pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Finetuning a Kalaallisut-English machine translation system using web-crawled data
Authors: Alex Jones
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Translation

West Greenlandic, known by native speakers as Kalaallisut, is an extremely low-resource polysynthetic language spoken by around 56,000 people in Greenland. Here, we attempt to finetune a pretrained Kalaallisut-to-English neural machine translation (NMT) system using web-crawled pseudoparallel sentences from around 30 multilingual websites. We compile a corpus of over 93,000 Kalaallisut sentences and over 140,000 Danish sentences, then use cross-lingual sentence embeddings and approximate nearest-neighbors search in an attempt to mine near-translations from these corpora. Finally, we translate the Danish sentence to English to obtain a synthetic Kalaallisut-English aligned corpus. Although the resulting dataset is too small and noisy to improve the pretrained MT model, we believe that with additional resources, we could construct a better pseudoparallel corpus and achieve more promising results on MT. We also note other possible uses of the monolingual Kalaallisut data and discuss directions for future work. We make the code and data for our experiments publicly available.
Physically Inspired Constraint for Unsupervised Regularized Ultrasound Elastography
Authors: Ali K. Z. Tehrani, Hassan Rivaz
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

Displacement estimation is a critical step of virtually all Ultrasound Elastography (USE) techniques. Two main features make this task unique compared to the general optical flow problem: the high-frequency nature of ultrasound radio-frequency (RF) data and the governing laws of physics on the displacement field. Recently, the architecture of the optical flow networks has been modified to be able to use RF data. Also, semi-supervised and unsupervised techniques have been employed for USE by considering prior knowledge of displacement continuity in the form of the first- and second-derivative regularizers. Despite these attempts, no work has considered the tissue compression pattern, and displacements in axial and lateral directions have been assumed to be independent. However, tissue motion pattern is governed by laws of physics in USE, rendering the axial and the lateral displacements highly correlated. In this paper, we propose Physically Inspired ConsTraint for Unsupervised Regularized Elastography (PICTURE), where we impose constraints on the Poisson's ratio to improve lateral displacement estimates. Experiments on phantom and in vivo data show that PICTURE substantially improves the quality of the lateral displacement estimation.
Sequential Counterfactual Decision-Making Under Confounded Reward
Authors: Erik Skalnes
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Decision Making

We investigate the limitations of random trials when the cause of interest is confounded with the effect by formalizing a counterfactual policy-space where the agent's natural predilection is input to a soft-intervention.
Variable-rate hierarchical CPC leads to acoustic unit discovery in speech
Authors: Santiago Cuervo, Adrian Łańcucki, Ricard Marxer, Paweł Rychlikowski, Jan Chorowski
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Unit Discovery, Disentanglement, Quantization, Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The success of deep learning comes from its ability to capture the hierarchical structure of data by learning high-level representations defined in terms of low-level ones. In this paper we explore self-supervised learning of hierarchical representations of speech by applying multiple levels of Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC). We observe that simply stacking two CPC models does not yield significant improvements over single-level architectures. Inspired by the fact that speech is often described as a sequence of discrete units unevenly distributed in time, we propose a model in which the output of a low-level CPC module is non-uniformly downsampled to directly minimize the loss of a high-level CPC module. The latter is designed to also enforce a prior of separability and discreteness in its representations by enforcing dissimilarity of successive high-level representations through focused negative sampling, and by quantization of the prediction targets. Accounting for the structure of the speech signal improves upon single-level CPC features and enhances the disentanglement of the learned representations, as measured by downstream speech recognition tasks, while resulting in a meaningful segmentation of the signal that closely resembles phone boundaries.
Factored Conditional Filtering: Tracking States and Estimating Parameters in High-Dimensional Spaces
Authors: Dawei Chen, Samuel Yang-Zhao, John Lloyd, Kee Siong Ng
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00

This paper introduces factored conditional filters, new filtering algorithms for simultaneously tracking states and estimating parameters in high-dimensional state spaces. The conditional nature of the algorithms is used to estimate parameters and the factored nature is used to decompose the state space into low-dimensional subspaces in such a way that filtering on these subspaces gives distributions whose product is a good approximation to the distribution on the entire state space. The conditions for successful application of the algorithms are that observations be available at the subspace level and that the transition model can be factored into local transition models that are approximately confined to the subspaces; these conditions are widely satisfied in computer science, engineering, and geophysical filtering applications. We give experimental results on tracking epidemics and estimating parameters in large contact networks that show the effectiveness of our approach.
Formally Verified Solution Methods for Infinite-Horizon Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Maximilian Schäfeller, Mohammad Abdulaziz
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00

We formally verify executable algorithms for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the interactive theorem prover Isabelle/HOL. We build on existing formalizations of probability theory to analyze the expected total reward criterion on infinite-horizon problems. Our developments formalize the Bellman equation and give conditions under which optimal policies exist. Based on this analysis, we verify dynamic programming algorithms to solve tabular MDPs. We evaluate the formally verified implementations experimentally on standard problems and show they are practical. Furthermore, we show that, combined with efficient unverified implementations, our system can compete with and even outperform state-of-the-art systems.
Estimating and Mitigating the Congestion Effect of Curbside Pick-ups and Drop-offs: A Causal Inference Approach
Authors: Xiaohui Liu, Sean Qian, Hock-Hai Teo, Wei Ma
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

Curb space is one of the busiest areas in urban road networks. Especially in recent years, the rapid increase of ride-hailing trips and commercial deliveries has induced massive pick-ups/drop-offs (PUDOs), which occupy the limited curb space that was designed and built decades ago. These PUDOs could jam curbside utilization and disturb the mainline traffic flow, evidently leading to significant negative societal externalities. However, there is a lack of an analytical framework that rigorously quantifies and mitigates the congestion effect of PUDOs in the system view, particularly with little data support and involvement of confounding effects. To bridge this research gap, this paper develops a rigorous causal inference approach to estimate the congestion effect of PUDOs on general regional networks. A causal graph is set to represent the spatio-temporal relationship between PUDOs and traffic speed, and a double and separated machine learning (DSML) method is proposed to quantify how PUDOs affect traffic congestion. Additionally, a re-routing formulation is developed and solved to encourage passenger walking and traffic flow re-routing to achieve system optimization. Numerical experiments are conducted using real-world data in the Manhattan area. On average, 100 additional units of PUDOs in a region could reduce the traffic speed by 3.70 and 4.54 mph on weekdays and weekends, respectively. Re-routing trips with PUDOs on curb space could respectively reduce the system-wide total travel time by 2.44% and 2.12% in Midtown and Central Park on weekdays. Sensitivity analysis is also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework.
Sentiment Analysis of Online Travel Reviews Based on Capsule Network and Sentiment Lexicon
Authors: Jia Wang, Junping Du, Yingxia Shao, Ang Li
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

With the development of online travel services, it has great application prospects to timely mine users' evaluation emotions for travel services and use them as indicators to guide the improvement of online travel service quality. In this paper, we study the text sentiment classification of online travel reviews based on social media online comments and propose the SCCL model based on capsule network and sentiment lexicon. SCCL model aims at the lack of consideration of local features and emotional semantic features of the text in the language model that can efficiently extract text context features like BERT and GRU. Then make the following improvements to their shortcomings. On the one hand, based on BERT-BiGRU, the capsule network is introduced to extract local features while retaining good context features. On the other hand, the sentiment lexicon is introduced to extract the emotional sequence of the text to provide richer emotional semantic features for the model. To enhance the universality of the sentiment lexicon, the improved SO-PMI algorithm based on TF-IDF is used to expand the lexicon, so that the lexicon can also perform well in the field of online travel reviews.
Product safety idioms: a method for building causal Bayesian networks for product safety and risk assessment
Authors: Joshua Hunte, Martin Neil, Norman Fenton
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00

Idioms are small, reusable Bayesian network (BN) fragments that represent generic types of uncertain reasoning. This paper shows how idioms can be used to build causal BNs for product safety and risk assessment that use a combination of data and knowledge. We show that the specific product safety idioms that we introduce are sufficient to build full BN models to evaluate safety and risk for a wide range of products. The resulting models can be used by safety regulators and product manufacturers even when there are limited (or no) product testing data.
AUTM Flow: Atomic Unrestricted Time Machine for Monotonic Normalizing Flows
Authors: Difeng Cai, Yuliang Ji, Huan He, Qiang Ye, Yuanzhe Xi
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Image Generation, Variational Inference

Nonlinear monotone transformations are used extensively in normalizing flows to construct invertible triangular mappings from simple distributions to complex ones. In existing literature, monotonicity is usually enforced by restricting function classes or model parameters and the inverse transformation is often approximated by root-finding algorithms as a closed-form inverse is unavailable. In this paper, we introduce a new integral-based approach termed "Atomic Unrestricted Time Machine (AUTM)", equipped with unrestricted integrands and easy-to-compute explicit inverse. AUTM offers a versatile and efficient way to the design of normalizing flows with explicit inverse and unrestricted function classes or parameters. Theoretically, we present a constructive proof that AUTM is universal: all monotonic normalizing flows can be viewed as limits of AUTM flows. We provide a concrete example to show how to approximate any given monotonic normalizing flow using AUTM flows with guaranteed convergence. The result implies that AUTM can be used to transform an existing flow into a new one equipped with explicit inverse and unrestricted parameters. The performance of the new approach is evaluated on high dimensional density estimation, variational inference and image generation. Experiments demonstrate superior speed and memory efficiency of AUTM.
LAE: Language-Aware Encoder for Monolingual and Multilingual ASR
Authors: Jinchuan Tian, Jianwei Yu, Chunlei Zhang, Chao Weng, Yuexian Zou, Dong Yu
Date: 2022-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Despite the rapid progress in automatic speech recognition (ASR) research, recognizing multilingual speech using a unified ASR system remains highly challenging. Previous works on multilingual speech recognition mainly focus on two directions: recognizing multiple monolingual speech or recognizing code-switched speech that uses different languages interchangeably within a single utterance. However, a pragmatic multilingual recognizer is expected to be compatible with both directions. In this work, a novel language-aware encoder (LAE) architecture is proposed to handle both situations by disentangling language-specific information and generating frame-level language-aware representations during encoding. In the LAE, the primary encoding is implemented by the shared block while the language-specific blocks are used to extract specific representations for each language. To learn language-specific information discriminatively, a language-aware training method is proposed to optimize the language-specific blocks in LAE. Experiments conducted on Mandarin-English code-switched speech suggest that the proposed LAE is capable of discriminating different languages in frame-level and shows superior performance on both monolingual and multilingual ASR tasks. With either a real-recorded or simulated code-switched dataset, the proposed LAE achieves statistically significant improvements on both CTC and neural transducer systems. Code is released
Priors in Deep Image Restoration and Enhancement: A Survey
Authors: Yunfan Lu, Yiqi Lin, Hao Wu, Yunhao Luo, Xu Zheng, Hui Xiong, Lin Wang
Date: 2022-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration, Survey

Image restoration and enhancement is a process of improving the image quality by removing degradations, such as noise, blur, and resolution degradation. Deep learning (DL) has recently been applied to image restoration and enhancement. Due to its ill-posed property, plenty of works have been explored priors to facilitate training deep neural networks (DNNs). However, the importance of priors has not been systematically studied and analyzed by far in the research community. Therefore, this paper serves as the first study that provides a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in priors for deep image restoration and enhancement. Our work covers five primary contents: (1) A theoretical analysis of priors for deep image restoration and enhancement; (2) A hierarchical and structural taxonomy of priors commonly used in the DL-based methods; (3) An insightful discussion on each prior regarding its principle, potential, and applications; (4) A summary of crucial problems by highlighting the potential future directions, especially adopting the large-scale foundation models as prior, to spark more research in the community; (5) An open-source repository that provides a taxonomy of all mentioned works and code links.
Learning Robust Representations Of Generative Models Using Set-Based Artificial Fingerprints
Authors: Hae Jin Song, Wael AbdAlmageed
Date: 2022-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

With recent progress in deep generative models, the problem of identifying synthetic data and comparing their underlying generative processes has become an imperative task for various reasons, including fighting visual misinformation and source attribution. Existing methods often approximate the distance between the models via their sample distributions. In this paper, we approach the problem of fingerprinting generative models by learning representations that encode the residual artifacts left by the generative models as unique signals that identify the source models. We consider these unique traces (a.k.a. "artificial fingerprints") as representations of generative models, and demonstrate their usefulness in both the discriminative task of source attribution and the unsupervised task of defining a similarity between the underlying models. We first extend the existing studies on fingerprints of GANs to four representative classes of generative models (VAEs, Flows, GANs and score-based models), and demonstrate their existence and attributability. We then improve the stability and attributability of the fingerprints by proposing a new learning method based on set-encoding and contrastive training. Our set-encoder, unlike existing methods that operate on individual images, learns fingerprints from a \textit{set} of images. We demonstrate improvements in the stability and attributability through comparisons to state-of-the-art fingerprint methods and ablation studies. Further, our method employs contrastive training to learn an implicit similarity between models. We discover latent families of generative models using this metric in a standard hierarchical clustering algorithm.
Active Bayesian Causal Inference
Authors: Christian Toth, Lars Lorch, Christian Knoll, Andreas Krause, Franz Pernkopf, Robert Peharz, Julius von Kügelgen
Date: 2022-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Causal Discovery, Causal Inference, Gaussian Processes

Causal discovery and causal reasoning are classically treated as separate and consecutive tasks: one first infers the causal graph, and then uses it to estimate causal effects of interventions. However, such a two-stage approach is uneconomical, especially in terms of actively collected interventional data, since the causal query of interest may not require a fully-specified causal model. From a Bayesian perspective, it is also unnatural, since a causal query (e.g., the causal graph or some causal effect) can be viewed as a latent quantity subject to posterior inference -- other unobserved quantities that are not of direct interest (e.g., the full causal model) ought to be marginalized out in this process and contribute to our epistemic uncertainty. In this work, we propose Active Bayesian Causal Inference (ABCI), a fully-Bayesian active learning framework for integrated causal discovery and reasoning, which jointly infers a posterior over causal models and queries of interest. In our approach to ABCI, we focus on the class of causally-sufficient, nonlinear additive noise models, which we model using Gaussian processes. We sequentially design experiments that are maximally informative about our target causal query, collect the corresponding interventional data, and update our beliefs to choose the next experiment. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our approach is more data-efficient than several baselines that only focus on learning the full causal graph. This allows us to accurately learn downstream causal queries from fewer samples while providing well-calibrated uncertainty estimates for the quantities of interest.
Empowering GNNs via Edge-Aware Weisfeiler-Leman Algorithm
Authors: Meng Liu, Haiyang Yu, Shuiwang Ji
Date: 2022-06-04 00:00:00

Message passing graph neural networks (GNNs) are known to have their expressiveness upper-bounded by 1-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman (1-WL) algorithm. To achieve more powerful GNNs, existing attempts either require ad hoc features, or involve operations that incur high time and space complexities. In this work, we propose a general and provably powerful GNN framework that preserves the scalability of the message passing scheme. In particular, we first propose to empower 1-WL for graph isomorphism test by considering edges among neighbors, giving rise to NC-1-WL. The expressiveness of NC-1-WL is shown to be strictly above 1-WL and below 3-WL theoretically. Further, we propose the NC-GNN framework as a differentiable neural version of NC-1-WL. Our simple implementation of NC-GNN is provably as powerful as NC-1-WL. Experiments demonstrate that our NC-GNN performs effectively and efficiently on various benchmarks.
Interpretable Models Capable of Handling Systematic Missingness in Imbalanced Classes and Heterogeneous Datasets
Authors: Sreejita Ghosh, Elizabeth S. Baranowski, Michael Biehl, Wiebke Arlt, Peter Tino, Kerstin Bunte
Date: 2022-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Interpretable Machine Learning

Application of interpretable machine learning techniques on medical datasets facilitate early and fast diagnoses, along with getting deeper insight into the data. Furthermore, the transparency of these models increase trust among application domain experts. Medical datasets face common issues such as heterogeneous measurements, imbalanced classes with limited sample size, and missing data, which hinder the straightforward application of machine learning techniques. In this paper we present a family of prototype-based (PB) interpretable models which are capable of handling these issues. The models introduced in this contribution show comparable or superior performance to alternative techniques applicable in such situations. However, unlike ensemble based models, which have to compromise on easy interpretation, the PB models here do not. Moreover we propose a strategy of harnessing the power of ensembles while maintaining the intrinsic interpretability of the PB models, by averaging the model parameter manifolds. All the models were evaluated on a synthetic (publicly available dataset) in addition to detailed analyses of two real-world medical datasets (one publicly available). Results indicated that the models and strategies we introduced addressed the challenges of real-world medical data, while remaining computationally inexpensive and transparent, as well as similar or superior in performance compared to their alternatives.
Fast and Accurate Error Simulation for CNNs against Soft Errors
Authors: Cristiana Bolchini, Luca Cassano, Antonio Miele, Alessandro Toschi
Date: 2022-06-04 00:00:00

The great quest for adopting AI-based computation for safety-/mission-critical applications motivates the interest towards methods for assessing the robustness of the application w.r.t. not only its training/tuning but also errors due to faults, in particular soft errors, affecting the underlying hardware. Two strategies exist: architecture-level fault injection and application-level functional error simulation. We present a framework for the reliability analysis of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) via an error simulation engine that exploits a set of validated error models extracted from a detailed fault injection campaign. These error models are defined based on the corruption patterns of the output of the CNN operators induced by faults and bridge the gap between fault injection and error simulation, exploiting the advantages of both approaches. We compared our methodology against SASSIFI for the accuracy of functional error simulation w.r.t. fault injection, and against TensorFI in terms of speedup for the error simulation strategy. Experimental results show that our methodology achieves about 99\% accuracy of the fault effects w.r.t. SASSIFI, and a speedup ranging from 44x up to 63x w.r.t. TensorFI, that only implements a limited set of error models.