pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SASS: Data and Methods for Subject Aware Sentence Simplification
Authors: Brad Windsor, Luke Martin, Anand Tyagi
Date: 2023-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Data Augmentation, Sentence

Sentence simplification tends to focus on the generic simplification of sentences by making them more readable and easier to understand. This paper provides a dataset aimed at training models that perform subject aware sentence simplifications rather than simplifying sentences as a whole. We also test models on that dataset which are inspired by model architecture used in abstractive summarization. We hand generated portions of the data and augment the dataset by further manipulating those hand written simplifications. Our results show that data-augmentation, data-masking, and model architecture choices used in summarization provide a solid baseline for comparison on subject aware simplification.
Identification of Negative Transfers in Multitask Learning Using Surrogate Models
Authors: Dongyue Li, Huy L. Nguyen, Hongyang R. Zhang
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Multitask learning is widely used in practice to train a low-resource target task by augmenting it with multiple related source tasks. Yet, naively combining all the source tasks with a target task does not always improve the prediction performance for the target task due to negative transfers. Thus, a critical problem in multitask learning is identifying subsets of source tasks that would benefit the target task. This problem is computationally challenging since the number of subsets grows exponentially with the number of source tasks; efficient heuristics for subset selection do not always capture the relationship between task subsets and multitask learning performances. In this paper, we introduce an efficient procedure to address this problem via surrogate modeling. In surrogate modeling, we sample (random) subsets of source tasks and precompute their multitask learning performances. Then, we approximate the precomputed performances with a linear regression model that can also predict the multitask performance of unseen task subsets. We show theoretically and empirically that fitting this model only requires sampling linearly many subsets in the number of source tasks. The fitted model provides a relevance score between each source and target task. We use the relevance scores to perform subset selection for multitask learning by thresholding. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach predicts negative transfers from multiple source tasks to target tasks much more accurately than existing task affinity measures. Additionally, we demonstrate that for several weak supervision datasets, our approach consistently improves upon existing optimization methods for multitask learning.
Measuring Classification Decision Certainty and Doubt
Authors: Alexander M. Berenbeim, Iain J. Cruickshank, Susmit Jha, Robert H. Thomson, Nathaniel D. Bastian
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Decision Making

Quantitative characterizations and estimations of uncertainty are of fundamental importance in optimization and decision-making processes. Herein, we propose intuitive scores, which we call certainty and doubt, that can be used in both a Bayesian and frequentist framework to assess and compare the quality and uncertainty of predictions in (multi-)classification decision machine learning problems.
Viewpoint Equivariance for Multi-View 3D Object Detection
Authors: Dian Chen, Jie Li, Vitor Guizilini, Rares Ambrus, Adrien Gaidon
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Understanding

3D object detection from visual sensors is a cornerstone capability of robotic systems. State-of-the-art methods focus on reasoning and decoding object bounding boxes from multi-view camera input. In this work we gain intuition from the integral role of multi-view consistency in 3D scene understanding and geometric learning. To this end, we introduce VEDet, a novel 3D object detection framework that exploits 3D multi-view geometry to improve localization through viewpoint awareness and equivariance. VEDet leverages a query-based transformer architecture and encodes the 3D scene by augmenting image features with positional encodings from their 3D perspective geometry. We design view-conditioned queries at the output level, which enables the generation of multiple virtual frames during training to learn viewpoint equivariance by enforcing multi-view consistency. The multi-view geometry injected at the input level as positional encodings and regularized at the loss level provides rich geometric cues for 3D object detection, leading to state-of-the-art performance on the nuScenes benchmark. The code and model are made available at https://github.com/TRI-ML/VEDet.
OVeNet: Offset Vector Network for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Stamatis Alexandropoulos, Christos Sakaridis, Petros Maragos
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in visual scene understanding. We focus on the supervised setting, where ground-truth semantic annotations are available. Based on knowledge about the high regularity of real-world scenes, we propose a method for improving class predictions by learning to selectively exploit information from neighboring pixels. In particular, our method is based on the prior that for each pixel, there is a seed pixel in its close neighborhood sharing the same prediction with the former. Motivated by this prior, we design a novel two-head network, named Offset Vector Network (OVeNet), which generates both standard semantic predictions and a dense 2D offset vector field indicating the offset from each pixel to the respective seed pixel, which is used to compute an alternative, seed-based semantic prediction. The two predictions are adaptively fused at each pixel using a learnt dense confidence map for the predicted offset vector field. We supervise offset vectors indirectly via optimizing the seed-based prediction and via a novel loss on the confidence map. Compared to the baseline state-of-the-art architectures HRNet and HRNet+OCR on which OVeNet is built, the latter achieves significant performance gains on three prominent benchmarks for semantic segmentation, namely Cityscapes, ACDC and ADE20K. Code is available at https://github.com/stamatisalex/OVeNet
Improving robustness of jet tagging algorithms with adversarial training: exploring the loss surface
Authors: Annika Stein
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Jet Tagging

In the field of high-energy physics, deep learning algorithms continue to gain in relevance and provide performance improvements over traditional methods, for example when identifying rare signals or finding complex patterns. From an analyst's perspective, obtaining highest possible performance is desirable, but recently, some attention has been shifted towards studying robustness of models to investigate how well these perform under slight distortions of input features. Especially for tasks that involve many (low-level) inputs, the application of deep neural networks brings new challenges. In the context of jet flavor tagging, adversarial attacks are used to probe a typical classifier's vulnerability and can be understood as a model for systematic uncertainties. A corresponding defense strategy, adversarial training, improves robustness, while maintaining high performance. Investigating the loss surface corresponding to the inputs and models in question reveals geometric interpretations of robustness, taking correlations into account.
Learning with Explanation Constraints
Authors: Rattana Pukdee, Dylan Sam, J. Zico Kolter, Maria-Florina Balcan, Pradeep Ravikumar
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

As larger deep learning models are hard to interpret, there has been a recent focus on generating explanations of these black-box models. In contrast, we may have apriori explanations of how models should behave. In this paper, we formalize this notion as learning from explanation constraints and provide a learning theoretic framework to analyze how such explanations can improve the learning of our models. One may naturally ask, "When would these explanations be helpful?" Our first key contribution addresses this question via a class of models that satisfies these explanation constraints in expectation over new data. We provide a characterization of the benefits of these models (in terms of the reduction of their Rademacher complexities) for a canonical class of explanations given by gradient information in the settings of both linear models and two layer neural networks. In addition, we provide an algorithmic solution for our framework, via a variational approximation that achieves better performance and satisfies these constraints more frequently, when compared to simpler augmented Lagrangian methods to incorporate these explanations. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach over a large array of synthetic and real-world experiments.
GANTEE: Generative Adversatial Network for Taxonomy Entering Evaluation
Authors: Zhouhong Gu, Sihang Jiang, Jingping Liu, Yanghua Xiao, Hongwei Feng, Zhixu Li, Jiaqing Liang, Jian Zhong
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Taxonomy Expansion

Taxonomy is formulated as directed acyclic concepts graphs or trees that support many downstream tasks. Many new coming concepts need to be added to an existing taxonomy. The traditional taxonomy expansion task aims only at finding the best position for new coming concepts in the existing taxonomy. However, they have two drawbacks when being applied to the real-scenarios. The previous methods suffer from low-efficiency since they waste much time when most of the new coming concepts are indeed noisy concepts. They also suffer from low-effectiveness since they collect training samples only from the existing taxonomy, which limits the ability of the model to mine more hypernym-hyponym relationships among real concepts. This paper proposes a pluggable framework called Generative Adversarial Network for Taxonomy Entering Evaluation (GANTEE) to alleviate these drawbacks. A generative adversarial network is designed in this framework by discriminative models to alleviate the first drawback and the generative model to alleviate the second drawback. Two discriminators are used in GANTEE to provide long-term and short-term rewards, respectively. Moreover, to further improve the efficiency, pre-trained language models are used to retrieve the representation of the concepts quickly. The experiments on three real-world large-scale datasets with two different languages show that GANTEE improves the performance of the existing taxonomy expansion methods in both effectiveness and efficiency.
Informed Machine Learning, Centrality, CNN, Relevant Document Detection, Repatriation of Indigenous Human Remains
Authors: Md Abul Bashar, Richi Nayak, Gareth Knapman, Paul Turnbull, Cressida Fforde
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Among the pressing issues facing Australian and other First Nations peoples is the repatriation of the bodily remains of their ancestors, which are currently held in Western scientific institutions. The success of securing the return of these remains to their communities for reburial depends largely on locating information within scientific and other literature published between 1790 and 1970 documenting their theft, donation, sale, or exchange between institutions. This article reports on collaborative research by data scientists and social science researchers in the Research, Reconcile, Renew Network (RRR) to develop and apply text mining techniques to identify this vital information. We describe our work to date on developing a machine learning-based solution to automate the process of finding and semantically analysing relevant texts. Classification models, particularly deep learning-based models, are known to have low accuracy when trained with small amounts of labelled (i.e. relevant/non-relevant) documents. To improve the accuracy of our detection model, we explore the use of an Informed Neural Network (INN) model that describes documentary content using expert-informed contextual knowledge. Only a few labelled documents are used to provide specificity to the model, using conceptually related keywords identified by RRR experts in provenance research. The results confirm the value of using an INN network model for identifying relevant documents related to the investigation of the global commercial trade in Indigenous human remains. Empirical analysis suggests that this INN model can be generalized for use by other researchers in the social sciences and humanities who want to extract relevant information from large textual corpora.
3Mformer: Multi-order Multi-mode Transformer for Skeletal Action Recognition
Authors: Lei Wang, Piotr Koniusz
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Many skeletal action recognition models use GCNs to represent the human body by 3D body joints connected body parts. GCNs aggregate one- or few-hop graph neighbourhoods, and ignore the dependency between not linked body joints. We propose to form hypergraph to model hyper-edges between graph nodes (e.g., third- and fourth-order hyper-edges capture three and four nodes) which help capture higher-order motion patterns of groups of body joints. We split action sequences into temporal blocks, Higher-order Transformer (HoT) produces embeddings of each temporal block based on (i) the body joints, (ii) pairwise links of body joints and (iii) higher-order hyper-edges of skeleton body joints. We combine such HoT embeddings of hyper-edges of orders 1, ..., r by a novel Multi-order Multi-mode Transformer (3Mformer) with two modules whose order can be exchanged to achieve coupled-mode attention on coupled-mode tokens based on 'channel-temporal block', 'order-channel-body joint', 'channel-hyper-edge (any order)' and 'channel-only' pairs. The first module, called Multi-order Pooling (MP), additionally learns weighted aggregation along the hyper-edge mode, whereas the second module, Temporal block Pooling (TP), aggregates along the temporal block mode. Our end-to-end trainable network yields state-of-the-art results compared to GCN-, transformer- and hypergraph-based counterparts.
A Survey on the Densest Subgraph Problem and Its Variants
Authors: Tommaso Lanciano, Atsushi Miyauchi, Adriano Fazzone, Francesco Bonchi
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

The Densest Subgraph Problem requires to find, in a given graph, a subset of vertices whose induced subgraph maximizes a measure of density. The problem has received a great deal of attention in the algorithmic literature since the early 1970s, with many variants proposed and many applications built on top of this basic definition. Recent years have witnessed a revival of research interest in this problem with several important contributions, including some groundbreaking results, published in 2022 and 2023. This survey provides a deep overview of the fundamental results and an exhaustive coverage of the many variants proposed in the literature, with a special attention to the most recent results. The survey also presents a comprehensive overview of applications and discusses some interesting open problems for this evergreen research topic.
Diverse Motion In-betweening with Dual Posture Stitching
Authors: Tianxiang Ren, Jubo Yu, Shihui Guo, Ying Ma, Yutao Ouyang, Zijiao Zeng, Yazhan Zhang, Yipeng Qin
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: motion in-betweening

In-betweening is a technique for generating transitions given initial and target character states. The majority of existing works require multiple (often $>$10) frames as input, which are not always accessible. Our work deals with a focused yet challenging problem: to generate the transition when given exactly two frames (only the first and last). To cope with this challenging scenario, we implement our bi-directional scheme which generates forward and backward transitions from the start and end frames with two adversarial autoregressive networks, and stitches them in the middle of the transition where there is no strict ground truth. The autoregressive networks based on conditional variational autoencoders (CVAE) are optimized by searching for a pair of optimal latent codes that minimize a novel stitching loss between their outputs. Results show that our method achieves higher motion quality and more diverse results than existing methods on both the LaFAN1 and Human3.6m datasets.
Federated Learning without Full Labels: A Survey
Authors: Yilun Jin, Yang Liu, Kai Chen, Qiang Yang
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Survey, Transfer Learning

Data privacy has become an increasingly important concern in real-world big data applications such as machine learning. To address the problem, federated learning (FL) has been a promising solution to building effective machine learning models from decentralized and private data. Existing federated learning algorithms mainly tackle the supervised learning problem, where data are assumed to be fully labeled. However, in practice, fully labeled data is often hard to obtain, as the participants may not have sufficient domain expertise, or they lack the motivation and tools to label data. Therefore, the problem of federated learning without full labels is important in real-world FL applications. In this paper, we discuss how the problem can be solved with machine learning techniques that leverage unlabeled data. We present a survey of methods that combine FL with semi-supervised learning, self-supervised learning, and transfer learning methods. We also summarize the datasets used to evaluate FL methods without full labels. Finally, we highlight future directions in the context of FL without full labels.
Design of a Smart Waste Management System for the City of Johannesburg
Authors: Beauty L. Komane, Topside E. Mathonsi
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Every human being in this world produces waste. South Africa is a developing country with many townships that have limited waste resources. Over-increasing population growth overpowers the volume of most municipal authorities to provide even the most essential services. Waste in townships is produced via littering, dumping of bins, cutting of trees, dumping of waste near rivers, and overrunning of waste bins. Waste increases diseases, air pollution, and environmental pollution, and lastly increases gas emissions that contribute to the release of greenhouse gases. The ungathered waste is dumped widely in the streets and drains contributing to flooding, breeding of insects, rodent vectors, and spreading of diseases. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to design a smart waste management system for the city of Johannesburg. The city of Johannesburg contains waste municipality workers and has provided some areas with waste resources such as waste bins and trucks for collecting waste. But the problem is that the resources only are not enough to solve the problem of waste in the city. The waste municipality uses traditional ways of collecting waste such as going to each street and picking up waste bins. The traditional way has worked for years but as the population is increasing more waste is produced which causes various problems for the waste municipalities and the public at large. The proposed system consists of sensors, user applications, and a real-time monitoring system. This paper adopts the experimental methodology.
Beta-VAE has 2 Behaviors: PCA or ICA?
Authors: Zhouzheng Li, Hao liu
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Disentanglement, Representation Learning

Beta-VAE is a very classical model for disentangled representation learning, the use of an expanding bottleneck that allow information into the decoder gradually is key to representation disentanglement as well as high-quality reconstruction. During recent experiments on such fascinating structure, we discovered that the total amount of latent variables can affect the representation learnt by the network: with very few latent variables, the network tend to learn the most important or principal variables, acting like a PCA; with very large numbers of latent variables, the variables tend to be more disentangled, and act like an ICA. Our assumption is that the competition between latent variables while trying to gain the most information bandwidth can lead to this phenomenon.
Sem4SAP: Synonymous Expression Mining From Open Knowledge Graph For Language Model Synonym-Aware Pretraining
Authors: Zhouhong Gu, Sihang Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaqing Liang, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The model's ability to understand synonymous expression is crucial in many kinds of downstream tasks. It will make the model to better understand the similarity between context, and more robust to the synonym substitution attack. However, many Pretrained Language Model (PLM) lack synonym knowledge due to limitation of small-scale synsets and PLM's pretraining objectives. In this paper, we propose a framework called Sem4SAP to mine synsets from Open Knowledge Graph (Open-KG) and using the mined synsets to do synonym-aware pretraining for language models. We propose to coarsly filter the content in Open-KG and use the frequency information to better help the clustering process under low-resource unsupervised conditions. We expand the mined synsets by migrating core semantics between synonymous expressions.We also propose two novel and effective synonym-aware pre-training methods for injecting synonym knowledge into PLMs.Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sem4SAP can dramatically outperform the original PLMs and other baselines on ten different tasks.
Human Preference Score: Better Aligning Text-to-Image Models with Human Preference
Authors: Xiaoshi Wu, Keqiang Sun, Feng Zhu, Rui Zhao, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2023-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of deep generative models, with text-to-image models gaining significant attention from the public. However, existing models often generate images that do not align well with human preferences, such as awkward combinations of limbs and facial expressions. To address this issue, we collect a dataset of human choices on generated images from the Stable Foundation Discord channel. Our experiments demonstrate that current evaluation metrics for generative models do not correlate well with human choices. Thus, we train a human preference classifier with the collected dataset and derive a Human Preference Score (HPS) based on the classifier. Using HPS, we propose a simple yet effective method to adapt Stable Diffusion to better align with human preferences. Our experiments show that HPS outperforms CLIP in predicting human choices and has good generalization capability toward images generated from other models. By tuning Stable Diffusion with the guidance of HPS, the adapted model is able to generate images that are more preferred by human users. The project page is available here: https://tgxs002.github.io/align_sd_web/ .