pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Are Sex-based Physiological Differences the Cause of Gender Bias for Chest X-ray Diagnosis?
Authors: Nina Weng, Siavash Bigdeli, Eike Petersen, Aasa Feragen
Date: 2023-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

While many studies have assessed the fairness of AI algorithms in the medical field, the causes of differences in prediction performance are often unknown. This lack of knowledge about the causes of bias hampers the efficacy of bias mitigation, as evidenced by the fact that simple dataset balancing still often performs best in reducing performance gaps but is unable to resolve all performance differences. In this work, we investigate the causes of gender bias in machine learning-based chest X-ray diagnosis. In particular, we explore the hypothesis that breast tissue leads to underexposure of the lungs and causes lower model performance. Methodologically, we propose a new sampling method which addresses the highly skewed distribution of recordings per patient in two widely used public datasets, while at the same time reducing the impact of label errors. Our comprehensive analysis of gender differences across diseases, datasets, and gender representations in the training set shows that dataset imbalance is not the sole cause of performance differences. Moreover, relative group performance differs strongly between datasets, indicating important dataset-specific factors influencing male/female group performance. Finally, we investigate the effect of breast tissue more specifically, by cropping out the breasts from recordings, finding that this does not resolve the observed performance gaps. In conclusion, our results indicate that dataset-specific factors, not fundamental physiological differences, are the main drivers of male--female performance gaps in chest X-ray analyses on widely used NIH and CheXpert Dataset.
High-Level Parallelism and Nested Features for Dynamic Inference Cost and Top-Down Attention
Authors: André Peter Kelm, Niels Hannemann, Bruno Heberle, Lucas Schmidt, Tim Rolff, Christian Wilms, Ehsan Yaghoubi, Simone Frintrop
Date: 2023-08-09 00:00:00

This paper introduces a novel network topology that seamlessly integrates dynamic inference cost with a top-down attention mechanism, addressing two significant gaps in traditional deep learning models. Drawing inspiration from human perception, we combine sequential processing of generic low-level features with parallelism and nesting of high-level features. This design not only reflects a finding from recent neuroscience research regarding - spatially and contextually distinct neural activations - in human cortex, but also introduces a novel "cutout" technique: the ability to selectively activate %segments of the network for task-relevant only network segments of task-relevant categories to optimize inference cost and eliminate the need for re-training. We believe this paves the way for future network designs that are lightweight and adaptable, making them suitable for a wide range of applications, from compact edge devices to large-scale clouds. Our proposed topology also comes with a built-in top-down attention mechanism, which allows processing to be directly influenced by either enhancing or inhibiting category-specific high-level features, drawing parallels to the selective attention mechanism observed in human cognition. Using targeted external signals, we experimentally enhanced predictions across all tested models. In terms of dynamic inference cost our methodology can achieve an exclusion of up to $73.48\,\%$ of parameters and $84.41\,\%$ fewer giga-multiply-accumulate (GMAC) operations, analysis against comparative baselines show an average reduction of $40\,\%$ in parameters and $8\,\%$ in GMACs across the cases we evaluated.
Towards Automatic Scoring of Spinal X-ray for Ankylosing Spondylitis
Authors: Yuanhan Mo, Yao Chen, Aimee Readie, Gregory Ligozio, Thibaud Coroller, Bartłomiej W. Papież
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00

Manually grading structural changes with the modified Stoke Ankylosing Spondylitis Spinal Score (mSASSS) on spinal X-ray imaging is costly and time-consuming due to bone shape complexity and image quality variations. In this study, we address this challenge by prototyping a 2-step auto-grading pipeline, called VertXGradeNet, to automatically predict mSASSS scores for the cervical and lumbar vertebral units (VUs) in X-ray spinal imaging. The VertXGradeNet utilizes VUs generated by our previously developed VU extraction pipeline (VertXNet) as input and predicts mSASSS based on those VUs. VertXGradeNet was evaluated on an in-house dataset of lateral cervical and lumbar X-ray images for axial spondylarthritis patients. Our results show that VertXGradeNet can predict the mSASSS score for each VU when the data is limited in quantity and imbalanced. Overall, it can achieve a balanced accuracy of 0.56 and 0.51 for 4 different mSASSS scores (i.e., a score of 0, 1, 2, 3) on two test datasets. The accuracy of the presented method shows the potential to streamline the spinal radiograph readings and therefore reduce the cost of future clinical trials.
Copy Number Variation Informs fMRI-based Prediction of Autism Spectrum Disorder
Authors: Nicha C. Dvornek, Catherine Sullivan, James S. Duncan, Abha R. Gupta
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, severity prediction

The multifactorial etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggests that its study would benefit greatly from multimodal approaches that combine data from widely varying platforms, e.g., neuroimaging, genetics, and clinical characterization. Prior neuroimaging-genetic analyses often apply naive feature concatenation approaches in data-driven work or use the findings from one modality to guide posthoc analysis of another, missing the opportunity to analyze the paired multimodal data in a truly unified approach. In this paper, we develop a more integrative model for combining genetic, demographic, and neuroimaging data. Inspired by the influence of genotype on phenotype, we propose using an attention-based approach where the genetic data guides attention to neuroimaging features of importance for model prediction. The genetic data is derived from copy number variation parameters, while the neuroimaging data is from functional magnetic resonance imaging. We evaluate the proposed approach on ASD classification and severity prediction tasks, using a sex-balanced dataset of 228 ASD and typically developing subjects in a 10-fold cross-validation framework. We demonstrate that our attention-based model combining genetic information, demographic data, and functional magnetic resonance imaging results in superior prediction performance compared to other multimodal approaches.
EXPRESSO: A Benchmark and Analysis of Discrete Expressive Speech Resynthesis
Authors: Tu Anh Nguyen, Wei-Ning Hsu, Antony D'Avirro, Bowen Shi, Itai Gat, Maryam Fazel-Zarani, Tal Remez, Jade Copet, Gabriel Synnaeve, Michael Hassid, Felix Kreuk, Yossi Adi, Emmanuel Dupoux
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Resynthesis, Speech Synthesis

Recent work has shown that it is possible to resynthesize high-quality speech based, not on text, but on low bitrate discrete units that have been learned in a self-supervised fashion and can therefore capture expressive aspects of speech that are hard to transcribe (prosody, voice styles, non-verbal vocalization). The adoption of these methods is still limited by the fact that most speech synthesis datasets are read, severely limiting spontaneity and expressivity. Here, we introduce Expresso, a high-quality expressive speech dataset for textless speech synthesis that includes both read speech and improvised dialogues rendered in 26 spontaneous expressive styles. We illustrate the challenges and potentials of this dataset with an expressive resynthesis benchmark where the task is to encode the input in low-bitrate units and resynthesize it in a target voice while preserving content and style. We evaluate resynthesis quality with automatic metrics for different self-supervised discrete encoders, and explore tradeoffs between quality, bitrate and invariance to speaker and style. All the dataset, evaluation metrics and baseline models are open source
Optimizing Performance of Feedforward and Convolutional Neural Networks through Dynamic Activation Functions
Authors: Chinmay Rane, Kanishka Tyagi, Michael Manry
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00

Deep learning training training algorithms are a huge success in recent years in many fields including speech, text,image video etc. Deeper and deeper layers are proposed with huge success with resnet structures having around 152 layers. Shallow convolution neural networks(CNN's) are still an active research, where some phenomena are still unexplained. Activation functions used in the network are of utmost importance, as they provide non linearity to the networks. Relu's are the most commonly used activation function.We show a complex piece-wise linear(PWL) activation in the hidden layer. We show that these PWL activations work much better than relu activations in our networks for convolution neural networks and multilayer perceptrons. Result comparison in PyTorch for shallow and deep CNNs are given to further strengthen our case.
A Comparison of Classical and Deep Reinforcement Learning Methods for HVAC Control
Authors: Marshall Wang, John Willes, Thomas Jiralerspong, Matin Moezzi
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for optimizing HVAC control. RL offers a framework for improving system performance, reducing energy consumption, and enhancing cost efficiency. We benchmark two popular classical and deep RL methods (Q-Learning and Deep-Q-Networks) across multiple HVAC environments and explore the practical consideration of model hyper-parameter selection and reward tuning. The findings provide insight for configuring RL agents in HVAC systems, promoting energy-efficient and cost-effective operation.
Breaking Language Barriers with MMTweets: Advancing Cross-Lingual Debunked Narrative Retrieval for Fact-Checking
Authors: Iknoor Singh, Carolina Scarton, Xingyi Song, Kalina Bontcheva
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Misinformation, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Zero-Shot Learning

Finding previously debunked narratives involves identifying claims that have already undergone fact-checking. The issue intensifies when similar false claims persist in multiple languages, despite the availability of debunks for several months in another language. Hence, automatically finding debunks (or fact-checks) in multiple languages is crucial to make the best use of scarce fact-checkers' resources. Mainly due to the lack of readily available data, this is an understudied problem, particularly when considering the cross-lingual scenario, i.e. the retrieval of debunks in a language different from the language of the online post being checked. This study introduces cross-lingual debunked narrative retrieval and addresses this research gap by: (i) creating Multilingual Misinformation Tweets (MMTweets): a dataset that stands out, featuring cross-lingual pairs, images, human annotations, and fine-grained labels, making it a comprehensive resource compared to its counterparts; (ii) conducting an extensive experiment to benchmark state-of-the-art cross-lingual retrieval models and introducing multistage retrieval methods tailored for the task; and (iii) comprehensively evaluating retrieval models for their cross-lingual and cross-dataset transfer capabilities within MMTweets, and conducting a retrieval latency analysis. We find that MMTweets presents challenges for cross-lingual debunked narrative retrieval, highlighting areas for improvement in retrieval models. Nonetheless, the study provides valuable insights for creating MMTweets datasets and optimising debunked narrative retrieval models to empower fact-checking endeavours. The dataset and annotation codebook are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10637161.
AST-MHSA : Code Summarization using Multi-Head Self-Attention
Authors: Yeshwanth Nagaraj, Ujjwal Gupta
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Summarization, Decoder

Code summarization aims to generate concise natural language descriptions for source code. The prevailing approaches adopt transformer-based encoder-decoder architectures, where the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the source code is utilized for encoding structural information. However, ASTs are much longer than the corresponding source code, and existing methods ignore this size constraint by directly feeding the entire linearized AST into the encoders. This simplistic approach makes it challenging to extract truly valuable dependency relations from the overlong input sequence and leads to significant computational overhead due to self-attention applied to all nodes in the AST. To address this issue effectively and efficiently, we present a model, AST-MHSA that uses multi-head attention to extract the important semantic information from the AST. The model consists of two main components: an encoder and a decoder. The encoder takes as input the abstract syntax tree (AST) of the code and generates a sequence of hidden states. The decoder then takes these hidden states as input and generates a natural language summary of the code. The multi-head attention mechanism allows the model to learn different representations of the input code, which can be combined to generate a more comprehensive summary. The model is trained on a dataset of code and summaries, and the parameters of the model are optimized to minimize the loss between the generated summaries and the ground-truth summaries.
ReLU and Addition-based Gated RNN
Authors: Rickard Brännvall, Henrik Forsgren, Fredrik Sandin, Marcus Liwicki
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Handwritten Text Recognition, Privacy Preserving, Quantization

We replace the multiplication and sigmoid function of the conventional recurrent gate with addition and ReLU activation. This mechanism is designed to maintain long-term memory for sequence processing but at a reduced computational cost, thereby opening up for more efficient execution or larger models on restricted hardware. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with gating mechanisms such as LSTM and GRU have been widely successful in learning from sequential data due to their ability to capture long-term dependencies. Conventionally, the update based on current inputs and the previous state history is each multiplied with dynamic weights and combined to compute the next state. However, multiplication can be computationally expensive, especially for certain hardware architectures or alternative arithmetic systems such as homomorphic encryption. It is demonstrated that the novel gating mechanism can capture long-term dependencies for a standard synthetic sequence learning task while significantly reducing computational costs such that execution time is reduced by half on CPU and by one-third under encryption. Experimental results on handwritten text recognition tasks furthermore show that the proposed architecture can be trained to achieve comparable accuracy to conventional GRU and LSTM baselines. The gating mechanism introduced in this paper may enable privacy-preserving AI applications operating under homomorphic encryption by avoiding the multiplication of encrypted variables. It can also support quantization in (unencrypted) plaintext applications, with the potential for substantial performance gains since the addition-based formulation can avoid the expansion to double precision often required for multiplication.
Normalized Gradients for All
Authors: Francesco Orabona
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: All

In this short note, I show how to adapt to H\"{o}lder smoothness using normalized gradients in a black-box way. Moreover, the bound will depend on a novel notion of local H\"{o}lder smoothness. The main idea directly comes from Levy [2017].
Symmetry Defense Against XGBoost Adversarial Perturbation Attacks
Authors: Blerta Lindqvist
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00

We examine whether symmetry can be used to defend tree-based ensemble classifiers such as gradient-boosting decision trees (GBDTs) against adversarial perturbation attacks. The idea is based on a recent symmetry defense for convolutional neural network classifiers (CNNs) that utilizes CNNs' lack of invariance with respect to symmetries. CNNs lack invariance because they can classify a symmetric sample, such as a horizontally flipped image, differently from the original sample. CNNs' lack of invariance also means that CNNs can classify symmetric adversarial samples differently from the incorrect classification of adversarial samples. Using CNNs' lack of invariance, the recent CNN symmetry defense has shown that the classification of symmetric adversarial samples reverts to the correct sample classification. In order to apply the same symmetry defense to GBDTs, we examine GBDT invariance and are the first to show that GBDTs also lack invariance with respect to symmetries. We apply and evaluate the GBDT symmetry defense for nine datasets against six perturbation attacks with a threat model that ranges from zero-knowledge to perfect-knowledge adversaries. Using the feature inversion symmetry against zero-knowledge adversaries, we achieve up to 100% accuracy on adversarial samples even when default and robust classifiers have 0% accuracy. Using the feature inversion and horizontal flip symmetries against perfect-knowledge adversaries, we achieve up to over 95% accuracy on adversarial samples for the GBDT classifier of the F-MNIST dataset even when default and robust classifiers have 0% accuracy.
AutoGluon-TimeSeries: AutoML for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Oleksandr Shchur, Caner Turkmen, Nick Erickson, Huibin Shen, Alexander Shirkov, Tony Hu, Yuyang Wang
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Philosophy, Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

We introduce AutoGluon-TimeSeries - an open-source AutoML library for probabilistic time series forecasting. Focused on ease of use and robustness, AutoGluon-TimeSeries enables users to generate accurate point and quantile forecasts with just 3 lines of Python code. Built on the design philosophy of AutoGluon, AutoGluon-TimeSeries leverages ensembles of diverse forecasting models to deliver high accuracy within a short training time. AutoGluon-TimeSeries combines both conventional statistical models, machine-learning based forecasting approaches, and ensembling techniques. In our evaluation on 29 benchmark datasets, AutoGluon-TimeSeries demonstrates strong empirical performance, outperforming a range of forecasting methods in terms of both point and quantile forecast accuracy, and often even improving upon the best-in-hindsight combination of prior methods.
Large Skew-t Copula Models and Asymmetric Dependence in Intraday Equity Returns
Authors: Lin Deng, Michael Stanley Smith, Worapree Maneesoonthorn
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

Skew-t copula models are attractive for the modeling of financial data because they allow for asymmetric and extreme tail dependence. We show that the copula implicit in the skew-t distribution of Azzalini and Capitanio (2003) allows for a higher level of pairwise asymmetric dependence than two popular alternative skew-t copulas. Estimation of this copula in high dimensions is challenging, and we propose a fast and accurate Bayesian variational inference (VI) approach to do so. The method uses a generative representation of the skew-t distribution to define an augmented posterior that can be approximated accurately. A stochastic gradient ascent algorithm is used to solve the variational optimization. The methodology is used to estimate skew-t factor copula models with up to 15 factors for intraday returns from 2017 to 2021 on 93 U.S. equities. The copula captures substantial heterogeneity in asymmetric dependence over equity pairs, in addition to the variability in pairwise correlations. In a moving window study we show that the asymmetric dependencies also vary over time, and that intraday predictive densities from the skew-t copula are more accurate than those from benchmark copula models. Portfolio selection strategies based on the estimated pairwise asymmetric dependencies improve performance relative to the index.
On the Optimal Expressive Power of ReLU DNNs and Its Application in Approximation with Kolmogorov Superposition Theorem
Authors: Juncai He
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00

This paper is devoted to studying the optimal expressive power of ReLU deep neural networks (DNNs) and its application in approximation via the Kolmogorov Superposition Theorem. We first constructively prove that any continuous piecewise linear functions on $[0,1]$, comprising $O(N^2L)$ segments, can be represented by ReLU DNNs with $L$ hidden layers and $N$ neurons per layer. Subsequently, we demonstrate that this construction is optimal regarding the parameter count of the DNNs, achieved through investigating the shattering capacity of ReLU DNNs. Moreover, by invoking the Kolmogorov Superposition Theorem, we achieve an enhanced approximation rate for ReLU DNNs of arbitrary width and depth when dealing with continuous functions in high-dimensional spaces.
Quality Diversity under Sparse Reward and Sparse Interaction: Application to Grasping in Robotics
Authors: J. Huber, F. Hélénon, M. Coninx, F. Ben Amar, S. Doncieux
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Quality-Diversity (QD) methods are algorithms that aim to generate a set of diverse and high-performing solutions to a given problem. Originally developed for evolutionary robotics, most QD studies are conducted on a limited set of domains - mainly applied to locomotion, where the fitness and the behavior signal are dense. Grasping is a crucial task for manipulation in robotics. Despite the efforts of many research communities, this task is yet to be solved. Grasping cumulates unprecedented challenges in QD literature: it suffers from reward sparsity, behavioral sparsity, and behavior space misalignment. The present work studies how QD can address grasping. Experiments have been conducted on 15 different methods on 10 grasping domains, corresponding to 2 different robot-gripper setups and 5 standard objects. An evaluation framework that distinguishes the evaluation of an algorithm from its internal components has also been proposed for a fair comparison. The obtained results show that MAP-Elites variants that select successful solutions in priority outperform all the compared methods on the studied metrics by a large margin. We also found experimental evidence that sparse interaction can lead to deceptive novelty. To our knowledge, the ability to efficiently produce examples of grasping trajectories demonstrated in this work has no precedent in the literature.
Exploring Machine Learning and Transformer-based Approaches for Deceptive Text Classification: A Comparative Analysis
Authors: Anusuya Krishnan
Date: 2023-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Deceptive text classification is a critical task in natural language processing that aims to identify deceptive o fraudulent content. This study presents a comparative analysis of machine learning and transformer-based approaches for deceptive text classification. We investigate the effectiveness of traditional machine learning algorithms and state-of-the-art transformer models, such as BERT, XLNET, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa, in detecting deceptive text. A labeled dataset consisting of deceptive and non-deceptive texts is used for training and evaluation purposes. Through extensive experimentation, we compare the performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score, of the different approaches. The results of this study shed light on the strengths and limitations of machine learning and transformer-based methods for deceptive text classification, enabling researchers and practitioners to make informed decisions when dealing with deceptive content.