pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Generating Large-scale Dynamic Optimization Problem Instances Using the Generalized Moving Peaks Benchmark
Authors: Mohammad Nabi Omidvar, Danial Yazdani, Juergen Branke, XiaoDong Li, Shengxiang Yang, Xin Yao
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00

This document describes the generalized moving peaks benchmark (GMPB) and how it can be used to generate problem instances for continuous large-scale dynamic optimization problems. It presents a set of 15 benchmark problems, the relevant source code, and a performance indicator, designed for comparative studies and competitions in large-scale dynamic optimization. Although its primary purpose is to provide a coherent basis for running competitions, its generality allows the interested reader to use this document as a guide to design customized problem instances to investigate issues beyond the scope of the presented benchmark suite. To this end, we explain the modular structure of the GMPB and how its constituents can be assembled to form problem instances with a variety of controllable characteristics ranging from unimodal to highly multimodal, symmetric to highly asymmetric, smooth to highly irregular, and various degrees of variable interaction and ill-conditioning.
Malware Analysis with Artificial Intelligence and a Particular Attention on Results Interpretability
Authors: Benjamin Marais, Tony Quertier, Christophe Chesneau
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Analysis, Malware Detection

Malware detection and analysis are active research subjects in cybersecurity over the last years. Indeed, the development of obfuscation techniques, as packing, for example, requires special attention to detect recent variants of malware. The usual detection methods do not necessarily provide tools to interpret the results. Therefore, we propose a model based on the transformation of binary files into grayscale image, which achieves an accuracy rate of 88%. Furthermore, the proposed model can determine if a sample is packed or encrypted with a precision of 85%. It allows us to analyze results and act appropriately. Also, by applying attention mechanisms on detection models, we have the possibility to identify which part of the files looks suspicious. This kind of tool should be very useful for data analysts, it compensates for the lack of interpretability of the common detection models, and it can help to understand why some malicious files are undetected.
A Fitness Landscape View on the Tuning of an Asynchronous Master-Worker EA for Nuclear Reactor Design
Authors: Mathieu Muniglia, Sébastien Verel, Jean-Charles Le Pallec, Jean-Michel Do
Date: 2021-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

In the context of the introduction of intermittent renewable energies, we propose to optimize the main variables of the control rods of a nuclear power plant to improve its capability to load-follow. The design problem is a black-box combinatorial optimization problem with expensive evaluation based on a multi-physics simulator. Therefore, we use a parallel asynchronous master-worker Evolutionary Algorithm scaling up to thousand computing units. One main issue is the tuning of the algorithm parameters. A fitness landscape analysis is conducted on this expensive real-world problem to show that it would be possible to tune the mutation parameters according to the low-cost estimation of the fitness landscape features.
An Improved Algorithm of Robot Path Planning in Complex Environment Based on Double DQN
Authors: Fei Zhang, Chaochen Gu, Feng Yang
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00

Deep Q Network (DQN) has several limitations when applied in planning a path in environment with a number of dilemmas according to our experiment. The reward function may be hard to model, and successful experience transitions are difficult to find in experience replay. In this context, this paper proposes an improved Double DQN (DDQN) to solve the problem by reference to A* and Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT). In order to achieve the rich experiments in experience replay, the initialization of robot in each training round is redefined based on RRT strategy. In addition, reward for the free positions is specially designed to accelerate the learning process according to the definition of position cost in A*. The simulation experimental results validate the efficiency of the improved DDQN, and robot could successfully learn the ability of obstacle avoidance and optimal path planning in which DQN or DDQN has no effect.
Adversarial Reinforced Instruction Attacker for Robust Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Bingqian Lin, Yi Zhu, Yanxin Long, Xiaodan Liang, Qixiang Ye, Liang Lin
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision and Language Navigation, Vision-Language Navigation

Language instruction plays an essential role in the natural language grounded navigation tasks. However, navigators trained with limited human-annotated instructions may have difficulties in accurately capturing key information from the complicated instruction at different timesteps, leading to poor navigation performance. In this paper, we exploit to train a more robust navigator which is capable of dynamically extracting crucial factors from the long instruction, by using an adversarial attacking paradigm. Specifically, we propose a Dynamic Reinforced Instruction Attacker (DR-Attacker), which learns to mislead the navigator to move to the wrong target by destroying the most instructive information in instructions at different timesteps. By formulating the perturbation generation as a Markov Decision Process, DR-Attacker is optimized by the reinforcement learning algorithm to generate perturbed instructions sequentially during the navigation, according to a learnable attack score. Then, the perturbed instructions, which serve as hard samples, are used for improving the robustness of the navigator with an effective adversarial training strategy and an auxiliary self-supervised reasoning task. Experimental results on both Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) and Navigation from Dialog History (NDH) tasks show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the visualization analysis shows the effectiveness of the proposed DR-Attacker, which can successfully attack crucial information in the instructions at different timesteps. Code is available at https://github.com/expectorlin/DR-Attacker.
Did the Cat Drink the Coffee? Challenging Transformers with Generalized Event Knowledge
Authors: Paolo Pedinotti, Giulia Rambelli, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Alessandro Lenci, Philippe Blache
Date: 2021-07-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics 2021
Tasks: Sentence

Prior research has explored the ability of computational models to predict a word semantic fit with a given predicate. While much work has been devoted to modeling the typicality relation between verbs and arguments in isolation, in this paper we take a broader perspective by assessing whether and to what extent computational approaches have access to the information about the typicality of entire events and situations described in language (Generalized Event Knowledge). Given the recent success of Transformers Language Models (TLMs), we decided to test them on a benchmark for the \textit{dynamic estimation of thematic fit}. The evaluation of these models was performed in comparison with SDM, a framework specifically designed to integrate events in sentence meaning representations, and we conducted a detailed error analysis to investigate which factors affect their behavior. Our results show that TLMs can reach performances that are comparable to those achieved by SDM. However, additional analysis consistently suggests that TLMs do not capture important aspects of event knowledge, and their predictions often depend on surface linguistic features, such as frequent words, collocations and syntactic patterns, thereby showing sub-optimal generalization abilities.
Graph-Based Learning for Stock Movement Prediction with Textual and Relational Data
Authors: Qinkai Chen, Christian-Yann Robert
Date: 2021-07-22 00:00:00

Predicting stock prices from textual information is a challenging task due to the uncertainty of the market and the difficulty understanding the natural language from a machine's perspective. Previous researches focus mostly on sentiment extraction based on single news. However, the stocks on the financial market can be highly correlated, one news regarding one stock can quickly impact the prices of other stocks. To take this effect into account, we propose a new stock movement prediction framework: Multi-Graph Recurrent Network for Stock Forecasting (MGRN). This architecture allows to combine the textual sentiment from financial news and multiple relational information extracted from other financial data. Through an accuracy test and a trading simulation on the stocks in the STOXX Europe 600 index, we demonstrate a better performance from our model than other benchmarks.
Emotion analysis and detection during COVID-19
Authors: Tiberiu Sosea, Chau Pham, Alexander Tekle, Cornelia Caragea, Junyi Jessy Li
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Emotion Recognition

Crises such as natural disasters, global pandemics, and social unrest continuously threaten our world and emotionally affect millions of people worldwide in distinct ways. Understanding emotions that people express during large-scale crises helps inform policy makers and first responders about the emotional states of the population as well as provide emotional support to those who need such support. We present CovidEmo, ~3K English tweets labeled with emotions and temporally distributed across 18 months. Our analyses reveal the emotional toll caused by COVID-19, and changes of the social narrative and associated emotions over time. Motivated by the time-sensitive nature of crises and the cost of large-scale annotation efforts, we examine how well large pre-trained language models generalize across domains and timeline in the task of perceived emotion prediction in the context of COVID-19. Our analyses suggest that cross-domain information transfers occur, yet there are still significant gaps. We propose semi-supervised learning as a way to bridge this gap, obtaining significantly better performance using unlabeled data from the target domain.
Improving Early Sepsis Prediction with Multi Modal Learning
Authors: Fred Qin, Vivek Madan, Ujjwal Ratan, Zohar Karnin, Vishaal Kapoor, Parminder Bhatia, Taha Kass-Hout
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Sepsis is a life-threatening disease with high morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs. The early prediction and administration of antibiotics and intravenous fluids is considered crucial for the treatment of sepsis and can save potentially millions of lives and billions in health care costs. Professional clinical care practitioners have proposed clinical criterion which aid in early detection of sepsis; however, performance of these criterion is often limited. Clinical text provides essential information to estimate the severity of the sepsis in addition to structured clinical data. In this study, we explore how clinical text can complement structured data towards early sepsis prediction task. In this paper, we propose multi modal model which incorporates both structured data in the form of patient measurements as well as textual notes on the patient. We employ state-of-the-art NLP models such as BERT and a highly specialized NLP model in Amazon Comprehend Medical to represent the text. On the MIMIC-III dataset containing records of ICU admissions, we show that by using these notes, one achieves an improvement of 6.07 points in a standard utility score for Sepsis prediction and 2.89% in AUROC score. Our methods significantly outperforms a clinical criteria suggested by experts, qSOFA, as well as the winning model of the PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology Challenge for predicting Sepsis.
Modeling Bilingual Conversational Characteristics for Neural Chat Translation
Authors: Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Translation

Neural chat translation aims to translate bilingual conversational text, which has a broad application in international exchanges and cooperation. Despite the impressive performance of sentence-level and context-aware Neural Machine Translation (NMT), there still remain challenges to translate bilingual conversational text due to its inherent characteristics such as role preference, dialogue coherence, and translation consistency. In this paper, we aim to promote the translation quality of conversational text by modeling the above properties. Specifically, we design three latent variational modules to learn the distributions of bilingual conversational characteristics. Through sampling from these learned distributions, the latent variables, tailored for role preference, dialogue coherence, and translation consistency, are incorporated into the NMT model for better translation. We evaluate our approach on the benchmark dataset BConTrasT (English-German) and a self-collected bilingual dialogue corpus, named BMELD (English-Chinese). Extensive experiments show that our approach notably boosts the performance over strong baselines by a large margin and significantly surpasses some state-of-the-art context-aware NMT models in terms of BLEU and TER. Additionally, we make the BMELD dataset publicly available for the research community.
Powering Effective Climate Communication with a Climate Knowledge Base
Authors: Kameron B. Rodrigues, Shweta Khushu, Mukut Mukherjee, Andrew Banister, Anthony Hevia, Sampath Duddu, Nikita Bhutani
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Base Construction

While many accept climate change and its growing impacts, few converse about it well, limiting the adoption speed of societal changes necessary to address it. In order to make effective climate communication easier, we aim to build a system that presents to any individual the climate information predicted to best motivate and inspire them to take action given their unique set of personal values. To alleviate the cold-start problem, the system relies on a knowledge base (ClimateKB) of causes and effects of climate change, and their associations to personal values. Since no such comprehensive ClimateKB exists, we revisit knowledge base construction techniques and build a ClimateKB from free text. We plan to open source the ClimateKB and associated code to encourage future research and applications.
Modelling Latent Translations for Cross-Lingual Transfer
Authors: Edoardo Maria Ponti, Julia Kreutzer, Ivan Vulić, Siva Reddy
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Few-Shot Learning, Machine Translation, Natural Language Inference, NMT, Paraphrase Identification, Translation

While achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple tasks and languages, translation-based cross-lingual transfer is often overlooked in favour of massively multilingual pre-trained encoders. Arguably, this is due to its main limitations: 1) translation errors percolating to the classification phase and 2) the insufficient expressiveness of the maximum-likelihood translation. To remedy this, we propose a new technique that integrates both steps of the traditional pipeline (translation and classification) into a single model, by treating the intermediate translations as a latent random variable. As a result, 1) the neural machine translation system can be fine-tuned with a variant of Minimum Risk Training where the reward is the accuracy of the downstream task classifier. Moreover, 2) multiple samples can be drawn to approximate the expected loss across all possible translations during inference. We evaluate our novel latent translation-based model on a series of multilingual NLU tasks, including commonsense reasoning, paraphrase identification, and natural language inference. We report gains for both zero-shot and few-shot learning setups, up to 2.7 accuracy points on average, which are even more prominent for low-resource languages (e.g., Haitian Creole). Finally, we carry out in-depth analyses comparing different underlying NMT models and assessing the impact of alternative translations on the downstream performance.
Power Plant Classification from Remote Imaging with Deep Learning
Authors: Michael Mommert, Linus Scheibenreif, Joëlle Hanna, Damian Borth
Date: 2021-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Learning

Satellite remote imaging enables the detailed study of land use patterns on a global scale. We investigate the possibility to improve the information content of traditional land use classification by identifying the nature of industrial sites from medium-resolution remote sensing images. In this work, we focus on classifying different types of power plants from Sentinel-2 imaging data. Using a ResNet-50 deep learning model, we are able to achieve a mean accuracy of 90.0% in distinguishing 10 different power plant types and a background class. Furthermore, we are able to identify the cooling mechanisms utilized in thermal power plants with a mean accuracy of 87.5%. Our results enable us to qualitatively investigate the energy mix from Sentinel-2 imaging data, and prove the feasibility to classify industrial sites on a global scale from freely available satellite imagery.
Pose Estimation and 3D Reconstruction of Vehicles from Stereo-Images Using a Subcategory-Aware Shape Prior
Authors: Max Coenen, Franz Rottensteiner
Date: 2021-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Object Reconstruction, Pose Estimation, Vehicle Pose Estimation

The 3D reconstruction of objects is a prerequisite for many highly relevant applications of computer vision such as mobile robotics or autonomous driving. To deal with the inverse problem of reconstructing 3D objects from their 2D projections, a common strategy is to incorporate prior object knowledge into the reconstruction approach by establishing a 3D model and aligning it to the 2D image plane. However, current approaches are limited due to inadequate shape priors and the insufficiency of the derived image observations for a reliable alignment with the 3D model. The goal of this paper is to show how 3D object reconstruction can profit from a more sophisticated shape prior and from a combined incorporation of different observation types inferred from the images. We introduce a subcategory-aware deformable vehicle model that makes use of a prediction of the vehicle type for a more appropriate regularisation of the vehicle shape. A multi-branch CNN is presented to derive predictions of the vehicle type and orientation. This information is also introduced as prior information for model fitting. Furthermore, the CNN extracts vehicle keypoints and wireframes, which are well-suited for model-to-image association and model fitting. The task of pose estimation and reconstruction is addressed by a versatile probabilistic model. Extensive experiments are conducted using two challenging real-world data sets on both of which the benefit of the developed shape prior can be shown. A comparison to state-of-the-art methods for vehicle pose estimation shows that the proposed approach performs on par or better, confirming the suitability of the developed shape prior and probabilistic model for vehicle reconstruction.
Pre-Clustering Point Clouds of Crop Fields Using Scalable Methods
Authors: Henry J. Nelson, Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos
Date: 2021-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Plant Phenotyping

In order to apply the recent successes of machine learning and automated plant phenotyping on a large scale using agricultural robotics, efficient and general algorithms must be designed to intelligently split crop fields into small, yet actionable, portions that can then be processed by more complex algorithms. In this paper, we notice a similarity between the current state-of-the-art for separating corn plants and a commonly used density-based clustering algorithm, Quickshift. Exploiting this similarity we propose a number of novel, application-specific algorithms with the goal of producing a general and scalable field segmentation algorithm. The novel algorithms proposed in this work are shown to produce quantitatively better results than the current state-of-the-art while being less sensitive to input parameters and maintaining the same algorithmic time complexity. When incorporated into field-scale phenotyping systems, the proposed algorithms should work as a drop-in replacement that can greatly improve the accuracy of results while ensuring that performance and scalability remain undiminished.
Score-Based Point Cloud Denoising
Authors: Shitong Luo, Wei Hu
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Denoising, point cloud upsampling, Surface Reconstruction

Point clouds acquired from scanning devices are often perturbed by noise, which affects downstream tasks such as surface reconstruction and analysis. The distribution of a noisy point cloud can be viewed as the distribution of a set of noise-free samples $p(x)$ convolved with some noise model $n$, leading to $(p * n)(x)$ whose mode is the underlying clean surface. To denoise a noisy point cloud, we propose to increase the log-likelihood of each point from $p * n$ via gradient ascent -- iteratively updating each point's position. Since $p * n$ is unknown at test-time, and we only need the score (i.e., the gradient of the log-probability function) to perform gradient ascent, we propose a neural network architecture to estimate the score of $p * n$ given only noisy point clouds as input. We derive objective functions for training the network and develop a denoising algorithm leveraging on the estimated scores. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods under a variety of noise models, and shows the potential to be applied in other tasks such as point cloud upsampling. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/luost26/score-denoise}.
Human Pose Transfer with Augmented Disentangled Feature Consistency
Authors: Kun Wu, Chengxiang Yin, Zhengping Che, Bo Jiang, Jian Tang, Zheng Guan, Gangyi Ding
Date: 2021-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Pose Transfer

Deep generative models have made great progress in synthesizing images with arbitrary human poses and transferring poses of one person to others. Though many different methods have been proposed to generate images with high visual fidelity, the main challenge remains and comes from two fundamental issues: pose ambiguity and appearance inconsistency. To alleviate the current limitations and improve the quality of the synthesized images, we propose a pose transfer network with augmented Disentangled Feature Consistency (DFC-Net) to facilitate human pose transfer. Given a pair of images containing the source and target person, DFC-Net extracts pose and static information from the source and target respectively, then synthesizes an image of the target person with the desired pose from the source. Moreover, DFC-Net leverages disentangled feature consistency losses in the adversarial training to strengthen the transfer coherence and integrates a keypoint amplifier to enhance the pose feature extraction. With the help of the disentangled feature consistency losses, we further propose a novel data augmentation scheme that introduces unpaired support data with the augmented consistency constraints to improve the generality and robustness of DFC-Net. Extensive experimental results on Mixamo-Pose and EDN-10k have demonstrated DFC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on pose transfer.