pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Distilling a Pretrained Language Model to a Multilingual ASR Model
Authors: Kwanghee Choi, Hyung-Min Park
Date: 2022-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Multilingual speech data often suffer from long-tailed language distribution, resulting in performance degradation. However, multilingual text data is much easier to obtain, yielding a more useful general language model. Hence, we are motivated to distill the rich knowledge embedded inside a well-trained teacher text model to the student speech model. We propose a novel method called the Distilling a Language model to a Speech model (Distill-L2S), which aligns the latent representations of two different modalities. The subtle differences are handled by the shrinking mechanism, nearest-neighbor interpolation, and a learnable linear projection layer. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our distillation method by applying it to the multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) task. We distill the transformer-based cross-lingual language model (InfoXLM) while fine-tuning the large-scale multilingual ASR model (XLSR-wav2vec 2.0) for each language. We show the superiority of our method on 20 low-resource languages of the CommonVoice dataset with less than 100 hours of speech data.
Language Models as Knowledge Embeddings
Authors: Xintao Wang, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao
Date: 2022-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Link Prediction, Triple Classification

Knowledge embeddings (KE) represent a knowledge graph (KG) by embedding entities and relations into continuous vector spaces. Existing methods are mainly structure-based or description-based. Structure-based methods learn representations that preserve the inherent structure of KGs. They cannot well represent abundant long-tail entities in real-world KGs with limited structural information. Description-based methods leverage textual information and language models. Prior approaches in this direction barely outperform structure-based ones, and suffer from problems like expensive negative sampling and restrictive description demand. In this paper, we propose LMKE, which adopts Language Models to derive Knowledge Embeddings, aiming at both enriching representations of long-tail entities and solving problems of prior description-based methods. We formulate description-based KE learning with a contrastive learning framework to improve efficiency in training and evaluation. Experimental results show that LMKE achieves state-of-the-art performance on KE benchmarks of link prediction and triple classification, especially for long-tail entities.
Self-supervision and Learnable STRFs for Age, Emotion, and Country Prediction
Authors: Roshan Sharma, Tyler Vuong, Mark Lindsey, Hira Dhamyal, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
Date: 2022-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

This work presents a multitask approach to the simultaneous estimation of age, country of origin, and emotion given vocal burst audio for the 2022 ICML Expressive Vocalizations Challenge ExVo-MultiTask track. The method of choice utilized a combination of spectro-temporal modulation and self-supervised features, followed by an encoder-decoder network organized in a multitask paradigm. We evaluate the complementarity between the tasks posed by examining independent task-specific and joint models, and explore the relative strengths of different feature sets. We also introduce a simple score fusion mechanism to leverage the complementarity of different feature sets for this task. We find that robust data preprocessing in conjunction with score fusion over spectro-temporal receptive field and HuBERT models achieved our best ExVo-MultiTask test score of 0.412.
Construct a Sentence with Multiple Specified Words
Authors: Yuanliang Meng
Date: 2022-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

This paper demonstrates a task to finetune a BART model so it can construct a sentence from an arbitrary set of words, which used to be a difficult NLP task. The training task is making sentences with four words, but the trained model can generate sentences when fewer or more words are provided. The output sentences have high quality in general. The model can have some real-world applications, and this task can be used as an evaluation mechanism for any language model as well.
Self-supervised Context-aware Style Representation for Expressive Speech Synthesis
Authors: Yihan Wu, Xi Wang, Shaofei Zhang, Lei He, Ruihua Song, Jian-Yun Nie
Date: 2022-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Deep Clustering, Expressive Speech Synthesis, Representation Learning, Speech Synthesis

Expressive speech synthesis, like audiobook synthesis, is still challenging for style representation learning and prediction. Deriving from reference audio or predicting style tags from text requires a huge amount of labeled data, which is costly to acquire and difficult to define and annotate accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for learning style representation from abundant plain text in a self-supervised manner. It leverages an emotion lexicon and uses contrastive learning and deep clustering. We further integrate the style representation as a conditioned embedding in a multi-style Transformer TTS. Comparing with multi-style TTS by predicting style tags trained on the same dataset but with human annotations, our method achieves improved results according to subjective evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets in audiobook speech. Moreover, with implicit context-aware style representation, the emotion transition of synthesized audio in a long paragraph appears more natural. The audio samples are available on the demo web.
Predicting Stock Price Movement after Disclosure of Corporate Annual Reports: A Case Study of 2021 China CSI 300 Stocks
Authors: Fengyu Han, Yue Wang
Date: 2022-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Stock Price Prediction

In the current stock market, computer science and technology are more and more widely used to analyse stocks. Not same as most related machine learning stock price prediction work, this work study the predicting the tendency of the stock price on the second day right after the disclosure of the companies' annual reports. We use a variety of different models, including decision tree, logistic regression, random forest, neural network, prototypical networks. We use two sets of financial indicators (key and expanded) to conduct experiments, these financial indicators are obtained from the EastMoney website disclosed by companies, and finally we find that these models are not well behaved to predict the tendency. In addition, we also filter stocks with ROE greater than 0.15 and net cash ratio greater than 0.9. We conclude that according to the financial indicators based on the just-released annual report of the company, the predictability of the stock price movement on the second day after disclosure is weak, with maximum accuracy about 59.6% and maximum precision about 0.56 on our test set by the random forest classifier, and the stock filtering does not improve the performance. And random forests perform best in general among all these models which conforms to some work's findings.
Placental Vessel Segmentation and Registration in Fetoscopy: Literature Review and MICCAI FetReg2021 Challenge Findings
Authors: Sophia Bano, Alessandro Casella, Francisco Vasconcelos, Abdul Qayyum, Abdesslam Benzinou, Moona Mazher, Fabrice Meriaudeau, Chiara Lena, Ilaria Anita Cintorrino, Gaia Romana De Paolis, Jessica Biagioli, Daria Grechishnikova, Jing Jiao, Bizhe Bai, Yanyan Qiao, Binod Bhattarai, Rebati Raman Gaire, Ronast Subedi, Eduard Vazquez, Szymon Płotka, Aneta Lisowska, Arkadiusz Sitek, George Attilakos, Ruwan Wimalasundera, Anna L David, Dario Paladini, Jan Deprest, Elena De Momi, Leonardo S Mattos, Sara Moccia, Danail Stoyanov
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

Fetoscopy laser photocoagulation is a widely adopted procedure for treating Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (TTTS). The procedure involves photocoagulation pathological anastomoses to regulate blood exchange among twins. The procedure is particularly challenging due to the limited field of view, poor manoeuvrability of the fetoscope, poor visibility, and variability in illumination. These challenges may lead to increased surgery time and incomplete ablation. Computer-assisted intervention (CAI) can provide surgeons with decision support and context awareness by identifying key structures in the scene and expanding the fetoscopic field of view through video mosaicking. Research in this domain has been hampered by the lack of high-quality data to design, develop and test CAI algorithms. Through the Fetoscopic Placental Vessel Segmentation and Registration (FetReg2021) challenge, which was organized as part of the MICCAI2021 Endoscopic Vision challenge, we released the first largescale multicentre TTTS dataset for the development of generalized and robust semantic segmentation and video mosaicking algorithms. For this challenge, we released a dataset of 2060 images, pixel-annotated for vessels, tool, fetus and background classes, from 18 in-vivo TTTS fetoscopy procedures and 18 short video clips. Seven teams participated in this challenge and their model performance was assessed on an unseen test dataset of 658 pixel-annotated images from 6 fetoscopic procedures and 6 short clips. The challenge provided an opportunity for creating generalized solutions for fetoscopic scene understanding and mosaicking. In this paper, we present the findings of the FetReg2021 challenge alongside reporting a detailed literature review for CAI in TTTS fetoscopy. Through this challenge, its analysis and the release of multi-centre fetoscopic data, we provide a benchmark for future research in this field.
Multi-Modal and Multi-Factor Branching Time Active Inference
Authors: Théophile Champion, Marek Grześ, Howard Bowman
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00

Active inference is a state-of-the-art framework for modelling the brain that explains a wide range of mechanisms such as habit formation, dopaminergic discharge and curiosity. Recently, two versions of branching time active inference (BTAI) based on Monte-Carlo tree search have been developed to handle the exponential (space and time) complexity class that occurs when computing the prior over all possible policies up to the time horizon. However, those two versions of BTAI still suffer from an exponential complexity class w.r.t the number of observed and latent variables being modelled. In the present paper, we resolve this limitation by first allowing the modelling of several observations, each of them having its own likelihood mapping. Similarly, we allow each latent state to have its own transition mapping. The inference algorithm then exploits the factorisation of the likelihood and transition mappings to accelerate the computation of the posterior. Those two optimisations were tested on the dSprites environment in which the metadata of the dSprites dataset was used as input to the model instead of the dSprites images. On this task, $BTAI_{VMP}$ (Champion et al., 2022b,a) was able to solve 96.9\% of the task in 5.1 seconds, and $BTAI_{BF}$ (Champion et al., 2021a) was able to solve 98.6\% of the task in 17.5 seconds. Our new approach ($BTAI_{3MF}$) outperformed both of its predecessors by solving the task completly (100\%) in only 2.559 seconds. Finally, $BTAI_{3MF}$ has been implemented in a flexible and easy to use (python) package, and we developed a graphical user interface to enable the inspection of the model's beliefs, planning process and behaviour.
RAPid-Learn: A Framework for Learning to Recover for Handling Novelties in Open-World Environments
Authors: Shivam Goel, Yash Shukla, Vasanth Sarathy, Matthias Scheutz, Jivko Sinapov
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Minecraft, Transfer Learning

We propose RAPid-Learn: Learning to Recover and Plan Again, a hybrid planning and learning method, to tackle the problem of adapting to sudden and unexpected changes in an agent's environment (i.e., novelties). RAPid-Learn is designed to formulate and solve modifications to a task's Markov Decision Process (MDPs) on-the-fly and is capable of exploiting domain knowledge to learn any new dynamics caused by the environmental changes. It is capable of exploiting the domain knowledge to learn action executors which can be further used to resolve execution impasses, leading to a successful plan execution. This novelty information is reflected in its updated domain model. We demonstrate its efficacy by introducing a wide variety of novelties in a gridworld environment inspired by Minecraft, and compare our algorithm with transfer learning baselines from the literature. Our method is (1) effective even in the presence of multiple novelties, (2) more sample efficient than transfer learning RL baselines, and (3) robust to incomplete model information, as opposed to pure symbolic planning approaches.
OPERA: Harmonizing Task-Oriented Dialogs and Information Seeking Experience
Authors: Miaoran Li, Baolin Peng, Jianfeng Gao, Zhu Zhang
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Existing studies in conversational AI mostly treat task-oriented dialog (TOD) and question answering (QA) as separate tasks. Towards the goal of constructing a conversational agent that can complete user tasks and support information seeking, it is important to build a system that handles both TOD and QA with access to various external knowledge. In this work, we propose a new task, Open-Book TOD (OB-TOD), which combines TOD with QA task and expand external knowledge sources to include both explicit knowledge sources (e.g., the Web) and implicit knowledge sources (e.g., pre-trained language models). We create a new dataset OB-MultiWOZ, where we enrich TOD sessions with QA-like information seeking experience grounded on external knowledge. We propose a unified model OPERA (Open-book End-to-end Task-oriented Dialog) which can appropriately access explicit and implicit external knowledge to tackle the defined task. Experimental results demonstrate OPERA's superior performance compared to closed-book baselines and illustrate the value of both knowledge types.
Deep Active Learning for Regression Using $ε$-weighted Hybrid Query Strategy
Authors: Harsh Vardhan, Janos Sztipanovits
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, regression

Designing an inexpensive approximate surrogate model that captures the salient features of an expensive high-fidelity behavior is a prevalent approach in design optimization. In recent times, Deep Learning (DL) models are being used as a promising surrogate computational model for engineering problems. However, the main challenge in creating a DL-based surrogate is to simulate/label a large number of design points, which is time-consuming for computationally costly and/or high-dimensional engineering problems. In the present work, we propose a novel sampling technique by combining the active learning (AL) method with DL. We call this method $\epsilon$-weighted hybrid query strategy ($\epsilon$-HQS) , which focuses on the evaluation of the surrogate at each learning iteration and provides an estimate of the failure probability of the surrogate in the Design Space. By reusing already collected training and test data, the learned failure probability guides the next iteration's sampling process to the region of the high probability of failure. During the empirical evaluation, better accuracy of the surrogate was observed in comparison to other methods of sample selection. We empirically evaluated this method in two different engineering design domains, finite element based static stress analysis of submarine pressure vessel(computationally costly process) and second submarine propeller design( high dimensional problem). https://github.com/vardhah/epsilon_weighted_Hybrid_Query_Strategy
ML-Based Approach for NFL Defensive Pass Interference Prediction Using GPS Tracking Data
Authors: Arian Skoki, Jonatan Lerga, Ivan Štajduhar
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Defensive Pass Interference (DPI) is one of the most impactful penalties in the NFL. DPI is a spot foul, yielding an automatic first down to the team in possession. With such an influence on the game, referees have no room for a mistake. It is also a very rare event, which happens 1-2 times per 100 pass attempts. With technology improving and many IoT wearables being put on the athletes to collect valuable data, there is a solid ground for applying machine learning (ML) techniques to improve every aspect of the game. The work presented here is the first attempt in predicting DPI using player tracking GPS data. The data we used was collected by NFL's Next Gen Stats throughout the 2018 regular season. We present ML models for highly imbalanced time-series binary classification: LSTM, GRU, ANN, and Multivariate LSTM-FCN. Results showed that using GPS tracking data to predict DPI has limited success. The best performing models had high recall with low precision which resulted in the classification of many false positive examples. Looking closely at the data confirmed that there is just not enough information to determine whether a foul was committed. This study might serve as a filter for multi-step pipeline for video sequence classification which could be able to solve this problem.
Modeling Adaptive Platoon and Reservation Based Autonomous Intersection Control: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Duowei Li, Jianping Wu, Feng Zhu, Tianyi Chen, Yiik Diew Wong
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

As a strategy to reduce travel delay and enhance energy efficiency, platooning of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) at non-signalized intersections has become increasingly popular in academia. However, few studies have attempted to model the relation between the optimal platoon size and the traffic conditions around the intersection. To this end, this study proposes an adaptive platoon based autonomous intersection control model powered by deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique. The model framework has following two levels: the first level adopts a First Come First Serve (FCFS) reservation based policy integrated with a nonconflicting lane selection mechanism to determine vehicles' passing priority; and the second level applies a deep Q-network algorithm to identify the optimal platoon size based on the real-time traffic condition of an intersection. When being tested on a traffic micro-simulator, our proposed model exhibits superior performances on travel efficiency and fuel conservation as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Geometry Interaction Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Authors: Zongsheng Cao, Qianqian Xu, Zhiyong Yang, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Link Prediction

Knowledge graph (KG) embeddings have shown great power in learning representations of entities and relations for link prediction tasks. Previous work usually embeds KGs into a single geometric space such as Euclidean space (zero curved), hyperbolic space (negatively curved) or hyperspherical space (positively curved) to maintain their specific geometric structures (e.g., chain, hierarchy and ring structures). However, the topological structure of KGs appears to be complicated, since it may contain multiple types of geometric structures simultaneously. Therefore, embedding KGs in a single space, no matter the Euclidean space, hyperbolic space or hyperspheric space, cannot capture the complex structures of KGs accurately. To overcome this challenge, we propose Geometry Interaction knowledge graph Embeddings (GIE), which learns spatial structures interactively between the Euclidean, hyperbolic and hyperspherical spaces. Theoretically, our proposed GIE can capture a richer set of relational information, model key inference patterns, and enable expressive semantic matching across entities. Experimental results on three well-established knowledge graph completion benchmarks show that our GIE achieves the state-of-the-art performance with fewer parameters.
Prediction of Football Player Value using Bayesian Ensemble Approach
Authors: Hansoo Lee, Bayu Adhi Tama, Meeyoung Cha
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization, regression

The transfer fees of sports players have become astronomical. This is because bringing players of great future value to the club is essential for their survival. We present a case study on the key factors affecting the world's top soccer players' transfer fees based on the FIFA data analysis. To predict each player's market value, we propose an improved LightGBM model by optimizing its hyperparameter using a Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) algorithm. We identify prominent features by the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) algorithm. The proposed method has been compared against the baseline regression models (e.g., linear regression, lasso, elastic net, kernel ridge regression) and gradient boosting model without hyperparameter optimization. The optimized LightGBM model showed an excellent accuracy of approximately 3.8, 1.4, and 1.8 times on average compared to the regression baseline models, GBDT, and LightGBM model in terms of RMSE. Our model offers interpretability in deciding what attributes football clubs should consider in recruiting players in the future.
A novel approach to increase scalability while training machine learning algorithms using Bfloat 16 in credit card fraud detection
Authors: Bushra Yousuf, Rejwan Bin Sulaiman, Musarrat Saberin Nipun
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fraud Detection

The use of credit cards has become quite common these days as digital banking has become the norm. With this increase, fraud in credit cards also has a huge problem and loss to the banks and customers alike. Normal fraud detection systems, are not able to detect the fraud since fraudsters emerge with new techniques to commit fraud. This creates the need to use machine learning-based software to detect frauds. Currently, the machine learning softwares that are available focuses only on the accuracy of detecting frauds but does not focus on the cost or time factors to detect. This research focuses on machine learning scalability for banks' credit card fraud detection systems. We have compared the existing machine learning algorithms and methods that are available with the newly proposed technique. The goal is to prove that using fewer bits for training a machine learning algorithm will result in a more scalable system, that will reduce the time and will also be less costly to implement.
Pruned RNN-T for fast, memory-efficient ASR training
Authors: Fangjun Kuang, Liyong Guo, Wei Kang, Long Lin, Mingshuang Luo, Zengwei Yao, Daniel Povey
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, GPU, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The RNN-Transducer (RNN-T) framework for speech recognition has been growing in popularity, particularly for deployed real-time ASR systems, because it combines high accuracy with naturally streaming recognition. One of the drawbacks of RNN-T is that its loss function is relatively slow to compute, and can use a lot of memory. Excessive GPU memory usage can make it impractical to use RNN-T loss in cases where the vocabulary size is large: for example, for Chinese character-based ASR. We introduce a method for faster and more memory-efficient RNN-T loss computation. We first obtain pruning bounds for the RNN-T recursion using a simple joiner network that is linear in the encoder and decoder embeddings; we can evaluate this without using much memory. We then use those pruning bounds to evaluate the full, non-linear joiner network.