pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Pedestrian Safety in a High-Fidelity Simulation Environment Framework
Authors: Lin Ma, Longrui Chen, Yan Zhang, Mengdi Chu, Wenjie Jiang, Jiahao Shen, Chuxuan Li, Yifeng Shi, Nairui Luo, Jirui Yuan, Guyue Zhou, Jiangtao Gong
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Pedestrians' safety is a crucial factor in assessing autonomous driving scenarios. However, pedestrian safety evaluation is rarely considered by existing autonomous driving simulation platforms. This paper proposes a pedestrian safety evaluation method for autonomous driving, in which not only the collision events but also the conflict events together with the characteristics of pedestrians are fully considered. Moreover, to apply the pedestrian safety evaluation system, we construct a high-fidelity simulation framework embedded with pedestrian safety-critical characteristics. We demonstrate our simulation framework and pedestrian safety evaluation with a comparative experiment with two kinds of autonomous driving perception algorithms -- single-vehicle perception and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) cooperative perception. The results show that our framework can evaluate different autonomous driving algorithms with detailed and quantitative pedestrian safety indexes. To this end, the proposed simulation method and framework can be used to access different autonomous driving algorithms and evaluate pedestrians' safety performance in future autonomous driving simulations, which can inspire more pedestrian-friendly autonomous driving algorithms.
RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models
Authors: Luyu Gao, Zhuyun Dai, Panupong Pasupat, Anthony Chen, Arun Tejasvi Chaganty, Yicheng Fan, Vincent Y. Zhao, Ni Lao, Hongrae Lee, Da-Cheng Juan, Kelvin Guu
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Text Generation

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as few-shot learning, question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.
Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Authors: Xiaohui Song, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Songlin Hu
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition in Conversation, imbalanced classification

Capturing emotions within a conversation plays an essential role in modern dialogue systems. However, the weak correlation between emotions and semantics brings many challenges to emotion recognition in conversation (ERC). Even semantically similar utterances, the emotion may vary drastically depending on contexts or speakers. In this paper, we propose a Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning (SPCL) loss for the ERC task. Leveraging the Prototypical Network, the SPCL targets at solving the imbalanced classification problem through contrastive learning and does not require a large batch size. Meanwhile, we design a difficulty measure function based on the distance between classes and introduce curriculum learning to alleviate the impact of extreme samples. We achieve state-of-the-art results on three widely used benchmarks. Further, we conduct analytical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SPCL and curriculum learning strategy. We release the code at https://github.com/caskcsg/SPCL.
A Unified Positive-Unlabeled Learning Framework for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Different Levels of Labeling
Authors: Ye Wang, Xinxin Liu, Wenxin Hu, Tao Zhang
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Document-level Relation Extraction, Document-level RE with incomplete labeling, Relation Extraction

Document-level relation extraction (RE) aims to identify relations between entities across multiple sentences. Most previous methods focused on document-level RE under full supervision. However, in real-world scenario, it is expensive and difficult to completely label all relations in a document because the number of entity pairs in document-level RE grows quadratically with the number of entities. To solve the common incomplete labeling problem, we propose a unified positive-unlabeled learning framework - shift and squared ranking loss positive-unlabeled (SSR-PU) learning. We use positive-unlabeled (PU) learning on document-level RE for the first time. Considering that labeled data of a dataset may lead to prior shift of unlabeled data, we introduce a PU learning under prior shift of training data. Also, using none-class score as an adaptive threshold, we propose squared ranking loss and prove its Bayesian consistency with multi-label ranking metrics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves an improvement of about 14 F1 points relative to the previous baseline with incomplete labeling. In addition, it outperforms previous state-of-the-art results under both fully supervised and extremely unlabeled settings as well.
Teacher Forcing Recovers Reward Functions for Text Generation
Authors: Yongchang Hao, Yuxin Liu, Lili Mou
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Text Generation

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous reward functions are typically task-specific and sparse, restricting the use of RL. In our work, we propose a task-agnostic approach that derives a step-wise reward function directly from a model trained with teacher forcing. We additionally propose a simple modification to stabilize the RL training on non-parallel datasets with our induced reward function. Empirical results show that our method outperforms self-training and reward regression methods on several text generation tasks, confirming the effectiveness of our reward function.
A Generative User Simulator with GPT-based Architecture and Goal State Tracking for Reinforced Multi-Domain Dialog Systems
Authors: Hong Liu, Yucheng Cai, Zhijian Ou, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Building user simulators (USs) for reinforcement learning (RL) of task-oriented dialog systems (DSs) has gained more and more attention, which, however, still faces several fundamental challenges. First, it is unclear whether we can leverage pretrained language models to design, for example, GPT-2 based USs, to catch up and interact with the recently advanced GPT-2 based DSs. Second, an important ingredient in a US is that the user goal can be effectively incorporated and tracked; but how to flexibly integrate goal state tracking and develop an end-to-end trainable US for multi-domains has remained to be a challenge. In this work, we propose a generative user simulator (GUS) with GPT-2 based architecture and goal state tracking towards addressing the above two challenges. Extensive experiments are conducted on MultiWOZ2.1. Different DSs are trained via RL with GUS, the classic agenda-based user simulator (ABUS) and other ablation simulators respectively, and are compared for cross-model evaluation, corpus-based evaluation and human evaluation. The GUS achieves superior results in all three evaluation tasks.
GeoThermalCloud: Machine Learning for Geothermal Resource Exploration
Authors: Maruti K. Mudunuru, Velimir V. Vesselinov, Bulbul Ahmmed
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Exploration

This paper presents a novel ML-based methodology for geothermal exploration towards PFA applications. Our methodology is provided through our open-source ML framework, GeoThermalCloud \url{https://github.com/SmartTensors/GeoThermalCloud.jl}. The GeoThermalCloud uses a series of unsupervised, supervised, and physics-informed ML methods available in SmartTensors AI platform \url{https://github.com/SmartTensors}. Here, the presented analyses are performed using our unsupervised ML algorithm called NMF$k$, which is available in the SmartTensors AI platform. Our ML algorithm facilitates the discovery of new phenomena, hidden patterns, and mechanisms that helps us to make informed decisions. Moreover, the GeoThermalCloud enhances the collected PFA data and discovers signatures representative of geothermal resources. Through GeoThermalCloud, we could identify hidden patterns in the geothermal field data needed to discover blind systems efficiently. Crucial geothermal signatures often overlooked in traditional PFA are extracted using the GeoThermalCloud and analyzed by the subject matter experts to provide ML-enhanced PFA, which is informative for efficient exploration. We applied our ML methodology to various open-source geothermal datasets within the U.S. (some of these are collected by past PFA work). The results provide valuable insights into resource types within those regions. This ML-enhanced workflow makes the GeoThermalCloud attractive for the geothermal community to improve existing datasets and extract valuable information often unnoticed during geothermal exploration.
Decision-Making Among Bounded Rational Agents
Authors: Junhong Xu, Durgakant Pushp, Kai Yin, Lantao Liu
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Robot Navigation

When robots share the same workspace with other intelligent agents (e.g., other robots or humans), they must be able to reason about the behaviors of their neighboring agents while accomplishing the designated tasks. In practice, frequently, agents do not exhibit absolutely rational behavior due to their limited computational resources. Thus, predicting the optimal agent behaviors is undesirable (because it demands prohibitive computational resources) and undesirable (because the prediction may be wrong). Motivated by this observation, we remove the assumption of perfectly rational agents and propose incorporating the concept of bounded rationality from an information-theoretic view into the game-theoretic framework. This allows the robots to reason other agents' sub-optimal behaviors and act accordingly under their computational constraints. Specifically, bounded rationality directly models the agent's information processing ability, which is represented as the KL-divergence between nominal and optimized stochastic policies, and the solution to the bounded-optimal policy can be obtained by an efficient importance sampling approach. Using both simulated and real-world experiments in multi-robot navigation tasks, we demonstrate that the resulting framework allows the robots to reason about different levels of rational behaviors of other agents and compute a reasonable strategy under its computational constraint.
Towards More Efficient Shared Autonomous Mobility: A Learning-Based Fleet Repositioning Approach
Authors: Monika Filipovska, Michael Hyland, Haimanti Bala
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Demand Forecasting

Shared-use autonomous mobility services (SAMS) present new opportunities for improving accessible and demand-responsive mobility. A fundamental challenge that SAMS face is appropriate positioning of idle fleet vehicles to meet future demand - a problem that strongly impacts service quality and efficiency. This paper formulates SAMS fleet repositioning as a Markov Decision Process and presents a reinforcement learning-based repositioning (RLR) approach called integrated system-agent repositioning (ISR). The ISR learns a scalable fleet repositioning strategy in an integrated manner: learning to respond to evolving demand patterns without explicit demand forecasting and to cooperate with optimization-based passenger-to-vehicle assignment. Numerical experiments are conducted using New York City taxi data and an agent-based simulation tool. The ISR is compared to an alternative RLR approach named externally guided repositioning (EGR) and a benchmark joint optimization (JO) for passenger-to-vehicle assignment and repositioning. The results demonstrate the RLR approaches' substantial reductions in passenger wait times, over 50%, relative to the JO approach. The ISR's ability to bypass demand forecasting is also demonstrated as it maintains comparable performance to EGR in terms of average metrics. The results also demonstrate the model's transferability to evolving conditions, including unseen demand patterns, extended operational periods, and changes in the assignment strategy.
Evaluation of the Synthetic Electronic Health Records
Authors: Emily Muller, Xu Zheng, Jer Hayes
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Ended Question Answering, Synthetic Data Evaluation

Generative models have been found effective for data synthesis due to their ability to capture complex underlying data distributions. The quality of generated data from these models is commonly evaluated by visual inspection for image datasets or downstream analytical tasks for tabular datasets. These evaluation methods neither measure the implicit data distribution nor consider the data privacy issues, and it remains an open question of how to compare and rank different generative models. Medical data can be sensitive, so it is of great importance to draw privacy concerns of patients while maintaining the data utility of the synthetic dataset. Beyond the utility evaluation, this work outlines two metrics called Similarity and Uniqueness for sample-wise assessment of synthetic datasets. We demonstrate the proposed notions with several state-of-the-art generative models to synthesise Cystic Fibrosis (CF) patients' electronic health records (EHRs), observing that the proposed metrics are suitable for synthetic data evaluation and generative model comparison.
Learning to Sample and Aggregate: Few-shot Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Ruijie Wang, Zheng Li, Dachun Sun, Shengzhong Liu, Jinning Li, Bing Yin, Tarek Abdelzaher
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Meta-Learning

In this paper, we investigate a realistic but underexplored problem, called few-shot temporal knowledge graph reasoning, that aims to predict future facts for newly emerging entities based on extremely limited observations in evolving graphs. It offers practical value in applications that need to derive instant new knowledge about new entities in temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) with minimal supervision. The challenges mainly come from the few-shot and time shift properties of new entities. First, the limited observations associated with them are insufficient for training a model from scratch. Second, the potentially dynamic distributions from the initially observable facts to the future facts ask for explicitly modeling the evolving characteristics of new entities. We correspondingly propose a novel Meta Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (MetaTKGR) framework. Unlike prior work that relies on rigid neighborhood aggregation schemes to enhance low-data entity representation, MetaTKGR dynamically adjusts the strategies of sampling and aggregating neighbors from recent facts for new entities, through temporally supervised signals on future facts as instant feedback. Besides, such a meta temporal reasoning procedure goes beyond existing meta-learning paradigms on static knowledge graphs that fail to handle temporal adaptation with large entity variance. We further provide a theoretical analysis and propose a temporal adaptation regularizer to stabilize the meta temporal reasoning over time. Empirically, extensive experiments on three real-world TKGs demonstrate the superiority of MetaTKGR over state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin.
Data-Efficient Pipeline for Offline Reinforcement Learning with Limited Data
Authors: Allen Nie, Yannis Flet-Berliac, Deon R. Jordan, William Steenbergen, Emma Brunskill
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to improve future performance by leveraging historical data. There exist many different algorithms for offline RL, and it is well recognized that these algorithms, and their hyperparameter settings, can lead to decision policies with substantially differing performance. This prompts the need for pipelines that allow practitioners to systematically perform algorithm-hyperparameter selection for their setting. Critically, in most real-world settings, this pipeline must only involve the use of historical data. Inspired by statistical model selection methods for supervised learning, we introduce a task- and method-agnostic pipeline for automatically training, comparing, selecting, and deploying the best policy when the provided dataset is limited in size. In particular, our work highlights the importance of performing multiple data splits to produce more reliable algorithm-hyperparameter selection. While this is a common approach in supervised learning, to our knowledge, this has not been discussed in detail in the offline RL setting. We show it can have substantial impacts when the dataset is small. Compared to alternate approaches, our proposed pipeline outputs higher-performing deployed policies from a broad range of offline policy learning algorithms and across various simulation domains in healthcare, education, and robotics. This work contributes toward the development of a general-purpose meta-algorithm for automatic algorithm-hyperparameter selection for offline RL.
Evaluating Guiding Spaces for Motion Planning
Authors: Amnon Attali, Stav Ashur, Isaac Burton Love, Courtney McBeth, James Motes, Diane Uwacu, Marco Morales, Nancy M. Amato
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants do not sample uniformly at random, and instead bias their sampling using various heuristics for determining which samples will provide more information, or are more likely to participate in the final solution. In this work, we define the \emph{motion planning guiding space}, which encapsulates many seemingly distinct prior works under the same framework. In addition, we suggest an information theoretic method to evaluate guided planning which places the focus on the quality of the resulting biased sampling. Finally, we analyze several motion planning algorithms in order to demonstrate the applicability of our definition and its evaluation.
Tracing Semantic Variation in Slang
Authors: Zhewei Sun, Yang Xu
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation is driven by culture-dependent communicative needs. An alternative view focuses on slang's social functions suggesting that the desire to foster semantic distinction may have led to the historical emergence of community-specific slang senses. We explore these theories using computational models and test them against historical slang dictionary entries, with a focus on characterizing regularity in the geographical variation of slang usages attested in the US and the UK over the past two centuries. We show that our models are able to predict the regional identity of emerging slang word meanings from historical slang records. We offer empirical evidence that both communicative need and semantic distinction play a role in the variation of slang meaning yet their relative importance fluctuates over the course of history. Our work offers an opportunity for incorporating historical cultural elements into the natural language processing of slang.
Robust, General, and Low Complexity Acoustic Scene Classification Systems and An Effective Visualization for Presenting a Sound Scene Context
Authors: Lam Pham, Dusan Salovic, Anahid Jalali, Alexander Schindler, Khoa Tran, Canh Vu, Phu X. Nguyen
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Scene Classification, Scene Classification

In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC), the task of identifying the scene of an audio recording from its acoustic signature. In particular, we firstly propose an inception-based and low footprint ASC model, referred to as the ASC baseline. The proposed ASC baseline is then compared with benchmark and high-complexity network architectures of MobileNetV1, MobileNetV2, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50V2, ResNet152V2, DenseNet121, DenseNet201, and Xception. Next, we improve the ASC baseline by proposing a novel deep neural network architecture which leverages residual-inception architectures and multiple kernels. Given the novel residual-inception (NRI) model, we further evaluate the trade off between the model complexity and the model accuracy performance. Finally, we evaluate whether sound events occurring in a sound scene recording can help to improve ASC accuracy, then indicate how a sound scene context is well presented by combining both sound scene and sound event information. We conduct extensive experiments on various ASC datasets, including Crowded Scenes, IEEE AASP Challenge on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2018 Task 1A and 1B, 2019 Task 1A and 1B, 2020 Task 1A, 2021 Task 1A, 2022 Task 1. The experimental results on several different ASC challenges highlight two main achievements; the first is to propose robust, general, and low complexity ASC systems which are suitable for real-life applications on a wide range of edge devices and mobiles; the second is to propose an effective visualization method for comprehensively presenting a sound scene context.
Posterior Regularized Bayesian Neural Network Incorporating Soft and Hard Knowledge Constraints
Authors: Jiayu Huang, Yutian Pang, Yongming Liu, Hao Yan
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

Neural Networks (NNs) have been widely {used in supervised learning} due to their ability to model complex nonlinear patterns, often presented in high-dimensional data such as images and text. However, traditional NNs often lack the ability for uncertainty quantification. Bayesian NNs (BNNS) could help measure the uncertainty by considering the distributions of the NN model parameters. Besides, domain knowledge is commonly available and could improve the performance of BNNs if it can be appropriately incorporated. In this work, we propose a novel Posterior-Regularized Bayesian Neural Network (PR-BNN) model by incorporating different types of knowledge constraints, such as the soft and hard constraints, as a posterior regularization term. Furthermore, we propose to combine the augmented Lagrangian method and the existing BNN solvers for efficient inference. The experiments in simulation and two case studies about aviation landing prediction and solar energy output prediction have shown the knowledge constraints and the performance improvement of the proposed model over traditional BNNs without the constraints.