pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CoCoPIE XGen: A Full-Stack AI-Oriented Optimizing Framework
Authors: Xiaofeng Li, Bin Ren, Xipeng Shen, Yanzhi Wang
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

There is a growing demand for shifting the delivery of AI capability from data centers on the cloud to edge or end devices, exemplified by the fast emerging real-time AI-based apps running on smartphones, AR/VR devices, autonomous vehicles, and various IoT devices. The shift has however been seriously hampered by the large growing gap between DNN computing demands and the computing power on edge or end devices. This article presents the design of XGen, an optimizing framework for DNN designed to bridge the gap. XGen takes cross-cutting co-design as its first-order consideration. Its full-stack AI-oriented optimizations consist of a number of innovative optimizations at every layer of the DNN software stack, all designed in a cooperative manner. The unique technology makes XGen able to optimize various DNNs, including those with an extreme depth (e.g., BERT, GPT, other transformers), and generate code that runs several times faster than those from existing DNN frameworks, while delivering the same level of accuracy.
World of Bugs: A Platform for Automated Bug Detection in 3D Video Games
Authors: Benedict Wilkins, Kostas Stathis
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00

We present World of Bugs (WOB), an open platform that aims to support Automated Bug Detection (ABD) research in video games. We discuss some open problems in ABD and how they relate to the platform's design, arguing that learning-based solutions are required if further progress is to be made. The platform's key feature is a growing collection of common video game bugs that may be used for training and evaluating ABD approaches.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Turbulence Modeling in Large Eddy Simulations
Authors: Marius Kurz, Philipp Offenhäuser, Andrea Beck
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Over the last years, supervised learning (SL) has established itself as the state-of-the-art for data-driven turbulence modeling. In the SL paradigm, models are trained based on a dataset, which is typically computed a priori from a high-fidelity solution by applying the respective filter function, which separates the resolved and the unresolved flow scales. For implicitly filtered large eddy simulation (LES), this approach is infeasible, since here, the employed discretization itself acts as an implicit filter function. As a consequence, the exact filter form is generally not known and thus, the corresponding closure terms cannot be computed even if the full solution is available. The reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm can be used to avoid this inconsistency by training not on a previously obtained training dataset, but instead by interacting directly with the dynamical LES environment itself. This allows to incorporate the potentially complex implicit LES filter into the training process by design. In this work, we apply a reinforcement learning framework to find an optimal eddy-viscosity for implicitly filtered large eddy simulations of forced homogeneous isotropic turbulence. For this, we formulate the task of turbulence modeling as an RL task with a policy network based on convolutional neural networks that adapts the eddy-viscosity in LES dynamically in space and time based on the local flow state only. We demonstrate that the trained models can provide long-term stable simulations and that they outperform established analytical models in terms of accuracy. In addition, the models generalize well to other resolutions and discretizations. We thus demonstrate that RL can provide a framework for consistent, accurate and stable turbulence modeling especially for implicitly filtered LES.
Penalty Weights in QUBO Formulations: Permutation Problems
Authors: Mayowa Ayodele
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Optimisation algorithms designed to work on quantum computers or other specialised hardware have been of research interest in recent years. Many of these solver can only optimise problems that are in binary and quadratic form. Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimisation (QUBO) is therefore a common formulation used by these solvers. There are many combinatorial optimisation problems that are naturally represented as permutations e.g., travelling salesman problem. Encoding permutation problems using binary variables however presents some challenges. Many QUBO solvers are single flip solvers, it is therefore possible to generate solutions that cannot be decoded to a valid permutation. To create bias towards generating feasible solutions, we use penalty weights. The process of setting static penalty weights for various types of problems is not trivial. This is because values that are too small will lead to infeasible solutions being returned by the solver while values that are too large may lead to slower convergence. In this study, we explore some methods of setting penalty weights within the context of QUBO formulations. We propose new static methods of calculating penalty weights which lead to more promising results than existing methods.
On the Impossibility of Learning to Cooperate with Adaptive Partner Strategies in Repeated Games
Authors: Robert Loftin, Frans A. Oliehoek
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00

Learning to cooperate with other agents is challenging when those agents also possess the ability to adapt to our own behavior. Practical and theoretical approaches to learning in cooperative settings typically assume that other agents' behaviors are stationary, or else make very specific assumptions about other agents' learning processes. The goal of this work is to understand whether we can reliably learn to cooperate with other agents without such restrictive assumptions, which are unlikely to hold in real-world applications. Our main contribution is a set of impossibility results, which show that no learning algorithm can reliably learn to cooperate with all possible adaptive partners in a repeated matrix game, even if that partner is guaranteed to cooperate with some stationary strategy. Motivated by these results, we then discuss potential alternative assumptions which capture the idea that an adaptive partner will only adapt rationally to our behavior.
Business Document Information Extraction: Towards Practical Benchmarks
Authors: Matyáš Skalický, Štěpán Šimsa, Michal Uřičář, Milan Šulc
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00

Information extraction from semi-structured documents is crucial for frictionless business-to-business (B2B) communication. While machine learning problems related to Document Information Extraction (IE) have been studied for decades, many common problem definitions and benchmarks do not reflect domain-specific aspects and practical needs for automating B2B document communication. We review the landscape of Document IE problems, datasets and benchmarks. We highlight the practical aspects missing in the common definitions and define the Key Information Localization and Extraction (KILE) and Line Item Recognition (LIR) problems. There is a lack of relevant datasets and benchmarks for Document IE on semi-structured business documents as their content is typically legally protected or sensitive. We discuss potential sources of available documents including synthetic data.
The Right Tool for the Job: Open-Source Auditing Tools in Machine Learning
Authors: Cherie M Poland
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Ethics, Fairness

In recent years, discussions about fairness in machine learning, AI ethics and algorithm audits have increased. Many entities have developed framework guidance to establish a baseline rubric for fairness and accountability. However, in spite of increased discussions and multiple frameworks, algorithm and data auditing still remain difficult to execute in practice. Many open-source auditing tools are available, but users aren't always aware of the tools, what they are useful for, or how to access them. Model auditing and evaluation are not frequently emphasized skills in machine learning. There are also legal reasons for the proactive adoption of these tools that extend beyond the desire for greater fairness in machine learning. There are positive social issues of public perception and goodwill that matter in our highly connected global society. Greater awareness of these tools and the reasons for actively utilizing them may be helpful to the entire continuum of programmers, data scientists, engineers, researchers, users and consumers of AI and machine learning products. It is important for everyone to better understand the input and output differentials, how they are occurring, and what can be done to promote FATE (fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics) in machine- and deep learning. The ability to freely access open-source auditing tools removes barriers to fairness assessment at the most basic levels of machine learning. This paper aims to reinforce the urgent need to actually use these tools and provides motivations for doing so. The exemplary tools highlighted herein are open-source with software or code-base repositories available that can be used immediately by anyone worldwide.
An Ontological Approach to Analysing Social Service Provisioning
Authors: Mark S. Fox, Bart Gajderowicz, Daniela Rosu, Alina Turner, Lester Lyu
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00

This paper introduces ontological concepts required to evaluate and manage the coverage of social services in a Smart City context. Here, we focus on the perspective of key stakeholders, namely social purpose organizations and the clients they serve. The Compass ontology presented here extends the Common Impact Data Standard by introducing new concepts related to key dimensions: the who (Stakeholder), the what (Need, Need Satisfier, Outcome), the how (Service, Event), and the contributions (tracking resources). The paper first introduces key stakeholders, services, outcomes, events, needs and need satisfiers, along with their definitions. Second, a subset of competency questions are presented to illustrate the types of questions key stakeholders have posed. Third, the extension's ability to answer questions is evaluated by presenting SPARQL queries executed on a Compass-based knowledge graph and analysing their results.
Neural Activation Patterns (NAPs): Visual Explainability of Learned Concepts
Authors: Alex Bäuerle, Daniel Jönsson, Timo Ropinski
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00

A key to deciphering the inner workings of neural networks is understanding what a model has learned. Promising methods for discovering learned features are based on analyzing activation values, whereby current techniques focus on analyzing high activation values to reveal interesting features on a neuron level. However, analyzing high activation values limits layer-level concept discovery. We present a method that instead takes into account the entire activation distribution. By extracting similar activation profiles within the high-dimensional activation space of a neural network layer, we find groups of inputs that are treated similarly. These input groups represent neural activation patterns (NAPs) and can be used to visualize and interpret learned layer concepts. We release a framework with which NAPs can be extracted from pre-trained models and provide a visual introspection tool that can be used to analyze NAPs. We tested our method with a variety of networks and show how it complements existing methods for analyzing neural network activation values.
Stop ordering machine learning algorithms by their explainability! A user-centered investigation of performance and explainability
Authors: Lukas-Valentin Herm, Kai Heinrich, Jonas Wanner, Christian Janiesch
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence

Machine learning algorithms enable advanced decision making in contemporary intelligent systems. Research indicates that there is a tradeoff between their model performance and explainability. Machine learning models with higher performance are often based on more complex algorithms and therefore lack explainability and vice versa. However, there is little to no empirical evidence of this tradeoff from an end user perspective. We aim to provide empirical evidence by conducting two user experiments. Using two distinct datasets, we first measure the tradeoff for five common classes of machine learning algorithms. Second, we address the problem of end user perceptions of explainable artificial intelligence augmentations aimed at increasing the understanding of the decision logic of high-performing complex models. Our results diverge from the widespread assumption of a tradeoff curve and indicate that the tradeoff between model performance and explainability is much less gradual in the end user's perception. This is a stark contrast to assumed inherent model interpretability. Further, we found the tradeoff to be situational for example due to data complexity. Results of our second experiment show that while explainable artificial intelligence augmentations can be used to increase explainability, the type of explanation plays an essential role in end user perception.
Autoencoder-based Attribute Noise Handling Method for Medical Data
Authors: Thomas Ranvier, Haytham Elgazel, Emmanuel Coquery, Khalid Benabdeslem
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Imputation

Medical datasets are particularly subject to attribute noise, that is, missing and erroneous values. Attribute noise is known to be largely detrimental to learning performances. To maximize future learning performances it is primordial to deal with attribute noise before any inference. We propose a simple autoencoder-based preprocessing method that can correct mixed-type tabular data corrupted by attribute noise. No other method currently exists to handle attribute noise in tabular data. We experimentally demonstrate that our method outperforms both state-of-the-art imputation methods and noise correction methods on several real-world medical datasets.
Generating Diverse Indoor Furniture Arrangements
Authors: Ya-Chuan Hsu, Matthew C. Fontaine, Sam Earle, Maria Edwards, Julian Togelius, Stefanos Nikolaidis
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network

We present a method for generating arrangements of indoor furniture from human-designed furniture layout data. Our method creates arrangements that target specified diversity, such as the total price of all furniture in the room and the number of pieces placed. To generate realistic furniture arrangement, we train a generative adversarial network (GAN) on human-designed layouts. To target specific diversity in the arrangements, we optimize the latent space of the GAN via a quality diversity algorithm to generate a diverse arrangement collection. Experiments show our approach discovers a set of arrangements that are similar to human-designed layouts but varies in price and number of furniture pieces.
MASER: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Subgoals Generated from Experience Replay Buffer
Authors: Jeewon Jeon, Woojun Kim, Whiyoung Jung, Youngchul Sung
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Starcraft, Starcraft II

In this paper, we consider cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with sparse reward. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method named MASER: MARL with subgoals generated from experience replay buffer. Under the widely-used assumption of centralized training with decentralized execution and consistent Q-value decomposition for MARL, MASER automatically generates proper subgoals for multiple agents from the experience replay buffer by considering both individual Q-value and total Q-value. Then, MASER designs individual intrinsic reward for each agent based on actionable representation relevant to Q-learning so that the agents reach their subgoals while maximizing the joint action value. Numerical results show that MASER significantly outperforms StarCraft II micromanagement benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art MARL algorithms.
S2RL: Do We Really Need to Perceive All States in Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning?
Authors: Shuang Luo, Yinchuan Li, Jiahui Li, Kun Kuang, Furui Liu, Yunfeng Shao, Chao Wu
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Starcraft, Starcraft II

Collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has been widely used in many practical applications, where each agent makes a decision based on its own observation. Most mainstream methods treat each local observation as an entirety when modeling the decentralized local utility functions. However, they ignore the fact that local observation information can be further divided into several entities, and only part of the entities is helpful to model inference. Moreover, the importance of different entities may change over time. To improve the performance of decentralized policies, the attention mechanism is used to capture features of local information. Nevertheless, existing attention models rely on dense fully connected graphs and cannot better perceive important states. To this end, we propose a sparse state based MARL (S2RL) framework, which utilizes a sparse attention mechanism to discard irrelevant information in local observations. The local utility functions are estimated through the self-attention and sparse attention mechanisms separately, then are combined into a standard joint value function and auxiliary joint value function in the central critic. We design the S2RL framework as a plug-and-play module, making it general enough to be applied to various methods. Extensive experiments on StarCraft II show that S2RL can significantly improve the performance of many state-of-the-art methods.
Good Time to Ask: A Learning Framework for Asking for Help in Embodied Visual Navigation
Authors: Jenny Zhang, Samson Yu, Jiafei Duan, Cheston Tan
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Navigation

In reality, it is often more efficient to ask for help than to search the entire space to find an object with an unknown location. We present a learning framework that enables an agent to actively ask for help in such embodied visual navigation tasks, where the feedback informs the agent of where the goal is in its view. To emulate the real-world scenario that a teacher may not always be present, we propose a training curriculum where feedback is not always available. We formulate an uncertainty measure of where the goal is and use empirical results to show that through this approach, the agent learns to ask for help effectively while remaining robust when feedback is not available.
Artificial intelligence system based on multi-value classification of fully connected neural network for construction management
Authors: Tetyana Honcharenko, Roman Akselrod, Andrii Shpakov, Oleksandr Khomenko
Date: 2022-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This study is devoted to solving the problem to determine the professional adaptive capabilities of construction management staff using artificial intelligence systems.It is proposed Fully Connected Feed-Forward Neural Network architecture and performed empirical modeling to create a Data Set. Model of artificial intelligence system allows evaluating the processes in an Fully Connected Feed-Forward Neural Network during the execution of multi-value classification of professional areas. A method has been developed for the training process of a machine learning model, which reflects the internal connections between the components of an artificial intelligence system that allow it to learn from training data. To train the neural network, a data set of 35 input parameters and 29 output parameters was used; the amount of data in the set is 936 data lines. Neural network training occurred in the proportion of 10% and 90%, respectively. Results of this study research can be used to further improve the knowledge and skills necessary for successful professional realization.
Traffic-Twitter Transformer: A Nature Language Processing-joined Framework For Network-wide Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Meng-Ju Tsai, Zhiyong Cui, Hao Yang, Cole Kopca, Sophie Tien, Yinhai Wang
Date: 2022-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Traffic Prediction

With accurate and timely traffic forecasting, the impacted traffic conditions can be predicted in advance to guide agencies and residents to respond to changes in traffic patterns appropriately. However, existing works on traffic forecasting mainly relied on historical traffic patterns confining to short-term prediction, under 1 hour, for instance. To better manage future roadway capacity and accommodate social and human impacts, it is crucial to propose a flexible and comprehensive framework to predict physical-aware long-term traffic conditions for public users and transportation agencies. In this paper, the gap of robust long-term traffic forecasting was bridged by taking social media features into consideration. A correlation study and a linear regression model were first implemented to evaluate the significance of the correlation between two time-series data, traffic intensity and Twitter data intensity. Two time-series data were then fed into our proposed social-aware framework, Traffic-Twitter Transformer, which integrated Nature Language representations into time-series records for long-term traffic prediction. Experimental results in the Great Seattle Area showed that our proposed model outperformed baseline models in all evaluation matrices. This NLP-joined social-aware framework can become a valuable implement of network-wide traffic prediction and management for traffic agencies.
An Embedded Feature Selection Framework for Control
Authors: Jiawen Wei, Fangyuan Wang, Wanxin Zeng, Wenwei Lin, Ning Gui
Date: 2022-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, feature selection

Reducing sensor requirements while keeping optimal control performance is crucial to many industrial control applications to achieve robust, low-cost, and computation-efficient controllers. However, existing feature selection solutions for the typical machine learning domain can hardly be applied in the domain of control with changing dynamics. In this paper, a novel framework, namely the Dual-world embedded Attentive Feature Selection (D-AFS), can efficiently select the most relevant sensors for the system under dynamic control. Rather than the one world used in most Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms, D-AFS has both the real world and its virtual peer with twisted features. By analyzing the DRL's response in two worlds, D-AFS can quantitatively identify respective features' importance towards control. A well-known active flow control problem, cylinder drag reduction, is used for evaluation. Results show that D-AFS successfully finds an optimized five-probes layout with 18.7\% drag reduction than the state-of-the-art solution with 151 probes and 49.2\% reduction than five-probes layout by human experts. We also apply this solution to four OpenAI classical control cases. In all cases, D-AFS achieves the same or better sensor configurations than originally provided solutions. Results highlight, we argued, a new way to achieve efficient and optimal sensor designs for experimental or industrial systems. Our source codes are made publicly available at https://github.com/G-AILab/DAFSFluid.