pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MS-RANAS: Multi-Scale Resource-Aware Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Cristian Cioflan, Radu Timofte
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has proved effective in offering outperforming alternatives to handcrafted neural networks. In this paper we analyse the benefits of NAS for image classification tasks under strict computational constraints. Our aim is to automate the design of highly efficient deep neural networks, capable of offering fast and accurate predictions and that could be deployed on a low-memory, low-power system-on-chip. The task thus becomes a three-party trade-off between accuracy, computational complexity, and memory requirements. To address this concern, we propose Multi-Scale Resource-Aware Neural Architecture Search (MS-RANAS). We employ a one-shot architecture search approach in order to obtain a reduced search cost and we focus on an anytime prediction setting. Through the usage of multiple-scaled features and early classifiers, we achieved state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy-speed trade-off.
Tackling unsupervised multi-source domain adaptation with optimism and consistency
Authors: Diogo Pernes, Jaime S. Cardoso
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Open-Ended Question Answering

It has been known for a while that the problem of multi-source domain adaptation can be regarded as a single source domain adaptation task where the source domain corresponds to a mixture of the original source domains. Nonetheless, how to adjust the mixture distribution weights remains an open question. Moreover, most existing work on this topic focuses only on minimizing the error on the source domains and achieving domain-invariant representations, which is insufficient to ensure low error on the target domain. In this work, we present a novel framework that addresses both problems and beats the current state of the art by using a mildly optimistic objective function and consistency regularization on the target samples.
A Comparative Study of Deep Learning Loss Functions for Multi-Label Remote Sensing Image Classification
Authors: Hichame Yessou, Gencer Sumbul, Begüm Demir
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Remote Sensing Image Classification, Scene Classification

This paper analyzes and compares different deep learning loss functions in the framework of multi-label remote sensing (RS) image scene classification problems. We consider seven loss functions: 1) cross-entropy loss; 2) focal loss; 3) weighted cross-entropy loss; 4) Hamming loss; 5) Huber loss; 6) ranking loss; and 7) sparseMax loss. All the considered loss functions are analyzed for the first time in RS. After a theoretical analysis, an experimental analysis is carried out to compare the considered loss functions in terms of their: 1) overall accuracy; 2) class imbalance awareness (for which the number of samples associated to each class significantly varies); 3) convexibility and differentiability; and 4) learning efficiency (i.e., convergence speed). On the basis of our analysis, some guidelines are derived for a proper selection of a loss function in multi-label RS scene classification problems.
Residual acoustic echo suppression based on efficient multi-task convolutional neural network
Authors: Xinquan Zhou, Yanhong Leng
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Acoustic echo degrades the user experience in voice communication systems thus needs to be suppressed completely. We propose a real-time residual acoustic echo suppression (RAES) method using an efficient convolutional neural network. The double talk detector is used as an auxiliary task to improve the performance of RAES in the context of multi-task learning. The training criterion is based on a novel loss function, which we call as the suppression loss, to balance the suppression of residual echo and the distortion of near-end signals. The experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently suppress the residual echo under different circumstances.
Towards Intelligent Risk-based Customer Segmentation in Banking
Authors: Shahabodin Khadivi Zand
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Segmentation

Business Processes, i.e., a set of coordinated tasks and activities to achieve a business goal, and their continuous improvements are key to the operation of any organization. In banking, business processes are increasingly dynamic as various technologies have made dynamic processes more prevalent. For example, customer segmentation, i.e., the process of grouping related customers based on common activities and behaviors, could be a data-driven and knowledge-intensive process. In this paper, we present an intelligent data-driven pipeline composed of a set of processing elements to move customers' data from one system to another, transforming the data into the contextualized data and knowledge along the way. The goal is to present a novel intelligent customer segmentation process which automates the feature engineering, i.e., the process of using (banking) domain knowledge to extract features from raw data via data mining techniques, in the banking domain. We adopt a typical scenario for analyzing customer transaction records, to highlight how the presented approach can significantly improve the quality of risk-based customer segmentation in the absence of feature engineering.As result, our proposed method is able to achieve accuracy of 91% compared to classical approaches in terms of detecting, identifying and classifying transaction to the right classification.
Mobility Management in Emerging Ultra-Dense Cellular Networks: A Survey, Outlook, and Future Research Directions
Authors: Syed Muhammad Asad Zaidi, Marvin Manalastas, Hasan Farooq, Ali Imran
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The exponential rise in mobile traffic originating from mobile devices highlights the need for making mobility management in future networks even more efficient and seamless than ever before. Ultra-Dense Cellular Network vision consisting of cells of varying sizes with conventional and mmWave bands is being perceived as the panacea for the eminent capacity crunch. However, mobility challenges in an ultra-dense heterogeneous network with motley of high frequency and mmWave band cells will be unprecedented due to plurality of handover instances, and the resulting signaling overhead and data interruptions for miscellany of devices. Similarly, issues like user tracking and cell discovery for mmWave with narrow beams need to be addressed before the ambitious gains of emerging mobile networks can be realized. Mobility challenges are further highlighted when considering the 5G deliverables of multi-Gbps wireless connectivity, <1ms latency and support for devices moving at maximum speed of 500km/h, to name a few. Despite its significance, few mobility surveys exist with the majority focused on adhoc networks. This paper is the first to provide a comprehensive survey on the panorama of mobility challenges in the emerging ultra-dense mobile networks. We not only present a detailed tutorial on 5G mobility approaches and highlight key mobility risks of legacy networks, but also review key findings from recent studies and highlight the technical challenges and potential opportunities related to mobility from the perspective of emerging ultra-dense cellular networks.
Aligning Intraobserver Agreement by Transitivity
Authors: Jacopo Amidei
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Annotation reproducibility and accuracy rely on good consistency within annotators. We propose a novel method for measuring within annotator consistency or annotator Intraobserver Agreement (IA). The proposed approach is based on transitivity, a measure that has been thoroughly studied in the context of rational decision-making. The transitivity measure, in contrast with the commonly used test-retest strategy for annotator IA, is less sensitive to the several types of bias introduced by the test-retest strategy. We present a representation theorem to the effect that relative judgement data that meet transitivity can be mapped to a scale (in terms of measurement theory). We also discuss a further application of transitivity as part of data collection design for addressing the problem of the quadratic complexity of data collection of relative judgements.
Weakly-supervised Salient Instance Detection
Authors: Xin Tian, Ke Xu, Xin Yang, Bao-Cai Yin, Rynson W. H. Lau
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Object Localization, Saliency Detection

Existing salient instance detection (SID) methods typically learn from pixel-level annotated datasets. In this paper, we present the first weakly-supervised approach to the SID problem. Although weak supervision has been considered in general saliency detection, it is mainly based on using class labels for object localization. However, it is non-trivial to use only class labels to learn instance-aware saliency information, as salient instances with high semantic affinities may not be easily separated by the labels. We note that subitizing information provides an instant judgement on the number of salient items, which naturally relates to detecting salient instances and may help separate instances of the same class while grouping different parts of the same instance. Inspired by this insight, we propose to use class and subitizing labels as weak supervision for the SID problem. We propose a novel weakly-supervised network with three branches: a Saliency Detection Branch leveraging class consistency information to locate candidate objects; a Boundary Detection Branch exploiting class discrepancy information to delineate object boundaries; and a Centroid Detection Branch using subitizing information to detect salient instance centroids. This complementary information is further fused to produce salient instance maps. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the proposed method plays favorably against carefully designed baseline methods adapted from related tasks.
Message Passing Neural Processes
Authors: Ben Day, Cătălina Cangea, Arian R. Jamasb, Pietro Liò
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Neural Processes (NPs) are powerful and flexible models able to incorporate uncertainty when representing stochastic processes, while maintaining a linear time complexity. However, NPs produce a latent description by aggregating independent representations of context points and lack the ability to exploit relational information present in many datasets. This renders NPs ineffective in settings where the stochastic process is primarily governed by neighbourhood rules, such as cellular automata (CA), and limits performance for any task where relational information remains unused. We address this shortcoming by introducing Message Passing Neural Processes (MPNPs), the first class of NPs that explicitly makes use of relational structure within the model. Our evaluation shows that MPNPs thrive at lower sampling rates, on existing benchmarks and newly-proposed CA and Cora-Branched tasks. We further report strong generalisation over density-based CA rule-sets and significant gains in challenging arbitrary-labelling and few-shot learning setups.
Towards Effective Context for Meta-Reinforcement Learning: an Approach based on Contrastive Learning
Authors: Haotian Fu, Hongyao Tang, Jianye Hao, Chen Chen, Xidong Feng, Dong Li, Wulong Liu
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Meta Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Context, the embedding of previous collected trajectories, is a powerful construct for Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) algorithms. By conditioning on an effective context, Meta-RL policies can easily generalize to new tasks within a few adaptation steps. We argue that improving the quality of context involves answering two questions: 1. How to train a compact and sufficient encoder that can embed the task-specific information contained in prior trajectories? 2. How to collect informative trajectories of which the corresponding context reflects the specification of tasks? To this end, we propose a novel Meta-RL framework called CCM (Contrastive learning augmented Context-based Meta-RL). We first focus on the contrastive nature behind different tasks and leverage it to train a compact and sufficient context encoder. Further, we train a separate exploration policy and theoretically derive a new information-gain-based objective which aims to collect informative trajectories in a few steps. Empirically, we evaluate our approaches on common benchmarks as well as several complex sparse-reward environments. The experimental results show that CCM outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by addressing previously mentioned problems respectively.
Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Indonesian Automatic Question Generator
Authors: Ferdiant Joshua Muis, Ayu Purwarianti
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

Automatic question generation is defined as the task of automating the creation of question given a various of textual data. Research in automatic question generator (AQG) has been conducted for more than 10 years, mainly focused on factoid question. In all these studies, the state-of-the-art is attained using sequence-to-sequence approach. However, AQG system for Indonesian has not ever been researched intensely. In this work we construct an Indonesian automatic question generator, adapting the architecture from some previous works. In summary, we used sequence-to-sequence approach using BiGRU, BiLSTM, and Transformer with additional linguistic features, copy mechanism, and coverage mechanism. Since there is no public large dan popular Indonesian dataset for question generation, we translated SQuAD v2.0 factoid question answering dataset, with additional Indonesian TyDiQA dev set for testing. The system achieved BLEU1, BLEU2, BLEU3, BLEU4, and ROUGE-L score at 38,35, 20,96, 10,68, 5,78, and 43,4 for SQuAD, and 39.9, 20.78, 10.26, 6.31, 44.13 for TyDiQA, respectively. The system performed well when the expected answers are named entities and are syntactically close with the context explaining them. Additionally, from native Indonesian perspective, the best questions generated by our best models on their best cases are acceptable and reasonably useful.
Utility is in the Eye of the User: A Critique of NLP Leaderboards
Authors: Kawin Ethayarajh, Dan Jurafsky
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Fairness

Benchmarks such as GLUE have helped drive advances in NLP by incentivizing the creation of more accurate models. While this leaderboard paradigm has been remarkably successful, a historical focus on performance-based evaluation has been at the expense of other qualities that the NLP community values in models, such as compactness, fairness, and energy efficiency. In this opinion paper, we study the divergence between what is incentivized by leaderboards and what is useful in practice through the lens of microeconomic theory. We frame both the leaderboard and NLP practitioners as consumers and the benefit they get from a model as its utility to them. With this framing, we formalize how leaderboards -- in their current form -- can be poor proxies for the NLP community at large. For example, a highly inefficient model would provide less utility to practitioners but not to a leaderboard, since it is a cost that only the former must bear. To allow practitioners to better estimate a model's utility to them, we advocate for more transparency on leaderboards, such as the reporting of statistics that are of practical concern (e.g., model size, energy efficiency, and inference latency).
A Multi-term and Multi-task Analyzing Framework for Affective Analysis in-the-wild
Authors: Sachihiro Youoku, Yuushi Toyoda, Takahisa Yamamoto, Junya Saito, Ryosuke Kawamura, Xiaoyu Mi, Kentaro Murase
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Human affective recognition is an important factor in human-computer interaction. However, the method development with in-the-wild data is not yet accurate enough for practical usage. In this paper, we introduce the affective recognition method focusing on valence-arousal (VA) and expression (EXP) that was submitted to the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2020 Contest. Since we considered that affective behaviors have many observable features that have their own time frames, we introduced multiple optimized time windows (short-term, middle-term, and long-term) into our analyzing framework for extracting feature parameters from video data. Moreover, multiple modality data are used, including action units, head poses, gaze, posture, and ResNet 50 or Efficient NET features, and are optimized during the extraction of these features. Then, we generated affective recognition models for each time window and ensembled these models together. Also, we fussed the valence, arousal, and expression models together to enable the multi-task learning, considering the fact that the basic psychological states behind facial expressions are closely related to each another. In the validation set, our model achieved a valence-arousal score of 0.498 and a facial expression score of 0.471. These verification results reveal that our proposed framework can improve estimation accuracy and robustness effectively.
Lipschitz neural networks are dense in the set of all Lipschitz functions
Authors: Stephan Eckstein
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: All

This note shows that, for a fixed Lipschitz constant $L > 0$, one layer neural networks that are $L$-Lipschitz are dense in the set of all $L$-Lipschitz functions with respect to the uniform norm on bounded sets.
Physics-Constrained Predictive Molecular Latent Space Discovery with Graph Scattering Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Navid Shervani-Tabar, Nicholas Zabaras
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, molecular representation, Variational Inference

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have propelled the development of innovative computational materials modeling and design techniques. Generative deep learning models have been used for molecular representation, discovery, and design. In this work, we assess the predictive capabilities of a molecular generative model developed based on variational inference and graph theory in the small data regime. Physical constraints that encourage energetically stable molecules are proposed. The encoding network is based on the scattering transform with adaptive spectral filters to allow for better generalization of the model. The decoding network is a one-shot graph generative model that conditions atom types on molecular topology. A Bayesian formalism is considered to capture uncertainties in the predictive estimates of molecular properties. The model's performance is evaluated by generating molecules with desired target properties.
Distributed ADMM with Synergetic Communication and Computation
Authors: Zhuojun Tian, Zhaoyang Zhang, Jue Wang, Xiaoming Chen, Wei Wang, Huaiyu Dai
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a novel distributed alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with synergetic communication and computation, called SCCD-ADMM, to reduce the total communication and computation cost of the system. Explicitly, in the proposed algorithm, each node interacts with only part of its neighboring nodes, the number of which is progressively determined according to a heuristic searching procedure, which takes into account both the predicted convergence rate and the communication and computation costs at each iteration, resulting in a trade-off between communication and computation. Then the node chooses its neighboring nodes according to an importance sampling distribution derived theoretically to minimize the variance with the latest information it locally stores. Finally, the node updates its local information with a new update rule which adapts to the number of communication nodes. We prove the convergence of the proposed algorithm and provide an upper bound of the convergence variance brought by randomness. Extensive simulations validate the excellent performances of the proposed algorithm in terms of convergence rate and variance, the overall communication and computation cost, the impact of network topology as well as the time for evaluation, in comparison with the traditional counterparts.
Where is the Model Looking At?--Concentrate and Explain the Network Attention
Authors: Wenjia Xu, Jiuniu Wang, Yang Wang, Guangluan Xu, Wei Dai, Yirong Wu
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Task Learning

Image classification models have achieved satisfactory performance on many datasets, sometimes even better than human. However, The model attention is unclear since the lack of interpretability. This paper investigates the fidelity and interpretability of model attention. We propose an Explainable Attribute-based Multi-task (EAT) framework to concentrate the model attention on the discriminative image area and make the attention interpretable. We introduce attributes prediction to the multi-task learning network, helping the network to concentrate attention on the foreground objects. We generate attribute-based textual explanations for the network and ground the attributes on the image to show visual explanations. The multi-model explanation can not only improve user trust but also help to find the weakness of network and dataset. Our framework can be generalized to any basic model. We perform experiments on three datasets and five basic models. Results indicate that the EAT framework can give multi-modal explanations that interpret the network decision. The performance of several recognition approaches is improved by guiding network attention.
Fake News Spreader Detection on Twitter using Character N-Grams. Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2020
Authors: Inna Vogel, Meghana Meghana
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, Misinformation

The authors of fake news often use facts from verified news sources and mix them with misinformation to create confusion and provoke unrest among the readers. The spread of fake news can thereby have serious implications on our society. They can sway political elections, push down the stock price or crush reputations of corporations or public figures. Several websites have taken on the mission of checking rumors and allegations, but are often not fast enough to check the content of all the news being disseminated. Especially social media websites have offered an easy platform for the fast propagation of information. Towards limiting fake news from being propagated among social media users, the task of this year's PAN 2020 challenge lays the focus on the fake news spreaders. The aim of the task is to determine whether it is possible to discriminate authors that have shared fake news in the past from those that have never done it. In this notebook, we describe our profiling system for the fake news detection task on Twitter. For this, we conduct different feature extraction techniques and learning experiments from a multilingual perspective, namely English and Spanish. Our final submitted systems use character n-grams as features in combination with a linear SVM for English and Logistic Regression for the Spanish language. Our submitted models achieve an overall accuracy of 73% and 79% on the English and Spanish official test set, respectively. Our experiments show that it is difficult to differentiate solidly fake news spreaders on Twitter from users who share credible information leaving room for further investigations. Our model ranked 3rd out of 72 competitors.