory Signals by Observing Learning Paths
Authors: Yi Ren, Shangmin Guo, Danica J. Sutherland
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Better-supervised models might have better performance. In this paper, we first clarify what makes for good supervision for a classification problem, and then explain two existing label refining methods, label smoothing and knowledge distillation, in terms of our proposed criterion. To further answer why and how better supervision emerges, we observe the learning path, i.e., the trajectory of the model's predictions during training, for each training sample. We find that the model can spontaneously refine "bad" labels through a "zig-zag" learning path, which occurs on both toy and real datasets. Observing the learning path not only provides a new perspective for understanding knowledge distillation, overfitting, and learning dynamics, but also reveals that the supervisory signal of a teacher network can be very unstable near the best points in training on real tasks. Inspired by this, we propose a new knowledge distillation scheme, Filter-KD, which improves downstream classification performance in various settings.
Ontological Learning from Weak Labels
Authors: Larry Tang, Po Hao Chou, Yi Yu Zheng, Ziqian Ge, Ankit Shah, Bhiksha Raj
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00

Ontologies encompass a formal representation of knowledge through the definition of concepts or properties of a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. In this work, we seek to investigate whether using this ontological information will improve learning from weakly labeled data, which are easier to collect since it requires only the presence or absence of an event to be known. We use the AudioSet ontology and dataset, which contains audio clips weakly labeled with the ontology concepts and the ontology providing the "Is A" relations between the concepts. We first re-implemented the model proposed by soundevent_ontology with modification to fit the multi-label scenario and then expand on that idea by using a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to model the ontology information to learn the concepts. We find that the baseline Siamese does not perform better by incorporating ontology information in the weak and multi-label scenario, but that the GCN does capture the ontology knowledge better for weak, multi-labeled data. In our experiments, we also investigate how different modules can tolerate noises introduced from weak labels and better incorporate ontology information. Our best Siamese-GCN model achieves mAP=0.45 and AUC=0.87 for lower-level concepts and mAP=0.72 and AUC=0.86 for higher-level concepts, which is an improvement over the baseline Siamese but about the same as our models that do not use ontology information.
Rate-Distortion Theoretic Generalization Bounds for Stochastic Learning Algorithms
Authors: Milad Sefidgaran, Amin Gohari, Gaël Richard, Umut Şimşekli
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Learning Theory

Understanding generalization in modern machine learning settings has been one of the major challenges in statistical learning theory. In this context, recent years have witnessed the development of various generalization bounds suggesting different complexity notions such as the mutual information between the data sample and the algorithm output, compressibility of the hypothesis space, and the fractal dimension of the hypothesis space. While these bounds have illuminated the problem at hand from different angles, their suggested complexity notions might appear seemingly unrelated, thereby restricting their high-level impact. In this study, we prove novel generalization bounds through the lens of rate-distortion theory, and explicitly relate the concepts of mutual information, compressibility, and fractal dimensions in a single mathematical framework. Our approach consists of (i) defining a generalized notion of compressibility by using source coding concepts, and (ii) showing that the `compression error rate' can be linked to the generalization error both in expectation and with high probability. We show that in the `lossless compression' setting, we recover and improve existing mutual information-based bounds, whereas a `lossy compression' scheme allows us to link generalization to the rate-distortion dimension -- a particular notion of fractal dimension. Our results bring a more unified perspective on generalization and open up several future research directions.
Interpretable Off-Policy Learning via Hyperbox Search
Authors: Daniel Tschernutter, Tobias Hatt, Stefan Feuerriegel
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00

Personalized treatment decisions have become an integral part of modern medicine. Thereby, the aim is to make treatment decisions based on individual patient characteristics. Numerous methods have been developed for learning such policies from observational data that achieve the best outcome across a certain policy class. Yet these methods are rarely interpretable. However, interpretability is often a prerequisite for policy learning in clinical practice. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for interpretable off-policy learning via hyperbox search. In particular, our policies can be represented in disjunctive normal form (i.e., OR-of-ANDs) and are thus intelligible. We prove a universal approximation theorem that shows that our policy class is flexible enough to approximate any measurable function arbitrarily well. For optimization, we develop a tailored column generation procedure within a branch-and-bound framework. Using a simulation study, we demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods from interpretable off-policy learning in terms of regret. Using real-word clinical data, we perform a user study with actual clinical experts, who rate our policies as highly interpretable.
Graph clustering with Boltzmann machines
Authors: Pierre Miasnikof, Mohammad Bagherbeik, Ali Sheikholeslami
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Clustering, Graph Clustering

Graph clustering is the process of grouping vertices into densely connected sets called clusters. We tailor two mathematical programming formulations from the literature, to this problem. In doing so, we obtain a heuristic approximation to the intra-cluster density maximization problem. We use two variations of a Boltzmann machine heuristic to obtain numerical solutions. For benchmarking purposes, we compare solution quality and computational performances to those obtained using a commercial solver, Gurobi. We also compare clustering quality to the clusters obtained using the popular Louvain modularity maximization method. Our initial results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our problem formulations. They also establish the superiority of the Boltzmann machine over the traditional exact solver. In the case of smaller less complex graphs, Boltzmann machines provide the same solutions as Gurobi, but with solution times that are orders of magnitude lower. In the case of larger and more complex graphs, Gurobi fails to return meaningful results within a reasonable time frame. Finally, we also note that both our clustering formulations, the distance minimization and $K$-medoids, yield clusters of superior quality to those obtained with the Louvain algorithm.
The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Competition (ML4CO): Results and Insights
Authors: Maxime Gasse, Quentin Cappart, Jonas Charfreitag, Laurent Charlin, Didier Chételat, Antonia Chmiela, Justin Dumouchelle, Ambros Gleixner, Aleksandr M. Kazachkov, Elias Khalil, Pawel Lichocki, Andrea Lodi, Miles Lubin, Chris J. Maddison, Christopher Morris, Dimitri J. Papageorgiou, Augustin Parjadis, Sebastian Pokutta, Antoine Prouvost, Lara Scavuzzo, Giulia Zarpellon, Linxin Yang, Sha Lai, Akang Wang, Xiaodong Luo, Xiang Zhou, Haohan Huang, Shengcheng Shao, Yuanming Zhu, Dong Zhang, Tao Quan, Zixuan Cao, Yang Xu, Zhewei Huang, Shuchang Zhou, Chen Binbin, He Minggui, Hao Hao, Zhang Zhiyu, An Zhiwu, Mao Kun
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Combinatorial Optimization

Combinatorial optimization is a well-established area in operations research and computer science. Until recently, its methods have focused on solving problem instances in isolation, ignoring that they often stem from related data distributions in practice. However, recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning as a new approach for solving combinatorial problems, either directly as solvers or by enhancing exact solvers. Based on this context, the ML4CO aims at improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components. The competition featured three challenging tasks: finding the best feasible solution, producing the tightest optimality certificate, and giving an appropriate solver configuration. Three realistic datasets were considered: balanced item placement, workload apportionment, and maritime inventory routing. This last dataset was kept anonymous for the contestants.
Improving \textit{Tug-of-War} sketch using Control-Variates method
Authors: Rameshwar Pratap, Bhisham Dev Verma, Raghav Kulkarni
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00

Computing space-efficient summary, or \textit{a.k.a. sketches}, of large data, is a central problem in the streaming algorithm. Such sketches are used to answer \textit{post-hoc} queries in several data analytics tasks. The algorithm for computing sketches typically requires to be fast, accurate, and space-efficient. A fundamental problem in the streaming algorithm framework is that of computing the frequency moments of data streams. The frequency moments of a sequence containing $f_i$ elements of type $i$, are the numbers $\mathbf{F}_k=\sum_{i=1}^n {f_i}^k,$ where $i\in [n]$. This is also called as $\ell_k$ norm of the frequency vector $(f_1, f_2, \ldots f_n).$ Another important problem is to compute the similarity between two data streams by computing the inner product of the corresponding frequency vectors. The seminal work of Alon, Matias, and Szegedy~\cite{AMS}, \textit{a.k.a. Tug-of-war} (or AMS) sketch gives a randomized sublinear space (and linear time) algorithm for computing the frequency moments, and the inner product between two frequency vectors corresponding to the data streams. However, the variance of these estimates typically tends to be large. In this work, we focus on minimizing the variance of these estimates. We use the techniques from the classical Control-Variate method~\cite{Lavenberg} which is primarily known for variance reduction in Monte-Carlo simulations, and as a result, we are able to obtain significant variance reduction, at the cost of a little computational overhead. We present a theoretical analysis of our proposal and complement it with supporting experiments on synthetic as well as real-world datasets.
Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm for Bayesian network structure learning
Authors: Vicente P. Soloviev, Concha Bielza, Pedro Larrañaga
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00

Bayesian network structure learning is an NP-hard problem that has been faced by a number of traditional approaches in recent decades. Currently, quantum technologies offer a wide range of advantages that can be exploited to solve optimization tasks that cannot be addressed in an efficient way when utilizing classic computing approaches. In this work, a specific type of variational quantum algorithm, the quantum approximate optimization algorithm, was used to solve the Bayesian network structure learning problem, by employing $3n(n-1)/2$ qubits, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the Bayesian network to be learned. Our results showed that the quantum approximate optimization algorithm approach offers competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and quantitative resilience to quantum noise. The approach was applied to a cancer benchmark problem, and the results justified the use of variational quantum algorithms for solving the Bayesian network structure learning problem.
iSTFTNet: Fast and Lightweight Mel-Spectrogram Vocoder Incorporating Inverse Short-Time Fourier Transform
Authors: Takuhiro Kaneko, Kou Tanaka, Hirokazu Kameoka, Shogo Seki
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion

In recent text-to-speech synthesis and voice conversion systems, a mel-spectrogram is commonly applied as an intermediate representation, and the necessity for a mel-spectrogram vocoder is increasing. A mel-spectrogram vocoder must solve three inverse problems: recovery of the original-scale magnitude spectrogram, phase reconstruction, and frequency-to-time conversion. A typical convolutional mel-spectrogram vocoder solves these problems jointly and implicitly using a convolutional neural network, including temporal upsampling layers, when directly calculating a raw waveform. Such an approach allows skipping redundant processes during waveform synthesis (e.g., the direct reconstruction of high-dimensional original-scale spectrograms). By contrast, the approach solves all problems in a black box and cannot effectively employ the time-frequency structures existing in a mel-spectrogram. We thus propose iSTFTNet, which replaces some output-side layers of the mel-spectrogram vocoder with the inverse short-time Fourier transform (iSTFT) after sufficiently reducing the frequency dimension using upsampling layers, reducing the computational cost from black-box modeling and avoiding redundant estimations of high-dimensional spectrograms. During our experiments, we applied our ideas to three HiFi-GAN variants and made the models faster and more lightweight with a reasonable speech quality. Audio samples are available at https://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/people/kaneko.takuhiro/projects/istftnet/.
Exploring Scalable, Distributed Real-Time Anomaly Detection for Bridge Health Monitoring
Authors: Amirhossein Moallemi, Alessio Burrello, Davide Brunelli, Luca Benini
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Cloud Computing, Structural Health Monitoring

Modern real-time Structural Health Monitoring systems can generate a considerable amount of information that must be processed and evaluated for detecting early anomalies and generating prompt warnings and alarms about the civil infrastructure conditions. The current cloud-based solutions cannot scale if the raw data has to be collected from thousands of buildings. This paper presents a full-stack deployment of an efficient and scalable anomaly detection pipeline for SHM systems which does not require sending raw data to the cloud but relies on edge computation. First, we benchmark three algorithmic approaches of anomaly detection, i.e., Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fully-Connected AutoEncoder (FC-AE), and Convolutional AutoEncoder (C-AE). Then, we deploy them on an edge-sensor, the STM32L4, with limited computing capabilities. Our approach decreases network traffic by $\approx8\cdot10^5\times$ , from 780KB/hour to less than 10 Bytes/hour for a single installation and minimize network and cloud resource utilization, enabling the scaling of the monitoring infrastructure. A real-life case study, a highway bridge in Italy, demonstrates that combining near-sensor computation of anomaly detection algorithms, smart pre-processing, and low-power wide-area network protocols (LPWAN) we can greatly reduce data communication and cloud computing costs, while anomaly detection accuracy is not adversely affected.
Boosting the Performance of Quantum Annealers using Machine Learning
Authors: Jure Brence, Dragan Mihailović, Viktor Kabanov, Ljupčo Todorovski, Sašo Džeroski, Jaka Vodeb
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices are spearheading the second quantum revolution. Of these, quantum annealers are the only ones currently offering real world, commercial applications on as many as 5000 qubits. The size of problems that can be solved by quantum annealers is limited mainly by errors caused by environmental noise and intrinsic imperfections of the processor. We address the issue of intrinsic imperfections with a novel error correction approach, based on machine learning methods. Our approach adjusts the input Hamiltonian to maximize the probability of finding the solution. In our experiments, the proposed error correction method improved the performance of annealing by up to three orders of magnitude and enabled the solving of a previously intractable, maximally complex problem.
Differentiable Causal Discovery Under Latent Interventions
Authors: Gonçalo R. A. Faria, André F. T. Martins, Mário A. T. Figueiredo
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Variational Inference

Recent work has shown promising results in causal discovery by leveraging interventional data with gradient-based methods, even when the intervened variables are unknown. However, previous work assumes that the correspondence between samples and interventions is known, which is often unrealistic. We envision a scenario with an extensive dataset sampled from multiple intervention distributions and one observation distribution, but where we do not know which distribution originated each sample and how the intervention affected the system, \textit{i.e.}, interventions are entirely latent. We propose a method based on neural networks and variational inference that addresses this scenario by framing it as learning a shared causal graph among an infinite mixture (under a Dirichlet process prior) of intervention structural causal models. Experiments with synthetic and real data show that our approach and its semi-supervised variant are able to discover causal relations in this challenging scenario.
Evaluating Local Model-Agnostic Explanations of Learning to Rank Models with Decision Paths
Authors: Amir Hossein Akhavan Rahnama, Judith Butepage
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Learning-To-Rank

Local explanations of learning-to-rank (LTR) models are thought to extract the most important features that contribute to the ranking predicted by the LTR model for a single data point. Evaluating the accuracy of such explanations is challenging since the ground truth feature importance scores are not available for most modern LTR models. In this work, we propose a systematic evaluation technique for explanations of LTR models. Instead of using black-box models, such as neural networks, we propose to focus on tree-based LTR models, from which we can extract the ground truth feature importance scores using decision paths. Once extracted, we can directly compare the ground truth feature importance scores to the feature importance scores generated with explanation techniques. We compare two recently proposed explanation techniques for LTR models when using decision trees and gradient boosting models on the MQ2008 dataset. We show that the explanation accuracy in these techniques can largely vary depending on the explained model and even which data point is explained.
Integrating Statistical Uncertainty into Neural Network-Based Speech Enhancement
Authors: Huajian Fang, Tal Peer, Stefan Wermter, Timo Gerkmann
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Speech enhancement in the time-frequency domain is often performed by estimating a multiplicative mask to extract clean speech. However, most neural network-based methods perform point estimation, i.e., their output consists of a single mask. In this paper, we study the benefits of modeling uncertainty in neural network-based speech enhancement. For this, our neural network is trained to map a noisy spectrogram to the Wiener filter and its associated variance, which quantifies uncertainty, based on the maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference of spectral coefficients. By estimating the distribution instead of the point estimate, one can model the uncertainty associated with each estimate. We further propose to use the estimated Wiener filter and its uncertainty to build an approximate MAP (A-MAP) estimator of spectral magnitudes, which in turn is combined with the MAP inference of spectral coefficients to form a hybrid loss function to jointly reinforce the estimation. Experimental results on different datasets show that the proposed method can not only capture the uncertainty associated with the estimated filters, but also yield a higher enhancement performance over comparable models that do not take uncertainty into account.
On the relevance of language in speaker recognition
Authors: Antonio Satue-Villar, Marcos Faundez-Zanuy
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Speaker Recognition

This paper presents a new database collected from a bilingual speakers set (49), in two different languages: Spanish and Catalan. Phonetically there are significative differences between both languages. These differences have let us to establish several conclusions on the relevance of language in speaker recognition, using two methods: vector quantization and covariance matrices
Cloud-Edge Training Architecture for Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hongpeng Cao, Mirco Theile, Federico G. Wyrwal, Marco Caccamo
Date: 2022-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Domain Adaptation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising approach to solve complex control tasks by learning policies through interactions with the environment. However, the training of DRL policies requires large amounts of training experiences, making it impractical to learn the policy directly on physical systems. Sim-to-real approaches leverage simulations to pretrain DRL policies and then deploy them in the real world. Unfortunately, the direct real-world deployment of pretrained policies usually suffers from performance deterioration due to the different dynamics, known as the reality gap. Recent sim-to-real methods, such as domain randomization and domain adaptation, focus on improving the robustness of the pretrained agents. Nevertheless, the simulation-trained policies often need to be tuned with real-world data to reach optimal performance, which is challenging due to the high cost of real-world samples. This work proposes a distributed cloud-edge architecture to train DRL agents in the real world in real-time. In the architecture, the inference and training are assigned to the edge and cloud, separating the real-time control loop from the computationally expensive training loop. To overcome the reality gap, our architecture exploits sim-to-real transfer strategies to continue the training of simulation-pretrained agents on a physical system. We demonstrate its applicability on a physical inverted-pendulum control system, analyzing critical parameters. The real-world experiments show that our architecture can adapt the pretrained DRL agents to unseen dynamics consistently and efficiently.