pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Machine and Deep Learning Methods with Manual and Automatic Labelling for News Classification in Bangla Language
Authors: Istiak Ahmad, Fahad AlQurashi, Rashid Mehmood
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Classification, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Natural Language Inference, News Classification, POS, POS Tagging, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

Research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has increasingly become important due to applications such as text classification, text mining, sentiment analysis, POS tagging, named entity recognition, textual entailment, and many others. This paper introduces several machine and deep learning methods with manual and automatic labelling for news classification in the Bangla language. We implemented several machine (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms. The ML algorithms are Logistic Regression (LR), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), used with Bag of Words (BoW), Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF), and Doc2Vec embedding models. The DL algorithms are Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), used with Word2vec, Glove, and FastText word embedding models. We develop automatic labelling methods using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and investigate the performance of single-label and multi-label article classification methods. To investigate performance, we developed from scratch Potrika, the largest and the most extensive dataset for news classification in the Bangla language, comprising 185.51 million words and 12.57 million sentences contained in 664,880 news articles in eight distinct categories, curated from six popular online news portals in Bangladesh for the period 2014-2020. GRU and Fasttext with 91.83% achieve the highest accuracy for manually-labelled data. For the automatic labelling case, KNN and Doc2Vec at 57.72% and 75% achieve the highest accuracy for single-label and multi-label data, respectively. The methods developed in this paper are expected to advance research in Bangla and other languages.
Learning Preferences for Interactive Autonomy
Authors: Erdem Biyik
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Autonomous Driving, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward functions can be extremely challenging for complex tasks and environments. A promising approach is to learn reward functions from humans. Recently, several robot learning works embrace this approach and leverage human demonstrations to learn the reward functions. Known as inverse reinforcement learning, this approach relies on a fundamental assumption: humans can provide near-optimal demonstrations to the robot. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case: human demonstrations to the robot are often suboptimal due to various reasons, e.g., difficulty of teleoperation, robot having high degrees of freedom, or humans' cognitive limitations. This thesis is an attempt towards learning reward functions from human users by using other, more reliable data modalities. Specifically, we study how reward functions can be learned using comparative feedback, in which the human user compares multiple robot trajectories instead of (or in addition to) providing demonstrations. To this end, we first propose various forms of comparative feedback, e.g., pairwise comparisons, best-of-many choices, rankings, scaled comparisons; and describe how a robot can use these various forms of human feedback to infer a reward function, which may be parametric or non-parametric. Next, we propose active learning techniques to enable the robot to ask for comparison feedback that optimizes for the expected information that will be gained from that user feedback. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of our methods in a wide variety of domains, ranging from autonomous driving simulations to home robotics, from standard reinforcement learning benchmarks to lower-body exoskeletons.
DEEP$^2$: Deep Learning Powered De-scattering with Excitation Patterning
Authors: Navodini Wijethilake, Mithunjha Anandakumar, Cheng Zheng, Peter T. C. So, Murat Yildirim, Dushan N. Wadduwage
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Limited throughput is a key challenge in in-vivo deep-tissue imaging using nonlinear optical microscopy. Point scanning multiphoton microscopy, the current gold standard, is slow especially compared to the wide-field imaging modalities used for optically cleared or thin specimens. We recently introduced 'De-scattering with Excitation Patterning or DEEP', as a widefield alternative to point-scanning geometries. Using patterned multiphoton excitation, DEEP encodes spatial information inside tissue before scattering. However, to de-scatter at typical depths, hundreds of such patterned excitations are needed. In this work, we present DEEP$^2$, a deep learning based model, that can de-scatter images from just tens of patterned excitations instead of hundreds. Consequently, we improve DEEP's throughput by almost an order of magnitude. We demonstrate our method in multiple numerical and physical experiments including in-vivo cortical vasculature imaging up to four scattering lengths deep, in alive mice.
Mitigating spectral bias for the multiscale operator learning
Authors: Xinliang Liu, Bo Xu, Shuhao Cao, Lei Zhang
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Operator learning

Neural operators have emerged as a powerful tool for learning the mapping between infinite-dimensional parameter and solution spaces of partial differential equations (PDEs). In this work, we focus on multiscale PDEs that have important applications such as reservoir modeling and turbulence prediction. We demonstrate that for such PDEs, the spectral bias towards low-frequency components presents a significant challenge for existing neural operators. To address this challenge, we propose a hierarchical attention neural operator (HANO) inspired by the hierarchical matrix approach. HANO features a scale-adaptive interaction range and self-attentions over a hierarchy of levels, enabling nested feature computation with controllable linear cost and encoding/decoding of multiscale solution space. We also incorporate an empirical $H^1$ loss function to enhance the learning of high-frequency components. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that HANO outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for representative multiscale problems.
Backdoor Attack and Defense in Federated Generative Adversarial Network-based Medical Image Synthesis
Authors: Ruinan Jin, Xiaoxiao Li
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Data Augmentation, Federated Learning, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Open-Ended Question Answering

Deep Learning-based image synthesis techniques have been applied in healthcare research for generating medical images to support open research and augment medical datasets. Training generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) usually require large amounts of training data. Federated learning (FL) provides a way of training a central model using distributed data while keeping raw data locally. However, given that the FL server cannot access the raw data, it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks, an adversarial by poisoning training data. Most backdoor attack strategies focus on classification models and centralized domains. It is still an open question if the existing backdoor attacks can affect GAN training and, if so, how to defend against the attack in the FL setting. In this work, we investigate the overlooked issue of backdoor attacks in federated GANs (FedGANs). The success of this attack is subsequently determined to be the result of some local discriminators overfitting the poisoned data and corrupting the local GAN equilibrium, which then further contaminates other clients when averaging the generator's parameters and yields high generator loss. Therefore, we proposed FedDetect, an efficient and effective way of defending against the backdoor attack in the FL setting, which allows the server to detect the client's adversarial behavior based on their losses and block the malicious clients. Our extensive experiments on two medical datasets with different modalities demonstrate the backdoor attack on FedGANs can result in synthetic images with low fidelity. After detecting and suppressing the detected malicious clients using the proposed defense strategy, we show that FedGANs can synthesize high-quality medical datasets (with labels) for data augmentation to improve classification models' performance.
Exiting the Simulation: The Road to Robust and Resilient Autonomous Vehicles at Scale
Authors: Richard Chakra
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

In the past two decades, autonomous driving has been catalyzed into reality by the growing capabilities of machine learning. This paradigm shift possesses significant potential to transform the future of mobility and reshape our society as a whole. With the recent advances in perception, planning, and control capabilities, autonomous driving technologies are being rolled out for public trials, yet we remain far from being able to rigorously ensure the resilient operations of these systems across the long-tailed nature of the driving environment. Given the limitations of real-world testing, autonomous vehicle simulation stands as the critical component in exploring the edge of autonomous driving capabilities, developing the robust behaviors required for successful real-world operation, and enabling the extraction of hidden risks from these complex systems prior to deployment. This paper presents the current state-of-the-art simulation frameworks and methodologies used in the development of autonomous driving systems, with a focus on outlining how simulation is used to build the resiliency required for real-world operation and the methods developed to bridge the gap between simulation and reality. A synthesis of the key challenges surrounding autonomous driving simulation is presented, specifically highlighting the opportunities to further advance the ability to continuously learn in simulation and effectively transfer the learning into the real-world - enabling autonomous vehicles to exit the guardrails of simulation and deliver robust and resilient operations at scale.
Robotic Table Wiping via Reinforcement Learning and Whole-body Trajectory Optimization
Authors: Thomas Lew, Sumeet Singh, Mario Prats, Jeffrey Bingham, Jonathan Weisz, Benjie Holson, Xiaohan Zhang, Vikas Sindhwani, Yao Lu, Fei Xia, Peng Xu, Tingnan Zhang, Jie Tan, Montserrat Gonzalez
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a framework to enable multipurpose assistive mobile robots to autonomously wipe tables to clean spills and crumbs. This problem is challenging, as it requires planning wiping actions while reasoning over uncertain latent dynamics of crumbs and spills captured via high-dimensional visual observations. Simultaneously, we must guarantee constraints satisfaction to enable safe deployment in unstructured cluttered environments. To tackle this problem, we first propose a stochastic differential equation to model crumbs and spill dynamics and absorption with a robot wiper. Using this model, we train a vision-based policy for planning wiping actions in simulation using reinforcement learning (RL). To enable zero-shot sim-to-real deployment, we dovetail the RL policy with a whole-body trajectory optimization framework to compute base and arm joint trajectories that execute the desired wiping motions while guaranteeing constraints satisfaction. We extensively validate our approach in simulation and on hardware. Video: https://youtu.be/inORKP4F3EI
Cluster and Aggregate: Face Recognition with Large Probe Set
Authors: Minchul Kim, Feng Liu, Anil Jain, Xiaoming Liu
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Face Verification, Surveillance-to-Booking, Surveillance-to-Single, Surveillance-to-Surveillance, Video Recognition

Feature fusion plays a crucial role in unconstrained face recognition where inputs (probes) comprise of a set of $N$ low quality images whose individual qualities vary. Advances in attention and recurrent modules have led to feature fusion that can model the relationship among the images in the input set. However, attention mechanisms cannot scale to large $N$ due to their quadratic complexity and recurrent modules suffer from input order sensitivity. We propose a two-stage feature fusion paradigm, Cluster and Aggregate, that can both scale to large $N$ and maintain the ability to perform sequential inference with order invariance. Specifically, Cluster stage is a linear assignment of $N$ inputs to $M$ global cluster centers, and Aggregation stage is a fusion over $M$ clustered features. The clustered features play an integral role when the inputs are sequential as they can serve as a summarization of past features. By leveraging the order-invariance of incremental averaging operation, we design an update rule that achieves batch-order invariance, which guarantees that the contributions of early image in the sequence do not diminish as time steps increase. Experiments on IJB-B and IJB-S benchmark datasets show the superiority of the proposed two-stage paradigm in unconstrained face recognition. Code and pretrained models are available in https://github.com/mk-minchul/caface
QA Domain Adaptation using Hidden Space Augmentation and Self-Supervised Contrastive Adaptation
Authors: Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Bernhard Kratzwald, Stefan Feuerriegel, Dong Wang
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Question Answering

Question answering (QA) has recently shown impressive results for answering questions from customized domains. Yet, a common challenge is to adapt QA models to an unseen target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised framework called QADA for QA domain adaptation. QADA introduces a novel data augmentation pipeline used to augment training QA samples. Different from existing methods, we enrich the samples via hidden space augmentation. For questions, we introduce multi-hop synonyms and sample augmented token embeddings with Dirichlet distributions. For contexts, we develop an augmentation method which learns to drop context spans via a custom attentive sampling strategy. Additionally, contrastive learning is integrated in the proposed self-supervised adaptation framework QADA. Unlike existing approaches, we generate pseudo labels and propose to train the model via a novel attention-based contrastive adaptation method. The attention weights are used to build informative features for discrepancy estimation that helps the QA model separate answers and generalize across source and target domains. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to leverage hidden space augmentation and attention-based contrastive adaptation for self-supervised domain adaptation in QA. Our evaluation shows that QADA achieves considerable improvements on multiple target datasets over state-of-the-art baselines in QA domain adaptation.
Black Box Model Explanations and the Human Interpretability Expectations -- An Analysis in the Context of Homicide Prediction
Authors: José Ribeiro, Níkolas Carneiro, Ronnie Alves
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Strategies based on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) have promoted better human interpretability of the results of black box models. This opens up the possibility of questioning whether explanations created by XAI methods meet human expectations. The XAI methods being currently used (Ciu, Dalex, Eli5, Lofo, Shap, and Skater) provide various forms of explanations, including global rankings of relevance of features, which allow for an overview of how the model is explained as a result of its inputs and outputs. These methods provide for an increase in the explainability of the model and a greater interpretability grounded on the context of the problem. Intending to shed light on the explanations generated by XAI methods and their interpretations, this research addresses a real-world classification problem related to homicide prediction, already peer-validated, replicated its proposed black box model and used 6 different XAI methods to generate explanations and 6 different human experts. The results were generated through calculations of correlations, comparative analysis and identification of relationships between all ranks of features produced. It was found that even though it is a model that is difficult to explain, 75\% of the expectations of human experts were met, with approximately 48\% agreement between results from XAI methods and human experts. The results allow for answering questions such as: "Are the Expectation of Interpretation generated among different human experts similar?", "Do the different XAI methods generate similar explanations for the proposed problem?", "Can explanations generated by XAI methods meet human expectation of Interpretations?", and "Can Explanations and Expectations of Interpretation work together?".
A Continuum of Generation Tasks for Investigating Length Bias and Degenerate Repetition
Authors: Darcey Riley, David Chiang
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Story Generation

Language models suffer from various degenerate behaviors. These differ between tasks: machine translation (MT) exhibits length bias, while tasks like story generation exhibit excessive repetition. Recent work has attributed the difference to task constrainedness, but evidence for this claim has always involved many confounding variables. To study this question directly, we introduce a new experimental framework that allows us to smoothly vary task constrainedness, from MT at one end to fully open-ended generation at the other, while keeping all other aspects fixed. We find that: (1) repetition decreases smoothly with constrainedness, explaining the difference in repetition across tasks; (2) length bias surprisingly also decreases with constrainedness, suggesting some other cause for the difference in length bias; (3) across the board, these problems affect the mode, not the whole distribution; (4) the differences cannot be attributed to a change in the entropy of the distribution, since another method of changing the entropy, label smoothing, does not produce the same effect.
Graph Regularized Probabilistic Matrix Factorization for Drug-Drug Interactions Prediction
Authors: Stuti Jain, Emilie Chouzenoux, Kriti Kumar, Angshul Majumdar
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Matrix Completion

Co-administration of two or more drugs simultaneously can result in adverse drug reactions. Identifying drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is necessary, especially for drug development and for repurposing old drugs. DDI prediction can be viewed as a matrix completion task, for which matrix factorization (MF) appears as a suitable solution. This paper presents a novel Graph Regularized Probabilistic Matrix Factorization (GRPMF) method, which incorporates expert knowledge through a novel graph-based regularization strategy within an MF framework. An efficient and sounded optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the resulting non-convex problem in an alternating fashion. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated through the DrugBank dataset, and comparisons are provided against state-of-the-art techniques. The results demonstrate the superior performance of GRPMF when compared to its counterparts.
The Effectiveness of Social Media Engagement Strategy on Disaster Fundraising
Authors: Vivek Velivela, Chahat Raj, Muhammad Salman Tiwana, Raj Prasanna, Mahendra Samarawickrama, Mukesh Prasad
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Social media has been a powerful tool and an integral part of communication, especially during natural disasters. Social media platforms help nonprofits in effective disaster management by disseminating crucial information to various communities at the earliest. Besides spreading information to every corner of the world, various platforms incorporate many features that give access to host online fundraising events, process online donations, etc. The current literature lacks the theoretical structure investigating the correlation between social media engagement and crisis management. Large nonprofit organisations like the Australian Red Cross have upscaled their operations to help nearly 6,000 bushfire survivors through various grants and helped 21,563 people with psychological support and other assistance through their recovery program (Australian Red Cross, 2021). This paper considers the case of bushfires in Australia 2019-2020 to inspect the role of social media in escalating fundraising via analysing the donation data of the Australian Red Cross from October 2019 - March 2020 and analysing the level of public interaction with their Facebook page and its content in the same period.
G2NetPL: Generic Game-Theoretic Network for Partial-Label Image Classification
Authors: Rabab Abdelfattah, Xin Zhang, Mostafa M. Fouda, XiaoFeng Wang, Song Wang
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-Label Image Classification, Partial Label Learning, Pseudo Label

Multi-label image classification aims to predict all possible labels in an image. It is usually formulated as a partial-label learning problem, since it could be expensive in practice to annotate all the labels in every training image. Existing works on partial-label learning focus on the case where each training image is labeled with only a subset of its positive/negative labels. To effectively address partial-label classification, this paper proposes an end-to-end Generic Game-theoretic Network (G2NetPL) for partial-label learning, which can be applied to most partial-label settings, including a very challenging, but annotation-efficient case where only a subset of the training images are labeled, each with only one positive label, while the rest of the training images remain unlabeled. In G2NetPL, each unobserved label is associated with a soft pseudo label, which, together with the network, formulates a two-player non-zero-sum non-cooperative game. The objective of the network is to minimize the loss function with given pseudo labels, while the pseudo labels will seek convergence to 1 (positive) or 0 (negative) with a penalty of deviating from the predicted labels determined by the network. In addition, we introduce a confidence-aware scheduler into the loss of the network to adaptively perform easy-to-hard learning for different labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed G2NetPL outperforms many state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods under various partial-label settings on three different datasets.