pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
deepstruct -- linking deep learning and graph theory
Authors: Julian Stier, Michael Granitzer
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Neural Architecture Search

deepstruct connects deep learning models and graph theory such that different graph structures can be imposed on neural networks or graph structures can be extracted from trained neural network models. For this, deepstruct provides deep neural network models with different restrictions which can be created based on an initial graph. Further, tools to extract graph structures from trained models are available. This step of extracting graphs can be computationally expensive even for models of just a few dozen thousand parameters and poses a challenging problem. deepstruct supports research in pruning, neural architecture search, automated network design and structure analysis of neural networks.
Attention Guided Cosine Margin For Overcoming Class-Imbalance in Few-Shot Road Object Detection
Authors: Ashutosh Agarwal, Anay Majee, Anbumani Subramanian, Chetan Arora
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Object Detection, Meta-Learning, Metric Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) localizes and classifies objects in an image given only a few data samples. Recent trends in FSOD research show the adoption of metric and meta-learning techniques, which are prone to catastrophic forgetting and class confusion. To overcome these pitfalls in metric learning based FSOD techniques, we introduce Attention Guided Cosine Margin (AGCM) that facilitates the creation of tighter and well separated class-specific feature clusters in the classification head of the object detector. Our novel Attentive Proposal Fusion (APF) module minimizes catastrophic forgetting by reducing the intra-class variance among co-occurring classes. At the same time, the proposed Cosine Margin Cross-Entropy loss increases the angular margin between confusing classes to overcome the challenge of class confusion between already learned (base) and newly added (novel) classes. We conduct our experiments on the challenging India Driving Dataset (IDD), which presents a real-world class-imbalanced setting alongside popular FSOD benchmark PASCAL-VOC. Our method outperforms State-of-the-Art (SoTA) approaches by up to 6.4 mAP points on the IDD-OS and up to 2.0 mAP points on the IDD-10 splits for the 10-shot setting. On the PASCAL-VOC dataset, we outperform existing SoTA approaches by up to 4.9 mAP points.
Meta-Teacher For Face Anti-Spoofing
Authors: Yunxiao Qin, Zitong Yu, Longbin Yan, Zezheng Wang, Chenxu Zhao, Zhen Lei
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Anti-Spoofing, Face Recognition

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) secures face recognition from presentation attacks (PAs). Existing FAS methods usually supervise PA detectors with handcrafted binary or pixel-wise labels. However, handcrafted labels may are not the most adequate way to supervise PA detectors learning sufficient and intrinsic spoofing cues. Instead of using the handcrafted labels, we propose a novel Meta-Teacher FAS (MT-FAS) method to train a meta-teacher for supervising PA detectors more effectively. The meta-teacher is trained in a bi-level optimization manner to learn the ability to supervise the PA detectors learning rich spoofing cues. The bi-level optimization contains two key components: 1) a lower-level training in which the meta-teacher supervises the detector's learning process on the training set; and 2) a higher-level training in which the meta-teacher's teaching performance is optimized by minimizing the detector's validation loss. Our meta-teacher differs significantly from existing teacher-student models because the meta-teacher is explicitly trained for better teaching the detector (student), whereas existing teachers are trained for outstanding accuracy neglecting teaching ability. Extensive experiments on five FAS benchmarks show that with the proposed MT-FAS, the trained meta-teacher 1) provides better-suited supervision than both handcrafted labels and existing teacher-student models; and 2) significantly improves the performances of PA detectors.
A Convolutional Neural Network Based Approach to Recognize Bangla Spoken Digits from Speech Signal
Authors: Ovishake Sen, Al-Mahmud, Pias Roy
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Speech recognition is a technique that converts human speech signals into text or words or in any form that can be easily understood by computers or other machines. There have been a few studies on Bangla digit recognition systems, the majority of which used small datasets with few variations in genders, ages, dialects, and other variables. Audio recordings of Bangladeshi people of various genders, ages, and dialects were used to create a large speech dataset of spoken '0-9' Bangla digits in this study. Here, 400 noisy and noise-free samples per digit have been recorded for creating the dataset. Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCCs) have been utilized for extracting meaningful features from the raw speech data. Then, to detect Bangla numeral digits, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were utilized. The suggested technique recognizes '0-9' Bangla spoken digits with 97.1% accuracy throughout the whole dataset. The efficiency of the model was also assessed using 10-fold crossvalidation, which yielded a 96.7% accuracy.
PESTO: Switching Point based Dynamic and Relative Positional Encoding for Code-Mixed Languages
Authors: Mohsin Ali, Kandukuri Sai Teja, Sumanth Manduru, Parth Patwa, Amitava Das
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Word Embeddings

NLP applications for code-mixed (CM) or mix-lingual text have gained a significant momentum recently, the main reason being the prevalence of language mixing in social media communications in multi-lingual societies like India, Mexico, Europe, parts of USA etc. Word embeddings are basic build-ing blocks of any NLP system today, yet, word embedding for CM languages is an unexplored territory. The major bottleneck for CM word embeddings is switching points, where the language switches. These locations lack in contextually and statistical systems fail to model this phenomena due to high variance in the seen examples. In this paper we present our initial observations on applying switching point based positional encoding techniques for CM language, specifically Hinglish (Hindi - English). Results are only marginally better than SOTA, but it is evident that positional encoding could bean effective way to train position sensitive language models for CM text.
On-the-Fly Rectification for Robust Large-Vocabulary Topic Inference
Authors: Moontae Lee, Sungjun Cho, Kun Dong, David Mimno, David Bindel
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection

Across many data domains, co-occurrence statistics about the joint appearance of objects are powerfully informative. By transforming unsupervised learning problems into decompositions of co-occurrence statistics, spectral algorithms provide transparent and efficient algorithms for posterior inference such as latent topic analysis and community detection. As object vocabularies grow, however, it becomes rapidly more expensive to store and run inference algorithms on co-occurrence statistics. Rectifying co-occurrence, the key process to uphold model assumptions, becomes increasingly more vital in the presence of rare terms, but current techniques cannot scale to large vocabularies. We propose novel methods that simultaneously compress and rectify co-occurrence statistics, scaling gracefully with the size of vocabulary and the dimension of latent space. We also present new algorithms learning latent variables from the compressed statistics, and verify that our methods perform comparably to previous approaches on both textual and non-textual data.
Self-supervised GAN Detector
Authors: Yonghyun Jeong, Doyeon Kim, Pyounggeon Kim, Youngmin Ro, Jongwon Choi
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00

Although the recent advancement in generative models brings diverse advantages to society, it can also be abused with malicious purposes, such as fraud, defamation, and fake news. To prevent such cases, vigorous research is conducted to distinguish the generated images from the real images, but challenges still remain to distinguish the unseen generated images outside of the training settings. Such limitations occur due to data dependency arising from the model's overfitting issue to the training data generated by specific GANs. To overcome this issue, we adopt a self-supervised scheme to propose a novel framework. Our proposed method is composed of the artificial fingerprint generator reconstructing the high-quality artificial fingerprints of GAN images for detailed analysis, and the GAN detector distinguishing GAN images by learning the reconstructed artificial fingerprints. To improve the generalization of the artificial fingerprint generator, we build multiple autoencoders with different numbers of upconvolution layers. With numerous ablation studies, the robust generalization of our method is validated by outperforming the generalization of the previous state-of-the-art algorithms, even without utilizing the GAN images of the training dataset.
Nonlinear Tensor Ring Network
Authors: Xiao Peng Li, Qi Liu, Hing Cheung So
Date: 2021-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

The state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied for various real-world applications, and achieved significant performance for cognitive problems. However, the increment of DNNs' width and depth in architecture results in a huge amount of parameters to challenge the storage and memory cost, limiting to the usage of DNNs on resource-constrained platforms, such as portable devices. By converting redundant models into compact ones, compression technique appears to be a practical solution to reducing the storage and memory consumption. In this paper, we develop a nonlinear tensor ring network (NTRN) in which both fullyconnected and convolutional layers are compressed via tensor ring decomposition. Furthermore, to mitigate the accuracy loss caused by compression, a nonlinear activation function is embedded into the tensor contraction and convolution operations inside the compressed layer. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed NTRN for image classification using two basic neural networks, LeNet-5 and VGG-11 on three datasets, viz. MNIST, Fashion MNIST and Cifar-10.
DPLL(MAPF): an Integration of Multi-Agent Path Finding and SAT Solving Technologies
Authors: Martin Čapek, Pavel Surynek
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Heuristic Search, Multi-Agent Path Finding

In multi-agent path finding (MAPF), the task is to find non-conflicting paths for multiple agents from their initial positions to given individual goal positions. MAPF represents a classical artificial intelligence problem often addressed by heuristic-search. An important alternative to search-based techniques is compilation of MAPF to a different formalism such as Boolean satisfiability (SAT). Contemporary SAT-based approaches to MAPF regard the SAT solver as an external tool whose task is to return an assignment of all decision variables of a Boolean model of input MAPF. We present in this short paper a novel compilation scheme called DPLL(MAPF) in which the consistency checking of partial assignments of decision variables with respect to the MAPF rules is integrated directly into the SAT solver. This scheme allows for far more automated compilation where the SAT solver and the consistency checking procedure work together simultaneously to create the Boolean model and to search for its satisfying assignment.
Variational Auto-Encoder Architectures that Excel at Causal Inference
Authors: Negar Hassanpour, Russell Greiner
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

Estimating causal effects from observational data (at either an individual -- or a population -- level) is critical for making many types of decisions. One approach to address this task is to learn decomposed representations of the underlying factors of data; this becomes significantly more challenging when there are confounding factors (which influence both the cause and the effect). In this paper, we take a generative approach that builds on the recent advances in Variational Auto-Encoders to simultaneously learn those underlying factors as well as the causal effects. We propose a progressive sequence of models, where each improves over the previous one, culminating in the Hybrid model. Our empirical results demonstrate that the performance of all three proposed models are superior to both state-of-the-art discriminative as well as other generative approaches in the literature.
Sequential Aggregation and Rematerialization: Distributed Full-batch Training of Graph Neural Networks on Large Graphs
Authors: Hesham Mostafa
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00

We present the Sequential Aggregation and Rematerialization (SAR) scheme for distributed full-batch training of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs. Large-scale training of GNNs has recently been dominated by sampling-based methods and methods based on non-learnable message passing. SAR on the other hand is a distributed technique that can train any GNN type directly on an entire large graph. The key innovation in SAR is the distributed sequential rematerialization scheme which sequentially re-constructs then frees pieces of the prohibitively large GNN computational graph during the backward pass. This results in excellent memory scaling behavior where the memory consumption per worker goes down linearly with the number of workers, even for densely connected graphs. Using SAR, we report the largest applications of full-batch GNN training to-date, and demonstrate large memory savings as the number of workers increases. We also present a general technique based on kernel fusion and attention-matrix rematerialization to optimize both the runtime and memory efficiency of attention-based models. We show that, coupled with SAR, our optimized attention kernels lead to significant speedups and memory savings in attention-based GNNs.We made the SAR GNN training library publicy available: \url{https://github.com/IntelLabs/SAR}.
SynthBio: A Case Study in Human-AI Collaborative Curation of Text Datasets
Authors: Ann Yuan, Daphne Ippolito, Vitaly Nikolaev, Chris Callison-Burch, Andy Coenen, Sebastian Gehrmann
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval

NLP researchers need more, higher-quality text datasets. Human-labeled datasets are expensive to collect, while datasets collected via automatic retrieval from the web such as WikiBio are noisy and can include undesired biases. Moreover, data sourced from the web is often included in datasets used to pretrain models, leading to inadvertent cross-contamination of training and test sets. In this work we introduce a novel method for efficient dataset curation: we use a large language model to provide seed generations to human raters, thereby changing dataset authoring from a writing task to an editing task. We use our method to curate SynthBio - a new evaluation set for WikiBio - composed of structured attribute lists describing fictional individuals, mapped to natural language biographies. We show that our dataset of fictional biographies is less noisy than WikiBio, and also more balanced with respect to gender and nationality.
Catalytic Role Of Noise And Necessity Of Inductive Biases In The Emergence Of Compositional Communication
Authors: Łukasz Kuciński, Tomasz Korbak, Paweł Kołodziej, Piotr Miłoś
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Communication is compositional if complex signals can be represented as a combination of simpler subparts. In this paper, we theoretically show that inductive biases on both the training framework and the data are needed to develop a compositional communication. Moreover, we prove that compositionality spontaneously arises in the signaling games, where agents communicate over a noisy channel. We experimentally confirm that a range of noise levels, which depends on the model and the data, indeed promotes compositionality. Finally, we provide a comprehensive study of this dependence and report results in terms of recently studied compositionality metrics: topographical similarity, conflict count, and context independence.
Expert Human-Level Driving in Gran Turismo Sport Using Deep Reinforcement Learning with Image-based Representation
Authors: Ryuji Imamura, Takuma Seno, Kenta Kawamoto, Michael Spranger
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Deep Reinforcement Learning

When humans play virtual racing games, they use visual environmental information on the game screen to understand the rules within the environments. In contrast, a state-of-the-art realistic racing game AI agent that outperforms human players does not use image-based environmental information but the compact and precise measurements provided by the environment. In this paper, a vision-based control algorithm is proposed and compared with human player performances under the same conditions in realistic racing scenarios using Gran Turismo Sport (GTS), which is known as a high-fidelity realistic racing simulator. In the proposed method, the environmental information that constitutes part of the observations in conventional state-of-the-art methods is replaced with feature representations extracted from game screen images. We demonstrate that the proposed method performs expert human-level vehicle control under high-speed driving scenarios even with game screen images as high-dimensional inputs. Additionally, it outperforms the built-in AI in GTS in a time trial task, and its score places it among the top 10% approximately 28,000 human players.
Observation Error Covariance Specification in Dynamical Systems for Data assimilation using Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Sibo Cheng, Mingming Qiu
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Data assimilation techniques are widely used to predict complex dynamical systems with uncertainties, based on time-series observation data. Error covariance matrices modelling is an important element in data assimilation algorithms which can considerably impact the forecasting accuracy. The estimation of these covariances, which usually relies on empirical assumptions and physical constraints, is often imprecise and computationally expensive especially for systems of large dimension. In this work, we propose a data-driven approach based on long short term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks (RNN) to improve both the accuracy and the efficiency of observation covariance specification in data assimilation for dynamical systems. Learning the covariance matrix from observed/simulated time-series data, the proposed approach does not require any knowledge or assumption about prior error distribution, unlike classical posterior tuning methods. We have compared the novel approach with two state-of-the-art covariance tuning algorithms, namely DI01 and D05, first in a Lorenz dynamical system and then in a 2D shallow water twin experiments framework with different covariance parameterization using ensemble assimilation. This novel method shows significant advantages in observation covariance specification, assimilation accuracy and computational efficiency.
Personalized multi-faceted trust modeling to determine trust links in social media and its potential for misinformation management
Authors: Alexandre Parmentier, Robin Cohen, Xueguang Ma, Gaurav Sahu, Queenie Chen
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Misinformation, Rumour Detection

In this paper, we present an approach for predicting trust links between peers in social media, one that is grounded in the artificial intelligence area of multiagent trust modeling. In particular, we propose a data-driven multi-faceted trust modeling which incorporates many distinct features for a comprehensive analysis. We focus on demonstrating how clustering of similar users enables a critical new functionality: supporting more personalized, and thus more accurate predictions for users. Illustrated in a trust-aware item recommendation task, we evaluate the proposed framework in the context of a large Yelp dataset. We then discuss how improving the detection of trusted relationships in social media can assist in supporting online users in their battle against the spread of misinformation and rumours, within a social networking environment which has recently exploded in popularity. We conclude with a reflection on a particularly vulnerable user base, older adults, in order to illustrate the value of reasoning about groups of users, looking to some future directions for integrating known preferences with insights gained through data analysis.
Explainable AI (XAI): A Systematic Meta-Survey of Current Challenges and Future Opportunities
Authors: Waddah Saeed, Christian Omlin
Date: 2021-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Survey

The past decade has seen significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI), which has resulted in algorithms being adopted for resolving a variety of problems. However, this success has been met by increasing model complexity and employing black-box AI models that lack transparency. In response to this need, Explainable AI (XAI) has been proposed to make AI more transparent and thus advance the adoption of AI in critical domains. Although there are several reviews of XAI topics in the literature that identified challenges and potential research directions in XAI, these challenges and research directions are scattered. This study, hence, presents a systematic meta-survey for challenges and future research directions in XAI organized in two themes: (1) general challenges and research directions in XAI and (2) challenges and research directions in XAI based on machine learning life cycle's phases: design, development, and deployment. We believe that our meta-survey contributes to XAI literature by providing a guide for future exploration in the XAI area.
A Quantum Natural Language Processing Approach to Musical Intelligence
Authors: Eduardo Reck Miranda, Richie Yeung, Anna Pearson, Konstantinos Meichanetzidis, Bob Coecke
Date: 2021-11-10 00:00:00

There has been tremendous progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI) for music, in particular for musical composition and access to large databases for commercialisation through the Internet. We are interested in further advancing this field, focusing on composition. In contrast to current black-box AI methods, we are championing an interpretable compositional outlook on generative music systems. In particular, we are importing methods from the Distributional Compositional Categorical (DisCoCat) modelling framework for Natural Language Processing (NLP), motivated by musical grammars. Quantum computing is a nascent technology, which is very likely to impact the music industry in time to come. Thus, we are pioneering a Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) approach to develop a new generation of intelligent musical systems. This work follows from previous experimental implementations of DisCoCat linguistic models on quantum hardware. In this chapter, we present Quanthoven, the first proof-of-concept ever built, which (a) demonstrates that it is possible to program a quantum computer to learn to classify music that conveys different meanings and (b) illustrates how such a capability might be leveraged to develop a system to compose meaningful pieces of music. After a discussion about our current understanding of music as a communication medium and its relationship to natural language, the chapter focuses on the techniques developed to (a) encode musical compositions as quantum circuits, and (b) design a quantum classifier. The chapter ends with demonstrations of compositions created with the system.