pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Band Selection in Hyperspectral Image Classification
Authors: Lichao Mou, Sudipan Saha, Yuansheng Hua, Francesca Bovolo, Lorenzo Bruzzone, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Reinforcement Learning, General Classification, Hyperspectral image analysis, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Band selection refers to the process of choosing the most relevant bands in a hyperspectral image. By selecting a limited number of optimal bands, we aim at speeding up model training, improving accuracy, or both. It reduces redundancy among spectral bands while trying to preserve the original information of the image. By now many efforts have been made to develop unsupervised band selection approaches, of which the majority are heuristic algorithms devised by trial and error. In this paper, we are interested in training an intelligent agent that, given a hyperspectral image, is capable of automatically learning policy to select an optimal band subset without any hand-engineered reasoning. To this end, we frame the problem of unsupervised band selection as a Markov decision process, propose an effective method to parameterize it, and finally solve the problem by deep reinforcement learning. Once the agent is trained, it learns a band-selection policy that guides the agent to sequentially select bands by fully exploiting the hyperspectral image and previously picked bands. Furthermore, we propose two different reward schemes for the environment simulation of deep reinforcement learning and compare them in experiments. This, to the best of our knowledge, is the first study that explores a deep reinforcement learning model for hyperspectral image analysis, thus opening a new door for future research and showcasing the great potential of deep reinforcement learning in remote sensing applications. Extensive experiments are carried out on four hyperspectral data sets, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata
Authors: Shyam Sudhakaran, Djordje Grbic, Siyan Li, Adam Katona, Elias Najarro, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Minecraft

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) have been proven effective in simulating morphogenetic processes, the continuous construction of complex structures from very few starting cells. Recent developments in NCAs lie in the 2D domain, namely reconstructing target images from a single pixel or infinitely growing 2D textures. In this work, we propose an extension of NCAs to 3D, utilizing 3D convolutions in the proposed neural network architecture. Minecraft is selected as the environment for our automaton since it allows the generation of both static structures and moving machines. We show that despite their simplicity, NCAs are capable of growing complex entities such as castles, apartment blocks, and trees, some of which are composed of over 3,000 blocks. Additionally, when trained for regeneration, the system is able to regrow parts of simple functional machines, significantly expanding the capabilities of simulated morphogenetic systems. The code for the experiment in this paper can be found at: https://github.com/real-itu/3d-artefacts-nca.
Category Aware Explainable Conversational Recommendation
Authors: Nikolaos Kondylidis, Jie Zou, Evangelos Kanoulas
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation

Most conversational recommendation approaches are either not explainable, or they require external user's knowledge for explaining or their explanations cannot be applied in real time due to computational limitations. In this work, we present a real time category based conversational recommendation approach, which can provide concise explanations without prior user knowledge being required. We first perform an explainable user model in the form of preferences over the items' categories, and then use the category preferences to recommend items. The user model is performed by applying a BERT-based neural architecture on the conversation. Then, we translate the user model into item recommendation scores using a Feed Forward Network. User preferences during the conversation in our approach are represented by category vectors which are directly interpretable. The experimental results on the real conversational recommendation dataset ReDial demonstrate comparable performance to the state-of-the-art, while our approach is explainable. We also show the potential power of our framework by involving an oracle setting of category preference prediction.
A Central Limit Theorem for Differentially Private Query Answering
Authors: Jinshuo Dong, Weijie J. Su, Linjun Zhang
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Perhaps the single most important use case for differential privacy is to privately answer numerical queries, which is usually achieved by adding noise to the answer vector. The central question, therefore, is to understand which noise distribution optimizes the privacy-accuracy trade-off, especially when the dimension of the answer vector is high. Accordingly, extensive literature has been dedicated to the question and the upper and lower bounds have been matched up to constant factors [BUV18, SU17]. In this paper, we take a novel approach to address this important optimality question. We first demonstrate an intriguing central limit theorem phenomenon in the high-dimensional regime. More precisely, we prove that a mechanism is approximately Gaussian Differentially Private [DRS21] if the added noise satisfies certain conditions. In particular, densities proportional to $\mathrm{e}^{-\|x\|_p^\alpha}$, where $\|x\|_p$ is the standard $\ell_p$-norm, satisfies the conditions. Taking this perspective, we make use of the Cramer--Rao inequality and show an "uncertainty principle"-style result: the product of the privacy parameter and the $\ell_2$-loss of the mechanism is lower bounded by the dimension. Furthermore, the Gaussian mechanism achieves the constant-sharp optimal privacy-accuracy trade-off among all such noises. Our findings are corroborated by numerical experiments.
Multi-task learning for virtual flow metering
Authors: Anders T. Sandnes, Bjarne Grimstad, Odd Kolbjørnsen
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Virtual flow metering (VFM) is a cost-effective and non-intrusive technology for inferring multiphase flow rates in petroleum assets. Inferences about flow rates are fundamental to decision support systems that operators extensively rely on. Data-driven VFM, where mechanistic models are replaced with machine learning models, has recently gained attention due to its promise of lower maintenance costs. While excellent performances in small sample studies have been reported in the literature, there is still considerable doubt about the robustness of data-driven VFM. In this paper, we propose a new multi-task learning (MTL) architecture for data-driven VFM. Our method differs from previous methods in that it enables learning across oil and gas wells. We study the method by modeling 55 wells from four petroleum assets and compare the results with two single-task baseline models. Our findings show that MTL improves robustness over single-task methods, without sacrificing performance. MTL yields a 25-50% error reduction on average for the assets where single-task architectures are struggling.
Deep Learning for Chest X-ray Analysis: A Survey
Authors: Ecem Sogancioglu, Erdi Çallı, Bram van Ginneken, Kicky G. van Leeuwen, Keelin Murphy
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Domain Adaptation, Image Generation, Medical Image Analysis, regression, Survey

Recent advances in deep learning have led to a promising performance in many medical image analysis tasks. As the most commonly performed radiological exam, chest radiographs are a particularly important modality for which a variety of applications have been researched. The release of multiple, large, publicly available chest X-ray datasets in recent years has encouraged research interest and boosted the number of publications. In this paper, we review all studies using deep learning on chest radiographs, categorizing works by task: image-level prediction (classification and regression), segmentation, localization, image generation and domain adaptation. Commercially available applications are detailed, and a comprehensive discussion of the current state of the art and potential future directions are provided.
HDTest: Differential Fuzz Testing of Brain-Inspired Hyperdimensional Computing
Authors: Dongning Ma, Jianmin Guo, Yu Jiang, Xun Jiao
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: One-Shot Learning

Brain-inspired hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is an emerging computational paradigm that mimics brain cognition and leverages hyperdimensional vectors with fully distributed holographic representation and (pseudo)randomness. Compared to other machine learning (ML) methods such as deep neural networks (DNNs), HDC offers several advantages including high energy efficiency, low latency, and one-shot learning, making it a promising alternative candidate on a wide range of applications. However, the reliability and robustness of HDC models have not been explored yet. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate HDTest to test HDC model by automatically exposing unexpected or incorrect behaviors under rare inputs. The core idea of HDTest is based on guided differential fuzz testing. Guided by the distance between query hypervector and reference hypervector in HDC, HDTest continuously mutates original inputs to generate new inputs that can trigger incorrect behaviors of HDC model. Compared to traditional ML testing methods, HDTest does not need to manually label the original input. Using handwritten digit classification as an example, we show that HDTest can generate thousands of adversarial inputs with negligible perturbations that can successfully fool HDC models. On average, HDTest can generate around 400 adversarial inputs within one minute running on a commodity computer. Finally, by using the HDTest-generated inputs to retrain HDC models, we can strengthen the robustness of HDC models. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first effort in systematically testing this emerging brain-inspired computational model.
dNNsolve: an efficient NN-based PDE solver
Authors: Veronica Guidetti, Francesco Muia, Yvette Welling, Alexander Westphal
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00

Neural Networks (NNs) can be used to solve Ordinary and Partial Differential Equations (ODEs and PDEs) by redefining the question as an optimization problem. The objective function to be optimized is the sum of the squares of the PDE to be solved and of the initial/boundary conditions. A feed forward NN is trained to minimise this loss function evaluated on a set of collocation points sampled from the domain where the problem is defined. A compact and smooth solution, that only depends on the weights of the trained NN, is then obtained. This approach is often referred to as PINN, from Physics Informed Neural Network~\cite{raissi2017physics_1, raissi2017physics_2}. Despite the success of the PINN approach in solving various classes of PDEs, an implementation of this idea that is capable of solving a large class of ODEs and PDEs with good accuracy and without the need to finely tune the hyperparameters of the network, is not available yet. In this paper, we introduce a new implementation of this concept - called dNNsolve - that makes use of dual Neural Networks to solve ODEs/PDEs. These include: i) sine and sigmoidal activation functions, that provide a more efficient basis to capture both secular and periodic patterns in the solutions; ii) a newly designed architecture, that makes it easy for the the NN to approximate the solution using the basis functions mentioned above. We show that dNNsolve is capable of solving a broad range of ODEs/PDEs in 1, 2 and 3 spacetime dimensions, without the need of hyperparameter fine-tuning.
Function approximation by deep neural networks with parameters $\{0,\pm \frac{1}{2}, \pm 1, 2\}$
Authors: Aleksandr Beknazaryan
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

In this paper it is shown that $C_\beta$-smooth functions can be approximated by deep neural networks with ReLU activation function and with parameters $\{0,\pm \frac{1}{2}, \pm 1, 2\}$. The $l_0$ and $l_1$ parameter norms of considered networks are thus equivalent. The depth, width and the number of active parameters of the constructed networks have, up to a logarithmic factor, the same dependence on the approximation error as the networks with parameters in $[-1,1]$. In particular, this means that the nonparametric regression estimation with the constructed networks attains the same convergence rate as with sparse networks with parameters in $[-1,1]$.
Discriminative Learning for Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars based on Generalized H-Criterion
Authors: Mauricio Maca, José Miguel Benedí, Joan Andreu Sánchez
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00

We present a formal framework for the development of a family of discriminative learning algorithms for Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars (PCFGs) based on a generalization of criterion-H. First of all, we propose the H-criterion as the objective function and the Growth Transformations as the optimization method, which allows us to develop the final expressions for the estimation of the parameters of the PCFGs. And second, we generalize the H-criterion to take into account the set of reference interpretations and the set of competing interpretations, and we propose a new family of objective functions that allow us to develop the expressions of the estimation transformations for PCFGs.
The Effect of Domain and Diacritics in Yorùbá-English Neural Machine Translation
Authors: David I. Adelani, Dana Ruiter, Jesujoba O. Alabi, Damilola Adebonojo, Adesina Ayeni, Mofe Adeyemi, Ayodele Awokoya, Cristina España-Bonet
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Domain Adaptation, Machine Translation, Translation

Massively multilingual machine translation (MT) has shown impressive capabilities, including zero and few-shot translation between low-resource language pairs. However, these models are often evaluated on high-resource languages with the assumption that they generalize to low-resource ones. The difficulty of evaluating MT models on low-resource pairs is often due to lack of standardized evaluation datasets. In this paper, we present MENYO-20k, the first multi-domain parallel corpus with a special focus on clean orthography for Yor\`ub\'a--English with standardized train-test splits for benchmarking. We provide several neural MT benchmarks and compare them to the performance of popular pre-trained (massively multilingual) MT models both for the heterogeneous test set and its subdomains. Since these pre-trained models use huge amounts of data with uncertain quality, we also analyze the effect of diacritics, a major characteristic of Yor\`ub\'a, in the training data. We investigate how and when this training condition affects the final quality and intelligibility of a translation. Our models outperform massively multilingual models such as Google ($+8.7$ BLEU) and Facebook M2M ($+9.1$ BLEU) when translating to Yor\`ub\'a, setting a high quality benchmark for future research.
Tomography of time-dependent quantum spin networks with machine learning
Authors: Chen-Di Han, Bryan Glaz, Mulugeta Haile, Ying-Cheng Lai
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Interacting spin networks are fundamental to quantum computing. Data-based tomography of time-independent spin networks has been achieved, but an open challenge is to ascertain the structures of time-dependent spin networks using time series measurements taken locally from a small subset of the spins. Physically, the dynamical evolution of a spin network under time-dependent driving or perturbation is described by the Heisenberg equation of motion. Motivated by this basic fact, we articulate a physics-enhanced machine learning framework whose core is Heisenberg neural networks. In particular, we develop a deep learning algorithm according to some physics motivated loss function based on the Heisenberg equation, which "forces" the neural network to follow the quantum evolution of the spin variables. We demonstrate that, from local measurements, not only the local Hamiltonian can be recovered but the Hamiltonian reflecting the interacting structure of the whole system can also be faithfully reconstructed. We test our Heisenberg neural machine on spin networks of a variety of structures. In the extreme case where measurements are taken from only one spin, the achieved tomography fidelity values can reach about 90%. The developed machine learning framework is applicable to any time-dependent systems whose quantum dynamical evolution is governed by the Heisenberg equation of motion.
UPANets: Learning from the Universal Pixel Attention Networks
Authors: Ching-Hsun Tseng, Shin-Jye Lee, Jia-Nan Feng, Shengzhong Mao, Yu-Ping Wu, Jia-Yu Shang, Mou-Chung Tseng, Xiao-jun Zeng
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, image-classification, Image Classification

Among image classification, skip and densely-connection-based networks have dominated most leaderboards. Recently, from the successful development of multi-head attention in natural language processing, it is sure that now is a time of either using a Transformer-like model or hybrid CNNs with attention. However, the former need a tremendous resource to train, and the latter is in the perfect balance in this direction. In this work, to make CNNs handle global and local information, we proposed UPANets, which equips channel-wise attention with a hybrid skip-densely-connection structure. Also, the extreme-connection structure makes UPANets robust with a smoother loss landscape. In experiments, UPANets surpassed most well-known and widely-used SOTAs with an accuracy of 96.47% in Cifar-10, 80.29% in Cifar-100, and 67.67% in Tiny Imagenet. Most importantly, these performances have high parameters efficiency and only trained in one customer-based GPU. We share implementing code of UPANets in https://github.com/hanktseng131415go/UPANets.
Domain-Incremental Continual Learning for Mitigating Bias in Facial Expression and Action Unit Recognition
Authors: Nikhil Churamani, Ozgur Kara, Hatice Gunes
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Fairness, Incremental Learning

As Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems become integrated into our daily lives, these systems need to prioritise making fair decisions instead of aiming at higher individual accuracy scores. Ranging from surveillance systems to diagnosing mental and emotional health conditions of individuals, these systems need to balance the accuracy vs fairness trade-off to make decisions that do not unjustly discriminate against specific under-represented demographic groups. Identifying bias as a critical problem in facial analysis systems, different methods have been proposed that aim to mitigate bias both at data and algorithmic levels. In this work, we propose the novel usage of Continual Learning (CL), in particular, using Domain-Incremental Learning (Domain-IL) settings, as a potent bias mitigation method to enhance the fairness of FER systems while guarding against biases arising from skewed data distributions. We compare different non-CL-based and CL-based methods for their classification accuracy and fairness scores on expression recognition and Action Unit (AU) detection tasks using two popular benchmarks, the RAF-DB and BP4D datasets, respectively. Our experimental results show that CL-based methods, on average, outperform other popular bias mitigation techniques on both accuracy and fairness metrics.
Autonomous Drone Racing with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yunlong Song, Mats Steinweg, Elia Kaufmann, Davide Scaramuzza
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In many robotic tasks, such as autonomous drone racing, the goal is to travel through a set of waypoints as fast as possible. A key challenge for this task is planning the time-optimal trajectory, which is typically solved by assuming perfect knowledge of the waypoints to pass in advance. The resulting solution is either highly specialized for a single-track layout, or suboptimal due to simplifying assumptions about the platform dynamics. In this work, a new approach to near-time-optimal trajectory generation for quadrotors is presented. Leveraging deep reinforcement learning and relative gate observations, our approach can compute near-time-optimal trajectories and adapt the trajectory to environment changes. Our method exhibits computational advantages over approaches based on trajectory optimization for non-trivial track configurations. The proposed approach is evaluated on a set of race tracks in simulation and the real world, achieving speeds of up to 60 km/h with a physical quadrotor.
A Hybrid Gradient Method to Designing Bayesian Experiments for Implicit Models
Authors: Jiaxin Zhang, Sirui Bi, Guannan Zhang
Date: 2021-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design

Bayesian experimental design (BED) aims at designing an experiment to maximize the information gathering from the collected data. The optimal design is usually achieved by maximizing the mutual information (MI) between the data and the model parameters. When the analytical expression of the MI is unavailable, e.g., having implicit models with intractable data distributions, a neural network-based lower bound of the MI was recently proposed and a gradient ascent method was used to maximize the lower bound. However, the approach in Kleinegesse et al., 2020 requires a pathwise sampling path to compute the gradient of the MI lower bound with respect to the design variables, and such a pathwise sampling path is usually inaccessible for implicit models. In this work, we propose a hybrid gradient approach that leverages recent advances in variational MI estimator and evolution strategies (ES) combined with black-box stochastic gradient ascent (SGA) to maximize the MI lower bound. This allows the design process to be achieved through a unified scalable procedure for implicit models without sampling path gradients. Several experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the scalability of BED for implicit models in high-dimensional design space.
Exact Sparse Orthogonal Dictionary Learning
Authors: Kai Liu, Yongjian Zhao, Hua Wang
Date: 2021-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Denoising, Dictionary Learning

Over the past decade, learning a dictionary from input images for sparse modeling has been one of the topics which receive most research attention in image processing and compressed sensing. Most existing dictionary learning methods consider an over-complete dictionary, such as the K-SVD method, which may result in high mutual incoherence and therefore has a negative impact in recognition. On the other side, the sparse codes are usually optimized by adding the $\ell_0$ or $\ell_1$-norm penalty, but with no strict sparsity guarantee. In this paper, we propose an orthogonal dictionary learning model which can obtain strictly sparse codes and orthogonal dictionary with global sequence convergence guarantee. We find that our method can result in better denoising results than over-complete dictionary based learning methods, and has the additional advantage of high computation efficiency.