pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Versatile Skill Control via Self-supervised Adversarial Imitation of Unlabeled Mixed Motions
Authors: Chenhao Li, Sebastian Blaes, Pavel Kolev, Marin Vlastelica, Jonas Frey, Georg Martius
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Learning diverse skills is one of the main challenges in robotics. To this end, imitation learning approaches have achieved impressive results. These methods require explicitly labeled datasets or assume consistent skill execution to enable learning and active control of individual behaviors, which limits their applicability. In this work, we propose a cooperative adversarial method for obtaining single versatile policies with controllable skill sets from unlabeled datasets containing diverse state transition patterns by maximizing their discriminability. Moreover, we show that by utilizing unsupervised skill discovery in the generative adversarial imitation learning framework, novel and useful skills emerge with successful task fulfillment. Finally, the obtained versatile policies are tested on an agile quadruped robot called Solo 8 and present faithful replications of diverse skills encoded in the demonstrations.
Model Predictive Robustness of Signal Temporal Logic Predicates
Authors: Yuanfei Lin, Haoxuan Li, Matthias Althoff
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, model

The robustness of signal temporal logic not only assesses whether a signal adheres to a specification but also provides a measure of how much a formula is fulfilled or violated. The calculation of robustness is based on evaluating the robustness of underlying predicates. However, the robustness of predicates is usually defined in a model-free way, i.e., without including the system dynamics. Moreover, it is often nontrivial to define the robustness of complicated predicates precisely. To address these issues, we propose a notion of model predictive robustness, which provides a more systematic way of evaluating robustness compared to previous approaches by considering model-based predictions. In particular, we use Gaussian process regression to learn the robustness based on precomputed predictions so that robustness values can be efficiently computed online. We evaluate our approach for the use case of autonomous driving with predicates used in formalized traffic rules on a recorded dataset, which highlights the advantage of our approach compared to traditional approaches in terms of precision. By incorporating our robustness definitions into a trajectory planner, autonomous vehicles obey traffic rules more robustly than human drivers in the dataset.
Less is Better: Recovering Intended-Feature Subspace to Robustify NLU Models
Authors: Ting Wu, Tao Gui
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10

Datasets with significant proportions of bias present threats for training a trustworthy model on NLU tasks. Despite yielding great progress, current debiasing methods impose excessive reliance on the knowledge of bias attributes. Definition of the attributes, however, is elusive and varies across different datasets. Furthermore, leveraging these attributes at input level to bias mitigation may leave a gap between intrinsic properties and the underlying decision rule. To narrow down this gap and liberate the supervision on bias, we suggest extending bias mitigation into feature space. Therefore, a novel model, Recovering Intended-Feature Subspace with Knowledge-Free (RISK) is developed. Assuming that shortcut features caused by various biases are unintended for prediction, RISK views them as redundant features. When delving into a lower manifold to remove redundancies, RISK reveals that an extremely low-dimensional subspace with intended features can robustly represent the highly biased dataset. Empirical results demonstrate our model can consistently improve model generalization to out-of-distribution set, and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance.
Adaptive Natural Language Generation for Task-oriented Dialogue via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Atsumoto Ohashi, Ryuichiro Higashinaka
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Text Generation

When a natural language generation (NLG) component is implemented in a real-world task-oriented dialogue system, it is necessary to generate not only natural utterances as learned on training data but also utterances adapted to the dialogue environment (e.g., noise from environmental sounds) and the user (e.g., users with low levels of understanding ability). Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) for language generation tasks, we propose ANTOR, a method for Adaptive Natural language generation for Task-Oriented dialogue via Reinforcement learning. In ANTOR, a natural language understanding (NLU) module, which corresponds to the user's understanding of system utterances, is incorporated into the objective function of RL. If the NLG's intentions are correctly conveyed to the NLU, which understands a system's utterances, the NLG is given a positive reward. We conducted experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset, and we confirmed that ANTOR could generate adaptive utterances against speech recognition errors and the different vocabulary levels of users.
FairGBM: Gradient Boosting with Fairness Constraints
Authors: André F Cruz, Catarina Belém, Sérgio Jesus, João Bravo, Pedro Saleiro, Pedro Bizarro
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

Tabular data is prevalent in many high-stakes domains, such as financial services or public policy. Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) are popular in these settings due to their scalability, performance, and low training cost. While fairness in these domains is a foremost concern, existing in-processing Fair ML methods are either incompatible with GBDT, or incur in significant performance losses while taking considerably longer to train. We present FairGBM, a dual ascent learning framework for training GBDT under fairness constraints, with little to no impact on predictive performance when compared to unconstrained GBDT. Since observational fairness metrics are non-differentiable, we propose smooth convex error rate proxies for common fairness criteria, enabling gradient-based optimization using a ``proxy-Lagrangian'' formulation. Our implementation shows an order of magnitude speedup in training time relative to related work, a pivotal aspect to foster the widespread adoption of FairGBM by real-world practitioners.
Negation, Coordination, and Quantifiers in Contextualized Language Models
Authors: Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli, Rita Sevastjanova, Christin Beck, Maribel Romero
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Negation

With the success of contextualized language models, much research explores what these models really learn and in which cases they still fail. Most of this work focuses on specific NLP tasks and on the learning outcome. Little research has attempted to decouple the models' weaknesses from specific tasks and focus on the embeddings per se and their mode of learning. In this paper, we take up this research opportunity: based on theoretical linguistic insights, we explore whether the semantic constraints of function words are learned and how the surrounding context impacts their embeddings. We create suitable datasets, provide new insights into the inner workings of LMs vis-a-vis function words and implement an assisting visual web interface for qualitative analysis.
M$^2$DQN: A Robust Method for Accelerating Deep Q-learning Network
Authors: Zhe Zhang, Yukun Zou, Junjie Lai, Qing Xu
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep Q-learning Network (DQN) is a successful way which combines reinforcement learning with deep neural networks and leads to a widespread application of reinforcement learning. One challenging problem when applying DQN or other reinforcement learning algorithms to real world problem is data collection. Therefore, how to improve data efficiency is one of the most important problems in the research of reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a framework which uses the Max-Mean loss in Deep Q-Network (M$^2$DQN). Instead of sampling one batch of experiences in the training step, we sample several batches from the experience replay and update the parameters such that the maximum TD-error of these batches is minimized. The proposed method can be combined with most of existing techniques of DQN algorithm by replacing the loss function. We verify the effectiveness of this framework with one of the most widely used techniques, Double DQN (DDQN), in several gym games. The results show that our method leads to a substantial improvement in both the learning speed and performance.
Model Inversion Attacks against Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zaixi Zhang, Qi Liu, Zhenya Huang, Hao Wang, Chee-Kong Lee, Enhong Chen
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Many data mining tasks rely on graphs to model relational structures among individuals (nodes). Since relational data are often sensitive, there is an urgent need to evaluate the privacy risks in graph data. One famous privacy attack against data analysis models is the model inversion attack, which aims to infer sensitive data in the training dataset and leads to great privacy concerns. Despite its success in grid-like domains, directly applying model inversion attacks on non-grid domains such as graph leads to poor attack performance. This is mainly due to the failure to consider the unique properties of graphs. To bridge this gap, we conduct a systematic study on model inversion attacks against Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), one of the state-of-the-art graph analysis tools in this paper. Firstly, in the white-box setting where the attacker has full access to the target GNN model, we present GraphMI to infer the private training graph data. Specifically, in GraphMI, a projected gradient module is proposed to tackle the discreteness of graph edges and preserve the sparsity and smoothness of graph features; a graph auto-encoder module is used to efficiently exploit graph topology, node attributes, and target model parameters for edge inference; a random sampling module can finally sample discrete edges. Furthermore, in the hard-label black-box setting where the attacker can only query the GNN API and receive the classification results, we propose two methods based on gradient estimation and reinforcement learning (RL-GraphMI). Our experimental results show that such defenses are not sufficiently effective and call for more advanced defenses against privacy attacks.
DBT-DMAE: An Effective Multivariate Time Series Pre-Train Model under Missing Data
Authors: Kai Zhang, Qinmin Yang, Chao Li
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Multivariate time series(MTS) is a universal data type related to many practical applications. However, MTS suffers from missing data problems, which leads to degradation or even collapse of the downstream tasks, such as prediction and classification. The concurrent missing data handling procedures could inevitably arouse the biased estimation and redundancy-training problem when encountering multiple downstream tasks. This paper presents a universally applicable MTS pre-train model, DBT-DMAE, to conquer the abovementioned obstacle. First, a missing representation module is designed by introducing dynamic positional embedding and random masking processing to characterize the missing symptom. Second, we proposed an auto-encoder structure to obtain the generalized MTS encoded representation utilizing an ameliorated TCN structure called dynamic-bidirectional-TCN as the basic unit, which integrates the dynamic kernel and time-fliping trick to draw temporal features effectively. Finally, the overall feed-in and loss strategy is established to ensure the adequate training of the whole model. Comparative experiment results manifest that the DBT-DMAE outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods in six real-world datasets and two different downstream tasks. Moreover, ablation and interpretability experiments are delivered to verify the validity of DBT-DMAE's substructures.
Possible Stories: Evaluating Situated Commonsense Reasoning under Multiple Possible Scenarios
Authors: Mana Ashida, Saku Sugawara
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning

The possible consequences for the same context may vary depending on the situation we refer to. However, current studies in natural language processing do not focus on situated commonsense reasoning under multiple possible scenarios. This study frames this task by asking multiple questions with the same set of possible endings as candidate answers, given a short story text. Our resulting dataset, Possible Stories, consists of more than 4.5K questions over 1.3K story texts in English. We discover that even current strong pretrained language models struggle to answer the questions consistently, highlighting that the highest accuracy in an unsupervised setting (60.2%) is far behind human accuracy (92.5%). Through a comparison with existing datasets, we observe that the questions in our dataset contain minimal annotation artifacts in the answer options. In addition, our dataset includes examples that require counterfactual reasoning, as well as those requiring readers' reactions and fictional information, suggesting that our dataset can serve as a challenging testbed for future studies on situated commonsense reasoning.
Game-theoretic Objective Space Planning
Authors: Hongrui Zheng, Zhijun Zhuang, Johannes Betz, Rahul Mangharam
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, counterfactual, Dimensionality Reduction, Motion Planning

Generating competitive strategies and performing continuous motion planning simultaneously in an adversarial setting is a challenging problem. In addition, understanding the intent of other agents is crucial to deploying autonomous systems in adversarial multi-agent environments. Existing approaches either discretize agent action by grouping similar control inputs, sacrificing performance in motion planning, or plan in uninterpretable latent spaces, producing hard-to-understand agent behaviors. Furthermore, the most popular policy optimization frameworks do not recognize the long-term effect of actions and become myopic. This paper proposes an agent action discretization method via abstraction that provides clear intentions of agent actions, an efficient offline pipeline of agent population synthesis, and a planning strategy using counterfactual regret minimization with function approximation. Finally, we experimentally validate our findings on scaled autonomous vehicles in a head-to-head racing setting. We demonstrate that using the proposed framework significantly improves learning, improves the win rate against different opponents, and the improvements can be transferred to unseen opponents in an unseen environment.
PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation
Authors: Sedrick Scott Keh, Kevin Lu, Varun Gangal, Steven Y. Feng, Harsh Jhamtani, Malihe Alikhani, Eduard Hovy
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10
Tasks: Sentence

A personification is a figure of speech that endows inanimate entities with properties and actions typically seen as requiring animacy. In this paper, we explore the task of personification generation. To this end, we propose PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation. We curate a corpus of personifications called PersonifCorp, together with automatically generated de-personified literalizations of these personifications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this parallel corpus by training a seq2seq model to personify a given literal input. Both automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning with PersonifCorp leads to significant gains in personification-related qualities such as animacy and interestingness. A detailed qualitative analysis also highlights key strengths and imperfections of PINEAPPLE over baselines, demonstrating a strong ability to generate diverse and creative personifications that enhance the overall appeal of a sentence.
Computing Abductive Explanations for Boosted Trees
Authors: Gilles Audemard, Jean-Marie Lagniez, Pierre Marquis, Nicolas Szczepanski
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00

Boosted trees is a dominant ML model, exhibiting high accuracy. However, boosted trees are hardly intelligible, and this is a problem whenever they are used in safety-critical applications. Indeed, in such a context, rigorous explanations of the predictions made are expected. Recent work have shown how subset-minimal abductive explanations can be derived for boosted trees, using automated reasoning techniques. However, the generation of such well-founded explanations is intractable in the general case. To improve the scalability of their generation, we introduce the notion of tree-specific explanation for a boosted tree. We show that tree-specific explanations are abductive explanations that can be computed in polynomial time. We also explain how to derive a subset-minimal abductive explanation from a tree-specific explanation. Experiments on various datasets show the computational benefits of leveraging tree-specific explanations for deriving subset-minimal abductive explanations.
DMFormer: Closing the Gap Between CNN and Vision Transformers
Authors: Zimian Wei, Hengyue Pan, Lujun Li, Menglong Lu, Xin Niu, Peijie Dong, Dongsheng Li
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Vision transformers have shown excellent performance in computer vision tasks. As the computation cost of their self-attention mechanism is expensive, recent works tried to replace the self-attention mechanism in vision transformers with convolutional operations, which is more efficient with built-in inductive bias. However, these efforts either ignore multi-level features or lack dynamic prosperity, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Multi-level Attention mechanism (DMA), which captures different patterns of input images by multiple kernel sizes and enables input-adaptive weights with a gating mechanism. Based on DMA, we present an efficient backbone network named DMFormer. DMFormer adopts the overall architecture of vision transformers, while replacing the self-attention mechanism with our proposed DMA. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet-1K and ADE20K datasets demonstrated that DMFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance, which outperforms similar-sized vision transformers(ViTs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs).
Extrapolation and Spectral Bias of Neural Nets with Hadamard Product: a Polynomial Net Study
Authors: Yongtao Wu, Zhenyu Zhu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios G Chrysos, Volkan Cevher
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Polynomial Neural Networks

Neural tangent kernel (NTK) is a powerful tool to analyze training dynamics of neural networks and their generalization bounds. The study on NTK has been devoted to typical neural network architectures, but it is incomplete for neural networks with Hadamard products (NNs-Hp), e.g., StyleGAN and polynomial neural networks (PNNs). In this work, we derive the finite-width NTK formulation for a special class of NNs-Hp, i.e., polynomial neural networks. We prove their equivalence to the kernel regression predictor with the associated NTK, which expands the application scope of NTK. Based on our results, we elucidate the separation of PNNs over standard neural networks with respect to extrapolation and spectral bias. Our two key insights are that when compared to standard neural networks, PNNs can fit more complicated functions in the extrapolation regime and admit a slower eigenvalue decay of the respective NTK, leading to a faster learning towards high-frequency functions. Besides, our theoretical results can be extended to other types of NNs-Hp, which expand the scope of our work. Our empirical results validate the separations in broader classes of NNs-Hp, which provide a good justification for a deeper understanding of neural architectures.
A Mosquito is Worth 16x16 Larvae: Evaluation of Deep Learning Architectures for Mosquito Larvae Classification
Authors: Aswin Surya, David B. Peral, Austin VanLoon, Akhila Rajesh
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Mosquito-borne diseases (MBDs), such as dengue virus, chikungunya virus, and West Nile virus, cause over one million deaths globally every year. Because many such diseases are spread by the Aedes and Culex mosquitoes, tracking these larvae becomes critical in mitigating the spread of MBDs. Even as citizen science grows and obtains larger mosquito image datasets, the manual annotation of mosquito images becomes ever more time-consuming and inefficient. Previous research has used computer vision to identify mosquito species, and the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has become the de-facto for image classification. However, these models typically require substantial computational resources. This research introduces the application of the Vision Transformer (ViT) in a comparative study to improve image classification on Aedes and Culex larvae. Two ViT models, ViT-Base and CvT-13, and two CNN models, ResNet-18 and ConvNeXT, were trained on mosquito larvae image data and compared to determine the most effective model to distinguish mosquito larvae as Aedes or Culex. Testing revealed that ConvNeXT obtained the greatest values across all classification metrics, demonstrating its viability for mosquito larvae classification. Based on these results, future research includes creating a model specifically designed for mosquito larvae classification by combining elements of CNN and transformer architecture.
Comments on "Iteratively Re-weighted Algorithm for Fuzzy c-Means"
Authors: Astha Saini, Prabhu Babu
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00

In this comment, we present a simple alternate derivation to the IRW-FCM algorithm presented in "Iteratively Re-weighted Algorithm for Fuzzy c-Means" for Fuzzy c-Means problem. We show that the iterative steps derived for IRW-FCM algorithm are nothing but steps of the popular Majorization Minimization (MM) algorithm. The derivation presented in this note is much simpler and straightforward and, unlike the derivation of IRW-FCM, the derivation here does not involve introduction of any auxiliary variable. Moreover, by showing the steps of IRW-FCM as the MM algorithm, the inner loop of the IRW-FCM algorithm can be eliminated and the algorithm can be effectively run as a "single loop" algorithm. More precisely, the new MM-based derivation deduces that a single inner loop of IRW-FCM is sufficient to decrease the Fuzzy c-means objective function, which speeds up the IRW-FCM algorithm.
Selecting Stickers in Open-Domain Dialogue through Multitask Learning
Authors: Zhexin Zhang, Yeshuang Zhu, Zhengcong Fei, Jinchao Zhang, Jie zhou
Date: 2022-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5

With the increasing popularity of online chatting, stickers are becoming important in our online communication. Selecting appropriate stickers in open-domain dialogue requires a comprehensive understanding of both dialogues and stickers, as well as the relationship between the two types of modalities. To tackle these challenges, we propose a multitask learning method comprised of three auxiliary tasks to enhance the understanding of dialogue history, emotion and semantic meaning of stickers. Extensive experiments conducted on a recent challenging dataset show that our model can better combine the multimodal information and achieve significantly higher accuracy over strong baselines. Ablation study further verifies the effectiveness of each auxiliary task. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/nonstopfor/Sticker-Selection}