pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Phasic Self-Imitative Reduction for Sparse-Reward Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yunfei Li, Tian Gao, Jiaqi Yang, Huazhe Xu, Yi Wu
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

It has been a recent trend to leverage the power of supervised learning (SL) towards more effective reinforcement learning (RL) methods. We propose a novel phasic approach by alternating online RL and offline SL for tackling sparse-reward goal-conditioned problems. In the online phase, we perform RL training and collect rollout data while in the offline phase, we perform SL on those successful trajectories from the dataset. To further improve sample efficiency, we adopt additional techniques in the online phase including task reduction to generate more feasible trajectories and a value-difference-based intrinsic reward to alleviate the sparse-reward issue. We call this overall algorithm, PhAsic self-Imitative Reduction (PAIR). PAIR substantially outperforms both non-phasic RL and phasic SL baselines on sparse-reward goal-conditioned robotic control problems, including a challenging stacking task. PAIR is the first RL method that learns to stack 6 cubes with only 0/1 success rewards from scratch.
A multi-model-based deep learning framework for short text multiclass classification with the imbalanced and extremely small data set
Authors: JiaJun Tong, Zhixiao Wang, Xiaobin Rui
Date: 2022-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

Text classification plays an important role in many practical applications. In the real world, there are extremely small datasets. Most existing methods adopt pre-trained neural network models to handle this kind of dataset. However, these methods are either difficult to deploy on mobile devices because of their large output size or cannot fully extract the deep semantic information between phrases and clauses. This paper proposes a multimodel-based deep learning framework for short-text multiclass classification with an imbalanced and extremely small data set. Our framework mainly includes five layers: The encoder layer uses DISTILBERT to obtain context-sensitive dynamic word vectors that are difficult to represent in traditional feature engineering methods. Since the transformer part of this layer is distilled, our framework is compressed. Then, we use the next two layers to extract deep semantic information. The output of the encoder layer is sent to a bidirectional LSTM network, and the feature matrix is extracted hierarchically through the LSTM at the word and sentence level to obtain the fine-grained semantic representation. After that, the max-pooling layer converts the feature matrix into a lower-dimensional matrix, preserving only the obvious features. Finally, the feature matrix is taken as the input of a fully connected softmax layer, which contains a function that can convert the predicted linear vector into the output value as the probability of the text in each classification. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on an extremely small data set. It retains the state-of-the-art baseline performance in terms of precision, recall, accuracy, and F1 score, and through the model size, training time, and convergence epoch, we can conclude that our method can be deployed faster and lighter on mobile devices.
The Real Deal: A Review of Challenges and Opportunities in Moving Reinforcement Learning-Based Traffic Signal Control Systems Towards Reality
Authors: Rex Chen, Fei Fang, Norman Sadeh
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traffic Signal Control

Traffic signal control (TSC) is a high-stakes domain that is growing in importance as traffic volume grows globally. An increasing number of works are applying reinforcement learning (RL) to TSC; RL can draw on an abundance of traffic data to improve signalling efficiency. However, RL-based signal controllers have never been deployed. In this work, we provide the first review of challenges that must be addressed before RL can be deployed for TSC. We focus on four challenges involving (1) uncertainty in detection, (2) reliability of communications, (3) compliance and interpretability, and (4) heterogeneous road users. We show that the literature on RL-based TSC has made some progress towards addressing each challenge. However, more work should take a systems thinking approach that considers the impacts of other pipeline components on RL.
A Disability Lens towards Biases in GPT-3 Generated Open-Ended Languages
Authors: Akhter Al Amin, Kazi Sinthia Kabir
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Language models (LM) are becoming prevalent in many language-based application spaces globally. Although these LMs are improving our day-to-day interactions with digital products, concerns remain whether open-ended languages or text generated from these models reveal any biases toward a specific group of people, thereby risking the usability of a certain product. There is a need to identify whether these models possess bias to improve the fairness in these models. This gap motivates our ongoing work, where we measured the two aspects of bias in GPT-3 generated text through a disability lens.
Equiformer: Equivariant Graph Attention Transformer for 3D Atomistic Graphs
Authors: Yi-Lun Liao, Tess Smidt
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Graph Neural Network, Graph Property Prediction, Initial Structure to Relaxed Energy (IS2RE), Direct, Molecular Property Prediction

Despite their widespread success in various domains, Transformer networks have yet to perform well across datasets in the domain of 3D atomistic graphs such as molecules even when 3D-related inductive biases like translational invariance and rotational equivariance are considered. In this paper, we demonstrate that Transformers can generalize well to 3D atomistic graphs and present Equiformer, a graph neural network leveraging the strength of Transformer architectures and incorporating SE(3)/E(3)-equivariant features based on irreducible representations (irreps). First, we propose a simple and effective architecture by only replacing original operations in Transformers with their equivariant counterparts and including tensor products. Using equivariant operations enables encoding equivariant information in channels of irreps features without complicating graph structures. With minimal modifications to Transformers, this architecture has already achieved strong empirical results. Second, we propose a novel attention mechanism called equivariant graph attention, which improves upon typical attention in Transformers through replacing dot product attention with multi-layer perceptron attention and including non-linear message passing. With these two innovations, Equiformer achieves competitive results to previous models on QM9, MD17 and OC20 datasets.
Never trust, always verify : a roadmap for Trustworthy AI?
Authors: Lionel Nganyewou Tidjon, Foutse khomh
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Selection bias

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming the corner stone of many systems used in our daily lives such as autonomous vehicles, healthcare systems, and unmanned aircraft systems. Machine Learning is a field of AI that enables systems to learn from data and make decisions on new data based on models to achieve a given goal. The stochastic nature of AI models makes verification and validation tasks challenging. Moreover, there are intrinsic biaises in AI models such as reproductibility bias, selection bias (e.g., races, genders, color), and reporting bias (i.e., results that do not reflect the reality). Increasingly, there is also a particular attention to the ethical, legal, and societal impacts of AI. AI systems are difficult to audit and certify because of their black-box nature. They also appear to be vulnerable to threats; AI systems can misbehave when untrusted data are given, making them insecure and unsafe. Governments, national and international organizations have proposed several principles to overcome these challenges but their applications in practice are limited and there are different interpretations in the principles that can bias implementations. In this paper, we examine trust in the context of AI-based systems to understand what it means for an AI system to be trustworthy and identify actions that need to be undertaken to ensure that AI systems are trustworthy. To achieve this goal, we first review existing approaches proposed for ensuring the trustworthiness of AI systems, in order to identify potential conceptual gaps in understanding what trustworthy AI is. Then, we suggest a trust (resp. zero-trust) model for AI and suggest a set of properties that should be satisfied to ensure the trustworthiness of AI systems.
Similarity-aware Positive Instance Sampling for Graph Contrastive Pre-training
Authors: Xueyi Liu, Yu Rong, Tingyang Xu, Fuchun Sun, Wenbing Huang, Junzhou Huang
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Classification, Graph Neural Network, Node Classification

Graph instance contrastive learning has been proved as an effective task for Graph Neural Network (GNN) pre-training. However, one key issue may seriously impede the representative power in existing works: Positive instances created by current methods often miss crucial information of graphs or even yield illegal instances (such as non-chemically-aware graphs in molecular generation). To remedy this issue, we propose to select positive graph instances directly from existing graphs in the training set, which ultimately maintains the legality and similarity to the target graphs. Our selection is based on certain domain-specific pair-wise similarity measurements as well as sampling from a hierarchical graph encoding similarity relations among graphs. Besides, we develop an adaptive node-level pre-training method to dynamically mask nodes to distribute them evenly in the graph. We conduct extensive experiments on $13$ graph classification and node classification benchmark datasets from various domains. The results demonstrate that the GNN models pre-trained by our strategies can outperform those trained-from-scratch models as well as the variants obtained by existing methods.
Do Trajectories Encode Verb Meaning?
Authors: Dylan Ebert, Chen Sun, Ellie Pavlick
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Representation Learning

Distributional models learn representations of words from text, but are criticized for their lack of grounding, or the linking of text to the non-linguistic world. Grounded language models have had success in learning to connect concrete categories like nouns and adjectives to the world via images and videos, but can struggle to isolate the meaning of the verbs themselves from the context in which they typically occur. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which trajectories (i.e. the position and rotation of objects over time) naturally encode verb semantics. We build a procedurally generated agent-object-interaction dataset, obtain human annotations for the verbs that occur in this data, and compare several methods for representation learning given the trajectories. We find that trajectories correlate as-is with some verbs (e.g., fall), and that additional abstraction via self-supervised pretraining can further capture nuanced differences in verb meaning (e.g., roll vs. slide).
World Value Functions: Knowledge Representation for Learning and Planning
Authors: Geraud Nangue Tasse, Benjamin Rosman, Steven James
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00

We propose world value functions (WVFs), a type of goal-oriented general value function that represents how to solve not just a given task, but any other goal-reaching task in an agent's environment. This is achieved by equipping an agent with an internal goal space defined as all the world states where it experiences a terminal transition. The agent can then modify the standard task rewards to define its own reward function, which provably drives it to learn how to achieve all reachable internal goals, and the value of doing so in the current task. We demonstrate two key benefits of WVFs in the context of learning and planning. In particular, given a learned WVF, an agent can compute the optimal policy in a new task by simply estimating the task's reward function. Furthermore, we show that WVFs also implicitly encode the transition dynamics of the environment, and so can be used to perform planning. Experimental results show that WVFs can be learned faster than regular value functions, while their ability to infer the environment's dynamics can be used to integrate learning and planning methods to further improve sample efficiency.
Measuring Representational Robustness of Neural Networks Through Shared Invariances
Authors: Vedant Nanda, Till Speicher, Camila Kolling, John P. Dickerson, Krishna P. Gummadi, Adrian Weller
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00

A major challenge in studying robustness in deep learning is defining the set of ``meaningless'' perturbations to which a given Neural Network (NN) should be invariant. Most work on robustness implicitly uses a human as the reference model to define such perturbations. Our work offers a new view on robustness by using another reference NN to define the set of perturbations a given NN should be invariant to, thus generalizing the reliance on a reference ``human NN'' to any NN. This makes measuring robustness equivalent to measuring the extent to which two NNs share invariances, for which we propose a measure called STIR. STIR re-purposes existing representation similarity measures to make them suitable for measuring shared invariances. Using our measure, we are able to gain insights into how shared invariances vary with changes in weight initialization, architecture, loss functions, and training dataset. Our implementation is available at: \url{https://github.com/nvedant07/STIR}.
Worldwide AI Ethics: a review of 200 guidelines and recommendations for AI governance
Authors: Nicholas Kluge Corrêa, Camila Galvão, James William Santos, Carolina Del Pino, Edson Pontes Pinto, Camila Barbosa, Diogo Massmann, Rodrigo Mambrini, Luiza Galvão, Edmund Terem, Nythamar de Oliveira
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization, Ethics

The utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) applications has experienced tremendous growth in recent years, bringing forth numerous benefits and conveniences. However, this expansion has also provoked ethical concerns, such as privacy breaches, algorithmic discrimination, security and reliability issues, transparency, and other unintended consequences. To determine whether a global consensus exists regarding the ethical principles that should govern AI applications and to contribute to the formation of future regulations, this paper conducts a meta-analysis of 200 governance policies and ethical guidelines for AI usage published by public bodies, academic institutions, private companies, and civil society organizations worldwide. We identified at least 17 resonating principles prevalent in the policies and guidelines of our dataset, released as an open-source database and tool. We present the limitations of performing a global scale analysis study paired with a critical analysis of our findings, presenting areas of consensus that should be incorporated into future regulatory efforts. All components tied to this work can be found in https://nkluge-correa.github.io/worldwide_AI-ethics/
CoSP: Co-supervised pretraining of pocket and ligand
Authors: Zhangyang Gao, Cheng Tan, Lirong Wu, Stan Z. Li
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Specificity

Can we inject the pocket-ligand interaction knowledge into the pre-trained model and jointly learn their chemical space? Pretraining molecules and proteins has attracted considerable attention in recent years, while most of these approaches focus on learning one of the chemical spaces and lack the injection of biological knowledge. We propose a co-supervised pretraining (CoSP) framework to simultaneously learn 3D pocket and ligand representations. We use a gated geometric message passing layer to model both 3D pockets and ligands, where each node's chemical features, geometric position and orientation are considered. To learn biological meaningful embeddings, we inject the pocket-ligand interaction knowledge into the pretraining model via contrastive loss. Considering the specificity of molecules, we further propose a chemical similarity-enhanced negative sampling strategy to improve the contrastive learning performance. Through extensive experiments, we conclude that CoSP can achieve competitive results in pocket matching, molecule property predictions, and virtual screening.
Intelligent Request Strategy Design in Recommender System
Authors: Xufeng Qian, Yue Xu, Fuyu Lv, Shengyu Zhang, Ziwen Jiang, Qingwen Liu, Xiaoyi Zeng, Tat-Seng Chua, Fei Wu
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, counterfactual, Recommendation Systems

Waterfall Recommender System (RS), a popular form of RS in mobile applications, is a stream of recommended items consisting of successive pages that can be browsed by scrolling. In waterfall RS, when a user finishes browsing a page, the edge (e.g., mobile phones) would send a request to the cloud server to get a new page of recommendations, known as the paging request mechanism. RSs typically put a large number of items into one page to reduce excessive resource consumption from numerous paging requests, which, however, would diminish the RSs' ability to timely renew the recommendations according to users' real-time interest and lead to a poor user experience. Intuitively, inserting additional requests inside pages to update the recommendations with a higher frequency can alleviate the problem. However, previous attempts, including only non-adaptive strategies (e.g., insert requests uniformly), would eventually lead to resource overconsumption. To this end, we envision a new learning task of edge intelligence named Intelligent Request Strategy Design (IRSD). It aims to improve the effectiveness of waterfall RSs by determining the appropriate occasions of request insertion based on users' real-time intention. Moreover, we propose a new paradigm of adaptive request insertion strategy named Uplift-based On-edge Smart Request Framework (AdaRequest). AdaRequest 1) captures the dynamic change of users' intentions by matching their real-time behaviors with their historical interests based on attention-based neural networks. 2) estimates the counterfactual uplift of user purchase brought by an inserted request based on causal inference. 3) determines the final request insertion strategy by maximizing the utility function under online resource constraints. We conduct extensive experiments on both offline dataset and online A/B test to verify the effectiveness of AdaRequest.
Adversarial Zoom Lens: A Novel Physical-World Attack to DNNs
Authors: Chengyin Hu, Weiwen Shi
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Autonomous Driving

Although deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be fragile, no one has studied the effects of zooming-in and zooming-out of images in the physical world on DNNs performance. In this paper, we demonstrate a novel physical adversarial attack technique called Adversarial Zoom Lens (AdvZL), which uses a zoom lens to zoom in and out of pictures of the physical world, fooling DNNs without changing the characteristics of the target object. The proposed method is so far the only adversarial attack technique that does not add physical adversarial perturbation attack DNNs. In a digital environment, we construct a data set based on AdvZL to verify the antagonism of equal-scale enlarged images to DNNs. In the physical environment, we manipulate the zoom lens to zoom in and out of the target object, and generate adversarial samples. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of AdvZL in both digital and physical environments. We further analyze the antagonism of the proposed data set to the improved DNNs. On the other hand, we provide a guideline for defense against AdvZL by means of adversarial training. Finally, we look into the threat possibilities of the proposed approach to future autonomous driving and variant attack ideas similar to the proposed attack.
Indecision Trees: Learning Argument-Based Reasoning under Quantified Uncertainty
Authors: Jonathan S. Kent, David H. Menager
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00

Using Machine Learning systems in the real world can often be problematic, with inexplicable black-box models, the assumed certainty of imperfect measurements, or providing a single classification instead of a probability distribution. This paper introduces Indecision Trees, a modification to Decision Trees which learn under uncertainty, can perform inference under uncertainty, provide a robust distribution over the possible labels, and can be disassembled into a set of logical arguments for use in other reasoning systems.
ASTERYX : A model-Agnostic SaT-basEd appRoach for sYmbolic and score-based eXplanations
Authors: Ryma Boumazouza, Fahima Cheikh-Alili, Bertrand Mazure, Karim Tabia
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00

The ever increasing complexity of machine learning techniques used more and more in practice, gives rise to the need to explain the predictions and decisions of these models, often used as black-boxes. Explainable AI approaches are either numerical feature-based aiming to quantify the contribution of each feature in a prediction or symbolic providing certain forms of symbolic explanations such as counterfactuals. This paper proposes a generic agnostic approach named ASTERYX allowing to generate both symbolic explanations and score-based ones. Our approach is declarative and it is based on the encoding of the model to be explained in an equivalent symbolic representation, this latter serves to generate in particular two types of symbolic explanations which are sufficient reasons and counterfactuals. We then associate scores reflecting the relevance of the explanations and the features w.r.t to some properties. Our experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach and its effectiveness in providing symbolic and score-based explanations.
A Design of A Simple Yet Effective Exercise Recommendation System in K-12 Online Learning
Authors: Shuyan Huang, Qiongqiong Liu, Jiahao Chen, Xiangen Hu, Zitao Liu, Weiqi Luo
Date: 2022-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

We propose a simple but effective method to recommend exercises with high quality and diversity for students. Our method is made up of three key components: (1) candidate generation module; (2) diversity-promoting module; and (3) scope restriction module. The proposed method improves the overall recommendation performance in terms of recall, and increases the diversity of the recommended candidates by 0.81\% compared to the baselines.