pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AutoDOViz: Human-Centered Automation for Decision Optimization
Authors: Daniel Karl I. Weidele, Shazia Afzal, Abel N. Valente, Cole Makuch, Owen Cornec, Long Vu, Dharmashankar Subramanian, Werner Geyer, Rahul Nair, Inge Vejsbjerg, Radu Marinescu, Paulito Palmes, Elizabeth M. Daly, Loraine Franke, Daniel Haehn
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present AutoDOViz, an interactive user interface for automated decision optimization (AutoDO) using reinforcement learning (RL). Decision optimization (DO) has classically being practiced by dedicated DO researchers where experts need to spend long periods of time fine tuning a solution through trial-and-error. AutoML pipeline search has sought to make it easier for a data scientist to find the best machine learning pipeline by leveraging automation to search and tune the solution. More recently, these advances have been applied to the domain of AutoDO, with a similar goal to find the best reinforcement learning pipeline through algorithm selection and parameter tuning. However, Decision Optimization requires significantly more complex problem specification when compared to an ML problem. AutoDOViz seeks to lower the barrier of entry for data scientists in problem specification for reinforcement learning problems, leverage the benefits of AutoDO algorithms for RL pipeline search and finally, create visualizations and policy insights in order to facilitate the typical interactive nature when communicating problem formulation and solution proposals between DO experts and domain experts. In this paper, we report our findings from semi-structured expert interviews with DO practitioners as well as business consultants, leading to design requirements for human-centered automation for DO with RL. We evaluate a system implementation with data scientists and find that they are significantly more open to engage in DO after using our proposed solution. AutoDOViz further increases trust in RL agent models and makes the automated training and evaluation process more comprehensible. As shown for other automation in ML tasks, we also conclude automation of RL for DO can benefit from user and vice-versa when the interface promotes human-in-the-loop.
CitySpec with Shield: A Secure Intelligent Assistant for Requirement Formalization
Authors: Zirong Chen, Issa Li, Haoxiang Zhang, Sarah Preum, John A. Stankovic, Meiyi Ma
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

An increasing number of monitoring systems have been developed in smart cities to ensure that the real-time operations of a city satisfy safety and performance requirements. However, many existing city requirements are written in English with missing, inaccurate, or ambiguous information. There is a high demand for assisting city policymakers in converting human-specified requirements to machine-understandable formal specifications for monitoring systems. To tackle this limitation, we build CitySpec, the first intelligent assistant system for requirement specification in smart cities. To create CitySpec, we first collect over 1,500 real-world city requirements across different domains (e.g., transportation and energy) from over 100 cities and extract city-specific knowledge to generate a dataset of city vocabulary with 3,061 words. We also build a translation model and enhance it through requirement synthesis and develop a novel online learning framework with shielded validation. The evaluation results on real-world city requirements show that CitySpec increases the sentence-level accuracy of requirement specification from 59.02% to 86.64%, and has strong adaptability to a new city and a new domain (e.g., the F1 score for requirements in Seattle increases from 77.6% to 93.75% with online learning). After the enhancement from the shield function, CitySpec is now immune to most known textual adversarial inputs (e.g., the attack success rate of DeepWordBug after the shield function is reduced to 0% from 82.73%). We test the CitySpec with 18 participants from different domains. CitySpec shows its strong usability and adaptability to different domains, and also its robustness to malicious inputs.
Semantic Uncertainty: Linguistic Invariances for Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation
Authors: Lorenz Kuhn, Yarin Gal, Sebastian Farquhar
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Text Generation

We introduce a method to measure uncertainty in large language models. For tasks like question answering, it is essential to know when we can trust the natural language outputs of foundation models. We show that measuring uncertainty in natural language is challenging because of "semantic equivalence" -- different sentences can mean the same thing. To overcome these challenges we introduce semantic entropy -- an entropy which incorporates linguistic invariances created by shared meanings. Our method is unsupervised, uses only a single model, and requires no modifications to off-the-shelf language models. In comprehensive ablation studies we show that the semantic entropy is more predictive of model accuracy on question answering data sets than comparable baselines.
Table Tennis Stroke Detection and Recognition Using Ball Trajectory Data
Authors: Kaustubh Milind Kulkarni, Rohan S Jamadagni, Jeffrey Aaron Paul, Sucheth Shenoy
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, object-detection, Object Detection, Temporal Action Localization, valid

In this work, the novel task of detecting and classifying table tennis strokes solely using the ball trajectory has been explored. A single camera setup positioned in the umpire's view has been employed to procure a dataset consisting of six stroke classes executed by four professional table tennis players. Ball tracking using YOLOv4, a traditional object detection model, and TrackNetv2, a temporal heatmap based model, have been implemented on our dataset and their performances have been benchmarked. A mathematical approach developed to extract temporal boundaries of strokes using the ball trajectory data yielded a total of 2023 valid strokes in our dataset, while also detecting services and missed strokes successfully. The temporal convolutional network developed performed stroke recognition on completely unseen data with an accuracy of 87.155%. Several machine learning and deep learning based model architectures have been trained for stroke recognition using ball trajectory input and benchmarked based on their performances. While stroke recognition in the field of table tennis has been extensively explored based on human action recognition using video data focused on the player's actions, the use of ball trajectory data for the same is an unexplored characteristic of the sport. Hence, the motivation behind the work is to demonstrate that meaningful inferences such as stroke detection and recognition can be drawn using minimal input information.
An Explainable Collaborative Dialogue System using a Theory of Mind
Authors: Philip R. Cohen, Lucian Galescu, Maayan Shvo
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00

Eva is a neuro-symbolic domain-independent multimodal collaborative dialogue system that takes seriously that the purpose of task-oriented dialogue is to assist the user. To do this, the system collaborates by inferring their intentions and plans, detects obstacles to success, finds plans to overcome them or to achieve higher-level goals, and plans its actions, including speech acts, to help users accomplish those goals. In doing so, the system maintains and reasons with its own declaratively-specified beliefs, goals and intentions, and explicitly reasons about those of its user. Because Eva can track different users' mental states, it can engage multiple agents in multi-party dialogues. Reasoning is accomplished with a modal Horn-clause meta-interpreter that enables computable inference within the subset of logic implemented. The system employs both hierarchical and backward-chaining planning, operating over a rich modal logic-based knowledge and action representation. The planning and reasoning subsystems obey the principles of persistent goals and intentions including: 1) The formation and decomposition of intentions to perform complex actions, 2) the conditions under which persistent goals and intentions can be given up, and 3) persistent goal and intention revision using the relativizing formulas that are created during the planning process. The system treats its speech acts just like its other actions. This general approach enables Eva to plan a variety of speech acts, including requests, informs, questions, confirmations, offers, acceptances, and emotive expressions. Because the dialogue engine is a planner, as the dialogue proceeds, the system can flexibly generate, execute, and potentially repair its plans using physical, digital, and speech actions. Importantly, Eva can explain its utterances because it has created a plan that caused it to utter them.
An overview of differentiable particle filters for data-adaptive sequential Bayesian inference
Authors: Xiongjie Chen, Yunpeng Li
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Sequential Bayesian Inference, State Estimation

By approximating posterior distributions with weighted samples, particle filters (PFs) provide an efficient mechanism for solving non-linear sequential state estimation problems. While the effectiveness of particle filters has been recognised in various applications, their performance relies on the knowledge of dynamic models and measurement models, as well as the construction of effective proposal distributions. An emerging trend involves constructing components of particle filters using neural networks and optimising them by gradient descent, and such data-adaptive particle filtering approaches are often called differentiable particle filters. Due to the expressiveness of neural networks, differentiable particle filters are a promising computational tool for performing inference on sequential data in complex, high-dimensional tasks, such as vision-based robot localisation. In this paper, we review recent advances in differentiable particle filters and their applications. We place special emphasis on different design choices for key components of differentiable particle filters, including dynamic models, measurement models, proposal distributions, optimisation objectives, and differentiable resampling techniques.
Jointly Complementary&Competitive Influence Maximization with Concurrent Ally-Boosting and Rival-Preventing
Authors: Qihao Shi, Wenjie Tian, Wujian Yang, Mengqi Xue, Can Wang, Minghui Wu
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Blocking

In this paper, we propose a new influence spread model, namely, Complementary\&Competitive Independent Cascade (C$^2$IC) model. C$^2$IC model generalizes three well known influence model, i.e., influence boosting (IB) model, campaign oblivious (CO)IC model and the IC-N (IC model with negative opinions) model. This is the first model that considers both complementary and competitive influence spread comprehensively under multi-agent environment. Correspondingly, we propose the Complementary\&Competitive influence maximization (C$^2$IM) problem. Given an ally seed set and a rival seed set, the C$^2$IM problem aims to select a set of assistant nodes that can boost the ally spread and prevent the rival spread concurrently. We show the problem is NP-hard and can generalize the influence boosting problem and the influence blocking problem. With classifying the different cascade priorities into 4 cases by the monotonicity and submodularity (M\&S) holding conditions, we design 4 algorithms respectively, with theoretical approximation bounds provided. We conduct extensive experiments on real social networks and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. We hope this work can inspire abundant future exploration for constructing more generalized influence models that help streamline the works of this area.
Exploring the Potential of Machine Translation for Generating Named Entity Datasets: A Case Study between Persian and English
Authors: Amir Sartipi, Afsaneh Fatemi
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Translation

This study focuses on the generation of Persian named entity datasets through the application of machine translation on English datasets. The generated datasets were evaluated by experimenting with one monolingual and one multilingual transformer model. Notably, the CoNLL 2003 dataset has achieved the highest F1 score of 85.11%. In contrast, the WNUT 2017 dataset yielded the lowest F1 score of 40.02%. The results of this study highlight the potential of machine translation in creating high-quality named entity recognition datasets for low-resource languages like Persian. The study compares the performance of these generated datasets with English named entity recognition systems and provides insights into the effectiveness of machine translation for this task. Additionally, this approach could be used to augment data in low-resource language or create noisy data to make named entity systems more robust and improve them.
Language-Specific Representation of Emotion-Concept Knowledge Causally Supports Emotion Inference
Authors: Ming Li, Yusheng Su, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Jiali Cheng, Xin Hu, Xinmiao Zhang, Huadong Wang, Yujia Qin, Xiaozhi Wang, Kristen A. Lindquist, Zhiyuan Liu, Dan Zhang
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Language Modelling

Humans no doubt use language to communicate about their emotional experiences, but does language in turn help humans understand emotions, or is language just a vehicle of communication? This study used a form of artificial intelligence (AI) known as large language models (LLMs) to assess whether language-based representations of emotion causally contribute to the AI's ability to generate inferences about the emotional meaning of novel situations. Fourteen attributes of human emotion concept representation were found to be represented by the LLM's distinct artificial neuron populations. By manipulating these attribute-related neurons, we in turn demonstrated the role of emotion concept knowledge in generative emotion inference. The attribute-specific performance deterioration was related to the importance of different attributes in human mental space. Our findings provide a proof-in-concept that even a LLM can learn about emotions in the absence of sensory-motor representations and highlight the contribution of language-derived emotion-concept knowledge for emotion inference.
Non-separable Covariance Kernels for Spatiotemporal Gaussian Processes based on a Hybrid Spectral Method and the Harmonic Oscillator
Authors: Dionissios T. Hristopulos
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Gaussian Processes

Gaussian processes provide a flexible, non-parametric framework for the approximation of functions in high-dimensional spaces. The covariance kernel is the main engine of Gaussian processes, incorporating correlations that underpin the predictive distribution. For applications with spatiotemporal datasets, suitable kernels should model joint spatial and temporal dependence. Separable space-time covariance kernels offer simplicity and computational efficiency. However, non-separable kernels include space-time interactions that better capture observed correlations. Most non-separable kernels that admit explicit expressions are based on mathematical considerations (admissibility conditions) rather than first-principles derivations. We present a hybrid spectral approach for generating covariance kernels which is based on physical arguments. We use this approach to derive a new class of physically motivated, non-separable covariance kernels which have their roots in the stochastic, linear, damped, harmonic oscillator (LDHO). The new kernels incorporate functions with both monotonic and oscillatory decay of space-time correlations. The LDHO covariance kernels involve space-time interactions which are introduced by dispersion relations that modulate the oscillator coefficients. We derive explicit relations for the spatiotemporal covariance kernels in the three oscillator regimes (underdamping, critical damping, overdamping) and investigate their properties. We further illustrate the hybrid spectral method by deriving covariance kernels that are based on the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck model.
On Feasibility of Server-side Backdoor Attacks on Split Learning
Authors: Behrad Tajalli, Oguzhan Ersoy, Stjepan Picek
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Federated Learning

Split learning is a collaborative learning design that allows several participants (clients) to train a shared model while keeping their datasets private. Recent studies demonstrate that collaborative learning models, specifically federated learning, are vulnerable to security and privacy attacks such as model inference and backdoor attacks. Backdoor attacks are a group of poisoning attacks in which the attacker tries to control the model output by manipulating the model's training process. While there have been studies regarding inference attacks on split learning, it has not yet been tested for backdoor attacks. This paper performs a novel backdoor attack on split learning and studies its effectiveness. Despite traditional backdoor attacks done on the client side, we inject the backdoor trigger from the server side. For this purpose, we provide two attack methods: one using a surrogate client and another using an autoencoder to poison the model via incoming smashed data and its outgoing gradient toward the innocent participants. We did our experiments using three model architectures and three publicly available datasets in the image domain and ran a total of 761 experiments to evaluate our attack methods. The results show that despite using strong patterns and injection methods, split learning is highly robust and resistant to such poisoning attacks. While we get the attack success rate of 100% as our best result for the MNIST dataset, in most of the other cases, our attack shows little success when increasing the cut layer.
TAX: Tendency-and-Assignment Explainer for Semantic Segmentation with Multi-Annotators
Authors: Yuan-Chia Cheng, Zu-Yun Shiau, Fu-En Yang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

To understand how deep neural networks perform classification predictions, recent research attention has been focusing on developing techniques to offer desirable explanations. However, most existing methods cannot be easily applied for semantic segmentation; moreover, they are not designed to offer interpretability under the multi-annotator setting. Instead of viewing ground-truth pixel-level labels annotated by a single annotator with consistent labeling tendency, we aim at providing interpretable semantic segmentation and answer two critical yet practical questions: "who" contributes to the resulting segmentation, and "why" such an assignment is determined. In this paper, we present a learning framework of Tendency-and-Assignment Explainer (TAX), designed to offer interpretability at the annotator and assignment levels. More specifically, we learn convolution kernel subsets for modeling labeling tendencies of each type of annotation, while a prototype bank is jointly observed to offer visual guidance for learning the above kernels. For evaluation, we consider both synthetic and real-world datasets with multi-annotators. We show that our TAX can be applied to state-of-the-art network architectures with comparable performances, while segmentation interpretability at both levels can be offered accordingly.
Topological Feature Selection
Authors: Antonio Briola, Tomaso Aste
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Position

In this paper, we introduce a novel unsupervised, graph-based filter feature selection technique which exploits the power of topologically constrained network representations. We model dependency structures among features using a family of chordal graphs (the Triangulated Maximally Filtered Graph), and we maximise the likelihood of features' relevance by studying their relative position inside the network. Such an approach presents three aspects that are particularly satisfactory compared to its alternatives: (i) it is highly tunable and easily adaptable to the nature of input data; (ii) it is fully explainable, maintaining, at the same time, a remarkable level of simplicity; (iii) it is computationally cheaper compared to its alternatives. We test our algorithm on 16 benchmark datasets from different applicative domains showing that it outperforms or matches the current state-of-the-art under heterogeneous evaluation conditions.
Pseudo Contrastive Learning for Graph-based Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Weigang Lu, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Yaming Yang, Yuanhai Lv, Lining Xing, Baosheng Yu, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation

Pseudo Labeling is a technique used to improve the performance of semi-supervised Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) by generating additional pseudo-labels based on confident predictions. However, the quality of generated pseudo-labels has been a longstanding concern due to the sensitivity of the classification objective with respect to the given labels. To avoid the untrustworthy classification supervision indicating ``a node belongs to a specific class,'' we favor the fault-tolerant contrasting supervision demonstrating ``two nodes do not belong to the same class.'' Thus, the problem of generating high-quality pseudo-labels is then transformed into a relaxed version, i.e., identifying reliable negative pairs. To achieve this, we propose a general framework for GNNs, termed Pseudo Contrastive Learning (PCL). It separates two nodes whose positive and negative pseudo-labels target the same class. To incorporate topological knowledge into learning, we devise a topologically weighted contrastive loss that spends more effort separating negative pairs with smaller topological distances. Experimentally, we apply PCL to various GNNs, which consistently outperform their counterparts using other popular general techniques on five real-world graphs.
Text Classification in the Wild: a Large-scale Long-tailed Name Normalization Dataset
Authors: Jiexing Qi, Shuhao Li, Zhixin Guo, Yusheng Huang, Chenghu Zhou, Weinan Zhang, Xinbing Wang, Zhouhan Lin
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-tail Learning, open-set classification, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, text-classification, Text Classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Real-world data usually exhibits a long-tailed distribution,with a few frequent labels and a lot of few-shot labels. The study of institution name normalization is a perfect application case showing this phenomenon. There are many institutions worldwide with enormous variations of their names in the publicly available literature. In this work, we first collect a large-scale institution name normalization dataset LoT-insts1, which contains over 25k classes that exhibit a naturally long-tailed distribution. In order to isolate the few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios from the massive many-shot classes, we construct our test set from four different subsets: many-, medium-, and few-shot sets, as well as a zero-shot open set. We also replicate several important baseline methods on our data, covering a wide range from search-based methods to neural network methods that use the pretrained BERT model. Further, we propose our specially pretrained, BERT-based model that shows better out-of-distribution generalization on few-shot and zero-shot test sets. Compared to other datasets focusing on the long-tailed phenomenon, our dataset has one order of magnitude more training data than the largest existing long-tailed datasets and is naturally long-tailed rather than manually synthesized. We believe it provides an important and different scenario to study this problem. To our best knowledge, this is the first natural language dataset that focuses on long-tailed and open-set classification problems.