pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Transformer-based conditional generative adversarial network for multivariate time series generation
Authors: Abdellah Madane, Mohamed-djallel Dilmi, Florent Forest, Hanane Azzag, Mustapha Lebbah, Jerome Lacaille
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Generation

Conditional generation of time-dependent data is a task that has much interest, whether for data augmentation, scenario simulation, completing missing data, or other purposes. Recent works proposed a Transformer-based Time series generative adversarial network (TTS-GAN) to address the limitations of recurrent neural networks. However, this model assumes a unimodal distribution and tries to generate samples around the expectation of the real data distribution. One of its limitations is that it may generate a random multivariate time series; it may fail to generate samples in the presence of multiple sub-components within an overall distribution. One could train models to fit each sub-component separately to overcome this limitation. Our work extends the TTS-GAN by conditioning its generated output on a particular encoded context allowing the use of one model to fit a mixture distribution with multiple sub-components. Technically, it is a conditional generative adversarial network that models realistic multivariate time series under different types of conditions, such as categorical variables or multivariate time series. We evaluate our model on UniMiB Dataset, which contains acceleration data following the XYZ axes of human activities collected using Smartphones. We use qualitative evaluations and quantitative metrics such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and we introduce a modified version of the Frechet inception distance (FID) to measure the performance of our model and the statistical similarities between the generated and the real data distributions. We show that this transformer-based CGAN can generate realistic high-dimensional and long data sequences under different kinds of conditions.
On the Learning Mechanisms in Physical Reasoning
Authors: Shiqian Li, Kewen Wu, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Is dynamics prediction indispensable for physical reasoning? If so, what kind of roles do the dynamics prediction modules play during the physical reasoning process? Most studies focus on designing dynamics prediction networks and treating physical reasoning as a downstream task without investigating the questions above, taking for granted that the designed dynamics prediction would undoubtedly help the reasoning process. In this work, we take a closer look at this assumption, exploring this fundamental hypothesis by comparing two learning mechanisms: Learning from Dynamics (LfD) and Learning from Intuition (LfI). In the first experiment, we directly examine and compare these two mechanisms. Results show a surprising finding: Simple LfI is better than or on par with state-of-the-art LfD. This observation leads to the second experiment with Ground-truth Dynamics, the ideal case of LfD wherein dynamics are obtained directly from a simulator. Results show that dynamics, if directly given instead of approximated, would achieve much higher performance than LfI alone on physical reasoning; this essentially serves as the performance upper bound. Yet practically, LfD mechanism can only predict Approximate Dynamics using dynamics learning modules that mimic the physical laws, making the following downstream physical reasoning modules degenerate into the LfI paradigm; see the third experiment. We note that this issue is hard to mitigate, as dynamics prediction errors inevitably accumulate in the long horizon. Finally, in the fourth experiment, we note that LfI, the extremely simpler strategy when done right, is more effective in learning to solve physical reasoning problems. Taken together, the results on the challenging benchmark of PHYRE show that LfI is, if not better, as good as LfD for dynamics prediction. However, the potential improvement from LfD, though challenging, remains lucrative.
Nonparametric Decoding for Generative Retrieval
Authors: Hyunji Lee, Jaeyoung Kim, Hoyeon Chang, Hanseok Oh, Sohee Yang, Vlad Karpukhin, Yi Lu, Minjoon Seo
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modelling, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

The generative retrieval model depends solely on the information encoded in its model parameters without external memory, its information capacity is limited and fixed. To overcome the limitation, we propose Nonparametric Decoding (Np Decoding) which can be applied to existing generative retrieval models. Np Decoding uses nonparametric contextualized vocab embeddings (external memory) rather than vanilla vocab embeddings as decoder vocab embeddings. By leveraging the contextualized vocab embeddings, the generative retrieval model is able to utilize both the parametric and nonparametric space. Evaluation over 9 datasets (8 single-hop and 1 multi-hop) in the document retrieval task shows that applying Np Decoding to generative retrieval models significantly improves the performance. We also show that Np Decoding is data- and parameter-efficient, and shows high performance in the zero-shot setting.
FedMT: Federated Learning with Mixed-type Labels
Authors: Qiong Zhang, Jing Peng, Xin Zhang, Aline Talhouk, Gang Niu, Xiaoxiao Li
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

In federated learning (FL), classifiers (e.g., deep networks) are trained on datasets from multiple data centers without exchanging data across them, which improves the sample efficiency. However, the conventional FL setting assumes the same labeling criterion in all data centers involved, thus limiting its practical utility. This limitation becomes particularly notable in domains like disease diagnosis, where different clinical centers may adhere to different standards, making traditional FL methods unsuitable. This paper addresses this important yet under-explored setting of FL, namely FL with mixed-type labels, where the allowance of different labeling criteria introduces inter-center label space differences. To address this challenge effectively and efficiently, we introduce a model-agnostic approach called FedMT, which estimates label space correspondences and projects classification scores to construct loss functions. The proposed FedMT is versatile and integrates seamlessly with various FL methods, such as FedAvg. Experimental results on benchmark and medical datasets highlight the substantial improvement in classification accuracy achieved by FedMT in the presence of mixed-type labels.
Natural Color Fool: Towards Boosting Black-box Unrestricted Attacks
Authors: Shengming Yuan, Qilong Zhang, Lianli Gao, Yaya Cheng, Jingkuan Song
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Unrestricted color attacks, which manipulate semantically meaningful color of an image, have shown their stealthiness and success in fooling both human eyes and deep neural networks. However, current works usually sacrifice the flexibility of the uncontrolled setting to ensure the naturalness of adversarial examples. As a result, the black-box attack performance of these methods is limited. To boost transferability of adversarial examples without damaging image quality, we propose a novel Natural Color Fool (NCF) which is guided by realistic color distributions sampled from a publicly available dataset and optimized by our neighborhood search and initialization reset. By conducting extensive experiments and visualizations, we convincingly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Notably, on average, results show that our NCF can outperform state-of-the-art approaches by 15.0%$\sim$32.9% for fooling normally trained models and 10.0%$\sim$25.3% for evading defense methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ylhz/Natural-Color-Fool.
GT-GAN: General Purpose Time Series Synthesis with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Jinsung Jeon, Jeonghak Kim, Haryong Song, Seunghyeon Cho, Noseong Park
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Irregular Time Series, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Time series synthesis is an important research topic in the field of deep learning, which can be used for data augmentation. Time series data types can be broadly classified into regular or irregular. However, there are no existing generative models that show good performance for both types without any model changes. Therefore, we present a general purpose model capable of synthesizing regular and irregular time series data. To our knowledge, we are the first designing a general purpose time series synthesis model, which is one of the most challenging settings for time series synthesis. To this end, we design a generative adversarial network-based method, where many related techniques are carefully integrated into a single framework, ranging from neural ordinary/controlled differential equations to continuous time-flow processes. Our method outperforms all existing methods.
Clustering Semantic Predicates in the Open Research Knowledge Graph
Authors: Omar Arab Oghli, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, graph construction, Knowledge Graphs

When semantically describing knowledge graphs (KGs), users have to make a critical choice of a vocabulary (i.e. predicates and resources). The success of KG building is determined by the convergence of shared vocabularies so that meaning can be established. The typical lifecycle for a new KG construction can be defined as follows: nascent phases of graph construction experience terminology divergence, while later phases of graph construction experience terminology convergence and reuse. In this paper, we describe our approach tailoring two AI-based clustering algorithms for recommending predicates (in RDF statements) about resources in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) https://orkg.org/. Such a service to recommend existing predicates to semantify new incoming data of scholarly publications is of paramount importance for fostering terminology convergence in the ORKG. Our experiments show very promising results: a high precision with relatively high recall in linear runtime performance. Furthermore, this work offers novel insights into the predicate groups that automatically accrue loosely as generic semantification patterns for semantification of scholarly knowledge spanning 44 research fields.
Atari-5: Distilling the Arcade Learning Environment down to Five Games
Authors: Matthew Aitchison, Penny Sweetser, Marcus Hutter
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games

The Arcade Learning Environment (ALE) has become an essential benchmark for assessing the performance of reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the computational cost of generating results on the entire 57-game dataset limits ALE's use and makes the reproducibility of many results infeasible. We propose a novel solution to this problem in the form of a principled methodology for selecting small but representative subsets of environments within a benchmark suite. We applied our method to identify a subset of five ALE games, called Atari-5, which produces 57-game median score estimates within 10% of their true values. Extending the subset to 10-games recovers 80% of the variance for log-scores for all games within the 57-game set. We show this level of compression is possible due to a high degree of correlation between many of the games in ALE.
Manipulation and Peer Mechanisms: A Survey
Authors: Matthew Olckers, Toby Walsh
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

In peer mechanisms, the competitors for a prize also determine who wins. Each competitor may be asked to rank, grade, or nominate peers for the prize. Since the prize can be valuable, such as financial aid, course grades, or an award at a conference, competitors may be tempted to manipulate the mechanism. We survey approaches to prevent or discourage the manipulation of peer mechanisms. We conclude our survey by identifying several important research challenges.
GAPX: Generalized Autoregressive Paraphrase-Identification X
Authors: Yifei Zhou, Renyu Li, Hayden Housen, Ser-Nam Lim
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Paraphrase Identification

Paraphrase Identification is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing. While much progress has been made in the field, the performance of many state-of-the-art models often suffer from distribution shift during inference time. We verify that a major source of this performance drop comes from biases introduced by negative examples. To overcome these biases, we propose in this paper to train two separate models, one that only utilizes the positive pairs and the other the negative pairs. This enables us the option of deciding how much to utilize the negative model, for which we introduce a perplexity based out-of-distribution metric that we show can effectively and automatically determine how much weight it should be given during inference. We support our findings with strong empirical results.
Towards Prototype-Based Self-Explainable Graph Neural Network
Authors: Enyan Dai, Suhang Wang
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great ability in modeling graph-structured data for various domains. However, GNNs are known as black-box models that lack interpretability. Without understanding their inner working, we cannot fully trust them, which largely limits their adoption in high-stake scenarios. Though some initial efforts have been taken to interpret the predictions of GNNs, they mainly focus on providing post-hoc explanations using an additional explainer, which could misrepresent the true inner working mechanism of the target GNN. The works on self-explainable GNNs are rather limited. Therefore, we study a novel problem of learning prototype-based self-explainable GNNs that can simultaneously give accurate predictions and prototype-based explanations on predictions. We design a framework which can learn prototype graphs that capture representative patterns of each class as class-level explanations. The learned prototypes are also used to simultaneously make prediction for for a test instance and provide instance-level explanation. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed framework for both prediction accuracy and explanation quality.
Option-Aware Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Control
Authors: Jiayu Chen, Tian Lan, Vaneet Aggarwal
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Multi-Task Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Hierarchical Imitation Learning (HIL) has been proposed to recover highly-complex behaviors in long-horizon tasks from expert demonstrations by modeling the task hierarchy with the option framework. Existing methods either overlook the causal relationship between the subtask and its corresponding policy or cannot learn the policy in an end-to-end fashion, which leads to suboptimality. In this work, we develop a novel HIL algorithm based on Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning and adapt it with the Expectation-Maximization algorithm in order to directly recover a hierarchical policy from the unannotated demonstrations. Further, we introduce a directed information term to the objective function to enhance the causality and propose a Variational Autoencoder framework for learning with our objectives in an end-to-end fashion. Theoretical justifications and evaluations on challenging robotic control tasks are provided to show the superiority of our algorithm. The codes are available at https://github.com/LucasCJYSDL/HierAIRL.
The Calibration Generalization Gap
Authors: A. Michael Carrell, Neil Mallinar, James Lucas, Preetum Nakkiran
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Calibration is a fundamental property of a good predictive model: it requires that the model predicts correctly in proportion to its confidence. Modern neural networks, however, provide no strong guarantees on their calibration -- and can be either poorly calibrated or well-calibrated depending on the setting. It is currently unclear which factors contribute to good calibration (architecture, data augmentation, overparameterization, etc), though various claims exist in the literature. We propose a systematic way to study the calibration error: by decomposing it into (1) calibration error on the train set, and (2) the calibration generalization gap. This mirrors the fundamental decomposition of generalization. We then investigate each of these terms, and give empirical evidence that (1) DNNs are typically always calibrated on their train set, and (2) the calibration generalization gap is upper-bounded by the standard generalization gap. Taken together, this implies that models with small generalization gap (|Test Error - Train Error|) are well-calibrated. This perspective unifies many results in the literature, and suggests that interventions which reduce the generalization gap (such as adding data, using heavy augmentation, or smaller model size) also improve calibration. We thus hope our initial study lays the groundwork for a more systematic and comprehensive understanding of the relation between calibration, generalization, and optimization.
COMPS: Conceptual Minimal Pair Sentences for testing Robust Property Knowledge and its Inheritance in Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Kanishka Misra, Julia Taylor Rayz, Allyson Ettinger
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

A characteristic feature of human semantic cognition is its ability to not only store and retrieve the properties of concepts observed through experience, but to also facilitate the inheritance of properties (can breathe) from superordinate concepts (animal) to their subordinates (dog) -- i.e. demonstrate property inheritance. In this paper, we present COMPS, a collection of minimal pair sentences that jointly tests pre-trained language models (PLMs) on their ability to attribute properties to concepts and their ability to demonstrate property inheritance behavior. Analyses of 22 different PLMs on COMPS reveal that they can easily distinguish between concepts on the basis of a property when they are trivially different, but find it relatively difficult when concepts are related on the basis of nuanced knowledge representations. Furthermore, we find that PLMs can demonstrate behavior consistent with property inheritance to a great extent, but fail in the presence of distracting information, which decreases the performance of many models, sometimes even below chance. This lack of robustness in demonstrating simple reasoning raises important questions about PLMs' capacity to make correct inferences even when they appear to possess the prerequisite knowledge.
Detect, Retrieve, Comprehend: A Flexible Framework for Zero-Shot Document-Level Question Answering
Authors: Tavish McDonald, Brian Tsan, Amar Saini, Juanita Ordonez, Luis Gutierrez, Phan Nguyen, Blake Mason, Brenda Ng
Date: 2022-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval

Researchers produce thousands of scholarly documents containing valuable technical knowledge. The community faces the laborious task of reading these documents to identify, extract, and synthesize information. To automate information gathering, document-level question answering (QA) offers a flexible framework where human-posed questions can be adapted to extract diverse knowledge. Finetuning QA systems requires access to labeled data (tuples of context, question and answer). However, data curation for document QA is uniquely challenging because the context (i.e. answer evidence passage) needs to be retrieved from potentially long, ill-formatted documents. Existing QA datasets sidestep this challenge by providing short, well-defined contexts that are unrealistic in real-world applications. We present a three-stage document QA approach: (1) text extraction from PDF; (2) evidence retrieval from extracted texts to form well-posed contexts; (3) QA to extract knowledge from contexts to return high-quality answers -- extractive, abstractive, or Boolean. Using QASPER for evaluation, our detect-retrieve-comprehend (DRC) system achieves a +7.19 improvement in Answer-F1 over existing baselines while delivering superior context selection. Our results demonstrate that DRC holds tremendous promise as a flexible framework for practical scientific document QA.
Learning Dynamic Abstract Representations for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mehdi Dadvar, Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar, Siddharth Srivastava
Date: 2022-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In many real-world problems, the learning agent needs to learn a problem's abstractions and solution simultaneously. However, most such abstractions need to be designed and refined by hand for different problems and domains of application. This paper presents a novel top-down approach for constructing state abstractions while carrying out reinforcement learning. Starting with state variables and a simulator, it presents a novel domain-independent approach for dynamically computing an abstraction based on the dispersion of Q-values in abstract states as the agent continues acting and learning. Extensive empirical evaluation on multiple domains and problems shows that this approach automatically learns abstractions that are finely-tuned to the problem, yield powerful sample efficiency, and result in the RL agent significantly outperforming existing approaches.
IGNiteR: News Recommendation in Microblogging Applications (Extended Version)
Authors: Yuting Feng, Bogdan Cautis
Date: 2022-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: News Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

News recommendation is one of the most challenging tasks in recommender systems, mainly due to the ephemeral relevance of news to users. As social media, and particularly microblogging applications like Twitter or Weibo, gains popularity as platforms for news dissemination, personalized news recommendation in this context becomes a significant challenge. We revisit news recommendation in the microblogging scenario, by taking into consideration social interactions and observations tracing how the information that is up for recommendation spreads in an underlying network. We propose a deep-learning based approach that is diffusion and influence-aware, called Influence-Graph News Recommender (IGNiteR). It is a content-based deep recommendation model that jointly exploits all the data facets that may impact adoption decisions, namely semantics, diffusion-related features pertaining to local and global influence among users, temporal attractiveness, and timeliness, as well as dynamic user preferences. To represent the news, a multi-level attention-based encoder is used to reveal the different interests of users. This news encoder relies on a CNN for the news content and on an attentive LSTM for the diffusion traces. For the latter, by exploiting previously observed news diffusions (cascades) in the microblogging medium, users are mapped to a latent space that captures potential influence on others or susceptibility of being influenced for news adoptions. Similarly, a time-sensitive user encoder enables us to capture the dynamic preferences of users with an attention-based bidirectional LSTM. We perform extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, showing that IGNiteR outperforms the state-of-the-art deep-learning based news recommendation methods.