pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A topic-aware graph neural network model for knowledge base updating
Authors: JiaJun Tong, Zhixiao Wang, Xiaobin Rui
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Graph Neural Network, Question Answering, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

The open domain knowledge base is very important. It is usually extracted from encyclopedia websites and is widely used in knowledge retrieval systems, question answering systems, or recommendation systems. In practice, the key challenge is to maintain an up-to-date knowledge base. Different from Unwieldy fetching all of the data from the encyclopedia dumps, to enlarge the freshness of the knowledge base as big as possible while avoiding invalid fetching, the current knowledge base updating methods usually determine whether entities need to be updated by building a prediction model. However, these methods can only be defined in some specific fields and the result turns out to be obvious bias, due to the problem of data source and data structure. The users' query intentions are often diverse as to the open domain knowledge, so we construct a topic-aware graph network for knowledge updating based on the user query log. Our methods can be summarized as follow: 1. Extract entities through the user's log and select them as seeds 2. Scrape the attributes of seed entities in the encyclopedia website, and self-supervised construct the entity attribute graph for each entity. 3. Use the entity attribute graph to train the GNN entity update model to determine whether the entity needs to be synchronized. 4.Use the encyclopedia knowledge to match and update the filtered entity with the entity in the knowledge base according to the minimum edit times algorithm.
One-class Recommendation Systems with the Hinge Pairwise Distance Loss and Orthogonal Representations
Authors: Ramin Raziperchikolaei, Young-joo Chung
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In one-class recommendation systems, the goal is to learn a model from a small set of interacted users and items and then identify the positively-related user-item pairs among a large number of pairs with unknown interactions. Most previous loss functions rely on dissimilar pairs of users and items, which are selected from the ones with unknown interactions, to obtain better prediction performance. This strategy introduces several challenges such as increasing training time and hurting the performance by picking "similar pairs with the unknown interactions" as dissimilar pairs. In this paper, the goal is to only use the similar set to train the models. We point out three trivial solutions that the models converge to when they are trained only on similar pairs: collapsed, partially collapsed, and shrinking solutions. We propose two terms that can be added to the objective functions in the literature to avoid these solutions. The first one is a hinge pairwise distance loss that avoids the shrinking and collapsed solutions by keeping the average pairwise distance of all the representations greater than a margin. The second one is an orthogonality term that minimizes the correlation between the dimensions of the representations and avoids the partially collapsed solution. We conduct experiments on a variety of tasks on public and real-world datasets. The results show that our approach using only similar pairs outperforms state-of-the-art methods using similar pairs and a large number of dissimilar pairs.
A Prescriptive Learning Analytics Framework: Beyond Predictive Modelling and onto Explainable AI with Prescriptive Analytics and ChatGPT
Authors: Teo Susnjak
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00

A significant body of recent research in the field of Learning Analytics has focused on leveraging machine learning approaches for predicting at-risk students in order to initiate timely interventions and thereby elevate retention and completion rates. The overarching feature of the majority of these research studies has been on the science of prediction only. The component of predictive analytics concerned with interpreting the internals of the models and explaining their predictions for individual cases to stakeholders has largely been neglected. Additionally, works that attempt to employ data-driven prescriptive analytics to automatically generate evidence-based remedial advice for at-risk learners are in their infancy. eXplainable AI is a field that has recently emerged providing cutting-edge tools which support transparent predictive analytics and techniques for generating tailored advice for at-risk students. This study proposes a novel framework that unifies both transparent machine learning as well as techniques for enabling prescriptive analytics, while integrating the latest advances in large language models. This work practically demonstrates the proposed framework using predictive models for identifying at-risk learners of programme non-completion. The study then further demonstrates how predictive modelling can be augmented with prescriptive analytics on two case studies in order to generate human-readable prescriptive feedback for those who are at risk using ChatGPT.
Efficient Sparsely Activated Transformers
Authors: Salar Latifi, Saurav Muralidharan, Michael Garland
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Transformer-based neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art task performance in a number of machine learning domains including natural language processing and computer vision. To further improve their accuracy, recent work has explored the integration of dynamic behavior into these networks in the form of mixture-of-expert (MoE) layers. In this paper, we explore the introduction of MoE layers to optimize a different metric: inference latency. We introduce a novel system named PLANER that takes an existing Transformer-based network and a user-defined latency target and produces an optimized, sparsely-activated version of the original network that tries to meet the latency target while maintaining baseline accuracy. We evaluate PLANER on two real-world language modeling tasks using the Transformer-XL network and achieve inference latency reductions of over 2x at iso-accuracy.
Truncated Matrix Power Iteration for Differentiable DAG Learning
Authors: Zhen Zhang, Ignavier Ng, Dong Gong, Yuhang Liu, Ehsan M Abbasnejad, Mingming Gong, Kun Zhang, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00

Recovering underlying Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structures from observational data is highly challenging due to the combinatorial nature of the DAG-constrained optimization problem. Recently, DAG learning has been cast as a continuous optimization problem by characterizing the DAG constraint as a smooth equality one, generally based on polynomials over adjacency matrices. Existing methods place very small coefficients on high-order polynomial terms for stabilization, since they argue that large coefficients on the higher-order terms are harmful due to numeric exploding. On the contrary, we discover that large coefficients on higher-order terms are beneficial for DAG learning, when the spectral radiuses of the adjacency matrices are small, and that larger coefficients for higher-order terms can approximate the DAG constraints much better than the small counterparts. Based on this, we propose a novel DAG learning method with efficient truncated matrix power iteration to approximate geometric series based DAG constraints. Empirically, our DAG learning method outperforms the previous state-of-the-arts in various settings, often by a factor of $3$ or more in terms of structural Hamming distance.
Optimizing Bi-Encoder for Named Entity Recognition via Contrastive Learning
Authors: Sheng Zhang, Hao Cheng, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Metric Learning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Nested Named Entity Recognition, Representation Learning

We present a bi-encoder framework for named entity recognition (NER), which applies contrastive learning to map candidate text spans and entity types into the same vector representation space. Prior work predominantly approaches NER as sequence labeling or span classification. We instead frame NER as a representation learning problem that maximizes the similarity between the vector representations of an entity mention and its type. This makes it easy to handle nested and flat NER alike, and can better leverage noisy self-supervision signals. A major challenge to this bi-encoder formulation for NER lies in separating non-entity spans from entity mentions. Instead of explicitly labeling all non-entity spans as the same class $\texttt{Outside}$ ($\texttt{O}$) as in most prior methods, we introduce a novel dynamic thresholding loss. Experiments show that our method performs well in both supervised and distantly supervised settings, for nested and flat NER alike, establishing new state of the art across standard datasets in the general domain (e.g., ACE2004, ACE2005) and high-value verticals such as biomedicine (e.g., GENIA, NCBI, BC5CDR, JNLPBA). We release the code at github.com/microsoft/binder.
Do language models make human-like predictions about the coreferents of Italian anaphoric zero pronouns?
Authors: James A. Michaelov, Benjamin K. Bergen
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2022 10

Some languages allow arguments to be omitted in certain contexts. Yet human language comprehenders reliably infer the intended referents of these zero pronouns, in part because they construct expectations about which referents are more likely. We ask whether Neural Language Models also extract the same expectations. We test whether 12 contemporary language models display expectations that reflect human behavior when exposed to sentences with zero pronouns from five behavioral experiments conducted in Italian by Carminati (2005). We find that three models - XGLM 2.9B, 4.5B, and 7.5B - capture the human behavior from all the experiments, with others successfully modeling some of the results. This result suggests that human expectations about coreference can be derived from exposure to language, and also indicates features of language models that allow them to better reflect human behavior.
System Resilience through Health Monitoring and Reconfiguration
Authors: Ion Matei, Wiktor Piotrowski, Alexandre Perez, Johan de Kleer, Jorge Tierno, Wendy Mungovan, Vance Turnewitsch
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Diagnosis

We demonstrate an end-to-end framework to improve the resilience of man-made systems to unforeseen events. The framework is based on a physics-based digital twin model and three modules tasked with real-time fault diagnosis, prognostics and reconfiguration. The fault diagnosis module uses model-based diagnosis algorithms to detect and isolate faults and generates interventions in the system to disambiguate uncertain diagnosis solutions. We scale up the fault diagnosis algorithm to the required real-time performance through the use of parallelization and surrogate models of the physics-based digital twin. The prognostics module tracks the fault progressions and trains the online degradation models to compute remaining useful life of system components. In addition, we use the degradation models to assess the impact of the fault progression on the operational requirements. The reconfiguration module uses PDDL-based planning endowed with semantic attachments to adjust the system controls so that the fault impact on the system operation is minimized. We define a resilience metric and use the example of a fuel system model to demonstrate how the metric improves with our framework.
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with SINDy
Authors: Rushiv Arora, Bruno Castro da Silva, Eliot Moss
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We draw on the latest advancements in the physics community to propose a novel method for discovering the governing non-linear dynamics of physical systems in reinforcement learning (RL). We establish that this method is capable of discovering the underlying dynamics using significantly fewer trajectories (as little as one rollout with $\leq 30$ time steps) than state of the art model learning algorithms. Further, the technique learns a model that is accurate enough to induce near-optimal policies given significantly fewer trajectories than those required by model-free algorithms. It brings the benefits of model-based RL without requiring a model to be developed in advance, for systems that have physics-based dynamics. To establish the validity and applicability of this algorithm, we conduct experiments on four classic control tasks. We found that an optimal policy trained on the discovered dynamics of the underlying system can generalize well. Further, the learned policy performs well when deployed on the actual physical system, thus bridging the model to real system gap. We further compare our method to state-of-the-art model-based and model-free approaches, and show that our method requires fewer trajectories sampled on the true physical system compared other methods. Additionally, we explored approximate dynamics models and found that they also can perform well.
Annotated Dataset Creation through General Purpose Language Models for non-English Medical NLP
Authors: Johann Frei, Frank Kramer
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: NER

Obtaining text datasets with semantic annotations is an effortful process, yet crucial for supervised training in natural language processsing (NLP). In general, developing and applying new NLP pipelines in domain-specific contexts for tasks often requires custom designed datasets to address NLP tasks in supervised machine learning fashion. When operating in non-English languages for medical data processing, this exposes several minor and major, interconnected problems such as lack of task-matching datasets as well as task-specific pre-trained models. In our work we suggest to leverage pretrained language models for training data acquisition in order to retrieve sufficiently large datasets for training smaller and more efficient models for use-case specific tasks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of your approach, we create a custom dataset which we use to train a medical NER model for German texts, GPTNERMED, yet our method remains language-independent in principle. Our obtained dataset as well as our pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GPTNERMED
Constraining Representations Yields Models That Know What They Don't Know
Authors: Joao Monteiro, Pau Rodriguez, Pierre-Andre Noel, Issam Laradji, David Vazquez
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00

A well-known failure mode of neural networks is that they may confidently return erroneous predictions. Such unsafe behaviour is particularly frequent when the use case slightly differs from the training context, and/or in the presence of an adversary. This work presents a novel direction to address these issues in a broad, general manner: imposing class-aware constraints on a model's internal activation patterns. Specifically, we assign to each class a unique, fixed, randomly-generated binary vector - hereafter called class code - and train the model so that its cross-depths activation patterns predict the appropriate class code according to the input sample's class. The resulting predictors are dubbed Total Activation Classifiers (TAC), and TACs may either be trained from scratch, or used with negligible cost as a thin add-on on top of a frozen, pre-trained neural network. The distance between a TAC's activation pattern and the closest valid code acts as an additional confidence score, besides the default unTAC'ed prediction head's. In the add-on case, the original neural network's inference head is completely unaffected (so its accuracy remains the same) but we now have the option to use TAC's own confidence and prediction when determining which course of action to take in an hypothetical production workflow. In particular, we show that TAC strictly improves the value derived from models allowed to reject/defer. We provide further empirical evidence that TAC works well on multiple types of architectures and data modalities and that it is at least as good as state-of-the-art alternative confidence scores derived from existing models.
Improving Operational Efficiency In EV Ridepooling Fleets By Predictive Exploitation of Idle Times
Authors: Jesper C. Provoost, Andreas Kamilaris, Gyözö Gidófalvi, Geert J. Heijenk, Luc J. J. Wismans
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In ridepooling systems with electric fleets, charging is a complex decision-making process. Most electric vehicle (EV) taxi services require drivers to make egoistic decisions, leading to decentralized ad-hoc charging strategies. The current state of the mobility system is often lacking or not shared between vehicles, making it impossible to make a system-optimal decision. Most existing approaches do not combine time, location and duration into a comprehensive control algorithm or are unsuitable for real-time operation. We therefore present a real-time predictive charging method for ridepooling services with a single operator, called Idle Time Exploitation (ITX), which predicts the periods where vehicles are idle and exploits these periods to harvest energy. It relies on Graph Convolutional Networks and a linear assignment algorithm to devise an optimal pairing of vehicles and charging stations, in pursuance of maximizing the exploited idle time. We evaluated our approach through extensive simulation studies on real-world datasets from New York City. The results demonstrate that ITX outperforms all baseline methods by at least 5% (equivalent to $70,000 for a 6,000 vehicle operation) per week in terms of a monetary reward function which was modeled to replicate the profitability of a real-world ridepooling system. Moreover, ITX can reduce delays by at least 4.68% in comparison with baseline methods and generally increase passenger comfort by facilitating a better spread of customers across the fleet. Our results also demonstrate that ITX enables vehicles to harvest energy during the day, stabilizing battery levels and increasing resilience to unexpected surges in demand. Lastly, compared to the best-performing baseline strategy, peak loads are reduced by 17.39% which benefits grid operators and paves the way for more sustainable use of the electrical grid.
A further exploration of deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid Action Space
Authors: Hongzhi Hua, Guixuan Wen, Kaigui Wu
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The research of extending deep reinforcement learning (drl) to multi-agent field has solved many complicated problems and made great achievements. However, almost all these studies only focus on discrete or continuous action space and there are few works having ever used multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to real-world environment problems which mostly have a hybrid action space. Therefore, in this paper, we propose two algorithms: deep multi-agent hybrid soft actor-critic (MAHSAC) and multi-agent hybrid deep deterministic policy gradients (MAHDDPG) to fill this gap. This two algorithms follow the centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm and could handle hybrid action space problems. Our experiences are running on multi-agent particle environment which is an easy multi-agent particle world, along with some basic simulated physics. The experimental results show that these algorithms have good performances.
Graph Distance Neural Networks for Predicting Multiple Drug Interactions
Authors: Haifan zhou, Wenjing Zhou, Junfeng Wu
Date: 2022-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Prediction

Since multidrug combination is widely applied, the accurate prediction of drug-drug interaction (DDI) is becoming more and more critical. In our method, we use graph to represent drug-drug interaction: nodes represent drug; edges represent drug-drug interactions. Based on our assumption, we convert the prediction of DDI to link prediction problem, utilizing known drug node characteristics and DDI types to predict unknown DDI types. This work proposes a Graph Distance Neural Network (GDNN) to predict drug-drug interactions. Firstly, GDNN generates initial features for nodes via target point method, fully including the distance information in the graph. Secondly, GDNN adopts an improved message passing framework to better generate each drug node embedded expression, comprehensively considering the nodes and edges characteristics synchronously. Thirdly, GDNN aggregates the embedded expressions, undergoing MLP processing to generate the final predicted drug interaction type. GDNN achieved Test Hits@20=0.9037 on the ogb-ddi dataset, proving GDNN can predict DDI efficiently.
MotionDiffuse: Text-Driven Human Motion Generation with Diffusion Model
Authors: Mingyuan Zhang, Zhongang Cai, Liang Pan, Fangzhou Hong, Xinying Guo, Lei Yang, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Motion Generation, Motion Synthesis

Human motion modeling is important for many modern graphics applications, which typically require professional skills. In order to remove the skill barriers for laymen, recent motion generation methods can directly generate human motions conditioned on natural languages. However, it remains challenging to achieve diverse and fine-grained motion generation with various text inputs. To address this problem, we propose MotionDiffuse, the first diffusion model-based text-driven motion generation framework, which demonstrates several desired properties over existing methods. 1) Probabilistic Mapping. Instead of a deterministic language-motion mapping, MotionDiffuse generates motions through a series of denoising steps in which variations are injected. 2) Realistic Synthesis. MotionDiffuse excels at modeling complicated data distribution and generating vivid motion sequences. 3) Multi-Level Manipulation. MotionDiffuse responds to fine-grained instructions on body parts, and arbitrary-length motion synthesis with time-varied text prompts. Our experiments show MotionDiffuse outperforms existing SoTA methods by convincing margins on text-driven motion generation and action-conditioned motion generation. A qualitative analysis further demonstrates MotionDiffuse's controllability for comprehensive motion generation. Homepage: https://mingyuan-zhang.github.io/projects/MotionDiffuse.html
Segmentation of Weakly Visible Environmental Microorganism Images Using Pair-wise Deep Learning Features
Authors: Frank Kulwa, Chen Li, Marcin Grzegorzek, Md Mamunur Rahaman, Kimiaki Shirahama, Sergey Kosov
Date: 2022-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Specificity

The use of Environmental Microorganisms (EMs) offers a highly efficient, low cost and harmless remedy to environmental pollution, by monitoring and decomposing of pollutants. This relies on how the EMs are correctly segmented and identified. With the aim of enhancing the segmentation of weakly visible EM images which are transparent, noisy and have low contrast, a Pairwise Deep Learning Feature Network (PDLF-Net) is proposed in this study. The use of PDLFs enables the network to focus more on the foreground (EMs) by concatenating the pairwise deep learning features of each image to different blocks of the base model SegNet. Leveraging the Shi and Tomas descriptors, we extract each image's deep features on the patches, which are centered at each descriptor using the VGG-16 model. Then, to learn the intermediate characteristics between the descriptors, pairing of the features is performed based on the Delaunay triangulation theorem to form pairwise deep learning features. In this experiment, the PDLF-Net achieves outstanding segmentation results of 89.24%, 63.20%, 77.27%, 35.15%, 89.72%, 91.44% and 89.30% on the accuracy, IoU, Dice, VOE, sensitivity, precision and specificity, respectively.