pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spatio-Temporal Wind Speed Forecasting using Graph Networks and Novel Transformer Architectures
Authors: Lars Ødegaard Bentsen, Narada Dilp Warakagoda, Roy Stenbro, Paal Engelstad
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Multivariate Time Series Forecasting, Spatio-Temporal Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting, Weather Forecasting

This study focuses on multi-step spatio-temporal wind speed forecasting for the Norwegian continental shelf. The study aims to leverage spatial dependencies through the relative physical location of different measurement stations to improve local wind forecasts. Our multi-step forecasting models produce either 10-minute, 1- or 4-hour forecasts, with 10-minute resolution, meaning that the models produce more informative time series for predicted future trends. A graph neural network (GNN) architecture was used to extract spatial dependencies, with different update functions to learn temporal correlations. These update functions were implemented using different neural network architectures. One such architecture, the Transformer, has become increasingly popular for sequence modelling in recent years. Various alterations have been proposed to better facilitate time series forecasting, of which this study focused on the Informer, LogSparse Transformer and Autoformer. This is the first time the LogSparse Transformer and Autoformer have been applied to wind forecasting and the first time any of these or the Informer have been formulated in a spatio-temporal setting for wind forecasting. By comparing against spatio-temporal Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) models, the study showed that the models using the altered Transformer architectures as update functions in GNNs were able to outperform these. Furthermore, we propose the Fast Fourier Transformer (FFTransformer), which is a novel Transformer architecture based on signal decomposition and consists of two separate streams that analyse the trend and periodic components separately. The FFTransformer and Autoformer were found to achieve superior results for the 10-minute and 1-hour ahead forecasts, with the FFTransformer significantly outperforming all other models for the 4-hour ahead forecasts.
LogicRank: Logic Induced Reranking for Generative Text-to-Image Systems
Authors: Björn Deiseroth, Patrick Schramowski, Hikaru Shindo, Devendra Singh Dhami, Kristian Kersting
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Reranking

Text-to-image models have recently achieved remarkable success with seemingly accurate samples in photo-realistic quality. However as state-of-the-art language models still struggle evaluating precise statements consistently, so do language model based image generation processes. In this work we showcase problems of state-of-the-art text-to-image models like DALL-E with generating accurate samples from statements related to the draw bench benchmark. Furthermore we show that CLIP is not able to rerank those generated samples consistently. To this end we propose LogicRank, a neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that can result in a more accurate ranking-system for such precision-demanding settings. LogicRank integrates smoothly into the generation process of text-to-image models and moreover can be used to further fine-tune towards a more logical precise model.
Detecting Surprising Situations in Event Data
Authors: Christian Kohlschmidt, Mahnaz Sadat Qafari, Wil M. P. van der Aalst
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Outlier Detection

Process mining is a set of techniques that are used by organizations to understand and improve their operational processes. The first essential step in designing any process reengineering procedure is to find process improvement opportunities. In existing work, it is usually assumed that the set of problematic process instances in which an undesirable outcome occurs is known prior or is easily detectable. So the process enhancement procedure involves finding the root causes and the treatments for the problem in those process instances. For example, the set of problematic instances is considered as those with outlier values or with values smaller/bigger than a given threshold in one of the process features. However, on various occasions, using this approach, many process enhancement opportunities, not captured by these problematic process instances, are missed. To overcome this issue, we formulate finding the process enhancement areas as a context-sensitive anomaly/outlier detection problem. We define a process enhancement area as a set of situations (process instances or prefixes of process instances) where the process performance is surprising. We aim to characterize those situations where process performance/outcome is significantly different from what was expected considering its performance/outcome in similar situations. To evaluate the validity and relevance of the proposed approach, we have implemented and evaluated it on several real-life event logs.
Generalization In Multi-Objective Machine Learning
Authors: Peter Súkeník, Christoph H. Lampert
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Generalization Bounds, Learning Theory

Modern machine learning tasks often require considering not just one but multiple objectives. For example, besides the prediction quality, this could be the efficiency, robustness or fairness of the learned models, or any of their combinations. Multi-objective learning offers a natural framework for handling such problems without having to commit to early trade-offs. Surprisingly, statistical learning theory so far offers almost no insight into the generalization properties of multi-objective learning. In this work, we make first steps to fill this gap: we establish foundational generalization bounds for the multi-objective setting as well as generalization and excess bounds for learning with scalarizations. We also provide the first theoretical analysis of the relation between the Pareto-optimal sets of the true objectives and the Pareto-optimal sets of their empirical approximations from training data. In particular, we show a surprising asymmetry: all Pareto-optimal solutions can be approximated by empirically Pareto-optimal ones, but not vice versa.
Rethinking Skip Connections in Encoder-decoder Networks for Monocular Depth Estimation
Authors: Zhitong Lai, Haichao Sun, Rui Tian, Nannan Ding, Zhiguo Wu, Yanjie Wang
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

Skip connections are fundamental units in encoder-decoder networks, which are able to improve the feature propagtion of the neural networks. However, most methods with skip connections just connected features with the same resolution in the encoder and the decoder, which ignored the information loss in the encoder with the layers going deeper. To leverage the information loss of the features in shallower layers of the encoder, we propose a full skip connection network (FSCN) for monocular depth estimation task. In addition, to fuse features within skip connections more closely, we present an adaptive concatenation module (ACM). Further more, we conduct extensive experiments on the ourdoor and indoor datasets (i.e., the KITTI dataste and the NYU Depth V2 dataset) for FSCN and FSCN gets the state-of-the-art results.
Unified Bayesian Frameworks for Multi-criteria Decision-making Problems
Authors: Majid Mohammadi
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

This paper introduces Bayesian frameworks for tackling various aspects of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems, leveraging a probabilistic interpretation of MCDM methods and challenges. By harnessing the flexibility of Bayesian models, the proposed frameworks offer statistically elegant solutions to key challenges in MCDM, such as group decision-making problems and criteria correlation. Additionally, these models can accommodate diverse forms of uncertainty in decision makers' (DMs) preferences, including normal and triangular distributions, as well as interval preferences. To address large-scale group MCDM scenarios, a probabilistic mixture model is developed, enabling the identification of homogeneous subgroups of DMs. Furthermore, a probabilistic ranking scheme is devised to assess the relative importance of criteria and alternatives based on DM(s) preferences. Through experimentation on various numerical examples, the proposed frameworks are validated, demonstrating their effectiveness and highlighting their distinguishing features in comparison to alternative methods.
Time-aware Self-Attention Meets Logic Reasoning in Recommender Systems
Authors: Zhijian Luo, Zihan Huang, Jiahui Tang, Yueen Hou, Yanzeng Gao
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Recommendation Systems

At the age of big data, recommender systems have shown remarkable success as a key means of information filtering in our daily life. Recent years have witnessed the technical development of recommender systems, from perception learning to cognition reasoning which intuitively build the task of recommendation as the procedure of logical reasoning and have achieve significant improvement. However, the logical statement in reasoning implicitly admits irrelevance of ordering, even does not consider time information which plays an important role in many recommendation tasks. Furthermore, recommendation model incorporated with temporal context would tend to be self-attentive, i.e., automatically focus more (less) on the relevance (irrelevance), respectively. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Time-aware Self-Attention with Neural Collaborative Reasoning (TiSANCR) based recommendation model, which integrates temporal patterns and self-attention mechanism into reasoning-based recommendation. Specially, temporal patterns represented by relative time, provide context and auxiliary information to characterize the user's preference in recommendation, while self-attention is leveraged to distill informative patterns and suppress irrelevances. Therefore, the fusion of self-attentive temporal information provides deeper representation of user's preference. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed TiSANCR achieves significant improvement and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation methods.
Effective approaches to disaster evacuation during a COVID-like pandemic
Authors: Yi-Lin Tsai, Dymasius Y. Sitepu, Karyn E. Chappell, Rishi P. Mediratta, C. Jason Wang, Peter K. Kitanidis, Christopher B. Field
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00

Since COVID-19 vaccines became available, no studies have quantified how different disaster evacuation strategies can mitigate pandemic risks in shelters. Therefore, we applied an age-structured epidemiological model, known as the Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) model, to investigate to what extent different vaccine uptake levels and the Diversion protocol implemented in Taiwan decrease infections and delay pandemic peak occurrences. Taiwan's Diversion protocol involves diverting those in self-quarantine due to exposure, thus preventing them from mingling with the general public at a congregate shelter. The Diversion protocol, combined with sufficient vaccine uptake, can decrease the maximum number of infections and delay outbreaks relative to scenarios without such strategies. When the diversion of all exposed people is not possible, or vaccine uptake is insufficient, the Diversion protocol is still valuable. Furthermore, a group of evacuees that consists primarily of a young adult population tends to experience pandemic peak occurrences sooner and have up to 180% more infections than does a majority elderly group when the Diversion protocol is implemented. However, when the Diversion protocol is not enforced, the majority elderly group suffers from up to 20% more severe cases than the majority young adult group.
Multi-dimensional Racism Classification during COVID-19: Stigmatization, Offensiveness, Blame, and Exclusion
Authors: Xin Pei, Deval Mehta
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00

Transcending the binary categorization of racist texts, our study takes cues from social science theories to develop a multi-dimensional model for racism detection, namely stigmatization, offensiveness, blame, and exclusion. With the aid of BERT and topic modeling, this categorical detection enables insights into the underlying subtlety of racist discussion on digital platforms during COVID-19. Our study contributes to enriching the scholarly discussion on deviant racist behaviours on social media. First, a stage-wise analysis is applied to capture the dynamics of the topic changes across the early stages of COVID-19 which transformed from a domestic epidemic to an international public health emergency and later to a global pandemic. Furthermore, mapping this trend enables a more accurate prediction of public opinion evolvement concerning racism in the offline world, and meanwhile, the enactment of specified intervention strategies to combat the upsurge of racism during the global public health crisis like COVID-19. In addition, this interdisciplinary research also points out a direction for future studies on social network analysis and mining. Integration of social science perspectives into the development of computational methods provides insights into more accurate data detection and analytics.
ANAct: Adaptive Normalization for Activation Functions
Authors: Yuan Peiwen, Henan Liu, Zhu Changsheng, Yuyi Wang
Date: 2022-08-29 00:00:00

In this paper, we investigate the negative effect of activation functions on forward and backward propagation and how to counteract this effect. First, We examine how activation functions affect the forward and backward propagation of neural networks and derive a general form for gradient variance that extends the previous work in this area. We try to use mini-batch statistics to dynamically update the normalization factor to ensure the normalization property throughout the training process, rather than only accounting for the state of the neural network after weight initialization. Second, we propose ANAct, a method that normalizes activation functions to maintain consistent gradient variance across layers and demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments. We observe that the convergence rate is roughly related to the normalization property. We compare ANAct with several common activation functions on CNNs and residual networks and show that ANAct consistently improves their performance. For instance, normalized Swish achieves 1.4\% higher top-1 accuracy than vanilla Swish on ResNet50 with the Tiny ImageNet dataset and more than 1.2\% higher with CIFAR-100.
Adapting the LodView RDF Browser for Navigation over the Multilingual Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud
Authors: Alexander Kirillovich, Konstantin Nikolaev
Date: 2022-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

The paper is dedicated to the use of LodView for navigation over the multilingual Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud. First, we define the class of Pubby-like tools, that LodView belongs to, and clarify the relation of this class to the classes of URI dereferenciation tools, RDF browsers and LOD visualization tools. Second, we reveal several limitations of LodView that impede its use for the designated purpose, and propose improvements to be made for fixing these limitations. These improvements are: 1) resolution of Cyrillic URIs; 2) decoding Cyrillic URIs in Turtle representations of resources; 3) support of Cyrillic literals; 4) user-friendly URLs for RDF representations of resources; 5) support of hash URIs; 6) expanding nested resources; 7) support of RDF collections; 8) pagination of resource property values; and 9) support of $\LaTeX$ math notation. Third, we partially implement several of the proposed improvements.
JARVIS: A Neuro-Symbolic Commonsense Reasoning Framework for Conversational Embodied Agents
Authors: Kaizhi Zheng, Kaiwen Zhou, Jing Gu, Yue Fan, Jialu Wang, Zonglin Di, Xuehai He, Xin Eric Wang
Date: 2022-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Common Sense Reasoning, Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

Building a conversational embodied agent to execute real-life tasks has been a long-standing yet quite challenging research goal, as it requires effective human-agent communication, multi-modal understanding, long-range sequential decision making, etc. Traditional symbolic methods have scaling and generalization issues, while end-to-end deep learning models suffer from data scarcity and high task complexity, and are often hard to explain. To benefit from both worlds, we propose JARVIS, a neuro-symbolic commonsense reasoning framework for modular, generalizable, and interpretable conversational embodied agents. First, it acquires symbolic representations by prompting large language models (LLMs) for language understanding and sub-goal planning, and by constructing semantic maps from visual observations. Then the symbolic module reasons for sub-goal planning and action generation based on task- and action-level common sense. Extensive experiments on the TEACh dataset validate the efficacy and efficiency of our JARVIS framework, which achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on all three dialog-based embodied tasks, including Execution from Dialog History (EDH), Trajectory from Dialog (TfD), and Two-Agent Task Completion (TATC) (e.g., our method boosts the unseen Success Rate on EDH from 6.1\% to 15.8\%). Moreover, we systematically analyze the essential factors that affect the task performance and also demonstrate the superiority of our method in few-shot settings. Our JARVIS model ranks first in the Alexa Prize SimBot Public Benchmark Challenge.
Bayesian Neural Network Language Modeling for Speech Recognition
Authors: Boyang Xue, Shoukang Hu, Junhao Xu, Mengzhe Geng, Xunying Liu, Helen Meng
Date: 2022-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Lipreading, Neural Architecture Search, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

State-of-the-art neural network language models (NNLMs) represented by long short term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNNs) and Transformers are becoming highly complex. They are prone to overfitting and poor generalization when given limited training data. To this end, an overarching full Bayesian learning framework encompassing three methods is proposed in this paper to account for the underlying uncertainty in LSTM-RNN and Transformer LMs. The uncertainty over their model parameters, choice of neural activations and hidden output representations are modeled using Bayesian, Gaussian Process and variational LSTM-RNN or Transformer LMs respectively. Efficient inference approaches were used to automatically select the optimal network internal components to be Bayesian learned using neural architecture search. A minimal number of Monte Carlo parameter samples as low as one was also used. These allow the computational costs incurred in Bayesian NNLM training and evaluation to be minimized. Experiments are conducted on two tasks: AMI meeting transcription and Oxford-BBC LipReading Sentences 2 (LRS2) overlapped speech recognition using state-of-the-art LF-MMI trained factored TDNN systems featuring data augmentation, speaker adaptation and audio-visual multi-channel beamforming for overlapped speech. Consistent performance improvements over the baseline LSTM-RNN and Transformer LMs with point estimated model parameters and drop-out regularization were obtained across both tasks in terms of perplexity and word error rate (WER). In particular, on the LRS2 data, statistically significant WER reductions up to 1.3% and 1.2% absolute (12.1% and 11.3% relative) were obtained over the baseline LSTM-RNN and Transformer LMs respectively after model combination between Bayesian NNLMs and their respective baselines.
FFCNN: Fast FPGA based Acceleration for Convolution neural network inference
Authors: F. Keddous, H-N. Nguyen, A. Nakib
Date: 2022-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: High-Level Synthesis

We present a new efficient OpenCL-based Accelerator for large scale Convolutional Neural Networks called Fast Inference on FPGAs for Convolution Neural Network (FFCNN). FFCNN is based on a deeply pipelined OpenCL kernels architecture. As pointed out before, high-level synthesis tools such as the OpenCL framework can easily port codes originally designed for CPUs and GPUs to FPGAs, but it is still difficult to make OpenCL codes run efficiently on FPGAs. This work aims to propose an efficient FPGA implementation of OpenCL High-Performance Computing Applications. To do so, a Data reuse and task mapping techniques are also presented to improve design efficiency. In addition, the following motivations were taken into account when developing FFCNN: 1) FFCNN has been designed to be easily implemented on Intel OpenCL SDK based FPGA design flow. 2) In FFFCN, different techniques have been integrated to improve the memory band with and throughput. A performance analysis is conducted on two deep CNN for Large-Scale Images classification. The obtained results, and the comparison with other works designed to accelerate the same types of architectures, show the efficiency and the competitiveness of the proposed accelerator design by significantly improved performance and resource utilization.
IDP-PGFE: An Interpretable Disruption Predictor based on Physics-Guided Feature Extraction
Authors: Chengshuo Shen, Wei Zheng, Yonghua Ding, Xinkun Ai, Fengming Xue, Yu Zhong, Nengchao Wang, Li Gao, Zhipeng Chen, Zhoujun Yang, Zhongyong Chen, Yuan Pan, J-TEXT team
Date: 2022-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Disruption prediction has made rapid progress in recent years, especially in machine learning (ML)-based methods. Understanding why a predictor makes a certain prediction can be as crucial as the prediction's accuracy for future tokamak disruption predictors. The purpose of most disruption predictors is accuracy or cross-machine capability. However, if a disruption prediction model can be interpreted, it can tell why certain samples are classified as disruption precursors. This allows us to tell the types of incoming disruption and gives us insight into the mechanism of disruption. This paper designs a disruption predictor called Interpretable Disruption Predictor based On Physics-guided feature extraction (IDP-PGFE) on J-TEXT. The prediction performance of the model is effectively improved by extracting physics-guided features. A high-performance model is required to ensure the validity of the interpretation results. The interpretability study of IDP-PGFE provides an understanding of J-TEXT disruption and is generally consistent with existing comprehension of disruption. IDP-PGFE has been applied to the disruption due to continuously increasing density towards density limit experiments on J-TEXT. The time evolution of the PGFE features contribution demonstrates that the application of ECRH triggers radiation-caused disruption, which lowers the density at disruption. While the application of RMP indeed raises the density limit in J-TEXT. The interpretability study guides intuition on the physical mechanisms of density limit disruption that RMPs affect not only the MHD instabilities but also the radiation profile, which delays density limit disruption.