pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Latent Aspect Detection from Online Unsolicited Customer Reviews
Authors: Mohammad Forouhesh, Arash Mansouri, Hossein Fani
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect Category Detection, Hidden Aspect Detection, Information Retrieval, Latent Aspect Detection

Within the context of review analytics, aspects are the features of products and services at which customers target their opinions and sentiments. Aspect detection helps product owners and service providers to identify shortcomings and prioritize customers' needs, and hence, maintain revenues and mitigate customer churn. Existing methods focus on detecting the surface form of an aspect by training supervised learning methods that fall short when aspects are latent in reviews. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method to extract latent occurrences of aspects. Specifically, we assume that a customer undergoes a two-stage hypothetical generative process when writing a review: (1) deciding on an aspect amongst the set of aspects available for the product or service, and (2) writing the opinion words that are more interrelated to the chosen aspect from the set of all words available in a language. We employ latent Dirichlet allocation to learn the latent aspects distributions for generating the reviews. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our proposed method is able to improve the state of the art when the aspects are latent with no surface form in reviews.
RecurSeed and EdgePredictMix: Pseudo-Label Refinement Learning for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation across Single- and Multi-Stage Frameworks
Authors: Sanghyun Jo, In-Jae Yu, KyungSu Kim
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Pseudo Label, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Although weakly supervised semantic segmentation using only image-level labels (WSSS-IL) is potentially useful, its low performance and implementation complexity still limit its application. The main causes are (a) non-detection and (b) false-detection phenomena: (a) The class activation maps refined from existing WSSS-IL methods still only represent partial regions for large-scale objects, and (b) for small-scale objects, over-activation causes them to deviate from the object edges. We propose RecurSeed, which alternately reduces non- and false detections through recursive iterations, thereby implicitly finding an optimal junction that minimizes both errors. We also propose a novel data augmentation (DA) approach called EdgePredictMix, which further expresses an object's edge by utilizing the probability difference information between adjacent pixels in combining the segmentation results, thereby compensating for the shortcomings when applying the existing DA methods to WSSS. We achieved new state-of-the-art performances on both the PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 benchmarks (VOC val: 74.4%, COCO val: 46.4%). The code is available at https://github.com/shjo-april/RecurSeed_and_EdgePredictMix.
Neighborhood Attention Transformer
Authors: Ali Hassani, Steven Walton, Jiachen Li, Shen Li, Humphrey Shi
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

We present Neighborhood Attention (NA), the first efficient and scalable sliding-window attention mechanism for vision. NA is a pixel-wise operation, localizing self attention (SA) to the nearest neighboring pixels, and therefore enjoys a linear time and space complexity compared to the quadratic complexity of SA. The sliding-window pattern allows NA's receptive field to grow without needing extra pixel shifts, and preserves translational equivariance, unlike Swin Transformer's Window Self Attention (WSA). We develop NATTEN (Neighborhood Attention Extension), a Python package with efficient C++ and CUDA kernels, which allows NA to run up to 40% faster than Swin's WSA while using up to 25% less memory. We further present Neighborhood Attention Transformer (NAT), a new hierarchical transformer design based on NA that boosts image classification and downstream vision performance. Experimental results on NAT are competitive; NAT-Tiny reaches 83.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, 51.4% mAP on MS-COCO and 48.4% mIoU on ADE20K, which is 1.9% ImageNet accuracy, 1.0% COCO mAP, and 2.6% ADE20K mIoU improvement over a Swin model with similar size. To support more research based on sliding-window attention, we open source our project and release our checkpoints at: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Neighborhood-Attention-Transformer .
CLUES: A Benchmark for Learning Classifiers using Natural Language Explanations
Authors: Rakesh R Menon, Sayan Ghosh, Shashank Srivastava
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Inductive Learning

Supervised learning has traditionally focused on inductive learning by observing labeled examples of a task. In contrast, humans have the ability to learn new concepts from language. Here, we explore training zero-shot classifiers for structured data purely from language. For this, we introduce CLUES, a benchmark for Classifier Learning Using natural language ExplanationS, consisting of a range of classification tasks over structured data along with natural language supervision in the form of explanations. CLUES consists of 36 real-world and 144 synthetic classification tasks. It contains crowdsourced explanations describing real-world tasks from multiple teachers and programmatically generated explanations for the synthetic tasks. To model the influence of explanations in classifying an example, we develop ExEnt, an entailment-based model that learns classifiers using explanations. ExEnt generalizes up to 18% better (relative) on novel tasks than a baseline that does not use explanations. We delineate key challenges for automated learning from explanations, addressing which can lead to progress on CLUES in the future. Code and datasets are available at: https://clues-benchmark.github.io.
Masked Siamese Networks for Label-Efficient Learning
Authors: Mahmoud Assran, Mathilde Caron, Ishan Misra, Piotr Bojanowski, Florian Bordes, Pascal Vincent, Armand Joulin, Michael Rabbat, Nicolas Ballas
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Self-Supervised Image Classification, Self-Supervised Learning, Semi-Supervised Image Classification

We propose Masked Siamese Networks (MSN), a self-supervised learning framework for learning image representations. Our approach matches the representation of an image view containing randomly masked patches to the representation of the original unmasked image. This self-supervised pre-training strategy is particularly scalable when applied to Vision Transformers since only the unmasked patches are processed by the network. As a result, MSNs improve the scalability of joint-embedding architectures, while producing representations of a high semantic level that perform competitively on low-shot image classification. For instance, on ImageNet-1K, with only 5,000 annotated images, our base MSN model achieves 72.4% top-1 accuracy, and with 1% of ImageNet-1K labels, we achieve 75.7% top-1 accuracy, setting a new state-of-the-art for self-supervised learning on this benchmark. Our code is publicly available.
Accelerated Policy Learning with Parallel Differentiable Simulation
Authors: Jie Xu, Viktor Makoviychuk, Yashraj Narang, Fabio Ramos, Wojciech Matusik, Animesh Garg, Miles Macklin
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning can generate complex control policies, but requires large amounts of training data to work effectively. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by leveraging differentiable simulators. However, inherent problems such as local minima and exploding/vanishing numerical gradients prevent these methods from being generally applied to control tasks with complex contact-rich dynamics, such as humanoid locomotion in classical RL benchmarks. In this work we present a high-performance differentiable simulator and a new policy learning algorithm (SHAC) that can effectively leverage simulation gradients, even in the presence of non-smoothness. Our learning algorithm alleviates problems with local minima through a smooth critic function, avoids vanishing/exploding gradients through a truncated learning window, and allows many physical environments to be run in parallel. We evaluate our method on classical RL control tasks, and show substantial improvements in sample efficiency and wall-clock time over state-of-the-art RL and differentiable simulation-based algorithms. In addition, we demonstrate the scalability of our method by applying it to the challenging high-dimensional problem of muscle-actuated locomotion with a large action space, achieving a greater than 17x reduction in training time over the best-performing established RL algorithm.
Scalable and Robust Self-Learning for Skill Routing in Large-Scale Conversational AI Systems
Authors: Mohammad Kachuee, Jinseok Nam, Sarthak Ahuja, Jin-Myung Won, Sungjin Lee
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (ACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Off-policy evaluation, Self-Learning

Skill routing is an important component in large-scale conversational systems. In contrast to traditional rule-based skill routing, state-of-the-art systems use a model-based approach to enable natural conversations. To provide supervision signal required to train such models, ideas such as human annotation, replication of a rule-based system, relabeling based on user paraphrases, and bandit-based learning were suggested. However, these approaches: (a) do not scale in terms of the number of skills and skill on-boarding, (b) require a very costly expert annotation/rule-design, (c) introduce risks in the user experience with each model update. In this paper, we present a scalable self-learning approach to explore routing alternatives without causing abrupt policy changes that break the user experience, learn from the user interaction, and incrementally improve the routing via frequent model refreshes. To enable such robust frequent model updates, we suggest a simple and effective approach that ensures controlled policy updates for individual domains, followed by an off-policy evaluation for making deployment decisions without any need for lengthy A/B experimentation. We conduct various offline and online A/B experiments on a commercial large-scale conversational system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in real-world production settings.
Retrospective on the 2021 BASALT Competition on Learning from Human Feedback
Authors: Rohin Shah, Steven H. Wang, Cody Wild, Stephanie Milani, Anssi Kanervisto, Vinicius G. Goecks, Nicholas Waytowich, David Watkins-Valls, Bharat Prakash, Edmund Mills, Divyansh Garg, Alexander Fries, Alexandra Souly, Chan Jun Shern, Daniel del Castillo, Tom Lieberum
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Minecraft

We held the first-ever MineRL Benchmark for Agents that Solve Almost-Lifelike Tasks (MineRL BASALT) Competition at the Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021). The goal of the competition was to promote research towards agents that use learning from human feedback (LfHF) techniques to solve open-world tasks. Rather than mandating the use of LfHF techniques, we described four tasks in natural language to be accomplished in the video game Minecraft, and allowed participants to use any approach they wanted to build agents that could accomplish the tasks. Teams developed a diverse range of LfHF algorithms across a variety of possible human feedback types. The three winning teams implemented significantly different approaches while achieving similar performance. Interestingly, their approaches performed well on different tasks, validating our choice of tasks to include in the competition. While the outcomes validated the design of our competition, we did not get as many participants and submissions as our sister competition, MineRL Diamond. We speculate about the causes of this problem and suggest improvements for future iterations of the competition.
Dialogue Strategy Adaptation to New Action Sets Using Multi-dimensional Modelling
Authors: Simon Keizer, Norbert Braunschweiler, Svetlana Stoyanchev, Rama Doddipatla
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Management, Management, Spoken Dialogue Systems, Transfer Learning

A major bottleneck for building statistical spoken dialogue systems for new domains and applications is the need for large amounts of training data. To address this problem, we adopt the multi-dimensional approach to dialogue management and evaluate its potential for transfer learning. Specifically, we exploit pre-trained task-independent policies to speed up training for an extended task-specific action set, in which the single summary action for requesting a slot is replaced by multiple slot-specific request actions. Policy optimisation and evaluation experiments using an agenda-based user simulator show that with limited training data, much better performance levels can be achieved when using the proposed multi-dimensional adaptation method. We confirm this improvement in a crowd-sourced human user evaluation of our spoken dialogue system, comparing partially trained policies. The multi-dimensional system (with adaptation on limited training data in the target scenario) outperforms the one-dimensional baseline (without adaptation on the same amount of training data) by 7% perceived success rate.
Sim-to-Real 6D Object Pose Estimation via Iterative Self-training for Robotic Bin Picking
Authors: Kai Chen, Rui Cao, Stephen James, Yichuan Li, Yun-hui Liu, Pieter Abbeel, Qi Dou
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Pose Estimation, Robotic Grasping

In this paper, we propose an iterative self-training framework for sim-to-real 6D object pose estimation to facilitate cost-effective robotic grasping. Given a bin-picking scenario, we establish a photo-realistic simulator to synthesize abundant virtual data, and use this to train an initial pose estimation network. This network then takes the role of a teacher model, which generates pose predictions for unlabeled real data. With these predictions, we further design a comprehensive adaptive selection scheme to distinguish reliable results, and leverage them as pseudo labels to update a student model for pose estimation on real data. To continuously improve the quality of pseudo labels, we iterate the above steps by taking the trained student model as a new teacher and re-label real data using the refined teacher model. We evaluate our method on a public benchmark and our newly-released dataset, achieving an ADD(-S) improvement of 11.49% and 22.62% respectively. Our method is also able to improve robotic bin-picking success by 19.54%, demonstrating the potential of iterative sim-to-real solutions for robotic applications.
Exploring the Distributed Knowledge Congruence in Proxy-data-free Federated Distillation
Authors: Zhiyuan Wu, Sheng Sun, Yuwei Wang, Min Liu, Quyang Pan, Junbo Zhang, Zeju Li, Qingxiang Liu
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm in which the server periodically aggregates local model parameters from clients without assembling their private data. Constrained communication and personalization requirements pose severe challenges to FL. Federated distillation (FD) is proposed to simultaneously address the above two problems, which exchanges knowledge between the server and clients, supporting heterogeneous local models while significantly reducing communication overhead. However, most existing FD methods require a proxy dataset, which is often unavailable in reality. A few recent proxy-data-free FD approaches can eliminate the need for additional public data, but suffer from remarkable discrepancy among local knowledge due to client-side model heterogeneity, leading to ambiguous representation on the server and inevitable accuracy degradation. To tackle this issue, we propose a proxy-data-free FD algorithm based on distributed knowledge congruence (FedDKC). FedDKC leverages well-designed refinement strategies to narrow local knowledge differences into an acceptable upper bound, so as to mitigate the negative effects of knowledge incongruence. Specifically, from perspectives of peak probability and Shannon entropy of local knowledge, we design kernel-based knowledge refinement (KKR) and searching-based knowledge refinement (SKR) respectively, and theoretically guarantee that the refined-local knowledge can satisfy an approximately-similar distribution and be regarded as congruent. Extensive experiments conducted on three common datasets demonstrate that our proposed FedDKC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on various heterogeneous settings while evidently improving the convergence speed.
Composite Code Sparse Autoencoders for first stage retrieval
Authors: Carlos Lassance, Thibault Formal, Stephane Clinchant
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Information Retrieval, Quantization, Retrieval

We propose a Composite Code Sparse Autoencoder (CCSA) approach for Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search of document representations based on Siamese-BERT models. In Information Retrieval (IR), the ranking pipeline is generally decomposed in two stages: the first stage focus on retrieving a candidate set from the whole collection. The second stage re-ranks the candidate set by relying on more complex models. Recently, Siamese-BERT models have been used as first stage ranker to replace or complement the traditional bag-of-word models. However, indexing and searching a large document collection require efficient similarity search on dense vectors and this is why ANN techniques come into play. Since composite codes are naturally sparse, we first show how CCSA can learn efficient parallel inverted index thanks to an uniformity regularizer. Second, CCSA can be used as a binary quantization method and we propose to combine it with the recent graph based ANN techniques. Our experiments on MSMARCO dataset reveal that CCSA outperforms IVF with product quantization. Furthermore, CCSA binary quantization is beneficial for the index size, and memory usage for the graph-based HNSW method, while maintaining a good level of recall and MRR. Third, we compare with recent supervised quantization methods for image retrieval and find that CCSA is able to outperform them.
Rows from Many Sources: Enriching row completions from Wikidata with a pre-trained Language Model
Authors: Carina Negreanu, Alperen Karaoglu, Jack Williams, Shuang Chen, Daniel Fabian, Andrew Gordon, Chin-Yew Lin
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Row completion is the task of augmenting a given table of text and numbers with additional, relevant rows. The task divides into two steps: subject suggestion, the task of populating the main column; and gap filling, the task of populating the remaining columns. We present state-of-the-art results for subject suggestion and gap filling measured on a standard benchmark (WikiTables). Our idea is to solve this task by harmoniously combining knowledge base table interpretation and free text generation. We interpret the table using the knowledge base to suggest new rows and generate metadata like headers through property linking. To improve candidate diversity, we synthesize additional rows using free text generation via GPT-3, and crucially, we exploit the metadata we interpret to produce better prompts for text generation. Finally, we verify that the additional synthesized content can be linked to the knowledge base or a trusted web source such as Wikipedia.
Interpretability of Machine Learning Methods Applied to Neuroimaging
Authors: Elina Thibeau-Sutre, Sasha Collin, Ninon Burgos, Olivier Colliot
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Deep learning methods have become very popular for the processing of natural images, and were then successfully adapted to the neuroimaging field. As these methods are non-transparent, interpretability methods are needed to validate them and ensure their reliability. Indeed, it has been shown that deep learning models may obtain high performance even when using irrelevant features, by exploiting biases in the training set. Such undesirable situations can potentially be detected by using interpretability methods. Recently, many methods have been proposed to interpret neural networks. However, this domain is not mature yet. Machine learning users face two major issues when aiming to interpret their models: which method to choose, and how to assess its reliability? Here, we aim at providing answers to these questions by presenting the most common interpretability methods and metrics developed to assess their reliability, as well as their applications and benchmarks in the neuroimaging context. Note that this is not an exhaustive survey: we aimed to focus on the studies which we found to be the most representative and relevant.
EEG-ITNet: An Explainable Inception Temporal Convolutional Network for Motor Imagery Classification
Authors: Abbas Salami, Javier Andreu-Perez, Helge Gillmeister
Date: 2022-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Motor Imagery

In recent years, neural networks and especially deep architectures have received substantial attention for EEG signal analysis in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). In this ongoing research area, the end-to-end models are more favoured than traditional approaches requiring signal transformation pre-classification. They can eliminate the need for prior information from experts and the extraction of handcrafted features. However, although several deep learning algorithms have been already proposed in the literature, achieving high accuracies for classifying motor movements or mental tasks, they often face a lack of interpretability and therefore are not quite favoured by the neuroscience community. The reasons behind this issue can be the high number of parameters and the sensitivity of deep neural networks to capture tiny yet unrelated discriminative features. We propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture called EEG-ITNet and a more comprehensible method to visualise the network learned patterns. Using inception modules and causal convolutions with dilation, our model can extract rich spectral, spatial, and temporal information from multi-channel EEG signals with less complexity (in terms of the number of trainable parameters) than other existing end-to-end architectures, such as EEG-Inception and EEG-TCNet. By an exhaustive evaluation on dataset 2a from BCI competition IV and OpenBMI motor imagery dataset, EEG-ITNet shows up to 5.9\% improvement in the classification accuracy in different scenarios with statistical significance compared to its competitors. We also comprehensively explain and support the validity of network illustration from a neuroscientific perspective. We have also made our code open at https://github.com/AbbasSalami/EEG-ITNet