pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Connecting Algorithmic Research and Usage Contexts: A Perspective of Contextualized Evaluation for Explainable AI
Authors: Q. Vera Liao, Yunfeng Zhang, Ronny Luss, Finale Doshi-Velez, Amit Dhurandhar
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the field of explainable AI (XAI), with a plethora of algorithms proposed in the literature. However, a lack of consensus on how to evaluate XAI hinders the advancement of the field. We highlight that XAI is not a monolithic set of technologies -- researchers and practitioners have begun to leverage XAI algorithms to build XAI systems that serve different usage contexts, such as model debugging and decision-support. Algorithmic research of XAI, however, often does not account for these diverse downstream usage contexts, resulting in limited effectiveness or even unintended consequences for actual users, as well as difficulties for practitioners to make technical choices. We argue that one way to close the gap is to develop evaluation methods that account for different user requirements in these usage contexts. Towards this goal, we introduce a perspective of contextualized XAI evaluation by considering the relative importance of XAI evaluation criteria for prototypical usage contexts of XAI. To explore the context dependency of XAI evaluation criteria, we conduct two survey studies, one with XAI topical experts and another with crowd workers. Our results urge for responsible AI research with usage-informed evaluation practices, and provide a nuanced understanding of user requirements for XAI in different usage contexts.
Parallel Pre-trained Transformers (PPT) for Synthetic Data-based Instance Segmentation
Authors: Ming Li, Jie Wu, Jinhang Cai, Jie Qin, Yuxi Ren, Xuefeng Xiao, Min Zheng, Rui Wang, Xin Pan
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recently, Synthetic data-based Instance Segmentation has become an exceedingly favorable optimization paradigm since it leverages simulation rendering and physics to generate high-quality image-annotation pairs. In this paper, we propose a Parallel Pre-trained Transformers (PPT) framework to accomplish the synthetic data-based Instance Segmentation task. Specifically, we leverage the off-the-shelf pre-trained vision Transformers to alleviate the gap between natural and synthetic data, which helps to provide good generalization in the downstream synthetic data scene with few samples. Swin-B-based CBNet V2, SwinL-based CBNet V2 and Swin-L-based Uniformer are employed for parallel feature learning, and the results of these three models are fused by pixel-level Non-maximum Suppression (NMS) algorithm to obtain more robust results. The experimental results reveal that PPT ranks first in the CVPR2022 AVA Accessibility Vision and Autonomy Challenge, with a 65.155% mAP.
A Feature Memory Rearrangement Network for Visual Inspection of Textured Surface Defects Toward Edge Intelligent Manufacturing
Authors: Haiming Yao, Wenyong Yu, Xue Wang
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Edge-computing

Recent advances in the industrial inspection of textured surfaces-in the form of visual inspection-have made such inspections possible for efficient, flexible manufacturing systems. We propose an unsupervised feature memory rearrangement network (FMR-Net) to accurately detect various textural defects simultaneously. Consistent with mainstream methods, we adopt the idea of background reconstruction; however, we innovatively utilize artificial synthetic defects to enable the model to recognize anomalies, while traditional wisdom relies only on defect-free samples. First, we employ an encoding module to obtain multiscale features of the textured surface. Subsequently, a contrastive-learning-based memory feature module (CMFM) is proposed to obtain discriminative representations and construct a normal feature memory bank in the latent space, which can be employed as a substitute for defects and fast anomaly scores at the patch level. Next, a novel global feature rearrangement module (GFRM) is proposed to further suppress the reconstruction of residual defects. Finally, a decoding module utilizes the restored features to reconstruct the normal texture background. In addition, to improve inspection performance, a two-phase training strategy is utilized for accurate defect restoration refinement, and we exploit a multimodal inspection method to achieve noise-robust defect localization. We verify our method through extensive experiments and test its practical deployment in collaborative edge--cloud intelligent manufacturing scenarios by means of a multilevel detection method, demonstrating that FMR-Net exhibits state-of-the-art inspection accuracy and shows great potential for use in edge-computing-enabled smart industries.
SSMI: How to Make Objects of Interest Disappear without Accessing Object Detectors?
Authors: Hui Xia, Rui Zhang, Zi Kang, Shuliang Jiang
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Most black-box adversarial attack schemes for object detectors mainly face two shortcomings: requiring access to the target model and generating inefficient adversarial examples (failing to make objects disappear in large numbers). To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a black-box adversarial attack scheme based on semantic segmentation and model inversion (SSMI). We first locate the position of the target object using semantic segmentation techniques. Next, we design a neighborhood background pixel replacement to replace the target region pixels with background pixels to ensure that the pixel modifications are not easily detected by human vision. Finally, we reconstruct a machine-recognizable example and use the mask matrix to select pixels in the reconstructed example to modify the benign image to generate an adversarial example. Detailed experimental results show that SSMI can generate efficient adversarial examples to evade human-eye perception and make objects of interest disappear. And more importantly, SSMI outperforms existing same kinds of attacks. The maximum increase in new and disappearing labels is 16%, and the maximum decrease in mAP metrics for object detection is 36%.
Jointist: Joint Learning for Multi-instrument Transcription and Its Applications
Authors: Kin Wai Cheuk, Keunwoo Choi, Qiuqiang Kong, Bochen Li, Minz Won, Amy Hung, Ju-Chiang Wang, Dorien Herremans
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Chord Recognition, Instrument Recognition, Music Transcription

In this paper, we introduce Jointist, an instrument-aware multi-instrument framework that is capable of transcribing, recognizing, and separating multiple musical instruments from an audio clip. Jointist consists of the instrument recognition module that conditions the other modules: the transcription module that outputs instrument-specific piano rolls, and the source separation module that utilizes instrument information and transcription results. The instrument conditioning is designed for an explicit multi-instrument functionality while the connection between the transcription and source separation modules is for better transcription performance. Our challenging problem formulation makes the model highly useful in the real world given that modern popular music typically consists of multiple instruments. However, its novelty necessitates a new perspective on how to evaluate such a model. During the experiment, we assess the model from various aspects, providing a new evaluation perspective for multi-instrument transcription. We also argue that transcription models can be utilized as a preprocessing module for other music analysis tasks. In the experiment on several downstream tasks, the symbolic representation provided by our transcription model turned out to be helpful to spectrograms in solving downbeat detection, chord recognition, and key estimation.
Automated Cancer Subtyping via Vector Quantization Mutual Information Maximization
Authors: Zheng Chen, Lingwei Zhu, Ziwei Yang, Takashi Matsubara
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Quantization

Cancer subtyping is crucial for understanding the nature of tumors and providing suitable therapy. However, existing labelling methods are medically controversial, and have driven the process of subtyping away from teaching signals. Moreover, cancer genetic expression profiles are high-dimensional, scarce, and have complicated dependence, thereby posing a serious challenge to existing subtyping models for outputting sensible clustering. In this study, we propose a novel clustering method for exploiting genetic expression profiles and distinguishing subtypes in an unsupervised manner. The proposed method adaptively learns categorical correspondence from latent representations of expression profiles to the subtypes output by the model. By maximizing the problem -- agnostic mutual information between input expression profiles and output subtypes, our method can automatically decide a suitable number of subtypes. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed method can refine existing controversial labels, and, by further medical analysis, this refinement is proven to have a high correlation with cancer survival rates.
Generative Pretraining for Black-Box Optimization
Authors: Siddarth Krishnamoorthy, Satvik Mehul Mashkaria, Aditya Grover
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00

Many problems in science and engineering involve optimizing an expensive black-box function over a high-dimensional space. For such black-box optimization (BBO) problems, we typically assume a small budget for online function evaluations, but also often have access to a fixed, offline dataset for pretraining. Prior approaches seek to utilize the offline data to approximate the function or its inverse but are not sufficiently accurate far from the data distribution. We propose BONET, a generative framework for pretraining a novel black-box optimizer using offline datasets. In BONET, we train an autoregressive model on fixed-length trajectories derived from an offline dataset. We design a sampling strategy to synthesize trajectories from offline data using a simple heuristic of rolling out monotonic transitions from low-fidelity to high-fidelity samples. Empirically, we instantiate BONET using a causally masked Transformer and evaluate it on Design-Bench, where we rank the best on average, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines.
On the Statistical Efficiency of Reward-Free Exploration in Non-Linear RL
Authors: Jinglin Chen, Aditya Modi, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Nan Jiang, Alekh Agarwal
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) under general non-linear function approximation, and establish sample efficiency and hardness results under various standard structural assumptions. On the positive side, we propose the RFOLIVE (Reward-Free OLIVE) algorithm for sample-efficient reward-free exploration under minimal structural assumptions, which covers the previously studied settings of linear MDPs (Jin et al., 2020b), linear completeness (Zanette et al., 2020b) and low-rank MDPs with unknown representation (Modi et al., 2021). Our analyses indicate that the explorability or reachability assumptions, previously made for the latter two settings, are not necessary statistically for reward-free exploration. On the negative side, we provide a statistical hardness result for both reward-free and reward-aware exploration under linear completeness assumptions when the underlying features are unknown, showing an exponential separation between low-rank and linear completeness settings.
A method for ethical AI in Defence: A case study on developing trustworthy autonomous systems
Authors: Tara Roberson, Stephen Bornstein, Rain Liivoja, Simon Ng, Jason Scholz, S. Kate Devitt
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Translation

What does it mean to be responsible and responsive when developing and deploying trusted autonomous systems in Defence? In this short reflective article, we describe a case study of building a trusted autonomous system - Athena AI - within an industry-led, government-funded project with diverse collaborators and stakeholders. Using this case study, we draw out lessons on the value and impact of embedding responsible research and innovation-aligned, ethics-by-design approaches and principles throughout the development of technology at high translation readiness levels.
BiometricBlender: Ultra-high dimensional, multi-class synthetic data generator to imitate biometric feature space
Authors: Marcell Stippinger, Dávid Hanák, Marcell T. Kurbucz, Gergely Hanczár, Olivér M. Törteli, Zoltán Somogyvári
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00

The lack of freely available (real-life or synthetic) high or ultra-high dimensional, multi-class datasets may hamper the rapidly growing research on feature screening, especially in the field of biometrics, where the usage of such datasets is common. This paper reports a Python package called BiometricBlender, which is an ultra-high dimensional, multi-class synthetic data generator to benchmark a wide range of feature screening methods. During the data generation process, the overall usefulness and the intercorrelations of blended features can be controlled by the user, thus the synthetic feature space is able to imitate the key properties of a real biometric dataset.
Don't Forget About Pronouns: Removing Gender Bias in Language Models Without Losing Factual Gender Information
Authors: Tomasz Limisiewicz, David Mareček
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

The representations in large language models contain multiple types of gender information. We focus on two types of such signals in English texts: factual gender information, which is a grammatical or semantic property, and gender bias, which is the correlation between a word and specific gender. We can disentangle the model's embeddings and identify components encoding both types of information with probing. We aim to diminish the stereotypical bias in the representations while preserving the factual gender signal. Our filtering method shows that it is possible to decrease the bias of gender-neutral profession names without significant deterioration of language modeling capabilities. The findings can be applied to language generation to mitigate reliance on stereotypes while preserving gender agreement in coreferences.
Imitate then Transcend: Multi-Agent Optimal Execution with Dual-Window Denoise PPO
Authors: Jin Fang, Jiacheng Weng, Yi Xiang, Xinwen Zhang
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A novel framework for solving the optimal execution and placement problems using reinforcement learning (RL) with imitation was proposed. The RL agents trained from the proposed framework consistently outperformed the industry benchmark time-weighted average price (TWAP) strategy in execution cost and showed great generalization across out-of-sample trading dates and tickers. The impressive performance was achieved from three aspects. First, our RL network architecture called Dual-window Denoise PPO enabled efficient learning in a noisy market environment. Second, a reward scheme with imitation learning was designed, and a comprehensive set of market features was studied. Third, our flexible action formulation allowed the RL agent to tackle optimal execution and placement collectively resulting in better performance than solving individual problems separately. The RL agent's performance was evaluated in our multi-agent realistic historical limit order book simulator in which price impact was accurately assessed. In addition, ablation studies were also performed, confirming the superiority of our framework.
Meta Reinforcement Learning with Finite Training Tasks -- a Density Estimation Approach
Authors: Zohar Rimon, Aviv Tamar, Gilad Adler
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Dimensionality Reduction, Meta Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), an agent learns from a set of training tasks how to quickly solve a new task, drawn from the same task distribution. The optimal meta RL policy, a.k.a. the Bayes-optimal behavior, is well defined, and guarantees optimal reward in expectation, taken with respect to the task distribution. The question we explore in this work is how many training tasks are required to guarantee approximately optimal behavior with high probability. Recent work provided the first such PAC analysis for a model-free setting, where a history-dependent policy was learned from the training tasks. In this work, we propose a different approach: directly learn the task distribution, using density estimation techniques, and then train a policy on the learned task distribution. We show that our approach leads to bounds that depend on the dimension of the task distribution. In particular, in settings where the task distribution lies in a low-dimensional manifold, we extend our analysis to use dimensionality reduction techniques and account for such structure, obtaining significantly better bounds than previous work, which strictly depend on the number of states and actions. The key of our approach is the regularization implied by the kernel density estimation method. We further demonstrate that this regularization is useful in practice, when `plugged in' the state-of-the-art VariBAD meta RL algorithm.
TraSE: Towards Tackling Authorial Style from a Cognitive Science Perspective
Authors: Ronald Wilson, Avanti Bhandarkar, Damon Woodard
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution

Stylistic analysis of text is a key task in research areas ranging from authorship attribution to forensic analysis and personality profiling. The existing approaches for stylistic analysis are plagued by issues like topic influence, lack of discriminability for large number of authors and the requirement for large amounts of diverse data. In this paper, the source of these issues are identified along with the necessity for a cognitive perspective on authorial style in addressing them. A novel feature representation, called Trajectory-based Style Estimation (TraSE), is introduced to support this purpose. Authorship attribution experiments with over 27,000 authors and 1.4 million samples in a cross-domain scenario resulted in 90% attribution accuracy suggesting that the feature representation is immune to such negative influences and an excellent candidate for stylistic analysis. Finally, a qualitative analysis is performed on TraSE using physical human characteristics, like age, to validate its claim on capturing cognitive traits.
TiCo: Transformation Invariance and Covariance Contrast for Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning
Authors: Jiachen Zhu, Rafael M. Moraes, Serkan Karakulak, Vlad Sobol, Alfredo Canziani, Yann Lecun
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

We present Transformation Invariance and Covariance Contrast (TiCo) for self-supervised visual representation learning. Similar to other recent self-supervised learning methods, our method is based on maximizing the agreement among embeddings of different distorted versions of the same image, which pushes the encoder to produce transformation invariant representations. To avoid the trivial solution where the encoder generates constant vectors, we regularize the covariance matrix of the embeddings from different images by penalizing low rank solutions. By jointly minimizing the transformation invariance loss and covariance contrast loss, we get an encoder that is able to produce useful representations for downstream tasks. We analyze our method and show that it can be viewed as a variant of MoCo with an implicit memory bank of unlimited size at no extra memory cost. This makes our method perform better than alternative methods when using small batch sizes. TiCo can also be seen as a modification of Barlow Twins. By connecting the contrastive and redundancy-reduction methods together, TiCo gives us new insights into how joint embedding methods work.
Making the case for audience design in conversational AI: Rapport expectations and language ideologies in a task-oriented chatbot
Authors: Doris Dippold
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Management

Chatbots are more and more prevalent in commercial and science contexts. They help customers complain about a product or service or support them to find the best travel deals. Other bots provide mental health support or help book medical appointments. This paper argues that insights into users' language ideologies and their rapport expectations can be used to inform the audience design of the bot's language and interaction patterns and ensure equitable access to the services provided by bots. The argument is underpinned by three kinds of data: simulated user interactions with a chatbot facilitating health appointment bookings, users' introspective comments on their interactions and users' qualitative survey comments post engagement with the booking bot. In closing, I will define audience design for conversational AI and discuss how user-centred analyses of chatbot interactions and sociolinguistically informed theoretical approaches, such as rapport management, can be used to support audience design.
Learning Continuous Rotation Canonicalization with Radial Beam Sampling
Authors: Johann Schmidt, Sebastian Stober
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Nearly all state of the art vision models are sensitive to image rotations. Existing methods often compensate for missing inductive biases by using augmented training data to learn pseudo-invariances. Alongside the resource demanding data inflation process, predictions often poorly generalize. The inductive biases inherent to convolutional neural networks allow for translation equivariance through kernels acting parallely to the horizontal and vertical axes of the pixel grid. This inductive bias, however, does not allow for rotation equivariance. We propose a radial beam sampling strategy along with radial kernels operating on these beams to inherently incorporate center-rotation covariance. Together with an angle distance loss, we present a radial beam-based image canonicalization model, short BIC. Our model allows for maximal continuous angle regression and canonicalizes arbitrary center-rotated input images. As a pre-processing model, this enables rotation-invariant vision pipelines with model-agnostic rotation-sensitive downstream predictions. We show that our end-to-end trained angle regressor is able to predict continuous rotation angles on several vision datasets, i.e. FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, COIL100, and LFW.
Learning Neuro-Symbolic Skills for Bilevel Planning
Authors: Tom Silver, Ashay Athalye, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Tomas Lozano-Perez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Motion Planning, Task and Motion Planning

Decision-making is challenging in robotics environments with continuous object-centric states, continuous actions, long horizons, and sparse feedback. Hierarchical approaches, such as task and motion planning (TAMP), address these challenges by decomposing decision-making into two or more levels of abstraction. In a setting where demonstrations and symbolic predicates are given, prior work has shown how to learn symbolic operators and neural samplers for TAMP with manually designed parameterized policies. Our main contribution is a method for learning parameterized polices in combination with operators and samplers. These components are packaged into modular neuro-symbolic skills and sequenced together with search-then-sample TAMP to solve new tasks. In experiments in four robotics domains, we show that our approach -- bilevel planning with neuro-symbolic skills -- can solve a wide range of tasks with varying initial states, goals, and objects, outperforming six baselines and ablations. Video: https://youtu.be/PbFZP8rPuGg Code: https://tinyurl.com/skill-learning