pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A modular software framework for the design and implementation of ptychography algorithms
Authors: Francesco Guzzi, George Kourousias, Fulvio Billè, Roberto Pugliese, Alessandra Gianoncelli, Sergio Carrato
Date: 2022-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Position

Computational methods are driving high impact microscopy techniques such as ptychography. However, the design and implementation of new algorithms is often a laborious process, as many parts of the code are written in close-to-the-hardware programming constructs to speed up the reconstruction. In this paper, we present SciComPty, a new ptychography software framework aiming at simulating ptychography datasets and testing state-of-the-art and new reconstruction algorithms. Despite its simplicity, the software leverages GPU accelerated processing through the PyTorch CUDA interface. This is essential to design new methods that can readily be employed. As an example, we present an improved position refinement method based on Adam and a new version of the rPIE algorithm, adapted for partial coherence setups. Results are shown on both synthetic and real datasets. The software is released as open-source.
HRCTCov19 -- A High-Resolution Chest CT Scan Image Dataset for COVID-19 Diagnosis and Differentiation
Authors: Iraj Abedi, Mahsa Vali, Bentolhoda Otroshi, Maryam Zamanian, Hamidreza Bolhasani
Date: 2022-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), COVID-19 Diagnosis, Diagnostic

Introduction: During the COVID-19 pandemic, computed tomography (CT) was a popular method for diagnosing COVID-19 patients. HRCT (High-Resolution Computed Tomography) is a form of computed tomography that uses advanced methods to improve image resolution. Publicly accessible COVID-19 CT image datasets are very difficult to come by due to privacy concerns, which impedes the study and development of AI-powered COVID-19 diagnostic algorithms based on CT images. Data description: To address this problem, we have introduced HRCTCov19, a new COVID-19 high-resolution chest CT scan image dataset that includes not only COVID-19 cases of Ground Glass Opacity (GGO), Crazy Paving, and Air Space Consolidation but also CT images of cases with negative COVID-19. The HRCTCov19 dataset, which includes slice-level, and patient-level labels, has the potential to aid COVID-19 research, especially for diagnosis and differentiation using artificial intelligence algorithms, machine learning, and deep learning methods. This dataset is accessible through the web at: http://databiox.com and includes 181,106 chest HRCT images from 395 patients with four labels: GGO, Crazy Paving, Air Space Consolidation, and Negative. Keywords: COVID-19, CT scan, Computed Tomography, Chest Image, Dataset, Medical Imaging
Mixed-UNet: Refined Class Activation Mapping for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Multi-scale Inference
Authors: Yang Liu, Ersi Zhang, Lulu Xu, Chufan Xiao, Xiaoyun Zhong, Lijin Lian, Fang Li, Bin Jiang, Yuhan Dong, Lan Ma, Qiming Huang, Ming Xu, Yongbing Zhang, Dongmei Yu, Chenggang Yan, Peiwu Qin
Date: 2022-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning techniques have shown great potential in medical image processing, particularly through accurate and reliable image segmentation on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans or computed tomography (CT) scans, which allow the localization and diagnosis of lesions. However, training these segmentation models requires a large number of manually annotated pixel-level labels, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive, in contrast to image-level labels that are easier to obtain. It is imperative to resolve this problem through weakly-supervised semantic segmentation models using image-level labels as supervision since it can significantly reduce human annotation efforts. Most of the advanced solutions exploit class activation mapping (CAM). However, the original CAMs rarely capture the precise boundaries of lesions. In this study, we propose the strategy of multi-scale inference to refine CAMs by reducing the detail loss in single-scale reasoning. For segmentation, we develop a novel model named Mixed-UNet, which has two parallel branches in the decoding phase. The results can be obtained after fusing the extracted features from two branches. We evaluate the designed Mixed-UNet against several prevalent deep learning-based segmentation approaches on our dataset collected from the local hospital and public datasets. The validation results demonstrate that our model surpasses available methods under the same supervision level in the segmentation of various lesions from brain imaging.
RCMNet: A deep learning model assists CAR-T therapy for leukemia
Authors: Ruitao Zhang, Xueying Han, Ijaz Gul, Shiyao Zhai, Ying Liu, Yongbing Zhang, Yuhan Dong, Lan Ma, Dongmei Yu, Jin Zhou, Peiwu Qin
Date: 2022-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, image-classification, Image Classification, Transfer Learning

Acute leukemia is a type of blood cancer with a high mortality rate. Current therapeutic methods include bone marrow transplantation, supportive therapy, and chemotherapy. Although a satisfactory remission of the disease can be achieved, the risk of recurrence is still high. Therefore, novel treatments are demanding. Chimeric antigen receptor-T (CAR-T) therapy has emerged as a promising approach to treat and cure acute leukemia. To harness the therapeutic potential of CAR-T cell therapy for blood diseases, reliable cell morphological identification is crucial. Nevertheless, the identification of CAR-T cells is a big challenge posed by their phenotypic similarity with other blood cells. To address this substantial clinical challenge, herein we first construct a CAR-T dataset with 500 original microscopy images after staining. Following that, we create a novel integrated model called RCMNet (ResNet18 with CBAM and MHSA) that combines the convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer. The model shows 99.63% top-1 accuracy on the public dataset. Compared with previous reports, our model obtains satisfactory results for image classification. Although testing on the CAR-T cells dataset, a decent performance is observed, which is attributed to the limited size of the dataset. Transfer learning is adapted for RCMNet and a maximum of 83.36% accuracy has been achieved, which is higher than other SOTA models. The study evaluates the effectiveness of RCMNet on a big public dataset and translates it to a clinical dataset for diagnostic applications.
BLINK with Elasticsearch for Efficient Entity Linking in Business Conversations
Authors: Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Cheng Chen, Aliaksandr Martsinovich, Jonathan Johnston, Xue-Yong Fu, Shashi Bhushan TN, Simon Corston-Oliver
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (ACL) 2022 7
Tasks: Entity Linking

An Entity Linking system aligns the textual mentions of entities in a text to their corresponding entries in a knowledge base. However, deploying a neural entity linking system for efficient real-time inference in production environments is a challenging task. In this work, we present a neural entity linking system that connects the product and organization type entities in business conversations to their corresponding Wikipedia and Wikidata entries. The proposed system leverages Elasticsearch to ensure inference efficiency when deployed in a resource limited cloud machine, and obtains significant improvements in terms of inference speed and memory consumption while retaining high accuracy.
Accelerated Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Logic Control Objectives
Authors: Yiannis Kantaros
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper addresses the problem of learning control policies for mobile robots, modeled as unknown Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), that are tasked with temporal logic missions, such as sequencing, coverage, or surveillance. The MDP captures uncertainty in the workspace structure and the outcomes of control decisions. The control objective is to synthesize a control policy that maximizes the probability of accomplishing a high-level task, specified as a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formula. To address this problem, we propose a novel accelerated model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for LTL control objectives that is capable of learning control policies significantly faster than related approaches. Its sample-efficiency relies on biasing exploration towards directions that may contribute to task satisfaction. This is accomplished by leveraging an automaton representation of the LTL task as well as a continuously learned MDP model. Finally, we provide comparative experiments that demonstrate the sample efficiency of the proposed method against recent RL methods for LTL objectives.
Model-Contrastive Learning for Backdoor Defense
Authors: Zhihao Yue, Jun Xia, Zhiwei Ling, Ming Hu, Ting Wang, Xian Wei, Mingsong Chen
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, backdoor defense, Contrastive Learning, model

Due to the popularity of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, we are witnessing an increasing number of backdoor injection attacks that are designed to maliciously threaten Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) causing misclassification. Although there exist various defense methods that can effectively erase backdoors from DNNs, they greatly suffer from both high Attack Success Rate (ASR) and a non-negligible loss in Benign Accuracy (BA). Inspired by the observation that a backdoored DNN tends to form a new cluster in its feature spaces for poisoned data, in this paper we propose a novel two-stage backdoor defense method, named MCLDef, based on Model-Contrastive Learning (MCL). In the first stage, our approach performs trigger inversion based on trigger synthesis, where the resultant trigger can be used to generate poisoned data. In the second stage, under the guidance of MCL and our defined positive and negative pairs, MCLDef can purify the backdoored model by pulling the feature representations of poisoned data towards those of their clean data counterparts. Due to the shrunken cluster of poisoned data, the backdoor formed by end-to-end supervised learning is eliminated. Comprehensive experimental results show that, with only 5% of clean data, MCLDef significantly outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods by up to 95.79% reduction in ASR, while in most cases the BA degradation can be controlled within less than 2%. Our code is available at https://github.com/WeCanShow/MCL.
EigenNoise: A Contrastive Prior to Warm-Start Representations
Authors: Hunter Scott Heidenreich, Jake Ryland Williams
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00

In this work, we present a naive initialization scheme for word vectors based on a dense, independent co-occurrence model and provide preliminary results that suggest it is competitive and warrants further investigation. Specifically, we demonstrate through information-theoretic minimum description length (MDL) probing that our model, EigenNoise, can approach the performance of empirically trained GloVe despite the lack of any pre-training data (in the case of EigenNoise). We present these preliminary results with interest to set the stage for further investigations into how this competitive initialization works without pre-training data, as well as to invite the exploration of more intelligent initialization schemes informed by the theory of harmonic linguistic structure. Our application of this theory likewise contributes a novel (and effective) interpretation of recent discoveries which have elucidated the underlying distributional information that linguistic representations capture from data and contrast distributions.
Towards Feature Selection for Ranking and Classification Exploiting Quantum Annealers
Authors: Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Fabio Moroni, Riccardo Nembrini, Nicola Ferro, Guglielmo Faggioli, Paolo Cremonesi
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, General Classification

Feature selection is a common step in many ranking, classification, or prediction tasks and serves many purposes. By removing redundant or noisy features, the accuracy of ranking or classification can be improved and the computational cost of the subsequent learning steps can be reduced. However, feature selection can be itself a computationally expensive process. While for decades confined to theoretical algorithmic papers, quantum computing is now becoming a viable tool to tackle realistic problems, in particular special-purpose solvers based on the Quantum Annealing paradigm. This paper aims to explore the feasibility of using currently available quantum computing architectures to solve some quadratic feature selection algorithms for both ranking and classification. The experimental analysis includes 15 state-of-the-art datasets. The effectiveness obtained with quantum computing hardware is comparable to that of classical solvers, indicating that quantum computers are now reliable enough to tackle interesting problems. In terms of scalability, current generation quantum computers are able to provide a limited speedup over certain classical algorithms and hybrid quantum-classical strategies show lower computational cost for problems of more than a thousand features.
Transfer Learning Based Efficient Traffic Prediction with Limited Training Data
Authors: Sajal Saha, Anwar Haque, Greg Sidebottom
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Management, Prediction, Traffic Prediction, Transfer Learning

Efficient prediction of internet traffic is an essential part of Self Organizing Network (SON) for ensuring proactive management. There are many existing solutions for internet traffic prediction with higher accuracy using deep learning. But designing individual predictive models for each service provider in the network is challenging due to data heterogeneity, scarcity, and abnormality. Moreover, the performance of the deep sequence model in network traffic prediction with limited training data has not been studied extensively in the current works. In this paper, we investigated and evaluated the performance of the deep transfer learning technique in traffic prediction with inadequate historical data leveraging the knowledge of our pre-trained model. First, we used a comparatively larger real-world traffic dataset for source domain prediction based on five different deep sequence models: Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), LSTM Encoder-Decoder (LSTM_En_De), LSTM_En_De with Attention layer (LSTM_En_De_Atn), and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Then, two best-performing models, LSTM_En_De and LSTM_En_De_Atn, from the source domain with an accuracy of 96.06% and 96.05% are considered for the target domain prediction. Finally, four smaller traffic datasets collected for four particular sources and destination pairs are used in the target domain to compare the performance of the standard learning and transfer learning in terms of accuracy and execution time. According to our experimental result, transfer learning helps to reduce the execution time for most cases, while the model's accuracy is improved in transfer learning with a larger training session.
Fatigue Prediction in Outdoor Running Conditions using Audio Data
Authors: Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Sandra Ottl, Alexander Gebhard, Esther Rituerto-González, Mirko Jaumann, Steffen Hüttner, Valerie Dieter, Patrick Schneeweiß, Inga Krauß, Maurice Gerczuk, Shahin Amiriparian, Björn W. Schuller
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00

Although running is a common leisure activity and a core training regiment for several athletes, between $29\%$ and $79\%$ of runners sustain an overuse injury each year. These injuries are linked to excessive fatigue, which alters how someone runs. In this work, we explore the feasibility of modelling the Borg received perception of exertion (RPE) scale (range: $[6-20]$), a well-validated subjective measure of fatigue, using audio data captured in realistic outdoor environments via smartphones attached to the runners' arms. Using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on log-Mel spectrograms, we obtain a mean absolute error of $2.35$ in subject-dependent experiments, demonstrating that audio can be effectively used to model fatigue, while being more easily and non-invasively acquired than by signals from other sensors.
Wavelet-Based Hybrid Machine Learning Model for Out-of-distribution Internet Traffic Prediction
Authors: Sajal Saha, Anwar Haque, Greg Sidebottom
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Hybrid Machine Learning, Management, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Traffic Prediction

Efficient prediction of internet traffic is essential for ensuring proactive management of computer networks. Nowadays, machine learning approaches show promising performance in modeling real-world complex traffic. However, most existing works assumed that model training and evaluation data came from identical distribution. But in practice, there is a high probability that the model will deal with data from a slightly or entirely unknown distribution in the deployment phase. This paper investigated and evaluated machine learning performances using eXtreme Gradient Boosting, Light Gradient Boosting Machine, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Gradient Boosting Regressor, CatBoost Regressor, and their stacked ensemble model using data from both identical and out-of distribution. Also, we proposed a hybrid machine learning model integrating wavelet decomposition for improving out-of-distribution prediction as standalone models were unable to generalize very well. Our experimental results show the best performance of the standalone ensemble model with an accuracy of 96.4%, while the hybrid ensemble model improved it by 1% for in-distribution data. But its performance dropped significantly when tested with three different datasets having a distribution shift than the training set. However, our proposed hybrid model considerably reduces the performance gap between identical and out-of-distribution evaluation compared with the standalone model, indicating the decomposition technique's effectiveness in the case of out-of-distribution generalization.
Protecting Data from all Parties: Combining FHE and DP in Federated Learning
Authors: Arnaud Grivet Sébert, Renaud Sirdey, Oana Stan, Cédric Gouy-Pailler
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Federated Learning, Quantization

This paper tackles the problem of ensuring training data privacy in a federated learning context. Relying on Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Differential Privacy (DP), we propose a framework addressing threats on the privacy of the training data. Notably, the proposed framework ensures the privacy of the training data from all actors of the learning process, namely the data owners and the aggregating server. More precisely, while HE blinds a semi-honest server during the learning protocol, DP protects the data from semi-honest clients participating in the training process as well as end-users with black-box or white-box access to the trained model. In order to achieve this, we provide new theoretical and practical results to allow these techniques to be rigorously combined. In particular, by means of a novel stochastic quantisation operator, we prove DP guarantees in a context where the noise is quantised and bounded due to the use of HE. The paper is concluded by experiments which show the practicality of the entire framework in terms of both model quality (impacted by DP) and computational overhead (impacted by HE).
Insights on Modelling Physiological, Appraisal, and Affective Indicators of Stress using Audio Features
Authors: Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Sandra Zänkert, Alice Baird, Julian Konzok, Brigitte M. Kudielka, Björn W. Schuller
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00

Stress is a major threat to well-being that manifests in a variety of physiological and mental symptoms. Utilising speech samples collected while the subject is undergoing an induced stress episode has recently shown promising results for the automatic characterisation of individual stress responses. In this work, we introduce new findings that shed light onto whether speech signals are suited to model physiological biomarkers, as obtained via cortisol measurements, or self-assessed appraisal and affect measurements. Our results show that different indicators impact acoustic features in a diverse way, but that their complimentary information can nevertheless be effectively harnessed by a multi-tasking architecture to improve prediction performance for all of them.
Evaluating the Fairness Impact of Differentially Private Synthetic Data
Authors: Blake Bullwinkel, Kristen Grabarz, Lily Ke, Scarlett Gong, Chris Tanner, Joshua Allen
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Fairness

Differentially private (DP) synthetic data is a promising approach to maximizing the utility of data containing sensitive information. Due to the suppression of underrepresented classes that is often required to achieve privacy, however, it may be in conflict with fairness. We evaluate four DP synthesizers and present empirical results indicating that three of these models frequently degrade fairness outcomes on downstream binary classification tasks. We draw a connection between fairness and the proportion of minority groups present in the generated synthetic data, and find that training synthesizers on data that are pre-processed via a multi-label undersampling method can promote more fair outcomes without degrading accuracy.
Multi-segment preserving sampling for deep manifold sampler
Authors: Daniel Berenberg, Jae Hyeon Lee, Simon Kelow, Ji Won Park, Andrew Watkins, Vladimir Gligorijević, Richard Bonneau, Stephen Ra, Kyunghyun Cho
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Deep generative modeling for biological sequences presents a unique challenge in reconciling the bias-variance trade-off between explicit biological insight and model flexibility. The deep manifold sampler was recently proposed as a means to iteratively sample variable-length protein sequences by exploiting the gradients from a function predictor. We introduce an alternative approach to this guided sampling procedure, multi-segment preserving sampling, that enables the direct inclusion of domain-specific knowledge by designating preserved and non-preserved segments along the input sequence, thereby restricting variation to only select regions. We present its effectiveness in the context of antibody design by training two models: a deep manifold sampler and a GPT-2 language model on nearly six million heavy chain sequences annotated with the IGHV1-18 gene. During sampling, we restrict variation to only the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) of the input. We obtain log probability scores from a GPT-2 model for each sampled CDR3 and demonstrate that multi-segment preserving sampling generates reasonable designs while maintaining the desired, preserved regions.
A Dataset and BERT-based Models for Targeted Sentiment Analysis on Turkish Texts
Authors: M. Melih Mutlu, Arzucan Özgür
Date: 2022-05-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Targeted Sentiment Analysis aims to extract sentiment towards a particular target from a given text. It is a field that is attracting attention due to the increasing accessibility of the Internet, which leads people to generate an enormous amount of data. Sentiment analysis, which in general requires annotated data for training, is a well-researched area for widely studied languages such as English. For low-resource languages such as Turkish, there is a lack of such annotated data. We present an annotated Turkish dataset suitable for targeted sentiment analysis. We also propose BERT-based models with different architectures to accomplish the task of targeted sentiment analysis. The results demonstrate that the proposed models outperform the traditional sentiment analysis models for the targeted sentiment analysis task.