pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Text to Image Synthesis using Stacked Conditional Variational Autoencoders and Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Haileleol Tibebu, Aadil Malik, Varuna De Silva
Date: 2022-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Synthesizing a realistic image from textual description is a major challenge in computer vision. Current text to image synthesis approaches falls short of producing a highresolution image that represent a text descriptor. Most existing studies rely either on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Auto Encoders (VAEs). GANs has the capability to produce sharper images but lacks the diversity of outputs, whereas VAEs are good at producing a diverse range of outputs, but the images generated are often blurred. Taking into account the relative advantages of both GANs and VAEs, we proposed a new stacked Conditional VAE (CVAE) and Conditional GAN (CGAN) network architecture for synthesizing images conditioned on a text description. This study uses Conditional VAEs as an initial generator to produce a high-level sketch of the text descriptor. This high-level sketch output from first stage and a text descriptor is used as an input to the conditional GAN network. The second stage GAN produces a 256x256 high resolution image. The proposed architecture benefits from a conditioning augmentation and a residual block on the Conditional GAN network to achieve the results. Multiple experiments were conducted using CUB and Oxford-102 dataset and the result of the proposed approach is compared against state-ofthe-art techniques such as StackGAN. The experiments illustrate that the proposed method generates a high-resolution image conditioned on text descriptions and yield competitive results based on Inception and Frechet Inception Score using both datasets
Physical Interaction and Manipulation of the Environment using Aerial Robots
Authors: Azarakhsh Keipour
Date: 2022-07-06 00:00:00

The physical interaction of aerial robots with their environment has countless potential applications and is an emerging area with many open challenges. Fully-actuated multirotors have been introduced to tackle some of these challenges. They provide complete control over position and orientation and eliminate the need for attaching a multi-DoF manipulation arm to the robot. However, there are many open problems before they can be used in real-world applications. Researchers have introduced some methods for physical interaction in limited settings. Their experiments primarily use prototype-level software without an efficient path to integration with real-world applications. We describe a new cost-effective solution for integrating these robots with the existing software and hardware flight systems for real-world applications and expand it to physical interaction applications. On the other hand, the existing control approaches for fully-actuated robots assume conservative limits for the thrusts and moments available to the robot. Using conservative assumptions for these already-inefficient robots makes their interactions even less optimal and may even result in many feasible physical interaction applications becoming infeasible. This work proposes a real-time method for estimating the complete set of instantaneously available forces and moments that robots can use to optimize their physical interaction performance. Finally, many real-world applications where aerial robots can improve the existing manual solutions deal with deformable objects. However, the perception and planning for their manipulation is still challenging. This research explores how aerial physical interaction can be extended to deformable objects. It provides a detection method suitable for manipulating deformable one-dimensional objects and introduces a new perspective on planning the manipulation of these objects.
Perfusion imaging in deep prostate cancer detection from mp-MRI: can we take advantage of it?
Authors: Audrey Duran, Gaspard Dussert, Carole Lartizien
Date: 2022-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

To our knowledge, all deep computer-aided detection and diagnosis (CAD) systems for prostate cancer (PCa) detection consider bi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (bp-MRI) only, including T2w and ADC sequences while excluding the 4D perfusion sequence,which is however part of standard clinical protocols for this diagnostic task. In this paper, we question strategies to integrate information from perfusion imaging in deep neural architectures. To do so, we evaluate several ways to encode the perfusion information in a U-Net like architecture, also considering early versus mid fusion strategies. We compare performance of multiparametric MRI (mp-MRI) models with the baseline bp-MRI model based on a private dataset of 219 mp-MRI exams. Perfusion maps derived from dynamic contrast enhanced MR exams are shown to positively impact segmentation and grading performance of PCa lesions, especially the 3D MR volume corresponding to the maximum slope of the wash-in curve as well as Tmax perfusion maps. The latter mp-MRI models indeed outperform the bp-MRI one whatever the fusion strategy, with Cohen's kappa score of 0.318$\pm$0.019 for the bp-MRI model and 0.378 $\pm$ 0.033 for the model including the maximum slope with a mid fusion strategy, also achieving competitive Cohen's kappa score compared to state of the art.
Training Transformers Together
Authors: Alexander Borzunov, Max Ryabinin, Tim Dettmers, Quentin Lhoest, Lucile Saulnier, Michael Diskin, Yacine Jernite, Thomas Wolf
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00

The infrastructure necessary for training state-of-the-art models is becoming overly expensive, which makes training such models affordable only to large corporations and institutions. Recent work proposes several methods for training such models collaboratively, i.e., by pooling together hardware from many independent parties and training a shared model over the Internet. In this demonstration, we collaboratively trained a text-to-image transformer similar to OpenAI DALL-E. We invited the viewers to join the ongoing training run, showing them instructions on how to contribute using the available hardware. We explained how to address the engineering challenges associated with such a training run (slow communication, limited memory, uneven performance between devices, and security concerns) and discussed how the viewers can set up collaborative training runs themselves. Finally, we show that the resulting model generates images of reasonable quality on a number of prompts.
Inferring Structural Parameters of Low-Surface-Brightness-Galaxies with Uncertainty Quantification using Bayesian Neural Networks
Authors: Dimitrios Tanoglidis, Aleksandra Ćiprijanović, Alex Drlica-Wagner
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

Measuring the structural parameters (size, total brightness, light concentration, etc.) of galaxies is a significant first step towards a quantitative description of different galaxy populations. In this work, we demonstrate that a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) can be used for the inference, with uncertainty quantification, of such morphological parameters from simulated low-surface-brightness galaxy images. Compared to traditional profile-fitting methods, we show that the uncertainties obtained using BNNs are comparable in magnitude, well-calibrated, and the point estimates of the parameters are closer to the true values. Our method is also significantly faster, which is very important with the advent of the era of large galaxy surveys and big data in astrophysics.
Stochastic optimal well control in subsurface reservoirs using reinforcement learning
Authors: Atish Dixit, Ahmed H. Elsheikh
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a case study of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) framework to solve stochastic optimal control for a predefined parameter uncertainty distribution and partially observable system. We focus on robust optimal well control problem which is a subject of intensive research activities in the field of subsurface reservoir management. For this problem, the system is partially observed since the data is only available at well locations. Furthermore, the model parameters are highly uncertain due to sparsity of available field data. In principle, RL algorithms are capable of learning optimal action policies -- a map from states to actions -- to maximize a numerical reward signal. In deep RL, this mapping from state to action is parameterized using a deep neural network. In the RL formulation of the robust optimal well control problem, the states are represented by saturation and pressure values at well locations while the actions represent the valve openings controlling the flow through wells. The numerical reward refers to the total sweep efficiency and the uncertain model parameter is the subsurface permeability field. The model parameter uncertainties are handled by introducing a domain randomisation scheme that exploits cluster analysis on its uncertainty distribution. We present numerical results using two state-of-the-art RL algorithms, proximal policy optimization (PPO) and advantage actor-critic (A2C), on two subsurface flow test cases representing two distinct uncertainty distributions of permeability field. The results were benchmarked against optimisation results obtained using differential evolution algorithm. Furthermore, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed use of RL by evaluating the learned control policy on unseen samples drawn from the parameter uncertainty distribution that were not used during the training process.
Adaptive Personlization in Federated Learning for Highly Non-i.i.d. Data
Authors: Yousef Yeganeh, Azade Farshad, Johann Boschmann, Richard Gaus, Maximilian Frantzen, Nassir Navab
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Federated Learning, Lesion Classification, Meta-Learning, Skin Lesion Classification

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed learning method that offers medical institutes the prospect of collaboration in a global model while preserving the privacy of their patients. Although most medical centers conduct similar medical imaging tasks, their differences, such as specializations, number of patients, and devices, lead to distinctive data distributions. Data heterogeneity poses a challenge for FL and the personalization of the local models. In this work, we investigate an adaptive hierarchical clustering method for FL to produce intermediate semi-global models, so clients with similar data distribution have the chance of forming a more specialized model. Our method forms several clusters consisting of clients with the most similar data distributions; then, each cluster continues to train separately. Inside the cluster, we use meta-learning to improve the personalization of the participants' models. We compare the clustering approach with classical FedAvg and centralized training by evaluating our proposed methods on the HAM10k dataset for skin lesion classification with extreme heterogeneous data distribution. Our experiments demonstrate significant performance gain in heterogeneous distribution compared to standard FL methods in classification accuracy. Moreover, we show that the models converge faster if applied in clusters and outperform centralized training while using only a small subset of data.
Differentially Private Stochastic Linear Bandits: (Almost) for Free
Authors: Osama A. Hanna, Antonious M. Girgis, Christina Fragouli, Suhas Diggavi
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose differentially private algorithms for the problem of stochastic linear bandits in the central, local and shuffled models. In the central model, we achieve almost the same regret as the optimal non-private algorithms, which means we get privacy for free. In particular, we achieve a regret of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}+\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ matching the known lower bound for private linear bandits, while the best previously known algorithm achieves $\tilde{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\sqrt{T})$. In the local case, we achieve a regret of $\tilde{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon}{\sqrt{T}})$ which matches the non-private regret for constant $\epsilon$, but suffers a regret penalty when $\epsilon$ is small. In the shuffled model, we also achieve regret of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T}+\frac{1}{\epsilon})$ %for small $\epsilon$ as in the central case, while the best previously known algorithm suffers a regret of $\tilde{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon}{T^{3/5}})$. Our numerical evaluation validates our theoretical results.
Machine Learning to Predict Aerodynamic Stall
Authors: Ettore Saetta, Renato Tognaccini, Gianluca Iaccarino
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decoder

A convolutional autoencoder is trained using a database of airfoil aerodynamic simulations and assessed in terms of overall accuracy and interpretability. The goal is to predict the stall and to investigate the ability of the autoencoder to distinguish between the linear and non-linear response of the airfoil pressure distribution to changes in the angle of attack. After a sensitivity analysis on the learning infrastructure, we investigate the latent space identified by the autoencoder targeting extreme compression rates, i.e. very low-dimensional reconstructions. We also propose a strategy to use the decoder to generate new synthetic airfoil geometries and aerodynamic solutions by interpolation and extrapolation in the latent representation learned by the autoencoder.
Representation Learning in Continuous-Time Dynamic Signed Networks
Authors: Kartik Sharma, Mohit Raghavendra, Yeon Chang Lee, Anand Kumar M, Srijan Kumar
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Link Sign Prediction, Representation Learning

Signed networks allow us to model conflicting relationships and interactions, such as friend/enemy and support/oppose. These signed interactions happen in real-time. Modeling such dynamics of signed networks is crucial to understanding the evolution of polarization in the network and enabling effective prediction of the signed structure (i.e., link signs and signed weights) in the future. However, existing works have modeled either (static) signed networks or dynamic (unsigned) networks but not dynamic signed networks. Since both sign and dynamics inform the graph structure in different ways, it is non-trivial to model how to combine the two features. In this work, we propose a new Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based approach to model dynamic signed networks, named SEMBA: Signed link's Evolution using Memory modules and Balanced Aggregation. Here, the idea is to incorporate the signs of temporal interactions using separate modules guided by balance theory and to evolve the embeddings from a higher-order neighborhood. Experiments on 4 real-world datasets and 4 different tasks demonstrate that SEMBA consistently and significantly outperforms the baselines by up to $80\%$ on the tasks of predicting signs of future links while matching the state-of-the-art performance on predicting the existence of these links in the future. We find that this improvement is due specifically to the superior performance of SEMBA on the minority negative class.
Neural Stein critics with staged $L^2$-regularization
Authors: Matthew Repasky, Xiuyuan Cheng, Yao Xie
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00

Learning to differentiate model distributions from observed data is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning, and high-dimensional data remains a challenging setting for such problems. Metrics that quantify the disparity in probability distributions, such as the Stein discrepancy, play an important role in high-dimensional statistical testing. In this paper, we investigate the role of $L^2$ regularization in training a neural network Stein critic so as to distinguish between data sampled from an unknown probability distribution and a nominal model distribution. Making a connection to the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory, we develop a novel staging procedure for the weight of regularization over training time, which leverages the advantages of highly-regularized training at early times. Theoretically, we prove the approximation of the training dynamic by the kernel optimization, namely the ``lazy training'', when the $L^2$ regularization weight is large, and training on $n$ samples converge at a rate of ${O}(n^{-1/2})$ up to a log factor. The result guarantees learning the optimal critic assuming sufficient alignment with the leading eigen-modes of the zero-time NTK. The benefit of the staged $L^2$ regularization is demonstrated on simulated high dimensional data and an application to evaluating generative models of image data.
On the Relationship Between Adversarial Robustness and Decision Region in Deep Neural Network
Authors: SeongJin Park, Haedong Jeong, Giyoung Jeon, Jaesik Choi
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Robustness

In general, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are evaluated by the generalization performance measured on unseen data excluded from the training phase. Along with the development of DNNs, the generalization performance converges to the state-of-the-art and it becomes difficult to evaluate DNNs solely based on this metric. The robustness against adversarial attack has been used as an additional metric to evaluate DNNs by measuring their vulnerability. However, few studies have been performed to analyze the adversarial robustness in terms of the geometry in DNNs. In this work, we perform an empirical study to analyze the internal properties of DNNs that affect model robustness under adversarial attacks. In particular, we propose the novel concept of the Populated Region Set (PRS), where training samples are populated more frequently, to represent the internal properties of DNNs in a practical setting. From systematic experiments with the proposed concept, we provide empirical evidence to validate that a low PRS ratio has a strong relationship with the adversarial robustness of DNNs. We also devise PRS regularizer leveraging the characteristics of PRS to improve the adversarial robustness without adversarial training.
Efficient Pruning for Machine Learning Under Homomorphic Encryption
Authors: Ehud Aharoni, Moran Baruch, Pradip Bose, Alper Buyuktosunoglu, Nir Drucker, Subhankar Pal, Tomer Pelleg, Kanthi Sarpatwar, Hayim Shaul, Omri Soceanu, Roman Vaculin
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Denoising, Image Compression, Privacy Preserving

Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) solutions are gaining widespread popularity. Among these, many rely on homomorphic encryption (HE) that offers confidentiality of the model and the data, but at the cost of large latency and memory requirements. Pruning neural network (NN) parameters improves latency and memory in plaintext ML but has little impact if directly applied to HE-based PPML. We introduce a framework called HE-PEx that comprises new pruning methods, on top of a packing technique called tile tensors, for reducing the latency and memory of PPML inference. HE-PEx uses permutations to prune additional ciphertexts, and expansion to recover inference loss. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods for pruning fully-connected and convolutional layers in NNs on PPML tasks, namely, image compression, denoising, and classification, with autoencoders, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We implement and deploy our networks atop a framework called HElayers, which shows a 10-35% improvement in inference speed and a 17-35% decrease in memory requirement over the unpruned network, corresponding to 33-65% fewer ciphertexts, within a 2.5% degradation in inference accuracy over the unpruned network. Compared to the state-of-the-art pruning technique for PPML, our techniques generate networks with 70% fewer ciphertexts, on average, for the same degradation limit.
Machine learning of percolation models using graph convolutional neural networks
Authors: Hua Tian, Lirong Zhang, Youjin Deng, Wanzhou Zhang
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Epidemiology

Percolation is an important topic in climate, physics, materials science, epidemiology, finance, and so on. Prediction of percolation thresholds with machine learning methods remains challenging. In this paper, we build a powerful graph convolutional neural network to study the percolation in both supervised and unsupervised ways. From a supervised learning perspective, the graph convolutional neural network simultaneously and correctly trains data of different lattice types, such as the square and triangular lattices. For the unsupervised perspective, combining the graph convolutional neural network and the confusion method, the percolation threshold can be obtained by the "W" shaped performance. The finding of this work opens up the possibility of building a more general framework that can probe the percolation-related phenomenon.
Group Equality in Adaptive Submodular Maximization
Authors: Shaojie Tang, Jing Yuan
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Summarization, Fairness

In this paper, we study the classic submodular maximization problem subject to a group equality constraint under both non-adaptive and adaptive settings. It has been shown that the utility function of many machine learning applications, including data summarization, influence maximization in social networks, and personalized recommendation, satisfies the property of submodularity. Hence, maximizing a submodular function subject to various constraints can be found at the heart of many of those applications. On a high level, submodular maximization aims to select a group of most representative items (e.g., data points). However, the design of most existing algorithms does not incorporate the fairness constraint, leading to under- or over-representation of some particular groups. This motivates us to study the submodular maximization problem with group equality, where we aim to select a group of items to maximize a (possibly non-monotone) submodular utility function subject to a group equality constraint. To this end, we develop the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for this problem. The design of our algorithm is robust enough to be extended to solving the submodular maximization problem under a more complicated adaptive setting. Moreover, we further extend our study to incorporating a global cardinality constraint and other fairness notations.
Calibrate to Interpret
Authors: Gregory Scafarto, Nicolas Posocco, Antoine Bonnefoy
Date: 2022-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, image-classification, Image Classification

Trustworthy machine learning is driving a large number of ML community works in order to improve ML acceptance and adoption. The main aspect of trustworthy machine learning are the followings: fairness, uncertainty, robustness, explainability and formal guaranties. Each of these individual domains gains the ML community interest, visible by the number of related publications. However few works tackle the interconnection between these fields. In this paper we show a first link between uncertainty and explainability, by studying the relation between calibration and interpretation. As the calibration of a given model changes the way it scores samples, and interpretation approaches often rely on these scores, it seems safe to assume that the confidence-calibration of a model interacts with our ability to interpret such model. In this paper, we show, in the context of networks trained on image classification tasks, to what extent interpretations are sensitive to confidence-calibration. It leads us to suggest a simple practice to improve the interpretation outcomes: Calibrate to Interpret.