pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Tired of Over-smoothing? Stress Graph Drawing Is All You Need!
Authors: Xue Li, Yuanzhi Cheng
Date: 2022-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: All

In designing and applying graph neural networks, we often fall into some optimization pitfalls, the most deceptive of which is that we can only build a deep model by solving over-smoothing. The fundamental reason is that we do not understand how graph neural networks work. Stress graph drawing can offer a unique viewpoint to message iteration in the graph, such as the root of the over-smoothing problem lies in the inability of graph models to maintain an ideal distance between nodes. We further elucidate the trigger conditions of over-smoothing and propose Stress Graph Neural Networks. By introducing the attractive and repulsive message passing from stress iteration, we show how to build a deep model without preventing over-smoothing, how to use repulsive information, and how to optimize the current message-passing scheme to approximate the full stress message propagation. By performing different tasks on 23 datasets, we verified the effectiveness of our attractive and repulsive models and the derived relationship between stress iteration and graph neural networks. We believe that stress graph drawing will be a popular resource for understanding and designing graph neural networks.
Filterbank Learning for Noise-Robust Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting
Authors: Iván López-Espejo, Ram C. M. C. Shekar, Zheng-Hua Tan, Jesper Jensen, John H. L. Hansen
Date: 2022-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Spotting, Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting

In the context of keyword spotting (KWS), the replacement of handcrafted speech features by learnable features has not yielded superior KWS performance. In this study, we demonstrate that filterbank learning outperforms handcrafted speech features for KWS whenever the number of filterbank channels is severely decreased. Reducing the number of channels might yield certain KWS performance drop, but also a substantial energy consumption reduction, which is key when deploying common always-on KWS on low-resource devices. Experimental results on a noisy version of the Google Speech Commands Dataset show that filterbank learning adapts to noise characteristics to provide a higher degree of robustness to noise, especially when dropout is integrated. Thus, switching from typically used 40-channel log-Mel features to 8-channel learned features leads to a relative KWS accuracy loss of only 3.5% while simultaneously achieving a 6.3x energy consumption reduction.
Evaluating COVID-19 Sequence Data Using Nearest-Neighbors Based Network Model
Authors: Sarwan Ali
Date: 2022-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Mining

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is the cause of the COVID-19 disease in humans. Like many coronaviruses, it can adapt to different hosts and evolve into different lineages. It is well-known that the major SARS-CoV-2 lineages are characterized by mutations that happen predominantly in the spike protein. Understanding the spike protein structure and how it can be perturbed is vital for understanding and determining if a lineage is of concern. These are crucial to identifying and controlling current outbreaks and preventing future pandemics. Machine learning (ML) methods are a viable solution to this effort, given the volume of available sequencing data, much of which is unaligned or even unassembled. However, such ML methods require fixed-length numerical feature vectors in Euclidean space to be applicable. Similarly, euclidean space is not considered the best choice when working with the classification and clustering tasks for biological sequences. For this purpose, we design a method that converts the protein (spike) sequences into the sequence similarity network (SSN). We can then use SSN as an input for the classical algorithms from the graph mining domain for the typical tasks such as classification and clustering to understand the data. We show that the proposed alignment-free method is able to outperform the current SOTA method in terms of clustering results. Similarly, we are able to achieve higher classification accuracy using well-known Node2Vec-based embedding compared to other baseline embedding approaches.
Differentiable Uncalibrated Imaging
Authors: Sidharth Gupta, Konik Kothari, Valentin Debarnot, Ivan Dokmanić
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

We propose a differentiable imaging framework to address uncertainty in measurement coordinates such as sensor locations and projection angles. We formulate the problem as measurement interpolation at unknown nodes supervised through the forward operator. To solve it we apply implicit neural networks, also known as neural fields, which are naturally differentiable with respect to the input coordinates. We also develop differentiable spline interpolators which perform as well as neural networks, require less time to optimize and have well-understood properties. Differentiability is key as it allows us to jointly fit a measurement representation, optimize over the uncertain measurement coordinates, and perform image reconstruction which in turn ensures consistent calibration. We apply our approach to 2D and 3D computed tomography, and show that it produces improved reconstructions compared to baselines that do not account for the lack of calibration. The flexibility of the proposed framework makes it easy to extend to almost arbitrary imaging problems.
Knowledge Graph Generation From Text
Authors: Igor Melnyk, Pierre Dognin, Payel Das
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Joint Entity and Relation Extraction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In this work we propose a novel end-to-end multi-stage Knowledge Graph (KG) generation system from textual inputs, separating the overall process into two stages. The graph nodes are generated first using pretrained language model, followed by a simple edge construction head, enabling efficient KG extraction from the text. For each stage we consider several architectural choices that can be used depending on the available training resources. We evaluated the model on a recent WebNLG 2020 Challenge dataset, matching the state-of-the-art performance on text-to-RDF generation task, as well as on New York Times (NYT) and a large-scale TekGen datasets, showing strong overall performance, outperforming the existing baselines. We believe that the proposed system can serve as a viable KG construction alternative to the existing linearization or sampling-based graph generation approaches. Our code can be found at https://github.com/IBM/Grapher
A Mathematical Programming Approach to Optimal Classification Forests
Authors: Víctor Blanco, Alberto Japón, Justo Puerto, Peter Zhang
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation

This paper introduces Weighted Optimal Classification Forests (WOCFs), a new family of classifiers that takes advantage of an optimal ensemble of decision trees to derive accurate and interpretable classifiers. We propose a novel mathematical optimization-based methodology which simultaneously constructs a given number of trees, each of them providing a predicted class for the observations in the feature space. The classification rule is derived by assigning to each observation its most frequently predicted class among the trees. We provide a mixed integer linear programming formulation (MIP) for the problem and several novel MIP strengthening / scaling techniques. We report the results of our computational experiments, from which we conclude that our method has equal or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art tree-based classification methods for small to medium-sized instances. We also present three real-world case studies showing that our methodology has very interesting implications in terms of interpretability. Overall, WOCFs complement existing methods such as CART, Optimal Classification Trees, Random Forests and XGBoost. In addition to its Pareto improvement on accuracy and interpretability, we also see unique properties emerging in terms of different trees focusing on different feature variables. This provides nontrivial improvement in interpretability and usability of the trained model in terms of counterfactual explanation. Thus, despite the apparent computational challenge of WOCFs that limit the size of the problems that can be efficiently solved with current MIP, this is an important research direction that can lead to qualitatively different insights for researchers and complement the toolbox of practitioners for high stakes problems.
Deep learning methods for drug response prediction in cancer: predominant and emerging trends
Authors: Alexander Partin, Thomas S. Brettin, Yitan Zhu, Oleksandr Narykov, Austin Clyde, Jamie Overbeek, Rick L. Stevens
Date: 2022-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Drug Response Prediction

Cancer claims millions of lives yearly worldwide. While many therapies have been made available in recent years, by in large cancer remains unsolved. Exploiting computational predictive models to study and treat cancer holds great promise in improving drug development and personalized design of treatment plans, ultimately suppressing tumors, alleviating suffering, and prolonging lives of patients. A wave of recent papers demonstrates promising results in predicting cancer response to drug treatments while utilizing deep learning methods. These papers investigate diverse data representations, neural network architectures, learning methodologies, and evaluations schemes. However, deciphering promising predominant and emerging trends is difficult due to the variety of explored methods and lack of standardized framework for comparing drug response prediction models. To obtain a comprehensive landscape of deep learning methods, we conducted an extensive search and analysis of deep learning models that predict the response to single drug treatments. A total of 60 deep learning-based models have been curated and summary plots were generated. Based on the analysis, observable patterns and prevalence of methods have been revealed. This review allows to better understand the current state of the field and identify major challenges and promising solution paths.
Random-LTD: Random and Layerwise Token Dropping Brings Efficient Training for Large-scale Transformers
Authors: Zhewei Yao, Xiaoxia Wu, Conglong Li, Connor Holmes, Minjia Zhang, Cheng Li, Yuxiong He
Date: 2022-11-17 00:00:00

Large-scale transformer models have become the de-facto architectures for various machine learning applications, e.g., CV and NLP. However, those large models also introduce prohibitive training costs. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel random and layerwise token dropping method (random-LTD), which skips the computation of a subset of the input tokens at all middle layers. Particularly, random-LTD achieves considerable speedups and comparable accuracy as the standard training baseline. Compared to other token dropping methods, random-LTD does not require (1) any importance score-based metrics, (2) any special token treatment (e.g., [CLS]), and (3) many layers in full sequence length training except the first and the last layers. Besides, a new LayerToken learning rate schedule is proposed for pretraining problems that resolve the heavy tuning requirement for our proposed training mechanism. Finally, we demonstrate that random-LTD can be applied to broader applications, including GPT and BERT pretraining as well as ViT and GPT finetuning tasks. Our results show that random-LTD can save about 33.3% theoretical compute cost and 25.6% wall-clock training time while achieving similar zero-shot evaluations on GPT-31.3B as compared to baseline.
Imputation of Missing Streamflow Data at Multiple Gauging Stations in Benin Republic
Authors: Rendani Mbuvha, Julien Yise Peniel Adounkpe, Wilson Tsakane Mongwe, Mandela Houngnibo, Nathaniel Newlands, Tshilidzi Marwala
Date: 2022-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Imputation, regression, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Streamflow observation data is vital for flood monitoring, agricultural, and settlement planning. However, such streamflow data are commonly plagued with missing observations due to various causes such as harsh environmental conditions and constrained operational resources. This problem is often more pervasive in under-resourced areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa. In this work, we reconstruct streamflow time series data through bias correction of the GEOGloWS ECMWF streamflow service (GESS) forecasts at ten river gauging stations in Benin Republic. We perform bias correction by fitting Quantile Mapping, Gaussian Process, and Elastic Net regression in a constrained training period. We show by simulating missingness in a testing period that GESS forecasts have a significant bias that results in low predictive skill over the ten Beninese stations. Our findings suggest that overall bias correction by Elastic Net and Gaussian Process regression achieves superior skill relative to traditional imputation by Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbour, and GESS lookup. The findings of this work provide a basis for integrating global GESS streamflow data into operational early-warning decision-making systems (e.g., flood alert) in countries vulnerable to drought and flooding due to extreme weather events.
SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale
Authors: Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Gefei Yang, Akshat Pandey, Yajie Mao, Vladislav Belyaev, Madhuri Emmadi, Craig Murray, Ferhan Ture, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems represent the state of the art, but they rely on thousands of hours of manually annotated speech for training, as well as heavyweight computation for inference. Of course, this impedes commercialization since most companies lack vast human and computational resources. In this paper, we explore training and deploying an ASR system in the label-scarce, compute-limited setting. To reduce human labor, we use a third-party ASR system as a weak supervision source, supplemented with labeling functions derived from implicit user feedback. To accelerate inference, we propose to route production-time queries across a pool of CUDA graphs of varying input lengths, the distribution of which best matches the traffic's. Compared to our third-party ASR, we achieve a relative improvement in word-error rate of 8% and a speedup of 600%. Our system, called SpeechNet, currently serves 12 million queries per day on our voice-enabled smart television. To our knowledge, this is the first time a large-scale, Wav2vec-based deployment has been described in the academic literature.
Legal and Political Stance Detection of SCOTUS Language
Authors: Noah Bergam, Emily Allaway, Kathleen McKeown
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Stance Detection

We analyze publicly available US Supreme Court documents using automated stance detection. In the first phase of our work, we investigate the extent to which the Court's public-facing language is political. We propose and calculate two distinct ideology metrics of SCOTUS justices using oral argument transcripts. We then compare these language-based metrics to existing social scientific measures of the ideology of the Supreme Court and the public. Through this cross-disciplinary analysis, we find that justices who are more responsive to public opinion tend to express their ideology during oral arguments. This observation provides a new kind of evidence in favor of the attitudinal change hypothesis of Supreme Court justice behavior. As a natural extension of this political stance detection, we propose the more specialized task of legal stance detection with our new dataset SC-stance, which matches written opinions to legal questions. We find competitive performance on this dataset using language adapters trained on legal documents.
Towards continually learning new languages
Authors: Ngoc-Quan Pham, Jan Niehues, Alexander Waibel
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: All, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

Multilingual speech recognition with neural networks is often implemented with batch-learning, when all of the languages are available before training. An ability to add new languages after the prior training sessions can be economically beneficial, but the main challenge is catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we combine the qualities of weight factorization and elastic weight consolidation in order to counter catastrophic forgetting and facilitate learning new languages quickly. Such combination allowed us to eliminate catastrophic forgetting while still achieving performance for the new languages comparable with having all languages at once, in experiments of learning from an initial 10 languages to achieve 26 languages without catastrophic forgetting and a reasonable performance compared to training all languages from scratch.
Measuring Harmful Representations in Scandinavian Language Models
Authors: Samia Touileb, Debora Nozza
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00

Scandinavian countries are perceived as role-models when it comes to gender equality. With the advent of pre-trained language models and their widespread usage, we investigate to what extent gender-based harmful and toxic content exist in selected Scandinavian language models. We examine nine models, covering Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, by manually creating template-based sentences and probing the models for completion. We evaluate the completions using two methods for measuring harmful and toxic completions and provide a thorough analysis of the results. We show that Scandinavian pre-trained language models contain harmful and gender-based stereotypes with similar values across all languages. This finding goes against the general expectations related to gender equality in Scandinavian countries and shows the possible problematic outcomes of using such models in real-world settings.
CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation
Authors: Yinpei Dai, Wanwei He, Bowen Li, Yuchuan Wu, Zheng Cao, Zhongqi An, Jian Sun, Yongbin Li
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Goal-Oriented Dialog, Retrieval

Practical dialog systems need to deal with various knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. To better solve the above problems, we propose CGoDial, new challenging and comprehensive Chinese benchmark for multi-domain Goal-oriented Dialog evaluation. It contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally, covering three datasets with different knowledge sources: 1) a slot-based dialog (SBD) dataset with table-formed knowledge, 2) a flow-based dialog (FBD) dataset with tree-formed knowledge, and a retrieval-based dialog (RBD) dataset with candidate-formed knowledge. To bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios, we either collect data from real conversations or add spoken features to existing datasets via crowd-sourcing. The proposed experimental settings include the combinations of training with either the entire training set or a few-shot training set, and testing with either the standard test set or a hard test subset, which can assess model capabilities in terms of general prediction, fast adaptability and reliable robustness.
Programming by Example and Text-to-Code Translation for Conversational Code Generation
Authors: Eli Whitehouse, William Gerard, Yauhen Klimovich, Marc Franco-Salvador
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Code Translation, Program Synthesis

Dialogue systems is an increasingly popular task of natural language processing. However, the dialogue paths tend to be deterministic, restricted to the system rails, regardless of the given request or input text. Recent advances in program synthesis have led to systems which can synthesize programs from very general search spaces, e.g. Programming by Example, and to systems with very accessible interfaces for writing programs, e.g. text-to-code translation, but have not achieved both of these qualities in the same system. We propose Modular Programs for Text-guided Hierarchical Synthesis (MPaTHS), a method for integrating Programming by Example and text-to-code systems which offers an accessible natural language interface for synthesizing general programs. We present a program representation that allows our method to be applied to the problem of task-oriented dialogue. Finally, we demo MPaTHS using our program representation.
Enhancing Crisis-Related Tweet Classification with Entity-Masked Language Modeling and Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Philipp Seeberger, Korbinian Riedhammer
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Multi-label Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Management, Masked Language Modeling, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-Task Learning

Social media has become an important information source for crisis management and provides quick access to ongoing developments and critical information. However, classification models suffer from event-related biases and highly imbalanced label distributions which still poses a challenging task. To address these challenges, we propose a combination of entity-masked language modeling and hierarchical multi-label classification as a multi-task learning problem. We evaluate our method on tweets from the TREC-IS dataset and show an absolute performance gain w.r.t. F1-score of up to 10% for actionable information types. Moreover, we found that entity-masking reduces the effect of overfitting to in-domain events and enables improvements in cross-event generalization.
SSCFormer: Push the Limit of Chunk-wise Conformer for Streaming ASR Using Sequentially Sampled Chunks and Chunked Causal Convolution
Authors: Fangyuan Wang, Bo Xu
Date: 2022-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Currently, the chunk-wise schemes are often used to make Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models to support streaming deployment. However, existing approaches are unable to capture the global context, lack support for parallel training, or exhibit quadratic complexity for the computation of multi-head self-attention (MHSA). On the other side, the causal convolution, no future context used, has become the de facto module in streaming Conformer. In this paper, we propose SSCFormer to push the limit of chunk-wise Conformer for streaming ASR using the following two techniques: 1) A novel cross-chunks context generation method, named Sequential Sampling Chunk (SSC) scheme, to re-partition chunks from regular partitioned chunks to facilitate efficient long-term contextual interaction within local chunks. 2)The Chunked Causal Convolution (C2Conv) is designed to concurrently capture the left context and chunk-wise future context. Evaluations on AISHELL-1 show that an End-to-End (E2E) CER 5.33% can achieve, which even outperforms a strong time-restricted baseline U2. Moreover, the chunk-wise MHSA computation in our model enables it to train with a large batch size and perform inference with linear complexity.