pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
InferNER: an attentive model leveraging the sentence-level information for Named Entity Recognition in Microblogs
Authors: Moemmur Shahzad, Ayesha Amin, Diego Esteves, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
Date: 2021-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Sentence

We investigate the problem of named entity recognition in the user-generated text such as social media posts. This task is rendered particularly difficult by the restricted length and limited grammatical coherence of this data type. Current state-of-the-art approaches rely on external sources such as gazetteers to alleviate some of these restrictions. We present a neural model able to outperform state of the art on this task without recurring to gazetteers or similar external sources of information. Our approach relies on word-, character-, and sentence-level information for NER in short-text. Social media posts like tweets often have associated images that may provide auxiliary context relevant to understand these texts. Hence, we also incorporate visual information and introduce an attention component which computes attention weight probabilities over textual and text-relevant visual contexts separately. Our model outperforms the current state of the art on various NER datasets. On WNUT 2016 and 2017, our model achieved 53.48% and 50.52% F1 score, respectively. With Multimodal model, our system also outperforms the current SOTA with an F1 score of 74% on the multimodal dataset. Our evaluation further suggests that our model also goes beyond the current state-of-the-art on newswire data, hence corroborating its suitability for various NER tasks.
Fusion-DHL: WiFi, IMU, and Floorplan Fusion for Dense History of Locations in Indoor Environments
Authors: Sachini Herath, Saghar Irandoust, Bowen Chen, Yiming Qian, Pyojin Kim, Yasutaka Furukawa
Date: 2021-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

The paper proposes a multi-modal sensor fusion algorithm that fuses WiFi, IMU, and floorplan information to infer an accurate and dense location history in indoor environments. The algorithm uses 1) an inertial navigation algorithm to estimate a relative motion trajectory from IMU sensor data; 2) a WiFi-based localization API in industry to obtain positional constraints and geo-localize the trajectory; and 3) a convolutional neural network to refine the location history to be consistent with the floorplan. We have developed a data acquisition app to build a new dataset with WiFi, IMU, and floorplan data with ground-truth positions at 4 university buildings and 3 shopping malls. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed system is able to produce twice as accurate and a few orders of magnitude denser location history than the current standard, while requiring minimal additional energy consumption. We will publicly share our code, data and models.
Complete gradient clustering algorithm for features analysis of x-ray images
Authors: M. Charytanowicz, J. Niewczas, P. Kulczycki, P.A. Kowalski, S. Lukasik, S. Zak
Date: 2010-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Density Estimation

Methods based on kernel density estimation have been successfully applied for various data mining tasks. Their natural interpretation together with suitable properties make them an attractive tool among others in clustering problems. In this paper, the Complete Gradient Clustering Algorithm has been used to investigate a real data set of grains. The wheat varieties, Kama, Rosa and Canadian, characterized by measurements of main grain geometric features obtained by X-ray technique, have been analyzed. The proposed algorithm is expected to be an effective tool for recognizing wheat varieties. A comparison between the clustering results obtained from this method and the classical k-means clustering algorithm shows positive practical features of the Complete Gradient Clustering Algorithm.
Guided Facial Skin Color Correction
Authors: Keiichiro Shirai, Tatsuya Baba, Shunsuke Ono, Masahiro Okuda, Yusuke Tatesumi, Paul Perrotin
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00

This paper proposes an automatic image correction method for portrait photographs, which promotes consistency of facial skin color by suppressing skin color changes due to background colors. In portrait photographs, skin color is often distorted due to the lighting environment (e.g., light reflected from a colored background wall and over-exposure by a camera strobe), and if the photo is artificially combined with another background color, this color change is emphasized, resulting in an unnatural synthesized result. In our framework, after roughly extracting the face region and rectifying the skin color distribution in a color space, we perform color and brightness correction around the face in the original image to achieve a proper color balance of the facial image, which is not affected by luminance and background colors. Unlike conventional algorithms for color correction, our final result is attained by a color correction process with a guide image. In particular, our guided image filtering for the color correction does not require a perfectly-aligned guide image required in the original guide image filtering method proposed by He et al. Experimental results show that our method generates more natural results than conventional methods on not only headshot photographs but also natural scene photographs. We also show automatic yearbook style photo generation as an another application.
LIT: Learned Intermediate Representation Training for Model Compression
Authors: Animesh Koratana, Daniel Kang, Peter Bailis, Matei Zaharia
Date: 2019-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, model, Model Compression, Sentiment Analysis, Style Transfer

Researchers have proposed a range of model compression techniques to reduce the computational
and memory footprint of deep neural networks
(DNNs). In this work, we introduce Learned
Intermediate representation Training (LIT), a
novel model compression technique that outperforms a range of recent model compression techniques by leveraging the highly repetitive structure of modern DNNs (e.g., ResNet). LIT uses a
teacher DNN to train a student DNN of reduced
depth by leveraging two key ideas: 1) LIT directly compares intermediate representations of
the teacher and student model and 2) LIT uses
the intermediate representation from the teacher
model’s previous block as input to the current
student block during training, improving stability of intermediate representations in the student
network. We show that LIT can substantially reduce network size without loss in accuracy on a
range of DNN architectures and datasets. For example, LIT can compress ResNet on CIFAR10 by
3.4× outperforming network slimming and FitNets. Furthermore, LIT can compress, by depth,
ResNeXt 5.5× on CIFAR10 (image classification), VDCNN by 1.7× on Amazon Reviews
(sentiment analysis), and StarGAN by 1.8× on
CelebA (style transfer, i.e., GANs).
Conformal Prediction using Conditional Histograms
Authors: Matteo Sesia, Yaniv Romano
Date: 2021-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Prediction Intervals, quantile regression, regression

This paper develops a conformal method to compute prediction intervals for non-parametric regression that can automatically adapt to skewed data. Leveraging black-box machine learning algorithms to estimate the conditional distribution of the outcome using histograms, it translates their output into the shortest prediction intervals with approximate conditional coverage. The resulting prediction intervals provably have marginal coverage in finite samples, while asymptotically achieving conditional coverage and optimal length if the black-box model is consistent. Numerical experiments with simulated and real data demonstrate improved performance compared to state-of-the-art alternatives, including conformalized quantile regression and other distributional conformal prediction approaches.
Self-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Authors: Muhammad Maaz, Hanoona Abdul Rasheed, Dhanalaxmi Gaddam
Date: 2021-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Visual Categorization, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Recent research in self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown its capability in learning useful semantic representations from images for classification tasks. Through our work, we study the usefulness of SSL for Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC). FGVC aims to distinguish objects of visually similar sub categories within a general category. The small inter-class, but large intra-class variations within the dataset makes it a challenging task. The limited availability of annotated labels for such a fine-grained data encourages the need for SSL, where additional supervision can boost learning without the cost of extra annotations. Our baseline achieves $86.36\%$ top-1 classification accuracy on CUB-200-2011 dataset by utilizing random crop augmentation during training and center crop augmentation during testing. In this work, we explore the usefulness of various pretext tasks, specifically, rotation, pretext invariant representation learning (PIRL), and deconstruction and construction learning (DCL) for FGVC. Rotation as an auxiliary task promotes the model to learn global features, and diverts it from focusing on the subtle details. PIRL that uses jigsaw patches attempts to focus on discriminative local regions, but struggles to accurately localize them. DCL helps in learning local discriminating features and outperforms the baseline by achieving $87.41\%$ top-1 accuracy. The deconstruction learning forces the model to focus on local object parts, while reconstruction learning helps in learning the correlation between the parts. We perform extensive experiments to reason our findings. Our code is available at https://github.com/mmaaz60/ssl_for_fgvc.
A LightGBM based Forecasting of Dominant Wave Periods in Oceanic Waters
Authors: Pujan Pokhrel
Date: 2021-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

In this paper, we propose a Light Gradient Boosting (LightGBM) to forecast dominant wave periods in oceanic waters. First, we use the data collected from CDIP buoys and apply various data filtering methods. The data filtering methods allow us to obtain a high-quality dataset for training and validation purposes. We then extract various wave-based features like wave heights, periods, skewness, kurtosis, etc., and atmospheric features like humidity, pressure, and air temperature for the buoys. Afterward, we train algorithms that use LightGBM and Extra Trees through a hv-block cross-validation scheme to forecast dominant wave periods for up to 30 days ahead. LightGBM has the R2 score of 0.94, 0.94, and 0.94 for 1-day ahead, 15-day ahead, and 30-day ahead prediction. Similarly, Extra Trees (ET) has an R2 score of 0.88, 0.86, and 0.85 for 1-day ahead, 15-day ahead, and 30 day ahead prediction. In case of the test dataset, LightGBM has R2 score of 0.94, 0.94, and 0.94 for 1-day ahead, 15-day ahead and 30-day ahead prediction. ET has R2 score of 0.88, 0.86, and 0.85 for 1-day ahead, 15-day ahead, and 30-day ahead prediction. A similar R2 score for both training and the test dataset suggests that the machine learning models developed in this paper are robust. Since the LightGBM algorithm outperforms ET for all the windows tested, it is taken as the final algorithm. Note that the performance of both methods does not decrease significantly as the forecast horizon increases. Likewise, the proposed method outperforms the numerical approaches included in this paper in the test dataset. For 1 day ahead prediction, the proposed algorithm has SI, Bias, CC, and RMSE of 0.09, 0.00, 0.97, and 1.78 compared to 0.268, 0.40, 0.63, and 2.18 for the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model, which outperforms all the other methods in the test dataset.
Online Selection of Diverse Committees
Authors: Virginie Do, Jamal Atif, Jérôme Lang, Nicolas Usunier
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00

Citizens' assemblies need to represent subpopulations according to their proportions in the general population. These large committees are often constructed in an online fashion by contacting people, asking for the demographic features of the volunteers, and deciding to include them or not. This raises a trade-off between the number of people contacted (and the incurring cost) and the representativeness of the committee. We study three methods, theoretically and experimentally: a greedy algorithm that includes volunteers as long as proportionality is not violated; a non-adaptive method that includes a volunteer with a probability depending only on their features, assuming that the joint feature distribution in the volunteer pool is known; and a reinforcement learning based approach when this distribution is not known a priori but learnt online.
Analyzing Machine Learning Approaches for Online Malware Detection in Cloud
Authors: Jeffrey C Kimmell, Mahmoud Abdelsalam, Maanak Gupta
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Malware Detection

The variety of services and functionality offered by various cloud service providers (CSP) have exploded lately. Utilizing such services has created numerous opportunities for enterprises infrastructure to become cloud-based and, in turn, assisted the enterprises to easily and flexibly offer services to their customers. The practice of renting out access to servers to clients for computing and storage purposes is known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The popularity of IaaS has led to serious and critical concerns with respect to the cyber security and privacy. In particular, malware is often leveraged by malicious entities against cloud services to compromise sensitive data or to obstruct their functionality. In response to this growing menace, malware detection for cloud environments has become a widely researched topic with numerous methods being proposed and deployed. In this paper, we present online malware detection based on process level performance metrics, and analyze the effectiveness of different baseline machine learning models including, Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Random Forest Classifier (RFC), KNearest Neighbor (KNN), Gradient Boosted Classifier (GBC), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Our analysis conclude that neural network models can most accurately detect the impact malware have on the process level features of virtual machines in the cloud, and therefore are best suited to detect them. Our models were trained, validated, and tested by using a dataset of 40,680 malicious and benign samples. The dataset was complied by running different families of malware (collected from VirusTotal) in a live cloud environment and collecting the process level features.
Copyright in Generative Deep Learning
Authors: Giorgio Franceschelli, Mirco Musolesi
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Deep Learning

Machine-generated artworks are now part of the contemporary art scene: they are attracting significant investments and they are presented in exhibitions together with those created by human artists. These artworks are mainly based on generative deep learning techniques, which have seen a formidable development and remarkable refinement in the very recent years. Given the inherent characteristics of these techniques, a series of novel legal problems arise. In this article, we consider a set of key questions in the area of generative deep learning for the arts, including the following: is it possible to use copyrighted works as training set for generative models? How do we legally store their copies in order to perform the training process? Who (if someone) will own the copyright on the generated data? We try to answer these questions considering the law in force in both the United States of America and the European Union, and potential future alternatives. We then extend our analysis to code generation, which is an emerging area of generative deep learning. Finally, we also formulate a set of practical guidelines for artists and developers working on deep learning generated art, as well as some policy suggestions for policymakers.
Retrieval-Augmented Transformer-XL for Close-Domain Dialog Generation
Authors: Giovanni Bonetta, Rossella Cancelliere, Ding Liu, Paul Vozila
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation, Retrieval, Text Generation

Transformer-based models have demonstrated excellent capabilities of capturing patterns and structures in natural language generation and achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. In this paper we present a transformer-based model for multi-turn dialog response generation. Our solution is based on a hybrid approach which augments a transformer-based generative model with a novel retrieval mechanism, which leverages the memorized information in the training data via k-Nearest Neighbor search. Our system is evaluated on two datasets made by customer/assistant dialogs: the Taskmaster-1, released by Google and holding high quality, goal-oriented conversational data and a proprietary dataset collected from a real customer service call center. Both achieve better BLEU scores over strong baselines.
More Similar Values, More Trust? -- the Effect of Value Similarity on Trust in Human-Agent Interaction
Authors: Siddharth Mehrotra, Catholijn M. Jonker, Myrthe L. Tielman
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

As AI systems are increasingly involved in decision making, it also becomes important that they elicit appropriate levels of trust from their users. To achieve this, it is first important to understand which factors influence trust in AI. We identify that a research gap exists regarding the role of personal values in trust in AI. Therefore, this paper studies how human and agent Value Similarity (VS) influences a human's trust in that agent. To explore this, 89 participants teamed up with five different agents, which were designed with varying levels of value similarity to that of the participants. In a within-subjects, scenario-based experiment, agents gave suggestions on what to do when entering the building to save a hostage. We analyzed the agent's scores on subjective value similarity, trust and qualitative data from open-ended questions. Our results show that agents rated as having more similar values also scored higher on trust, indicating a positive effect between the two. With this result, we add to the existing understanding of human-agent trust by providing insight into the role of value-similarity.
Program Synthesis as Dependency Quantified Formula Modulo Theory
Authors: Priyanka Golia, Subhajit Roy, Kuldeep S. Meel
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Program Synthesis

Given a specification $\varphi(X,Y)$ over inputs $X$ and output $Y$, defined over a background theory $\mathbb{T}$, the problem of program synthesis is to design a program $f$ such that $Y=f(X)$ satisfies the specification $\varphi$. Over the past decade, syntax-guided synthesis (SyGuS) has emerged as a dominant approach for program synthesis where in addition to the specification $\varphi$, the end-user also specifies a grammar $L$ to aid the underlying synthesis engine. This paper investigates the feasibility of synthesis techniques without grammar, a sub-class defined as $\mathbb{T}$-constrained synthesis. We show that $\mathbb{T}$-constrained synthesis can be reduced to DQF($\mathbb{T}$), i.e., to the problem of finding a witness of a Dependency Quantified Formula Modulo Theory. When the underlying theory is the theory of bitvectors, the corresponding DQF(BV) problem can be further reduced to Dependency Quantified Boolean Formulas (DQBF). We rely on the progress in DQBF solving to design DQBF-based synthesizers that outperform the domain-specific program synthesis techniques, thereby positioning DQBF as a core representation language for program synthesis. Our empirical analysis shows that $\mathbb{T}$-constrained synthesis can achieve significantly better performance than syntax-guided approaches. Furthermore, the general-purpose DQBF solvers perform on par with domain-specific synthesis techniques.
Learn Fine-grained Adaptive Loss for Multiple Anatomical Landmark Detection in Medical Images
Authors: Guang-Quan Zhou, Juzheng Miao, Xin Yang, Rui Li, En-Ze Huo, Wenlong Shi, Yuhao Huang, Jikuan Qian, Chaoyu Chen, Dong Ni
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomical Landmark Detection, Anatomy, Medical Image Analysis, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Automatic and accurate detection of anatomical landmarks is an essential operation in medical image analysis with a multitude of applications. Recent deep learning methods have improved results by directly encoding the appearance of the captured anatomy with the likelihood maps (i.e., heatmaps). However, most current solutions overlook another essence of heatmap regression, the objective metric for regressing target heatmaps and rely on hand-crafted heuristics to set the target precision, thus being usually cumbersome and task-specific. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-to-learn framework for landmark detection to optimize the neural network and the target precision simultaneously. The pivot of this work is to leverage the reinforcement learning (RL) framework to search objective metrics for regressing multiple heatmaps dynamically during the training process, thus avoiding setting problem-specific target precision. We also introduce an early-stop strategy for active termination of the RL agent's interaction that adapts the optimal precision for separate targets considering exploration-exploitation tradeoffs. This approach shows better stability in training and improved localization accuracy in inference. Extensive experimental results on two different applications of landmark localization: 1) our in-house prenatal ultrasound (US) dataset and 2) the publicly available dataset of cephalometric X-Ray landmark detection, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our proposed framework is general and shows the potential to improve the efficiency of anatomical landmark detection.
Explainable Tsetlin Machine framework for fake news detection with credibility score assessment
Authors: Bimal Bhattarai, Ole-Christoffer Granmo, Lei Jiao
Date: 2021-05-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Fact Checking, Fake News Detection, Misinformation, News Classification

The proliferation of fake news, i.e., news intentionally spread for misinformation, poses a threat to individuals and society. Despite various fact-checking websites such as PolitiFact, robust detection techniques are required to deal with the increase in fake news. Several deep learning models show promising results for fake news classification, however, their black-box nature makes it difficult to explain their classification decisions and quality-assure the models. We here address this problem by proposing a novel interpretable fake news detection framework based on the recently introduced Tsetlin Machine (TM). In brief, we utilize the conjunctive clauses of the TM to capture lexical and semantic properties of both true and fake news text. Further, we use the clause ensembles to calculate the credibility of fake news. For evaluation, we conduct experiments on two publicly available datasets, PolitiFact and GossipCop, and demonstrate that the TM framework significantly outperforms previously published baselines by at least $5\%$ in terms of accuracy, with the added benefit of an interpretable logic-based representation. Further, our approach provides higher F1-score than BERT and XLNet, however, we obtain slightly lower accuracy. We finally present a case study on our model's explainability, demonstrating how it decomposes into meaningful words and their negations.