pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fast Global Registration
Authors: Qian-Yi Zhou, Jaesik Park, Vladlen Koltun
Date: 2016-10-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2016 10
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration

We present an algorithm for fast global registration of partially overlapping 3D surfaces. The algorithm operates on candidate matches that cover the
surfaces. A single objective is optimized to align the surfaces and disable false
matches. The objective is defined densely over the surfaces and the optimization achieves tight alignment with no initialization. No correspondence updates
or closest-point queries are performed in the inner loop. An extension of the algorithm can perform joint global registration of many partially overlapping surfaces. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the presented approach matches
or exceeds the accuracy of state-of-the-art global registration pipelines, while being at least an order of magnitude faster. Remarkably, the presented approach is
also faster than local refinement algorithms such as ICP. It provides the accuracy achieved by well-initialized local refinement algorithms, without requiring
an initialization and at lower computational cost.
HMM-based phoneme speech recognition system for the control and command of industrial robots
Authors: Adwait Naik
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Technical Transactions 2021 1
Tasks: Industrial Robots, Robust Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

In recent years, the integration of human-robot interaction with speech recognition has gained a lot of pace in the manufacturing industries. Conventional methods to control the robots include semi-autonomous, fully autonomous, and wired methods. Operating through a teaching pendant or a joystick is easy to implement but is not effective when the robot is deployed to perform complex repetitive tasks. Speech and touch are natural ways of communicating for humans and speech recognition, being the best option, is a heavily researched technology. In this study, we aim at developing a stable and robust speech recognition system to allow humans to communicate with machines (robotic arms) in a seamless manner. This paper investigates the potential of the linear predictive coding technique to develop a stable and robust HMM-based phoneme speech recognition system for applications in robotics. Our system is divided into three segments: a microphone array, a voice module, and a robotic arm with three degrees of freedom (DOF). To validate our approach, we performed experiments with simple and complex sentences for various robotic activities such as manipulating a cube and picking and placing tasks. Moreover, we also analyzed the test results to rectify problems including accuracy and recognition scores.
Predicting Financial Literacy via Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Hason Rudd, David;  Huo, Huan;  Xu, Guandong
Date: 2022-03-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2022 3
Tasks: regression

Financial literacy (FL) represents a person's ability to turn assets into income, and understanding digital currencies has been added to the modern definition. FL can be predicted by exploiting unlabelled recorded data in financial networks via semi-supervised learning (SSL). Measuring and predicting FL has not been widely studied, resulting in limited understanding of customer financial engagement consequences. Previous studies have shown that low FL increases the risk of social harm. Therefore, it is important to accurately estimate FL to allocate specific intervention programs to less financially literate groups. This will not only increase company profitability, but will also reduce government spending. Some studies considered predicting FL in classification tasks, whereas others developed FL definitions and impacts. The current paper investigated mechanisms to learn customer FL level from their financial data using sampling by synthetic minority over-sampling techniques for regression with Gaussian noise (SMOGN). We propose the SMOGN-COREG model for semi-supervised regression, applying SMOGN to deal with unbalanced datasets and a nonparametric multi-learner co-regression (COREG) algorithm for labeling. We compared the SMOGN-COREG model with six well-known regressors on five datasets to evaluate the proposed models effectiveness on unbalanced and unlabelled financial data. Experimental results confirmed that the proposed method outperformed the comparator models for unbalanced and unlabelled financial data. Therefore, SMOGN-COREG is a step towards using unlabelled data to estimate FL level.
Counterfactual Debiasing Inference for Compositional Action Recognition
Authors: Pengzhan Sun, Bo Wu, Xunsong Li, Wen Li, Lixin Duan, Chuang Gan
Date: 2021-10-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2021 10
Tasks: Action Recognition, Causal Inference, counterfactual, Counterfactual Inference

Compositional action recognition is a novel challenge in the computer vision community and focuses on revealing the different combinations of verbs and nouns instead of treating subject-object interactions in videos as individual instances only. Existing methods tackle this challenging task by simply ignoring appearance information or fusing object appearances with dynamic instance tracklets. However, those strategies usually do not perform well for unseen action instances. For that, in this work we propose a novel learning framework called Counterfactual Debiasing Network (CDN) to improve the model generalization ability by removing the interference introduced by visual appearances of objects/subjects. It explicitly learns the appearance information in action representations and later removes the effect of such information in a causal inference manner. Specifically, we use tracklets and video content to model the factual inference by considering both appearance information and structure information. In contrast, only video content with appearance information is leveraged in the counterfactual inference. With the two inferences, we conduct a causal graph which captures and removes the bias introduced by the appearance information by subtracting the result of the counterfactual inference from that of the factual inference. By doing that, our proposed CDN method can better recognize unseen action instances by debiasing the effect of appearances. Extensive experiments on the Something-Else dataset clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed CDN over existing state-of-the-art methods.
Protocol Based Deep Intrusion Detection for DoS and DDoS attacks using UNSW-NB15 and Bot-IoT data-sets
Authors: MUHAMMAD ZEESHAN1(Senior Member, QAISER RIAZ1(MEMBER, IEEE), MUHAMMAD A. BILAL1, MUHAMMAD K. SHAHZAD1, HAJIRA JABEEN2, SYED ALIHAIDER3, AZIZUR RAHIM1
Date: 2021-12-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE 2021 12
Tasks: Intrusion Detection

Since its inception, the Internet of Things (IoT) has witnessed mushroom growth as a breakthrough technology. In a nutshell, IoT is the integration of devices and data such that processes are automated and centralized to a certain extent. IoT is revolutionizing the way business is done and is transforming society as a whole. As this technology advances further, the need to exploit detection and weakness awareness increases to prevent unauthorized access to critical resources and business functions, thereby rendering the system unavailable. Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed DoS attacks are all too common. In this paper, we propose a Protocol Based Deep Intrusion Detection (PB-DID) architecture, in which we created a data-set of packets from IoT traffic by comparing features from the UNSWNB15 and Bot-IoT data-sets based on flow and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). We classify non-anomalous, DoS, and DDoS traffic uniquely by taking care of the problems like imbalanced and over-fitting. We have achieved a classification accuracy of 96.3% by using deep learning (DL) technique.
Federated Semi-Supervised Learning with Prototypical Networks
Authors: Woojung Kim, Keondo Park, Kihyuk Sohn, Raphael Shu, Hyung-Sin Kim
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

With the increasing computing power of edge devices, Federated Learning (FL) emerges to enable model training without privacy concerns. The majority of existing studies assume the data are fully labeled on the client side. In practice, however, the amount of labeled data is often limited. Recently, federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL) is explored as a way to effectively utilize unlabeled data during training. In this work, we propose ProtoFSSL, a novel FSSL approach based on prototypical networks. In ProtoFSSL, clients share knowledge with each other via lightweight prototypes, which prevents the local models from diverging. For computing loss on unlabeled data, each client creates accurate pseudo-labels based on shared prototypes. Jointly with labeled data, the pseudo-labels provide training signals for local prototypes. Compared to a FSSL approach based on weight sharing, the prototype-based inter-client knowledge sharing significantly reduces both communication and computation costs, enabling more frequent knowledge sharing between more clients for better accuracy. In multiple datasets, ProtoFSSL results in higher accuracy compared to the recent FSSL methods with and without knowledge sharing, such as FixMatch, FedRGD, and FedMatch. On SVHN dataset, ProtoFSSL performs comparably to fully supervised FL methods.
FedFormer: Contextual Federation with Attention in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Liam Hebert, Lukasz Golab, Pascal Poupart, Robin Cohen
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A core issue in multi-agent federated reinforcement learning is defining how to aggregate insights from multiple agents. This is commonly done by taking the average of each participating agent's model weights into one common model (FedAvg). We instead propose FedFormer, a novel federation strategy that utilizes Transformer Attention to contextually aggregate embeddings from models originating from different learner agents. In so doing, we attentively weigh the contributions of other agents with respect to the current agent's environment and learned relationships, thus providing a more effective and efficient federation. We evaluate our methods on the Meta-World environment and find that our approach yields significant improvements over FedAvg and non-federated Soft Actor-Critic single-agent methods. Our results compared to Soft Actor-Critic show that FedFormer achieves higher episodic return while still abiding by the privacy constraints of federated learning. Finally, we also demonstrate improvements in effectiveness with increased agent pools across all methods in certain tasks. This is contrasted by FedAvg, which fails to make noticeable improvements when scaled.
Meta-Learning Adversarial Bandits
Authors: Maria-Florina Balcan, Keegan Harris, Mikhail Khodak, Zhiwei Steven Wu
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Multi-Armed Bandits

We study online learning with bandit feedback across multiple tasks, with the goal of improving average performance across tasks if they are similar according to some natural task-similarity measure. As the first to target the adversarial setting, we design a unified meta-algorithm that yields setting-specific guarantees for two important cases: multi-armed bandits (MAB) and bandit linear optimization (BLO). For MAB, the meta-algorithm tunes the initialization, step-size, and entropy parameter of the Tsallis-entropy generalization of the well-known Exp3 method, with the task-averaged regret provably improving if the entropy of the distribution over estimated optima-in-hindsight is small. For BLO, we learn the initialization, step-size, and boundary-offset of online mirror descent (OMD) with self-concordant barrier regularizers, showing that task-averaged regret varies directly with a measure induced by these functions on the interior of the action space. Our adaptive guarantees rely on proving that unregularized follow-the-leader combined with multiplicative weights is enough to online learn a non-smooth and non-convex sequence of affine functions of Bregman divergences that upper-bound the regret of OMD.
Cycle Mutation: Evolving Permutations via Cycle Induction
Authors: Vincent A. Cicirello
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms solve problems by simulating the evolution of a population of candidate solutions. We focus on evolving permutations for ordering problems like the traveling salesperson problem (TSP), as well as assignment problems like the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) and largest common subgraph (LCS). We propose cycle mutation, a new mutation operator whose inspiration is the well known cycle crossover operator, and the concept of a permutation cycle. We use fitness landscape analysis to explore the problem characteristics for which cycle mutation works best. As a prerequisite, we develop new permutation distance measures: cycle distance, $k$-cycle distance, and cycle edit distance. The fitness landscape analysis predicts that cycle mutation is better suited for assignment and mapping problems than it is for ordering problems. We experimentally validate these findings showing cycle mutation's strengths on problems like QAP and LCS, and its limitations on problems like the TSP, while also showing that it is less prone to local optima than commonly used alternatives. We integrate cycle mutation into the open-source Chips-n-Salsa library, and the new distance metrics into the open-source JavaPermutationTools library.
Learning to Solve Combinatorial Graph Partitioning Problems via Efficient Exploration
Authors: Thomas D. Barrett, Christopher W. F. Parsonson, Alexandre Laterre
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, graph partitioning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

From logistics to the natural sciences, combinatorial optimisation on graphs underpins numerous real-world applications. Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown particular promise in this setting as it can adapt to specific problem structures and does not require pre-solved instances for these, often NP-hard, problems. However, state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches typically suffer from severe scalability issues, primarily due to their reliance on expensive graph neural networks (GNNs) at each decision step. We introduce ECORD; a novel RL algorithm that alleviates this expense by restricting the GNN to a single pre-processing step, before entering a fast-acting exploratory phase directed by a recurrent unit. Experimentally, ECORD achieves a new SOTA for RL algorithms on the Maximum Cut problem, whilst also providing orders of magnitude improvement in speed and scalability. Compared to the nearest competitor, ECORD reduces the optimality gap by up to 73% on 500 vertex graphs with a decreased wall-clock time. Moreover, ECORD retains strong performance when generalising to larger graphs with up to 10000 vertices.
Failure Detection in Medical Image Classification: A Reality Check and Benchmarking Testbed
Authors: Melanie Bernhardt, Fabio De Sousa Ribeiro, Ben Glocker
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Binary Classification, Decision Making, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification, Out-of-Distribution Detection

Failure detection in automated image classification is a critical safeguard for clinical deployment. Detected failure cases can be referred to human assessment, ensuring patient safety in computer-aided clinical decision making. Despite its paramount importance, there is insufficient evidence about the ability of state-of-the-art confidence scoring methods to detect test-time failures of classification models in the context of medical imaging. This paper provides a reality check, establishing the performance of in-domain misclassification detection methods, benchmarking 9 widely used confidence scores on 6 medical imaging datasets with different imaging modalities, in multiclass and binary classification settings. Our experiments show that the problem of failure detection is far from being solved. We found that none of the benchmarked advanced methods proposed in the computer vision and machine learning literature can consistently outperform a simple softmax baseline, demonstrating that improved out-of-distribution detection or model calibration do not necessarily translate to improved in-domain misclassification detection. Our developed testbed facilitates future work in this important area
Sharpness-Aware Training for Free
Authors: Jiawei Du, Daquan Zhou, Jiashi Feng, Vincent Y. F. Tan, Joey Tianyi Zhou
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performances but are typically over-parameterized. The over-parameterization may result in undesirably large generalization error in the absence of other customized training strategies. Recently, a line of research under the name of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has shown that minimizing a sharpness measure, which reflects the geometry of the loss landscape, can significantly reduce the generalization error. However, SAM-like methods incur a two-fold computational overhead of the given base optimizer (e.g. SGD) for approximating the sharpness measure. In this paper, we propose Sharpness-Aware Training for Free, or SAF, which mitigates the sharp landscape at almost zero additional computational cost over the base optimizer. Intuitively, SAF achieves this by avoiding sudden drops in the loss in the sharp local minima throughout the trajectory of the updates of the weights. Specifically, we suggest a novel trajectory loss, based on the KL-divergence between the outputs of DNNs with the current weights and past weights, as a replacement of the SAM's sharpness measure. This loss captures the rate of change of the training loss along the model's update trajectory. By minimizing it, SAF ensures the convergence to a flat minimum with improved generalization capabilities. Extensive empirical results show that SAF minimizes the sharpness in the same way that SAM does, yielding better results on the ImageNet dataset with essentially the same computational cost as the base optimizer.
AANG: Automating Auxiliary Learning
Authors: Lucio M. Dery, Paul Michel, Mikhail Khodak, Graham Neubig, Ameet Talwalkar
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Auxiliary Learning

Auxiliary objectives, supplementary learning signals that are introduced to help aid learning on data-starved or highly complex end-tasks, are commonplace in machine learning. Whilst much work has been done to formulate useful auxiliary objectives, their construction is still an art which proceeds by slow and tedious hand-design. Intuition for how and when these objectives improve end-task performance has also had limited theoretical backing. In this work, we present an approach for automatically generating a suite of auxiliary objectives. We achieve this by deconstructing existing objectives within a novel unified taxonomy, identifying connections between them, and generating new ones based on the uncovered structure. Next, we theoretically formalize widely-held intuitions about how auxiliary learning improves generalization on the end-task. This leads us to a principled and efficient algorithm for searching the space of generated objectives to find those most useful to a specified end-task. With natural language processing (NLP) as our domain of study, we demonstrate that our automated auxiliary learning pipeline leads to strong improvements over competitive baselines across continued training experiments on a pre-trained model on 5 NLP tasks.
Multi-criteria Decision-making of Intelligent Vehicles under Fault Condition Enhancing Public-private Partnership
Authors: Xin Tao, Mladen Čičić, Jonas Mårtensson
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

With the development of vehicular technologies on automation, electrification, and digitalization, vehicles are becoming more intelligent while being exposed to more complex, uncertain, and frequently occurring faults. In this paper, we look into the maintenance planning of an operating vehicle under fault condition and formulate it as a multi-criteria decision-making problem. The maintenance decisions are generated by route searching in road networks and evaluated based on risk assessment considering the uncertainty of vehicle breakdowns. Particularly, we consider two criteria, namely the risk of public time loss and the risk of mission delay, representing the concerns of the public sector and the private sector, respectively. A public time loss model is developed to evaluate the traffic congestion caused by a vehicle breakdown and the corresponding towing process. The Pareto optimal set of non-dominated decisions is derived by evaluating the risk of the decisions. We demonstrate the relevance of the problem and the effectiveness of the proposed method by numerical experiments derived from real-world scenarios. The experiments show that neglecting the risk of vehicle breakdown on public roads can cause a high risk of public time loss in dense traffic flow. With the proposed method, alternate decisions can be derived to reduce the risks of public time loss significantly with a low increase in the risk of mission delay. This study aims at catalyzing public-private partnership through collaborative decision-making between the private sector and the public sector, thus archiving a more sustainable transportation system in the future.
Ontology Design Facilitating Wikibase Integration -- and a Worked Example for Historical Data
Authors: Cogan Shimizu, Andrew Eells, Seila Gonzalez, Lu Zhou, Pascal Hitzler, Alicia Sheill, Catherine Foley, Dean Rehberger
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Wikibase -- which is the software underlying Wikidata -- is a powerful platform for knowledge graph creation and management. However, it has been developed with a crowd-sourced knowledge graph creation scenario in mind, which in particular means that it has not been designed for use case scenarios in which a tightly controlled high-quality schema, in the form of an ontology, is to be imposed, and indeed, independently developed ontologies do not necessarily map seamlessly to the Wikibase approach. In this paper, we provide the key ingredients needed in order to combine traditional ontology modeling with use of the Wikibase platform, namely a set of \emph{axiom} patterns that bridge the paradigm gap, together with usage instructions and a worked example for historical data.
What Dense Graph Do You Need for Self-Attention?
Authors: Yuxin Wang, Chu-Tak Lee, Qipeng Guo, Zhangyue Yin, Yunhua Zhou, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2022-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Miscellaneous

Transformers have made progress in miscellaneous tasks, but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities. Recent works propose sparse Transformers with attention on sparse graphs to reduce complexity and remain strong performance. While effective, the crucial parts of how dense a graph needs to be to perform well are not fully explored. In this paper, we propose Normalized Information Payload (NIP), a graph scoring function measuring information transfer on graph, which provides an analysis tool for trade-offs between performance and complexity. Guided by this theoretical analysis, we present Hypercube Transformer, a sparse Transformer that models token interactions in a hypercube and shows comparable or even better results with vanilla Transformer while yielding $O(N\log N)$ complexity with sequence length $N$. Experiments on tasks requiring various sequence lengths lay validation for our graph function well.