pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Science Checker: Extractive-Boolean Question Answering For Scientific Fact Checking
Authors: Loïc Rakotoson, Charles Letaillieur, Sylvain Massip, Fréjus Laleye
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Extractive Question-Answering, Fact Checking, Question Answering

With the explosive growth of scientific publications, making the synthesis of scientific knowledge and fact checking becomes an increasingly complex task. In this paper, we propose a multi-task approach for verifying the scientific questions based on a joint reasoning from facts and evidence in research articles. We propose an intelligent combination of (1) an automatic information summarization and (2) a Boolean Question Answering which allows to generate an answer to a scientific question from only extracts obtained after summarization. Thus on a given topic, our proposed approach conducts structured content modeling based on paper abstracts to answer a scientific question while highlighting texts from paper that discuss the topic. We based our final system on an end-to-end Extractive Question Answering (EQA) combined with a three outputs classification model to perform in-depth semantic understanding of a question to illustrate the aggregation of multiple responses. With our light and fast proposed architecture, we achieved an average error rate of 4% and a F1-score of 95.6%. Our results are supported via experiments with two QA models (BERT, RoBERTa) over 3 Million Open Access (OA) articles in the medical and health domains on Europe PMC.
Hybridised Loss Functions for Improved Neural Network Generalisation
Authors: Matthew C. Dickson, Anna S. Bosman, Katherine M. Malan
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

Loss functions play an important role in the training of artificial neural networks (ANNs), and can affect the generalisation ability of the ANN model, among other properties. Specifically, it has been shown that the cross entropy and sum squared error loss functions result in different training dynamics, and exhibit different properties that are complementary to one another. It has previously been suggested that a hybrid of the entropy and sum squared error loss functions could combine the advantages of the two functions, while limiting their disadvantages. The effectiveness of such hybrid loss functions is investigated in this study. It is shown that hybridisation of the two loss functions improves the generalisation ability of the ANNs on all problems considered. The hybrid loss function that starts training with the sum squared error loss function and later switches to the cross entropy error loss function is shown to either perform the best on average, or to not be significantly different than the best loss function tested for all problems considered. This study shows that the minima discovered by the sum squared error loss function can be further exploited by switching to cross entropy error loss function. It can thus be concluded that hybridisation of the two loss functions could lead to better performance in ANNs.
Intercategorical Label Interpolation for Emotional Face Generation with Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Silvan Mertes, Dominik Schiller, Florian Lingenfelser, Thomas Kiderle, Valentin Kroner, Lama Diab, Elisabeth André
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation

Generative adversarial networks offer the possibility to generate deceptively real images that are almost indistinguishable from actual photographs. Such systems however rely on the presence of large datasets to realistically replicate the corresponding domain. This is especially a problem if not only random new images are to be generated, but specific (continuous) features are to be co-modeled. A particularly important use case in \emph{Human-Computer Interaction} (HCI) research is the generation of emotional images of human faces, which can be used for various use cases, such as the automatic generation of avatars. The problem hereby lies in the availability of training data. Most suitable datasets for this task rely on categorical emotion models and therefore feature only discrete annotation labels. This greatly hinders the learning and modeling of smooth transitions between displayed affective states. To overcome this challenge, we explore the potential of label interpolation to enhance networks trained on categorical datasets with the ability to generate images conditioned on continuous features.
Hypergraph Contrastive Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Lianghao Xia, Chao Huang, Yong Xu, Jiashu Zhao, Dawei Yin, Jimmy Xiangji Huang
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Contrastive Learning, Recommendation Systems, Self-Supervised Learning

Collaborative Filtering (CF) has emerged as fundamental paradigms for parameterizing users and items into latent representation space, with their correlative patterns from interaction data. Among various CF techniques, the development of GNN-based recommender systems, e.g., PinSage and LightGCN, has offered the state-of-the-art performance. However, two key challenges have not been well explored in existing solutions: i) The over-smoothing effect with deeper graph-based CF architecture, may cause the indistinguishable user representations and degradation of recommendation results. ii) The supervision signals (i.e., user-item interactions) are usually scarce and skewed distributed in reality, which limits the representation power of CF paradigms. To tackle these challenges, we propose a new self-supervised recommendation framework Hypergraph Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (HCCF) to jointly capture local and global collaborative relations with a hypergraph-enhanced cross-view contrastive learning architecture. In particular, the designed hypergraph structure learning enhances the discrimination ability of GNN-based CF paradigm, so as to comprehensively capture the complex high-order dependencies among users. Additionally, our HCCF model effectively integrates the hypergraph structure encoding with self-supervised learning to reinforce the representation quality of recommender systems, based on the hypergraph-enhanced self-discrimination. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over various state-of-the-art recommendation methods, and the robustness against sparse user interaction data. Our model implementation codes are available at https://github.com/akaxlh/HCCF.
Stochastic Coherence Over Attention Trajectory For Continuous Learning In Video Streams
Authors: Matteo Tiezzi, Simone Marullo, Lapo Faggi, Enrico Meloni, Alessandro Betti, Stefano Melacci
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

Devising intelligent agents able to live in an environment and learn by observing the surroundings is a longstanding goal of Artificial Intelligence. From a bare Machine Learning perspective, challenges arise when the agent is prevented from leveraging large fully-annotated dataset, but rather the interactions with supervisory signals are sparsely distributed over space and time. This paper proposes a novel neural-network-based approach to progressively and autonomously develop pixel-wise representations in a video stream. The proposed method is based on a human-like attention mechanism that allows the agent to learn by observing what is moving in the attended locations. Spatio-temporal stochastic coherence along the attention trajectory, paired with a contrastive term, leads to an unsupervised learning criterion that naturally copes with the considered setting. Differently from most existing works, the learned representations are used in open-set class-incremental classification of each frame pixel, relying on few supervisions. Our experiments leverage 3D virtual environments and they show that the proposed agents can learn to distinguish objects just by observing the video stream. Inheriting features from state-of-the art models is not as powerful as one might expect.
EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents
Authors: Mao Yan Chen, Siheng Li, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Diversity

In empathetic conversations, humans express their empathy to others with empathetic intents. However, most existing empathetic conversational methods suffer from a lack of empathetic intents, which leads to monotonous empathy. To address the bias of the empathetic intents distribution between empathetic dialogue models and humans, we propose a novel model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent empathetic intents, EmpHi for short. Precisely, EmpHi learns the distribution of potential empathetic intents with a discrete latent variable, then combines both implicit and explicit intent representation to generate responses with various empathetic intents. Experiments show that EmpHi outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of empathy, relevance, and diversity on both automatic and human evaluation. Moreover, the case studies demonstrate the high interpretability and outstanding performance of our model.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Signal Control through Universal Communication Method
Authors: Qize Jiang, Minhao Qin, Shengmin Shi, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traffic Signal Control

How to coordinate the communication among intersections effectively in real complex traffic scenarios with multi-intersection is challenging. Existing approaches only enable the communication in a heuristic manner without considering the content/importance of information to be shared. In this paper, we propose a universal communication form UniComm between intersections. UniComm embeds massive observations collected at one agent into crucial predictions of their impact on its neighbors, which improves the communication efficiency and is universal across existing methods. We also propose a concise network UniLight to make full use of communications enabled by UniComm. Experimental results on real datasets demonstrate that UniComm universally improves the performance of existing state-of-the-art methods, and UniLight significantly outperforms existing methods on a wide range of traffic situations.
SkillNet-NLG: General-Purpose Natural Language Generation with a Sparsely Activated Approach
Authors: Junwei Liao, Duyu Tang, Fan Zhang, Shuming Shi
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Text Generation

We present SkillNet-NLG, a sparsely activated approach that handles many natural language generation tasks with one model. Different from traditional dense models that always activate all the parameters, SkillNet-NLG selectively activates relevant parts of the parameters to accomplish a task, where the relevance is controlled by a set of predefined skills. The strength of such model design is that it provides an opportunity to precisely adapt relevant skills to learn new tasks effectively. We evaluate on Chinese natural language generation tasks. Results show that, with only one model file, SkillNet-NLG outperforms previous best performance methods on four of five tasks. SkillNet-NLG performs better than two multi-task learning baselines (a dense model and a Mixture-of-Expert model) and achieves comparable performance to task-specific models. Lastly, SkillNet-NLG surpasses baseline systems when being adapted to new tasks.
Collaborative Target Search with a Visual Drone Swarm: An Adaptive Curriculum Embedded Multistage Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Jiaping Xiao, Phumrapee Pisutsin, Mir Feroskhan
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management

Equipping drones with target search capabilities is highly desirable for applications in disaster rescue and smart warehouse delivery systems. Multiple intelligent drones that can collaborate with each other and maneuver among obstacles show more effectiveness in accomplishing tasks in a shorter amount of time. However, carrying out collaborative target search (CTS) without prior target information is extremely challenging, especially with a visual drone swarm. In this work, we propose a novel data-efficient deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach called adaptive curriculum embedded multistage learning (ACEMSL) to address these challenges, mainly 3-D sparse reward space exploration with limited visual perception and collaborative behavior requirements. Specifically, we decompose the CTS task into several subtasks including individual obstacle avoidance, target search, and inter-agent collaboration, and progressively train the agents with multistage learning. Meanwhile, an adaptive embedded curriculum (AEC) is designed, where the task difficulty level (TDL) can be adaptively adjusted based on the success rate (SR) achieved in training. ACEMSL allows data-efficient training and individual-team reward allocation for the visual drone swarm. Furthermore, we deploy the trained model over a real visual drone swarm and perform CTS operations without fine-tuning. Extensive simulations and real-world flight tests validate the effectiveness and generalizability of ACEMSL. The project is available at https://github.com/NTU-UAVG/CTS-visual-drone-swarm.git.
A Comparative Study on Approaches to Acoustic Scene Classification using CNNs
Authors: Ishrat Jahan Ananya, Sarah Suad, Shadab Hafiz Choudhury, Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Khan
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Scene Classification, Classification, Scene Classification

Acoustic scene classification is a process of characterizing and classifying the environments from sound recordings. The first step is to generate features (representations) from the recorded sound and then classify the background environments. However, different kinds of representations have dramatic effects on the accuracy of the classification. In this paper, we explored the three such representations on classification accuracy using neural networks. We investigated the spectrograms, MFCCs, and embeddings representations using different CNN networks and autoencoders. Our dataset consists of sounds from three settings of indoors and outdoors environments - thus the dataset contains sound from six different kinds of environments. We found that the spectrogram representation has the highest classification accuracy while MFCC has the lowest classification accuracy. We reported our findings, insights as well as some guidelines to achieve better accuracy for environment classification using sounds.
Mixed Strategies for Security Games with General Defending Requirements
Authors: Rufan Bai, Haoxing Lin, Xinyu Yang, Xiaowei Wu, Minming Li, Weijia Jia
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

The Stackelberg security game is played between a defender and an attacker, where the defender needs to allocate a limited amount of resources to multiple targets in order to minimize the loss due to adversarial attack by the attacker. While allowing targets to have different values, classic settings often assume uniform requirements to defend the targets. This enables existing results that study mixed strategies (randomized allocation algorithms) to adopt a compact representation of the mixed strategies. In this work, we initiate the study of mixed strategies for the security games in which the targets can have different defending requirements. In contrast to the case of uniform defending requirement, for which an optimal mixed strategy can be computed efficiently, we show that computing the optimal mixed strategy is NP-hard for the general defending requirements setting. However, we show that strong upper and lower bounds for the optimal mixed strategy defending result can be derived. We propose an efficient close-to-optimal Patching algorithm that computes mixed strategies that use only few pure strategies. We also study the setting when the game is played on a network and resource sharing is enabled between neighboring targets. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in several large real-world datasets.
Convergence of neural networks to Gaussian mixture distribution
Authors: Yasuhiko Asao, Ryotaro Sakamoto, Shiro Takagi
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

We give a proof that, under relatively mild conditions, fully-connected feed-forward deep random neural networks converge to a Gaussian mixture distribution as only the width of the last hidden layer goes to infinity. We conducted experiments for a simple model which supports our result. Moreover, it gives a detailed description of the convergence, namely, the growth of the last hidden layer gets the distribution closer to the Gaussian mixture, and the other layer successively get the Gaussian mixture closer to the normal distribution.
U-Net with ResNet Backbone for Garment Landmarking Purpose
Authors: Khay Boon Hong
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

We build a heatmap-based landmark detection model to locate important landmarks on 2D RGB garment images. The main goal is to detect edges, corners and suitable interior region of the garments. This let us re-create 3D garments in modern 3D editing software by incorporate landmark detection model and texture unwrapping. We use a U-net architecture with ResNet backbone to build the model. With an appropriate loss function, we are able to train a moderately robust model.
ATST: Audio Representation Learning with Teacher-Student Transformer
Authors: Xian Li, Xiaofei Li
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Instrument Recognition, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Audio Classification, Self-Supervised Learning, Speaker Identification, Spoken Command Recognition

Self-supervised learning (SSL) learns knowledge from a large amount of unlabeled data, and then transfers the knowledge to a specific problem with a limited number of labeled data. SSL has achieved promising results in various domains. This work addresses the problem of segment-level general audio SSL, and proposes a new transformer-based teacher-student SSL model, named ATST. A transformer encoder is developed on a recently emerged teacher-student baseline scheme, which largely improves the modeling capability of pre-training. In addition, a new strategy for positive pair creation is designed to fully leverage the capability of transformer. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the proposed model achieves the new state-of-the-art results on almost all of the downstream tasks.
PP-MARL: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Intelligence in Communications
Authors: Tingting Yuan, Hwei-Ming Chung, XiaoMing Fu
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Management, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Privacy Preserving

Cooperative intelligence (CI) is expected to become an integral element in next-generation networks because it can aggregate the capabilities and intelligence of multiple devices. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a popular approach for achieving CI in communication problems by enabling effective collaboration among agents to address sequential problems. However, ensuring privacy protection for MARL is a challenging task because of the presence of heterogeneous agents that learn interdependently via sharing information. Implementing privacy protection techniques such as data encryption and federated learning to MARL introduces the notable overheads (e.g., computation and bandwidth). To overcome these challenges, we propose PP-MARL, an efficient privacy-preserving learning scheme for MARL. PP-MARL leverages homomorphic encryption (HE) and differential privacy (DP) to protect privacy, while introducing split learning to decrease overheads via reducing the volume of shared messages, and then improve efficiency. We apply and evaluate PP-MARL in two communication-related use cases. Simulation results reveal that PP-MARL can achieve efficient and reliable collaboration with 1.1-6 times better privacy protection and lower overheads (e.g., 84-91% reduction in bandwidth) than state-of-the-art approaches.
Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: Achieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction
Authors: Gourab K. Patro, Prithwish Jana, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Krishna P. Gummadi, Niloy Ganguly
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Scheduling

Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them. As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency, participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and flexibility of our proposed approaches.
An Efficient Dynamic Sampling Policy For Monte Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Gongbo Zhang, Yijie Peng, Yilong Xu
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We consider the popular tree-based search strategy within the framework of reinforcement learning, the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), in the context of finite-horizon Markov decision process. We propose a dynamic sampling tree policy that efficiently allocates limited computational budget to maximize the probability of correct selection of the best action at the root node of the tree. Experimental results on Tic-Tac-Toe and Gomoku show that the proposed tree policy is more efficient than other competing methods.