pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scientific Explanation and Natural Language: A Unified Epistemological-Linguistic Perspective for Explainable AI
Authors: Marco Valentino, André Freitas
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Philosophy

A fundamental research goal for Explainable AI (XAI) is to build models that are capable of reasoning through the generation of natural language explanations. However, the methodologies to design and evaluate explanation-based inference models are still poorly informed by theoretical accounts on the nature of explanation. As an attempt to provide an epistemologically grounded characterisation for XAI, this paper focuses on the scientific domain, aiming to bridge the gap between theory and practice on the notion of a scientific explanation. Specifically, the paper combines a detailed survey of the modern accounts of scientific explanation in Philosophy of Science with a systematic analysis of corpora of natural language explanations, clarifying the nature and function of explanatory arguments from both a top-down (categorical) and a bottom-up (corpus-based) perspective. Through a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the presented study allows deriving the following main conclusions: (1) Explanations cannot be entirely characterised in terms of inductive or deductive arguments as their main function is to perform unification; (2) An explanation must cite causes and mechanisms that are responsible for the occurrence of the event to be explained; (3) While natural language explanations possess an intrinsic causal-mechanistic nature, they are not limited to causes and mechanisms, also accounting for pragmatic elements such as definitions, properties and taxonomic relations; (4) Patterns of unification naturally emerge in corpora of explanations even if not intentionally modelled; (5) Unification is realised through a process of abstraction, whose function is to provide the inference substrate for subsuming the event to be explained under recurring patterns and high-level regularities.
A Review on Pushing the Limits of Baseline Recommendation Systems with the integration of Opinion Mining & Information Retrieval Techniques
Authors: Dinuka Ravijaya Piyadigama, Guhanathan Poravi
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Information Retrieval, Opinion Mining, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

Recommendations Systems allow users to identify trending items among a community while being timely and relevant to the user's expectations. When the purpose of various Recommendation Systems differs, the required type of recommendations also differs for each use case. While one Recommendation System may focus on recommending popular items, another may focus on recommending items that are comparable to the user's interests. Content-based filtering, user-to-user & item-to-item Collaborative filtering, and more recently; Deep Learning methods have been brought forward by the researchers to achieve better quality recommendations. Even though each of these methods has proven to perform well individually, there have been attempts to push the boundaries of their limitations. Following a wide range of methods, researchers have tried to expand on the capabilities of standard recommendation systems to provide the most effective recommendations to users while being more profitable from a business's perspective. This has been achieved by taking a hybrid approach when building models and architectures for Recommendation Systems. This paper is a review of the novel models & architectures of hybrid Recommendation Systems. The author identifies possibilities of expanding the capabilities of baseline models & the advantages and drawbacks of each model with selected use cases in this review.
The Brazilian Data at Risk in the Age of AI?
Authors: Raoni F. da S. Teixeira, Rafael B. Januzi, Fabio A. Faria
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00

Advances in image processing and analysis as well as machine learning techniques have contributed to the use of biometric recognition systems in daily people tasks. These tasks range from simple access to mobile devices to tagging friends in photos shared on social networks and complex financial operations on self-service devices for banking transactions. In China, the use of these systems goes beyond personal use becoming a country's government policy with the objective of monitoring the behavior of its population. On July 05th 2021, the Brazilian government announced acquisition of a biometric recognition system to be used nationwide. In the opposite direction to China, Europe and some American cities have already started the discussion about the legality of using biometric systems in public places, even banning this practice in their territory. In order to open a deeper discussion about the risks and legality of using these systems, this work exposes the vulnerabilities of biometric recognition systems, focusing its efforts on the face modality. Furthermore, it shows how it is possible to fool a biometric system through a well-known presentation attack approach in the literature called morphing. Finally, a list of ten concerns was created to start the discussion about the security of citizen data and data privacy law in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Explain and Conquer: Personalised Text-based Reviews to Achieve Transparency
Authors: Iñigo López-Riobóo Botana, Verónica Bolón-Canedo, Bertha Guijarro-Berdiñas, Amparo Alonso-Betanzos
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Language Modelling, Learning-To-Rank, Natural Language Understanding, Recommendation Systems

There are many contexts in which dyadic data are present. Social networks are a well-known example. In these contexts, pairs of elements are linked building a network that reflects interactions. Explaining why these relationships are established is essential to obtain transparency, an increasingly important notion. These explanations are often presented using text, thanks to the spread of the natural language understanding tasks. Our aim is to represent and explain pairs established by any agent (e.g., a recommender system or a paid promotion mechanism), so that text-based personalisation is taken into account. We have focused on the TripAdvisor platform, considering the applicability to other dyadic data contexts. The items are a subset of users and restaurants and the interactions the reviews posted by these users. We propose the PTER (Personalised TExt-based Reviews) model. We predict, from the available reviews for a given restaurant, those that fit to the specific user interactions. PTER leverages the BERT (Bidirectional Encoders Representations from Transformers) transformer-encoder model. We customised a deep neural network following the feature-based approach, presenting a LTR (Learning To Rank) downstream task. We carried out several comparisons of our proposal with a random baseline and other models of the state of the art, following the EXTRA (EXplanaTion RAnking) benchmark. Our method outperforms other collaborative filtering proposals.
Object Class Aware Video Anomaly Detection through Image Translation
Authors: Mohammad Baradaran, Robert Bergevin
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Object, Optical Flow Estimation, Semantic Segmentation, Translation, Video Anomaly Detection

Semi-supervised video anomaly detection (VAD) methods formulate the task of anomaly detection as detection of deviations from the learned normal patterns. Previous works in the field (reconstruction or prediction-based methods) suffer from two drawbacks: 1) They focus on low-level features, and they (especially holistic approaches) do not effectively consider the object classes. 2) Object-centric approaches neglect some of the context information (such as location). To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a novel two-stream object-aware VAD method that learns the normal appearance and motion patterns through image translation tasks. The appearance branch translates the input image to the target semantic segmentation map produced by Mask-RCNN, and the motion branch associates each frame with its expected optical flow magnitude. Any deviation from the expected appearance or motion in the inference stage shows the degree of potential abnormality. We evaluated our proposed method on the ShanghaiTech, UCSD-Ped1, and UCSD-Ped2 datasets and the results show competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art works. Most importantly, the results show that, as significant improvements to previous methods, detections by our method are completely explainable and anomalies are localized accurately in the frames.
Improved Orientation Estimation and Detection with Hybrid Object Detection Networks for Automotive Radar
Authors: Michael Ulrich, Sascha Braun, Daniel Köhler, Daniel Niederlöhner, Florian Faion, Claudius Gläser, Holger Blume
Date: 2022-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Radar Object Detection

This paper presents novel hybrid architectures that combine grid- and point-based processing to improve the detection performance and orientation estimation of radar-based object detection networks. Purely grid-based detection models operate on a bird's-eye-view (BEV) projection of the input point cloud. These approaches suffer from a loss of detailed information through the discrete grid resolution. This applies in particular to radar object detection, where relatively coarse grid resolutions are commonly used to account for the sparsity of radar point clouds. In contrast, point-based models are not affected by this problem as they process point clouds without discretization. However, they generally exhibit worse detection performances than grid-based methods. We show that a point-based model can extract neighborhood features, leveraging the exact relative positions of points, before grid rendering. This has significant benefits for a subsequent grid-based convolutional detection backbone. In experiments on the public nuScenes dataset our hybrid architecture achieves improvements in terms of detection performance (19.7% higher mAP for car class than next-best radar-only submission) and orientation estimates (11.5% relative orientation improvement) over networks from previous literature.
Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition
Authors: Cheng Luo, Siyang Song, Weicheng Xie, Linlin Shen, Hatice Gunes
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Action Unit Detection, Relation

The activations of Facial Action Units (AUs) mutually influence one another. While the relationship between a pair of AUs can be complex and unique, existing approaches fail to specifically and explicitly represent such cues for each pair of AUs in each facial display. This paper proposes an AU relationship modelling approach that deep learns a unique graph to explicitly describe the relationship between each pair of AUs of the target facial display. Our approach first encodes each AU's activation status and its association with other AUs into a node feature. Then, it learns a pair of multi-dimensional edge features to describe multiple task-specific relationship cues between each pair of AUs. During both node and edge feature learning, our approach also considers the influence of the unique facial display on AUs' relationship by taking the full face representation as an input. Experimental results on BP4D and DISFA datasets show that both node and edge feature learning modules provide large performance improvements for CNN and transformer-based backbones, with our best systems achieving the state-of-the-art AU recognition results. Our approach not only has a strong capability in modelling relationship cues for AU recognition but also can be easily incorporated into various backbones. Our PyTorch code is made available.
A New Dimensionality Reduction Method Based on Hensel's Compression for Privacy Protection in Federated Learning
Authors: Ahmed El Ouadrhiri, Ahmed Abdelhadi
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Federated Learning, LEMMA, Privacy Preserving

Differential privacy (DP) is considered a de-facto standard for protecting users' privacy in data analysis, machine, and deep learning. Existing DP-based privacy-preserving training approaches consist of adding noise to the clients' gradients before sharing them with the server. However, implementing DP on the gradient is not efficient as the privacy leakage increases by increasing the synchronization training epochs due to the composition theorem. Recently researchers were able to recover images used in the training dataset using Generative Regression Neural Network (GRNN) even when the gradient was protected by DP. In this paper, we propose two layers of privacy protection approach to overcome the limitations of the existing DP-based approaches. The first layer reduces the dimension of the training dataset based on Hensel's Lemma. We are the first to use Hensel's Lemma for reducing the dimension (i.e., compress) of a dataset. The new dimensionality reduction method allows reducing the dimension of a dataset without losing information since Hensel's Lemma guarantees uniqueness. The second layer applies DP to the compressed dataset generated by the first layer. The proposed approach overcomes the problem of privacy leakage due to composition by applying DP only once before the training; clients train their local model on the privacy-preserving dataset generated by the second layer. Experimental results show that the proposed approach ensures strong privacy protection while achieving good accuracy. The new dimensionality reduction method achieves an accuracy of 97%, with only 25 % of the original data size.
Branch & Learn for Recursively and Iteratively Solvable Problems in Predict+Optimize
Authors: Xinyi Hu, Jasper C. H. Lee, Jimmy H. M. Lee, Allen Z. Zhong
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00

This paper proposes Branch & Learn, a framework for Predict+Optimize to tackle optimization problems containing parameters that are unknown at the time of solving. Given an optimization problem solvable by a recursive algorithm satisfying simple conditions, we show how a corresponding learning algorithm can be constructed directly and methodically from the recursive algorithm. Our framework applies also to iterative algorithms by viewing them as a degenerate form of recursion. Extensive experimentation shows better performance for our proposal over classical and state-of-the-art approaches.
Processing Network Controls via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mark Gluzman
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Novel advanced policy gradient (APG) algorithms, such as proximal policy optimization (PPO), trust region policy optimization, and their variations, have become the dominant reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms because of their ease of implementation and good practical performance. This dissertation is concerned with theoretical justification and practical application of the APG algorithms for solving processing network control optimization problems. Processing network control problems are typically formulated as Markov decision process (MDP) or semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) problems that have several unconventional for RL features: infinite state spaces, unbounded costs, long-run average cost objectives. Policy improvement bounds play a crucial role in the theoretical justification of the APG algorithms. In this thesis we refine existing bounds for MDPs with finite state spaces and prove novel policy improvement bounds for classes of MDPs and SMDPs used to model processing network operations. We consider two examples of processing network control problems and customize the PPO algorithm to solve them. First, we consider parallel-server and multiclass queueing networks controls. Second, we consider the drivers repositioning problem in a ride-hailing service system. For both examples the PPO algorithm with auxiliary modifications consistently generates control policies that outperform state-of-art heuristics.
The scope for AI-augmented interpretation of building blueprints in commercial and industrial property insurance
Authors: Long Chen, Mao Ye, Alistair Milne, John Hillier, Frances Oglesby
Date: 2022-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This report, commissioned by the WTW research network, investigates the use of AI in property risk assessment. It (i) reviews existing work on risk assessment in commercial and industrial properties and automated information extraction from building blueprints; and (ii) presents an exploratory 'proof-of concept-solution' exploring the feasibility of using machine learning for the automated extraction of information from building blueprints to support insurance risk assessment.
Compound virtual screening by learning-to-rank with gradient boosting decision tree and enrichment-based cumulative gain
Authors: Kairi Furui, Masahito Ohue
Date: 2022-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Learning-To-Rank, regression, Retrieval

Learning-to-rank, a machine learning technique widely used in information retrieval, has recently been applied to the problem of ligand-based virtual screening, to accelerate the early stages of new drug development. Ranking prediction models learn based on ordinal relationships, making them suitable for integrating assay data from various environments. Existing studies of rank prediction in compound screening have generally used a learning-to-rank method called RankSVM. However, they have not been compared with or validated against the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT)-based learning-to-rank methods that have gained popularity recently. Furthermore, although the ranking metric called Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) is widely used in information retrieval, it only determines whether the predictions are better than those of other models. In other words, NDCG is incapable of recognizing when a prediction model produces worse than random results. Nevertheless, NDCG is still used in the performance evaluation of compound screening using learning-to-rank. This study used the GBDT model with ranking loss functions, called lambdarank and lambdaloss, for ligand-based virtual screening; results were compared with existing RankSVM methods and GBDT models using regression. We also proposed a new ranking metric, Normalized Enrichment Discounted Cumulative Gain (NEDCG), which aims to properly evaluate the goodness of ranking predictions. Results showed that the GBDT model with learning-to-rank outperformed existing regression methods using GBDT and RankSVM on diverse datasets. Moreover, NEDCG showed that predictions by regression were comparable to random predictions in multi-assay, multi-family datasets, demonstrating its usefulness for a more direct assessment of compound screening performance.
UnrealNAS: Can We Search Neural Architectures with Unreal Data?
Authors: Zhen Dong, Kaicheng Zhou, Guohao Li, Qiang Zhou, Mingfei Guo, Bernard Ghanem, Kurt Keutzer, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2022-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown great success in the automatic design of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the best way to use data to search network architectures is still unclear and under exploration. Previous work has analyzed the necessity of having ground-truth labels in NAS and inspired broad interest. In this work, we take a further step to question whether real data is necessary for NAS to be effective. The answer to this question is important for applications with limited amount of accessible data, and can help people improve NAS by leveraging the extra flexibility of data generation. To explore if NAS needs real data, we construct three types of unreal datasets using: 1) randomly labeled real images; 2) generated images and labels; and 3) generated Gaussian noise with random labels. These datasets facilitate to analyze the generalization and expressivity of the searched architectures. We study the performance of architectures searched on these constructed datasets using popular differentiable NAS methods. Extensive experiments on CIFAR, ImageNet and CheXpert show that the searched architectures can achieve promising results compared with those derived from the conventional NAS pipeline with real labeled data, suggesting the feasibility of performing NAS with unreal data.
Evaluating Transferability for Covid 3D Localization Using CT SARS-CoV-2 segmentation models
Authors: Constantine Maganaris, Eftychios Protopapadakis, Nikolaos Bakalos, Nikolaos Doulamis, Dimitris Kalogeras, Aikaterini Angeli
Date: 2022-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Sensitivity, Specificity, Transfer Learning

Recent studies indicate that detecting radiographic patterns on CT scans can yield high sensitivity and specificity for Covid-19 localization. In this paper, we investigate the appropriateness of deep learning models transferability, for semantic segmentation of pneumonia-infected areas in CT images. Transfer learning allows for the fast initialization/reutilization of detection models, given that large volumes of training data are not available. Our work explores the efficacy of using pre-trained U-Net architectures, on a specific CT data set, for identifying Covid-19 side-effects over images from different datasets. Experimental results indicate improvement in the segmentation accuracy of identifying Covid-19 infected regions.
An Analysis of Generative Methods for Multiple Image Inpainting
Authors: Coloma Ballester, Aurelie Bugeau, Samuel Hurault, Simone Parisotto, Patricia Vitoria
Date: 2022-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Inpainting

Image inpainting refers to the restoration of an image with missing regions in a way that is not detectable by the observer. The inpainting regions can be of any size and shape. This is an ill-posed inverse problem that does not have a unique solution. In this work, we focus on learning-based image completion methods for multiple and diverse inpainting which goal is to provide a set of distinct solutions for a given damaged image. These methods capitalize on the probabilistic nature of certain generative models to sample various solutions that coherently restore the missing content. Along the chapter, we will analyze the underlying theory and analyze the recent proposals for multiple inpainting. To investigate the pros and cons of each method, we present quantitative and qualitative comparisons, on common datasets, regarding both the quality and the diversity of the set of inpainted solutions. Our analysis allows us to identify the most successful generative strategies in both inpainting quality and inpainting diversity. This task is closely related to the learning of an accurate probability distribution of images. Depending on the dataset in use, the challenges that entail the training of such a model will be discussed through the analysis.