pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Utility-Optimized Synthesis of Differentially Private Location Traces
Authors: Mehmet Emre Gursoy, Vivekanand Rajasekar, Ling Liu
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Benchmarking

Differentially private location trace synthesis (DPLTS) has recently emerged as a solution to protect mobile users' privacy while enabling the analysis and sharing of their location traces. A key challenge in DPLTS is to best preserve the utility in location trace datasets, which is non-trivial considering the high dimensionality, complexity and heterogeneity of datasets, as well as the diverse types and notions of utility. In this paper, we present OptaTrace: a utility-optimized and targeted approach to DPLTS. Given a real trace dataset D, the differential privacy parameter epsilon controlling the strength of privacy protection, and the utility/error metric Err of interest; OptaTrace uses Bayesian optimization to optimize DPLTS such that the output error (measured in terms of given metric Err) is minimized while epsilon-differential privacy is satisfied. In addition, OptaTrace introduces a utility module that contains several built-in error metrics for utility benchmarking and for choosing Err, as well as a front-end web interface for accessible and interactive DPLTS service. Experiments show that OptaTrace's optimized output can yield substantial utility improvement and error reduction compared to previous work.
Filling the Gap of Utterance-aware and Speaker-aware Representation for Multi-turn Dialogue
Authors: Longxiang Liu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Xi Zhou, Xiang Zhou
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

A multi-turn dialogue is composed of multiple utterances from two or more different speaker roles. Thus utterance- and speaker-aware clues are supposed to be well captured in models. However, in the existing retrieval-based multi-turn dialogue modeling, the pre-trained language models (PrLMs) as encoder represent the dialogues coarsely by taking the pairwise dialogue history and candidate response as a whole, the hierarchical information on either utterance interrelation or speaker roles coupled in such representations is not well addressed. In this work, we propose a novel model to fill such a gap by modeling the effective utterance-aware and speaker-aware representations entailed in a dialogue history. In detail, we decouple the contextualized word representations by masking mechanisms in Transformer-based PrLM, making each word only focus on the words in current utterance, other utterances, two speaker roles (i.e., utterances of sender and utterances of receiver), respectively. Experimental results show that our method boosts the strong ELECTRA baseline substantially in four public benchmark datasets, and achieves various new state-of-the-art performance over previous methods. A series of ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
A Study of Human Gaze Behavior During Visual Crowd Counting
Authors: Raji Annadi, Yupei Chen, Viresh Ranjan, Dimitris Samaras, Gregory Zelinsky, Minh Hoai
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

In this paper, we describe our study on how humans allocate their attention during visual crowd counting. Using an eye tracker, we collect gaze behavior of human participants who are tasked with counting the number of people in crowd images. Analyzing the collected gaze behavior of ten human participants on thirty crowd images, we observe some common approaches for visual counting. For an image of a small crowd, the approach is to enumerate over all people or groups of people in the crowd, and this explains the high level of similarity between the fixation density maps of different human participants. For an image of a large crowd, our participants tend to focus on one section of the image, count the number of people in that section, and then extrapolate to the other sections. In terms of count accuracy, our human participants are not as good at the counting task, compared to the performance of the current state-of-the-art computer algorithms. Interestingly, there is a tendency to under count the number of people in all crowd images. Gaze behavior data and images can be downloaded from https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~minhhoai/projects/crowd_counting_gaze/.
Performance Evaluation of Linear Regression Algorithm in Cluster Environment
Authors: Cinantya Paramita, Fauzi Adi Rafrastara, Usman Sudibyo, R. I. W. Agung Wibowo
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Cluster computing was introduced to replace the superiority of super computers. Cluster computing is able to overcome the problems that cannot be effectively dealt with supercomputers. In this paper, we are going to evaluate the performance of cluster computing by executing one of data mining techniques in the cluster environment. The experiment will attempt to predict the flight delay by using linear regression algorithm with apache spark as a framework for cluster computing. The result shows that, by involving 5 PCs in cluster environment with equal specifications can increase the performance of computation up to 39.76% compared to the standalone one. Attaching more nodes to the cluster can make the process become faster significantly.
Principle Component Analysis for Classification of the Quality of Aromatic Rice
Authors: Etika Kartikadarma, Sari Wijayanti, Sari Ayu Wulandari, Fauzi Adi Rafrastara
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

This research introduces an instrument for performing quality control on aromatic rice by utilizing feature extraction of Principle Component Analysis (PCA) method. Our proposed system (DNose v0.2) uses the principle of electronic nose or enose. Enose is a detector instrument that work based on classification of the smell, like function of human nose. It has to be trained first for recognizing the smell before work in classification process. The aim of this research is to build an enose system for quality control instrument, especially on aromatic rice. The advantage of this system is easy to operate and not damaging the object of research. In this experiment, ATMega 328 and 6 gas sensors are involved in the electronic module and PCA method is used for classification process.
Beyond Accuracy: ROI-driven Data Analytics of Empirical Data
Authors: Gouri Deshpande, Guenther Ruhe
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

This vision paper demonstrates that it is crucial to consider Return-on-Investment (ROI) when performing Data Analytics. Decisions on "How much analytics is needed"? are hard to answer. ROI could guide for decision support on the What?, How?, and How Much? analytics for a given problem. Method: The proposed conceptual framework is validated through two empirical studies that focus on requirements dependencies extraction in the Mozilla Firefox project. The two case studies are (i) Evaluation of fine-tuned BERT against Naive Bayes and Random Forest machine learners for binary dependency classification and (ii) Active Learning against passive Learning (random sampling) for REQUIRES dependency extraction. For both the cases, their analysis investment (cost) is estimated, and the achievable benefit from DA is predicted, to determine a break-even point of the investigation. Results: For the first study, fine-tuned BERT performed superior to the Random Forest, provided that more than 40% of training data is available. For the second, Active Learning achieved higher F1 accuracy within fewer iterations and higher ROI compared to Baseline (Random sampling based RF classifier). In both the studies, estimate on, How much analysis likely would pay off for the invested efforts?, was indicated by the break-even point. Conclusions: Decisions for the depth and breadth of DA of empirical data should not be made solely based on the accuracy measures. Since ROI-driven Data Analytics provides a simple yet effective direction to discover when to stop further investigation while considering the cost and value of the various types of analysis, it helps to avoid over-analyzing empirical data.
The Hardware Lottery
Authors: Sara Hooker
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00

Hardware, systems and algorithms research communities have historically had different incentive structures and fluctuating motivation to engage with each other explicitly. This historical treatment is odd given that hardware and software have frequently determined which research ideas succeed (and fail). This essay introduces the term hardware lottery to describe when a research idea wins because it is suited to the available software and hardware and not because the idea is superior to alternative research directions. Examples from early computer science history illustrate how hardware lotteries can delay research progress by casting successful ideas as failures. These lessons are particularly salient given the advent of domain specialized hardware which make it increasingly costly to stray off of the beaten path of research ideas. This essay posits that the gains from progress in computing are likely to become even more uneven, with certain research directions moving into the fast-lane while progress on others is further obstructed.
Fast Implementation of 4-bit Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Devices
Authors: Anton Trusov, Elena Limonova, Dmitry Slugin, Dmitry Nikolaev, Vladimir V. Arlazarov
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Quantization

Quantized low-precision neural networks are very popular because they require less computational resources for inference and can provide high performance, which is vital for real-time and embedded recognition systems. However, their advantages are apparent for FPGA and ASIC devices, while general-purpose processor architectures are not always able to perform low-bit integer computations efficiently. The most frequently used low-precision neural network model for mobile central processors is an 8-bit quantized network. However, in a number of cases, it is possible to use fewer bits for weights and activations, and the only problem is the difficulty of efficient implementation. We introduce an efficient implementation of 4-bit matrix multiplication for quantized neural networks and perform time measurements on a mobile ARM processor. It shows 2.9 times speedup compared to standard floating-point multiplication and is 1.5 times faster than 8-bit quantized one. We also demonstrate a 4-bit quantized neural network for OCR recognition on the MIDV-500 dataset. 4-bit quantization gives 95.0% accuracy and 48% overall inference speedup, while an 8-bit quantized network gives 95.4% accuracy and 39% speedup. The results show that 4-bit quantization perfectly suits mobile devices, yielding good enough accuracy and low inference time.
EasyASR: A Distributed Machine Learning Platform for End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Chengyu Wang, Mengli Cheng, Xu Hu, Jun Huang
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), BIG-bench Machine Learning, GPU, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We present EasyASR, a distributed machine learning platform for training and serving large-scale Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models, as well as collecting and processing audio data at scale. Our platform is built upon the Machine Learning Platform for AI of Alibaba Cloud. Its main functionality is to support efficient learning and inference for end-to-end ASR models on distributed GPU clusters. It allows users to learn ASR models with either pre-defined or user-customized network architectures via simple user interface. On EasyASR, we have produced state-of-the-art results over several public datasets for Mandarin speech recognition.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Uncertain Feature Alignment
Authors: Tobias Ringwald, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) deals with the adaptation of models from a given source domain with labeled data to an unlabeled target domain. In this paper, we utilize the inherent prediction uncertainty of a model to accomplish the domain adaptation task. The uncertainty is measured by Monte-Carlo dropout and used for our proposed Uncertainty-based Filtering and Feature Alignment (UFAL) that combines an Uncertain Feature Loss (UFL) function and an Uncertainty-Based Filtering (UBF) approach for alignment of features in Euclidean space. Our method surpasses recently proposed architectures and achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple challenging datasets. Code is available on the project website.
Estimating Individual Treatment Effects using Non-Parametric Regression Models: a Review
Authors: Alberto Caron, Gianluca Baio, Ioanna Manolopoulou
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Model Selection, regression

Large observational data are increasingly available in disciplines such as health, economic and social sciences, where researchers are interested in causal questions rather than prediction. In this paper, we examine the problem of estimating heterogeneous treatment effects using non-parametric regression-based methods, starting from an empirical study aimed at investigating the effect of participation in school meal programs on health indicators. Firstly, we introduce the setup and the issues related to conducting causal inference with observational or non-fully randomized data, and how these issues can be tackled with the help of statistical learning tools. Then, we review and develop a unifying taxonomy of the existing state-of-the-art frameworks that allow for individual treatment effects estimation via non-parametric regression models. After presenting a brief overview on the problem of model selection, we illustrate the performance of some of the methods on three different simulated studies. We conclude by demonstrating the use of some of the methods on an empirical analysis of the school meal program data.
EfficientSeg: An Efficient Semantic Segmentation Network
Authors: Vahit Bugra Yesilkaynak, Yusuf H. Sahin, Gozde Unal
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural network training without pre-trained weights and few data is shown to need more training iterations. It is also known that, deeper models are more successful than their shallow counterparts for semantic segmentation task. Thus, we introduce EfficientSeg architecture, a modified and scalable version of U-Net, which can be efficiently trained despite its depth. We evaluated EfficientSeg architecture on Minicity dataset and outperformed U-Net baseline score (40% mIoU) using the same parameter count (51.5% mIoU). Our most successful model obtained 58.1% mIoU score and got the fourth place in semantic segmentation track of ECCV 2020 VIPriors challenge.
Communication Efficient Distributed Learning with Censored, Quantized, and Generalized Group ADMM
Authors: Chaouki Ben Issaid, Anis Elgabli, Jihong Park, Mehdi Bennis, Mérouane Debbah
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

In this paper, we propose a communication-efficiently decentralized machine learning framework that solves a consensus optimization problem defined over a network of inter-connected workers. The proposed algorithm, Censored and Quantized Generalized GADMM (CQ-GGADMM), leverages the worker grouping and decentralized learning ideas of Group Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (GADMM), and pushes the frontier in communication efficiency by extending its applicability to generalized network topologies, while incorporating link censoring for negligible updates after quantization. We theoretically prove that CQ-GGADMM achieves the linear convergence rate when the local objective functions are strongly convex under some mild assumptions. Numerical simulations corroborate that CQ-GGADMM exhibits higher communication efficiency in terms of the number of communication rounds and transmit energy consumption without compromising the accuracy and convergence speed, compared to the censored decentralized ADMM, and the worker grouping method of GADMM.
Development of a Dataset and a Deep Learning Baseline Named Entity Recognizer for Three Low Resource Languages: Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi
Authors: Rajesh Kumar Mundotiya, Shantanu Kumar, Ajeet kumar, Umesh Chandra Chaudhary, Supriya Chauhan, Swasti Mishra, Praveen Gatla, Anil Kumar Singh
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Translation

In Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the preliminary problems, which marks proper nouns and other named entities such as Location, Person, Organization, Disease etc. Such entities, without a NER module, adversely affect the performance of a machine translation system. NER helps in overcoming this problem by recognising and handling such entities separately, although it can be useful in Information Extraction systems also. Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi are low resource languages, usually known as Purvanchal languages. This paper focuses on the development of a NER benchmark dataset for the Machine Translation systems developed to translate from these languages to Hindi by annotating parts of their available corpora. Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magahi corpora of sizes 228373, 157468 and 56190 tokens, respectively, were annotated using 22 entity labels. The annotation considers coarse-grained annotation labels followed by the tagset used in one of the Hindi NER datasets. We also report a Deep Learning based baseline that uses an LSTM-CNNs-CRF model. The lower baseline F1-scores from the NER tool obtained by using Conditional Random Fields models are 96.73 for Bhojpuri, 93.33 for Maithili and 95.04 for Magahi. The Deep Learning-based technique (LSTM-CNNs-CRF) achieved 96.25 for Bhojpuri, 93.33 for Maithili and 95.44 for Magahi.
Sufficient Dimension Reduction for Average Causal Effect Estimation
Authors: Debo Cheng, Jiuyong Li, Lin Liu, Jixue Liu
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Dimensionality Reduction

Having a large number of covariates can have a negative impact on the quality of causal effect estimation since confounding adjustment becomes unreliable when the number of covariates is large relative to the samples available. Propensity score is a common way to deal with a large covariate set, but the accuracy of propensity score estimation (normally done by logistic regression) is also challenged by large number of covariates. In this paper, we prove that a large covariate set can be reduced to a lower dimensional representation which captures the complete information for adjustment in causal effect estimation. The theoretical result enables effective data-driven algorithms for causal effect estimation. We develop an algorithm which employs a supervised kernel dimension reduction method to search for a lower dimensional representation for the original covariates, and then utilizes nearest neighbor matching in the reduced covariate space to impute the counterfactual outcomes to avoid large-sized covariate set problem. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on two semi-synthetic and three real-world datasets and the results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Should We Trust (X)AI? Design Dimensions for Structured Experimental Evaluations
Authors: Fabian Sperrle, Mennatallah El-Assady, Grace Guo, Duen Horng Chau, Alex Endert, Daniel Keim
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

This paper systematically derives design dimensions for the structured evaluation of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches. These dimensions enable a descriptive characterization, facilitating comparisons between different study designs. They further structure the design space of XAI, converging towards a precise terminology required for a rigorous study of XAI. Our literature review differentiates between comparative studies and application papers, revealing methodological differences between the fields of machine learning, human-computer interaction, and visual analytics. Generally, each of these disciplines targets specific parts of the XAI process. Bridging the resulting gaps enables a holistic evaluation of XAI in real-world scenarios, as proposed by our conceptual model characterizing bias sources and trust-building. Furthermore, we identify and discuss the potential for future work based on observed research gaps that should lead to better coverage of the proposed model.
Adaptive Label Smoothing
Authors: Ujwal Krothapalli, A. Lynn Abbott
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Object Localization, Transfer Learning

This paper concerns the use of objectness measures to improve the calibration performance of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CNNs have proven to be very good classifiers and generally localize objects well; however, the loss functions typically used to train classification CNNs do not penalize inability to localize an object, nor do they take into account an object's relative size in the given image. During training on ImageNet-1K almost all approaches use random crops on the images and this transformation sometimes provides the CNN with background only samples. This causes the classifiers to depend on context. Context dependence is harmful for safety-critical applications. We present a novel approach to classification that combines the ideas of objectness and label smoothing during training. Unlike previous methods, we compute a smoothing factor that is \emph{adaptive} based on relative object size within an image. This causes our approach to produce confidences that are grounded in the size of the object being classified instead of relying on context to make the correct predictions. We present extensive results using ImageNet to demonstrate that CNNs trained using adaptive label smoothing are much less likely to be overconfident in their predictions. We show qualitative results using class activation maps and quantitative results using classification and transfer learning tasks. Our approach is able to produce an order of magnitude reduction in confidence when predicting on context only images when compared to baselines. Using transfer learning, we gain 2.1mAP on MS COCO compared to the hard label approach.
Into the Unknown: Active Monitoring of Neural Networks
Authors: Anna Lukina, Christian Schilling, Thomas A. Henzinger
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00

Neural-network classifiers achieve high accuracy when predicting the class of an input that they were trained to identify. Maintaining this accuracy in dynamic environments, where inputs frequently fall outside the fixed set of initially known classes, remains a challenge. The typical approach is to detect inputs from novel classes and retrain the classifier on an augmented dataset. However, not only the classifier but also the detection mechanism needs to adapt in order to distinguish between newly learned and yet unknown input classes. To address this challenge, we introduce an algorithmic framework for active monitoring of a neural network. A monitor wrapped in our framework operates in parallel with the neural network and interacts with a human user via a series of interpretable labeling queries for incremental adaptation. In addition, we propose an adaptive quantitative monitor to improve precision. An experimental evaluation on a diverse set of benchmarks with varying numbers of classes confirms the benefits of our active monitoring framework in dynamic scenarios.