pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Ball Mill Fault Prediction Based on Deep Convolutional Auto-Encoding Network
Authors: Xinkun Ai, Kun Liu, Wei Zheng, Yonggang Fan, Xinwu Wu, Peilong Zhang, Liye Wang, JanFeng Zhu, Yuan Pan
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Fault Detection

Ball mills play a critical role in modern mining operations, making their bearing failures a significant concern due to the potential loss of production efficiency and economic consequences. This paper presents an anomaly detection method based on Deep Convolutional Auto-encoding Neural Networks (DCAN) for addressing the issue of ball mill bearing fault detection. The proposed approach leverages vibration data collected during normal operation for training, overcoming challenges such as labeling issues and data imbalance often encountered in supervised learning methods. DCAN includes the modules of convolutional feature extraction and transposed convolutional feature reconstruction, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in signal processing and feature extraction. Additionally, the paper describes the practical deployment of the DCAN-based anomaly detection model for bearing fault detection, utilizing data from the ball mill bearings of Wuhan Iron & Steel Resources Group and fault data from NASA's bearing vibration dataset. Experimental results validate the DCAN model's reliability in recognizing fault vibration patterns. This method holds promise for enhancing bearing fault detection efficiency, reducing production interruptions, and lowering maintenance costs.
$σ$-PCA: a building block for neural learning of identifiable linear transformations
Authors: Fahdi Kanavati, Lucy Katsnith, Masayuki Tsuneki
Date: 2023-11-22 00:00:00

Linear principal component analysis (PCA) learns (semi-)orthogonal transformations by orienting the axes to maximize variance. Consequently, it can only identify orthogonal axes whose variances are clearly distinct, but it cannot identify the subsets of axes whose variances are roughly equal. It cannot eliminate the subspace rotational indeterminacy: it fails to disentangle components with equal variances (eigenvalues), resulting, in each eigen subspace, in randomly rotated axes. In this paper, we propose $\sigma$-PCA, a method that (1) formulates a unified model for linear and nonlinear PCA, the latter being a special case of linear independent component analysis (ICA), and (2) introduces a missing piece into nonlinear PCA that allows it to eliminate, from the canonical linear PCA solution, the subspace rotational indeterminacy -- without whitening the inputs. Whitening, a preprocessing step which converts the inputs into unit-variance inputs, has generally been a prerequisite step for linear ICA methods, which meant that conventional nonlinear PCA could not necessarily preserve the orthogonality of the overall transformation, could not directly reduce dimensionality, and could not intrinsically order by variances. We offer insights on the relationship between linear PCA, nonlinear PCA, and linear ICA -- three methods with autoencoder formulations for learning special linear transformations from data, transformations that are (semi-)orthogonal for PCA, and arbitrary unit-variance for ICA. As part of our formulation, nonlinear PCA can be seen as a method that maximizes both variance and statistical independence, lying in the middle between linear PCA and linear ICA, serving as a building block for learning linear transformations that are identifiable.
Adaptive Sampling for Deep Learning via Efficient Nonparametric Proxies
Authors: Shabnam Daghaghi, Benjamin Coleman, Benito Geordie, Anshumali Shrivastava
Date: 2023-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, regression

Data sampling is an effective method to improve the training speed of neural networks, with recent results demonstrating that it can even break the neural scaling laws. These results critically rely on high-quality scores to estimate the importance of an input to the network. We observe that there are two dominant strategies: static sampling, where the scores are determined before training, and dynamic sampling, where the scores can depend on the model weights. Static algorithms are computationally inexpensive but less effective than their dynamic counterparts, which can cause end-to-end slowdown due to their need to explicitly compute losses. To address this problem, we propose a novel sampling distribution based on nonparametric kernel regression that learns an effective importance score as the neural network trains. However, nonparametric regression models are too computationally expensive to accelerate end-to-end training. Therefore, we develop an efficient sketch-based approximation to the Nadaraya-Watson estimator. Using recent techniques from high-dimensional statistics and randomized algorithms, we prove that our Nadaraya-Watson sketch approximates the estimator with exponential convergence guarantees. Our sampling algorithm outperforms the baseline in terms of wall-clock time and accuracy on four datasets.
On diffusion-based generative models and their error bounds: The log-concave case with full convergence estimates
Authors: Stefano Bruno, Ying Zhang, Dong-Young Lim, Ömer Deniz Akyildiz, Sotirios Sabanis
Date: 2023-11-22 00:00:00

We provide full theoretical guarantees for the convergence behaviour of diffusion-based generative models under the assumption of strongly log-concave data distributions while our approximating class of functions used for score estimation is made of Lipschitz continuous functions avoiding any Lipschitzness assumption on the score function. We demonstrate via a motivating example, sampling from a Gaussian distribution with unknown mean, the powerfulness of our approach. In this case, explicit estimates are provided for the associated optimization problem, i.e. score approximation, while these are combined with the corresponding sampling estimates. As a result, we obtain the best known upper bound estimates in terms of key quantities of interest, such as the dimension and rates of convergence, for the Wasserstein-2 distance between the data distribution (Gaussian with unknown mean) and our sampling algorithm. Beyond the motivating example and in order to allow for the use of a diverse range of stochastic optimizers, we present our results using an $L^2$-accurate score estimation assumption, which crucially is formed under an expectation with respect to the stochastic optimizer and our novel auxiliary process that uses only known information. This approach yields the best known convergence rate for our sampling algorithm.
Risk-sensitive Markov Decision Process and Learning under General Utility Functions
Authors: Zhengqi Wu, Renyuan Xu
Date: 2023-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to maximize the expected cumulative reward. However, in practical scenarios such as portfolio management and e-commerce recommendations, decision-makers often persist in heterogeneous risk preferences subject to outcome uncertainties, which can not be well-captured by the risk-neural framework. Incorporating these preferences can be approached through utility theory, yet the development of risk-sensitive RL under general utility functions remains an open question for theoretical exploration. In this paper, we consider a scenario where the decision-maker seeks to optimize a general utility function of the cumulative reward in the framework of a Markov decision process (MDP). To facilitate the Dynamic Programming Principle and Bellman equation, we enlarge the state space with an additional dimension that accounts for the cumulative reward. We propose a discretized approximation scheme to the MDP under enlarged state space, which is tractable and key for algorithmic design. We then propose a modified value iteration algorithm that employs an epsilon-covering over the space of cumulative reward. When a simulator is accessible, our algorithm efficiently learns a near-optimal policy with guaranteed sample complexity. In the absence of a simulator, our algorithm, designed with an upper-confidence-bound exploration approach, identifies a near-optimal policy while ensuring a guaranteed regret bound. Finally, we establish a novel theoretical regret lower bound for the risk-sensitive setting, and show that the regret of our algorithm matches this lower bound up to a small polynomial factor
Towards the generation of synchronized and believable non-verbal facial behaviors of a talking virtual agent
Authors: Alice Delbosc, Magalie Ochs, Nicolas Sabouret, Brian Ravenet, Stéphane Ayache
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00

This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and replayed on a virtual agent, in terms of synchronization with speech and believability. Interestingly, we found that training the model with two different sets of data, instead of one, did not necessarily improve its performance. The expressiveness of the people in the dataset and the shooting conditions are key elements. We also show that employing an adversarial model, in which fabricated fake examples are introduced during the training phase, increases the perception of synchronization with speech. A collection of videos demonstrating the results and code can be accessed at: https://github.com/aldelb/non_verbal_facial_animation.
MatGD: Materials Graph Digitizer
Authors: Jaewoong Lee, Wonseok Lee, Jihan Kim
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Detection

We have developed MatGD (Material Graph Digitizer), which is a tool for digitizing a data line from scientific graphs. The algorithm behind the tool consists of four steps: (1) identifying graphs within subfigures, (2) separating axes and data sections, (3) discerning the data lines by eliminating irrelevant graph objects and matching with the legend, and (4) data extraction and saving. From the 62,534 papers in the areas of batteries, catalysis, and MOFs, 501,045 figures were mined. Remarkably, our tool showcased performance with over 99% accuracy in legend marker and text detection. Moreover, its capability for data line separation stood at 66%, which is much higher compared to other existing figure mining tools. We believe that this tool will be integral to collecting both past and future data from publications, and these data can be used to train various machine learning models that can enhance material predictions and new materials discovery.
Reducing the Environmental Impact of Wireless Communication via Probabilistic Machine Learning
Authors: A. Ryo Koblitz, Lorenzo Maggi, Matthew Andrews
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Bayesian Optimization

Machine learning methods are increasingly adopted in communications problems, particularly those arising in next generation wireless settings. Though seen as a key climate mitigation and societal adaptation enabler, communications related energy consumption is high and is expected to grow in future networks in spite of anticipated efficiency gains in 6G due to exponential communications traffic growth. To make meaningful climate mitigation impact in the communications sector, a mindset shift away from maximizing throughput at all cost and towards prioritizing energy efficiency is needed. Moreover, this must be adopted in both existing (without incurring further embodied carbon costs through equipment replacement) and future network infrastructure, given the long development time of mobile generations. To that end, we present summaries of two such problems, from both current and next generation network specifications, where probabilistic inference methods were used to great effect: using Bayesian parameter tuning we are able to safely reduce the energy consumption of existing hardware on a live communications network by $11\%$ whilst maintaining operator specified performance envelopes; through spatiotemporal Gaussian process surrogate modeling we reduce the overhead in a next generation hybrid beamforming system by over $60\%$, greatly improving the networks' ability to target highly mobile users such as autonomous vehicles. The Bayesian paradigm is itself helpful in terms of energy usage, since training a Bayesian optimization model can require much less computation than, say, training a deep neural network.
Combining low-dose CT-based radiomics and metabolomics for early lung cancer screening support
Authors: Joanna Zyla, Michal Marczyk, Wojciech Prazuch, Marek Socha, Aleksandra Suwalska, Agata Durawa, Malgorzata Jelitto-Gorska, Katarzyna Dziadziuszko, Edyta Szurowska, Witold Rzyman, Piotr Widlak, Joanna Polanska
Date: 2023-09-20 00:00:00

Due to its predominantly asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic progression, lung cancer is often diagnosed in advanced stages, resulting in poorer survival rates for patients. As with other cancers, early detection significantly improves the chances of successful treatment. Early diagnosis can be facilitated through screening programs designed to detect lung tissue tumors when they are still small, typically around 3mm in size. However, the analysis of extensive screening program data is hampered by limited access to medical experts. In this study, we developed a procedure for identifying potential malignant neoplastic lesions within lung parenchyma. The system leverages machine learning (ML) techniques applied to two types of measurements: low-dose Computed Tomography-based radiomics and metabolomics. Using data from two Polish screening programs, two ML algorithms were tested, along with various integration methods, to create a final model that combines both modalities to support lung cancer screening.
Personalization of Affective Models to Enable Neuropsychiatric Digital Precision Health Interventions: A Feasibility Study
Authors: Ali Kargarandehkordi, Matti Kaisti, Peter Washington
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

Mobile digital therapeutics for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often target emotion recognition and evocation, which is a challenge for children with ASD. While such mobile applications often use computer vision machine learning (ML) models to guide the adaptive nature of the digital intervention, a single model is usually deployed and applied to all children. Here, we explore the potential of model personalization, or training a single emotion recognition model per person, to improve the performance of these underlying emotion recognition models used to guide digital health therapies for children with ASD. We conducted experiments on the Emognition dataset, a video dataset of human subjects evoking a series of emotions. For a subset of 10 individuals in the dataset with a sufficient representation of at least two ground truth emotion labels, we trained a personalized version of three classical ML models on a set of 51 features extracted from each video frame. We measured the importance of each facial feature for all personalized models and observed differing ranked lists of top features across subjects, motivating the need for model personalization. We then compared the personalized models against a generalized model trained using data from all 10 participants. The mean F1-scores achieved by the personalized models were 90.48%, 92.66%, and 86.40%, respectively. By contrast, the mean F1-scores reached by non-personalized models trained on different human subjects and evaluated using the same test set were 88.55%, 91.78%, and 80.42%, respectively. The personalized models outperformed the generalized models for 7 out of 10 participants. PCA analyses on the remaining 3 participants revealed relatively facial configuration differences between emotion labels within each subject, suggesting that personalized ML will fail when the variation among data points within a subjects data is too low.
Targeted Activation Penalties Help CNNs Ignore Spurious Signals
Authors: Dekai Zhang, Matthew Williams, Francesca Toni
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00

Neural networks (NNs) can learn to rely on spurious signals in the training data, leading to poor generalisation. Recent methods tackle this problem by training NNs with additional ground-truth annotations of such signals. These methods may, however, let spurious signals re-emerge in deep convolutional NNs (CNNs). We propose Targeted Activation Penalty (TAP), a new method tackling the same problem by penalising activations to control the re-emergence of spurious signals in deep CNNs, while also lowering training times and memory usage. In addition, ground-truth annotations can be expensive to obtain. We show that TAP still works well with annotations generated by pre-trained models as effective substitutes of ground-truth annotations. We demonstrate the power of TAP against two state-of-the-art baselines on the MNIST benchmark and on two clinical image datasets, using four different CNN architectures.
HydraScreen: A Generalizable Structure-Based Deep Learning Approach to Drug Discovery
Authors: Alvaro Prat, Hisham Abdel Aty, Gintautas Kamuntavičius, Tanya Paquet, Povilas Norvaišas, Piero Gasparotto, Roy Tal
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design, Drug Discovery, Pose Prediction

We propose HydraScreen, a deep-learning approach that aims to provide a framework for more robust machine-learning-accelerated drug discovery. HydraScreen utilizes a state-of-the-art 3D convolutional neural network, designed for the effective representation of molecular structures and interactions in protein-ligand binding. We design an end-to-end pipeline for high-throughput screening and lead optimization, targeting applications in structure-based drug design. We assess our approach using established public benchmarks based on the CASF 2016 core set, achieving top-tier results in affinity and pose prediction (Pearson's r = 0.86, RMSE = 1.15, Top-1 = 0.95). Furthermore, we utilize a novel interaction profiling approach to identify potential biases in the model and dataset to boost interpretability and support the unbiased nature of our method. Finally, we showcase HydraScreen's capacity to generalize across unseen proteins and ligands, offering directions for future development of robust machine learning scoring functions. HydraScreen (accessible at https://hydrascreen.ro5.ai) provides a user-friendly GUI and a public API, facilitating easy assessment of individual protein-ligand complexes.
Evolution of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN): Compute vs Memory bandwidth for Edge AI
Authors: Dwith Chenna
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have greatly influenced the field of Embedded Vision and Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling powerful machine learning capabilities on resource-constrained devices. This article explores the relationship between CNN compute requirements and memory bandwidth in the context of Edge AI. We delve into the historical progression of CNN architectures, from the early pioneering models to the current state-of-the-art designs, highlighting the advancements in compute-intensive operations. We examine the impact of increasing model complexity on both computational requirements and memory access patterns. The paper presents a comparison analysis of the evolving trade-off between compute demands and memory bandwidth requirements in CNNs. This analysis provides insights into designing efficient architectures and potential hardware accelerators in enhancing CNN performance on edge devices.
Fixing the problems of deep neural networks will require better training data and learning algorithms
Authors: Drew Linsley, Thomas Serre
Date: 2023-09-26 00:00:00

Bowers and colleagues argue that DNNs are poor models of biological vision because they often learn to rival human accuracy by relying on strategies that differ markedly from those of humans. We show that this problem is worsening as DNNs are becoming larger-scale and increasingly more accurate, and prescribe methods for building DNNs that can reliably model biological vision.
Advancing The Rate-Distortion-Computation Frontier For Neural Image Compression
Authors: David Minnen, Nick Johnston
Date: 2023-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Compression

The rate-distortion performance of neural image compression models has exceeded the state-of-the-art for non-learned codecs, but neural codecs are still far from widespread deployment and adoption. The largest obstacle is having efficient models that are feasible on a wide variety of consumer hardware. Comparative research and evaluation is difficult due to the lack of standard benchmarking platforms and due to variations in hardware architectures and test environments. Through our rate-distortion-computation (RDC) study we demonstrate that neither floating-point operations (FLOPs) nor runtime are sufficient on their own to accurately rank neural compression methods. We also explore the RDC frontier, which leads to a family of model architectures with the best empirical trade-off between computational requirements and RD performance. Finally, we identify a novel neural compression architecture that yields state-of-the-art RD performance with rate savings of 23.1% over BPG (7.0% over VTM and 3.0% over ELIC) without requiring significantly more FLOPs than other learning-based codecs.
A PSO Based Method to Generate Actionable Counterfactuals for High Dimensional Data
Authors: Shashank Shekhar, Asif Salim, Adesh Bansode, Vivaswan Jinturkar, Anirudha Nayak
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Counterfactual explanations (CFE) are methods that explain a machine learning model by giving an alternate class prediction of a data point with some minimal changes in its features. It helps the users to identify their data attributes that caused an undesirable prediction like a loan or credit card rejection. We describe an efficient and an actionable counterfactual (CF) generation method based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). We propose a simple objective function for the optimization of the instance-centric CF generation problem. The PSO brings in a lot of flexibility in terms of carrying out multi-objective optimization in large dimensions, capability for multiple CF generation, and setting box constraints or immutability of data attributes. An algorithm is proposed that incorporates these features and it enables greater control over the proximity and sparsity properties over the generated CFs. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with a set of action-ability metrics in real-world datasets, and the results were superior compared to that of the state-of-the-arts.
ECNR: Efficient Compressive Neural Representation of Time-Varying Volumetric Datasets
Authors: Kaiyuan Tang, Chaoli Wang
Date: 2023-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Compression

Due to its conceptual simplicity and generality, compressive neural representation has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional compression methods for managing massive volumetric datasets. The current practice of neural compression utilizes a single large multilayer perceptron (MLP) to encode the global volume, incurring slow training and inference. This paper presents an efficient compressive neural representation (ECNR) solution for time-varying data compression, utilizing the Laplacian pyramid for adaptive signal fitting. Following a multiscale structure, we leverage multiple small MLPs at each scale for fitting local content or residual blocks. By assigning similar blocks to the same MLP via size uniformization, we enable balanced parallelization among MLPs to significantly speed up training and inference. Working in concert with the multiscale structure, we tailor a deep compression strategy to compact the resulting model. We show the effectiveness of ECNR with multiple datasets and compare it with state-of-the-art compression methods (mainly SZ3, TTHRESH, and neurcomp). The results position ECNR as a promising solution for volumetric data compression.