pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
No Pairs Left Behind: Improving Metric Learning with Regularized Triplet Objective
Authors: A. Ali Heydari, Naghmeh Rezaei, Daniel J. McDuff, Javier L. Prieto
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Triplet

We propose a novel formulation of the triplet objective function that improves metric learning without additional sample mining or overhead costs. Our approach aims to explicitly regularize the distance between the positive and negative samples in a triplet with respect to the anchor-negative distance. As an initial validation, we show that our method (called No Pairs Left Behind [NPLB]) improves upon the traditional and current state-of-the-art triplet objective formulations on standard benchmark datasets. To show the effectiveness and potentials of NPLB on real-world complex data, we evaluate our approach on a large-scale healthcare dataset (UK Biobank), demonstrating that the embeddings learned by our model significantly outperform all other current representations on tested downstream tasks. Additionally, we provide a new model-agnostic single-time health risk definition that, when used in tandem with the learned representations, achieves the most accurate prediction of subjects' future health complications. Our results indicate that NPLB is a simple, yet effective framework for improving existing deep metric learning models, showcasing the potential implications of metric learning in more complex applications, especially in the biological and healthcare domains.
Enabling Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation in Multi-inhabitants Smart Home Activity Learning
Authors: Md Mahmudur Rahman, Mahta Mousavi, Peri Tarr, Mohammad Arif Ul Alam
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation for sensor-based activity learning is of utmost importance in remote health monitoring research. However, many domain adaptation algorithms suffer with failure to operate adaptation in presence of target domain heterogeneity (which is always present in reality) and presence of multiple inhabitants dramatically hinders their generalizability producing unsatisfactory results for semi-supervised and unseen activity learning tasks. We propose \emph{AEDA}, a novel deep auto-encoder-based model to enable semi-supervised domain adaptation in the existence of target domain heterogeneity and how to incorporate it to empower heterogeneity to any homogeneous deep domain adaptation architecture for cross-domain activity learning. Experimental evaluation on 18 different heterogeneous and multi-inhabitants use-cases of 8 different domains created from 2 publicly available human activity datasets (wearable and ambient smart homes) shows that \emph{AEDA} outperforms (max. 12.8\% and 8.9\% improvements for ambient smart home and wearables) over existing domain adaptation techniques for both seen and unseen activity learning in a heterogeneous setting.
CEIP: Combining Explicit and Implicit Priors for Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations
Authors: Kai Yan, Alexander G. Schwing, Yu-Xiong Wang
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Retrieval

Although reinforcement learning has found widespread use in dense reward settings, training autonomous agents with sparse rewards remains challenging. To address this difficulty, prior work has shown promising results when using not only task-specific demonstrations but also task-agnostic albeit somewhat related demonstrations. In most cases, the available demonstrations are distilled into an implicit prior, commonly represented via a single deep net. Explicit priors in the form of a database that can be queried have also been shown to lead to encouraging results. To better benefit from available demonstrations, we develop a method to Combine Explicit and Implicit Priors (CEIP). CEIP exploits multiple implicit priors in the form of normalizing flows in parallel to form a single complex prior. Moreover, CEIP uses an effective explicit retrieval and push-forward mechanism to condition the implicit priors. In three challenging environments, we find the proposed CEIP method to improve upon sophisticated state-of-the-art techniques.
Leveraging Non-dialogue Summaries for Dialogue Summarization
Authors: Seongmin Park, Dongchan Shin, Jihwa Lee
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: TU (COLING) 2022 10
Tasks: Document Summarization

To mitigate the lack of diverse dialogue summarization datasets in academia, we present methods to utilize non-dialogue summarization data for enhancing dialogue summarization systems. We apply transformations to document summarization data pairs to create training data that better befit dialogue summarization. The suggested transformations also retain desirable properties of non-dialogue datasets, such as improved faithfulness to the source text. We conduct extensive experiments across both English and Korean to verify our approach. Although absolute gains in ROUGE naturally plateau as more dialogue summarization samples are introduced, utilizing non-dialogue data for training significantly improves summarization performance in zero- and few-shot settings and enhances faithfulness across all training regimes.
Adversarial and Safely Scaled Question Generation
Authors: Sreehari Sankar, Zhihang Dong
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

Question generation has recently gained a lot of research interest, especially with the advent of large language models. In and of itself, question generation can be considered 'AI-hard', as there is a lack of unanimously agreed sense of what makes a question 'good' or 'bad'. In this paper, we tackle two fundamental problems in parallel: on one hand, we try to solve the scaling problem, where question-generation and answering applications have to be applied to a massive amount of text without ground truth labeling. The usual approach to solve this problem is to either downsample or summarize. However, there are critical risks of misinformation with these approaches. On the other hand, and related to the misinformation problem, we try to solve the 'safety' problem, as many public institutions rely on a much higher level of accuracy for the content they provide. We introduce an adversarial approach to tackle the question generation safety problem with scale. Specifically, we designed a question-answering system that specifically prunes out unanswerable questions that may be generated, and further increases the quality of the answers that are generated. We build a production-ready, easily-plugged pipeline that can be used on any given body of text, that is scalable and immune from generating any hate speech, profanity, or misinformation. Based on the results, we are able to generate more than six times the number of quality questions generated by the abstractive approach, with a perceived quality being 44% higher, according to a survey of 168 participants.
Extensible Proxy for Efficient NAS
Authors: Yuhong Li, Jiajie Li, Cong Han, Pan Li, JinJun Xiong, Deming Chen
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become a de facto approach in the recent trend of AutoML to design deep neural networks (DNNs). Efficient or near-zero-cost NAS proxies are further proposed to address the demanding computational issues of NAS, where each candidate architecture network only requires one iteration of backpropagation. The values obtained from the proxies are considered the predictions of architecture performance on downstream tasks. However, two significant drawbacks hinder the extended usage of Efficient NAS proxies. (1) Efficient proxies are not adaptive to various search spaces. (2) Efficient proxies are not extensible to multi-modality downstream tasks. Based on the observations, we design a Extensible proxy (Eproxy) that utilizes self-supervised, few-shot training (i.e., 10 iterations of backpropagation) which yields near-zero costs. The key component that makes Eproxy efficient is an untrainable convolution layer termed barrier layer that add the non-linearities to the optimization spaces so that the Eproxy can discriminate the performance of architectures in the early stage. Furthermore, to make Eproxy adaptive to different downstream tasks/search spaces, we propose a Discrete Proxy Search (DPS) to find the optimized training settings for Eproxy with only handful of benchmarked architectures on the target tasks. Our extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of both Eproxy and Eproxy+DPS. Code is available at https://github.com/leeyeehoo/GenNAS-Zero.
Track Targets by Dense Spatio-Temporal Position Encoding
Authors: Jinkun Cao, Hao Wu, Kris Kitani
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation, Object, Object Tracking, Position

In this work, we propose a novel paradigm to encode the position of targets for target tracking in videos using transformers. The proposed paradigm, Dense Spatio-Temporal (DST) position encoding, encodes spatio-temporal position information in a pixel-wise dense fashion. The provided position encoding provides location information to associate targets across frames beyond appearance matching by comparing objects in two bounding boxes. Compared to the typical transformer positional encoding, our proposed encoding is applied to the 2D CNN features instead of the projected feature vectors to avoid losing positional information. Moreover, the designed DST encoding can represent the location of a single-frame object and the evolution of the location of the trajectory among frames uniformly. Integrated with the DST encoding, we build a transformer-based multi-object tracking model. The model takes a video clip as input and conducts the target association in the clip. It can also perform online inference by associating existing trajectories with objects from the new-coming frames. Experiments on video multi-object tracking (MOT) and multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DST position encoding.
Multiple Instance Learning via Iterative Self-Paced Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Kangning Liu, Weicheng Zhu, Yiqiu Shen, Sheng Liu, Narges Razavian, Krzysztof J. Geras, Carlos Fernandez-Granda
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification, Multiple Instance Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Learning representations for individual instances when only bag-level labels are available is a fundamental challenge in multiple instance learning (MIL). Recent works have shown promising results using contrastive self-supervised learning (CSSL), which learns to push apart representations corresponding to two different randomly-selected instances. Unfortunately, in real-world applications such as medical image classification, there is often class imbalance, so randomly-selected instances mostly belong to the same majority class, which precludes CSSL from learning inter-class differences. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Iterative Self-paced Supervised Contrastive Learning for MIL Representations (ItS2CLR), which improves the learned representation by exploiting instance-level pseudo labels derived from the bag-level labels. The framework employs a novel self-paced sampling strategy to ensure the accuracy of pseudo labels. We evaluate ItS2CLR on three medical datasets, showing that it improves the quality of instance-level pseudo labels and representations, and outperforms existing MIL methods in terms of both bag and instance level accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/Kangningthu/ItS2CLR
Deformably-Scaled Transposed Convolution
Authors: Stefano B. Blumberg, Daniele Raví, Mou-Cheng Xu, Matteo Figini, Iasonas Kokkinos, Daniel C. Alexander
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Transposed convolution is crucial for generating high-resolution outputs, yet has received little attention compared to convolution layers. In this work we revisit transposed convolution and introduce a novel layer that allows us to place information in the image selectively and choose the `stroke breadth' at which the image is synthesized, whilst incurring a small additional parameter cost. For this we introduce three ideas: firstly, we regress offsets to the positions where the transpose convolution results are placed; secondly we broadcast the offset weight locations over a learnable neighborhood; and thirdly we use a compact parametrization to share weights and restrict offsets. We show that simply substituting upsampling operators with our novel layer produces substantial improvements across tasks as diverse as instance segmentation, object detection, semantic segmentation, generative image modeling, and 3D magnetic resonance image enhancement, while outperforming all existing variants of transposed convolutions. Our novel layer can be used as a drop-in replacement for 2D and 3D upsampling operators and the code will be publicly available.
Using Bottleneck Adapters to Identify Cancer in Clinical Notes under Low-Resource Constraints
Authors: Omid Rohanian, Hannah Jauncey, Mohammadmahdi Nouriborji, Vinod Kumar Chauhan, Bronner P. Gonçalves, Christiana Kartsonaki, ISARIC Clinical Characterisation Group, Laura Merson, David Clifton
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00

Processing information locked within clinical health records is a challenging task that remains an active area of research in biomedical NLP. In this work, we evaluate a broad set of machine learning techniques ranging from simple RNNs to specialised transformers such as BioBERT on a dataset containing clinical notes along with a set of annotations indicating whether a sample is cancer-related or not. Furthermore, we specifically employ efficient fine-tuning methods from NLP, namely, bottleneck adapters and prompt tuning, to adapt the models to our specialised task. Our evaluations suggest that fine-tuning a frozen BERT model pre-trained on natural language and with bottleneck adapters outperforms all other strategies, including full fine-tuning of the specialised BioBERT model. Based on our findings, we suggest that using bottleneck adapters in low-resource situations with limited access to labelled data or processing capacity could be a viable strategy in biomedical text mining. The code used in the experiments are going to be made available at https://github.com/omidrohanian/bottleneck-adapters.
Robot Learning Theory of Mind through Self-Observation: Exploiting the Intentions-Beliefs Synergy
Authors: Francesca Bianco, Dimitri Ognibene
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Learning Theory

In complex environments, where the human sensory system reaches its limits, our behaviour is strongly driven by our beliefs about the state of the world around us. Accessing others' beliefs, intentions, or mental states in general, could thus allow for more effective social interactions in natural contexts. Yet these variables are not directly observable. Theory of Mind (TOM), the ability to attribute to other agents' beliefs, intentions, or mental states in general, is a crucial feature of human social interaction and has become of interest to the robotics community. Recently, new models that are able to learn TOM have been introduced. In this paper, we show the synergy between learning to predict low-level mental states, such as intentions and goals, and attributing high-level ones, such as beliefs. Assuming that learning of beliefs can take place by observing own decision and beliefs estimation processes in partially observable environments and using a simple feed-forward deep learning model, we show that when learning to predict others' intentions and actions, faster and more accurate predictions can be acquired if beliefs attribution is learnt simultaneously with action and intentions prediction. We show that the learning performance improves even when observing agents with a different decision process and is higher when observing beliefs-driven chunks of behaviour. We propose that our architectural approach can be relevant for the design of future adaptive social robots that should be able to autonomously understand and assist human partners in novel natural environments and tasks.
Differentiable Physics Simulation of Dynamics-Augmented Neural Objects
Authors: Simon Le Cleac'h, Hong-Xing Yu, Michelle Guo, Taylor A. Howell, Ruohan Gao, Jiajun Wu, Zachary Manchester, Mac Schwager
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, Object

We present a differentiable pipeline for simulating the motion of objects that represent their geometry as a continuous density field parameterized as a deep network. This includes Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), and other related models. From the density field, we estimate the dynamical properties of the object, including its mass, center of mass, and inertia matrix. We then introduce a differentiable contact model based on the density field for computing normal and friction forces resulting from collisions. This allows a robot to autonomously build object models that are visually and \emph{dynamically} accurate from still images and videos of objects in motion. The resulting Dynamics-Augmented Neural Objects (DANOs) are simulated with an existing differentiable simulation engine, Dojo, interacting with other standard simulation objects, such as spheres, planes, and robots specified as URDFs. A robot can use this simulation to optimize grasps and manipulation trajectories of neural objects, or to improve the neural object models through gradient-based real-to-simulation transfer. We demonstrate the pipeline to learn the coefficient of friction of a bar of soap from a real video of the soap sliding on a table. We also learn the coefficient of friction and mass of a Stanford bunny through interactions with a Panda robot arm from synthetic data, and we optimize trajectories in simulation for the Panda arm to push the bunny to a goal location.
Affective Idiosyncratic Responses to Music
Authors: Sky CH-Wang, Evan Li, Oliver Li, Smaranda Muresan, Zhou Yu
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00

Affective responses to music are highly personal. Despite consensus that idiosyncratic factors play a key role in regulating how listeners emotionally respond to music, precisely measuring the marginal effects of these variables has proved challenging. To address this gap, we develop computational methods to measure affective responses to music from over 403M listener comments on a Chinese social music platform. Building on studies from music psychology in systematic and quasi-causal analyses, we test for musical, lyrical, contextual, demographic, and mental health effects that drive listener affective responses. Finally, motivated by the social phenomenon known as w\v{a}ng-y\`i-y\'un, we identify influencing factors of platform user self-disclosures, the social support they receive, and notable differences in discloser user activity.
Review Learning: Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting with Generative Replay without Generator
Authors: Jaesung Yoo, Sunghyuk Choi, Ye Seul Yang, Suhyeon Kim, Jieun Choi, Dongkyeong Lim, Yaeji Lim, Hyung Joon Joo, Dae Jung Kim, Rae Woong Park, Hyeong-Jin Yoon, Kwangsoo Kim
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Continual Learning, Deep Learning, Privacy Preserving, Privacy Preserving Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

When a deep learning model is sequentially trained on different datasets, it forgets the knowledge acquired from previous data, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. It deteriorates performance of the deep learning model on diverse datasets, which is critical in privacy-preserving deep learning (PPDL) applications based on transfer learning (TL). To overcome this, we propose review learning (RL), a generative-replay-based continual learning technique that does not require a separate generator. Data samples are generated from the memory stored within the synaptic weights of the deep learning model which are used to review knowledge acquired from previous datasets. The performance of RL was validated through PPDL experiments. Simulations and real-world medical multi-institutional experiments were conducted using three types of binary classification electronic health record data. In the real-world experiments, the global area under the receiver operating curve was 0.710 for RL and 0.655 for TL. Thus, RL was highly effective in retaining previously learned knowledge.
Potrika: Raw and Balanced Newspaper Datasets in the Bangla Language with Eight Topics and Five Attributes
Authors: Istiak Ahmad, Fahad AlQurashi, Rashid Mehmood
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, News Classification

Knowledge is central to human and scientific developments. Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows automated analysis and creation of knowledge. Data is a crucial NLP and machine learning ingredient. The scarcity of open datasets is a well-known problem in machine and deep learning research. This is very much the case for textual NLP datasets in English and other major world languages. For the Bangla language, the situation is even more challenging and the number of large datasets for NLP research is practically nil. We hereby present Potrika, a large single-label Bangla news article textual dataset curated for NLP research from six popular online news portals in Bangladesh (Jugantor, Jaijaidin, Ittefaq, Kaler Kontho, Inqilab, and Somoyer Alo) for the period 2014-2020. The articles are classified into eight distinct categories (National, Sports, International, Entertainment, Economy, Education, Politics, and Science \& Technology) providing five attributes (News Article, Category, Headline, Publication Date, and Newspaper Source). The raw dataset contains 185.51 million words and 12.57 million sentences contained in 664,880 news articles. Moreover, using NLP augmentation techniques, we create from the raw (unbalanced) dataset another (balanced) dataset comprising 320,000 news articles with 40,000 articles in each of the eight news categories. Potrika contains both the datasets (raw and balanced) to suit a wide range of NLP research. By far, to the best of our knowledge, Potrika is the largest and the most extensive dataset for news classification.
6th Place Solution to Google Universal Image Embedding
Authors: S. Gkelios, A. Kastellos, S. Chatzichristofis
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

This paper presents the 6th place solution to the Google Universal Image Embedding competition on Kaggle. Our approach is based on the CLIP architecture, a powerful pre-trained model used to learn visual representation from natural language supervision. We also utilized the SubCenter ArcFace loss with dynamic margins to improve the distinctive power of class separability and embeddings. Finally, a diverse dataset has been created based on the test's set categories and the leaderboard's feedback. By carefully crafting a training scheme to enhance transfer learning, our submission scored 0.685 on the private leaderboard.