pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HiFlash: Communication-Efficient Hierarchical Federated Learning with Adaptive Staleness Control and Heterogeneity-aware Client-Edge Association
Authors: Qiong Wu, Xu Chen, Tao Ouyang, Zhi Zhou, Xiaoxi Zhang, Shusen Yang, Junshan Zhang
Date: 2023-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Edge-computing, Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm that enables collaboratively learning a shared model across massive clients while keeping the training data locally. However, for many existing FL systems, clients need to frequently exchange model parameters of large data size with the remote cloud server directly via wide-area networks (WAN), leading to significant communication overhead and long transmission time. To mitigate the communication bottleneck, we resort to the hierarchical federated learning paradigm of HiFL, which reaps the benefits of mobile edge computing and combines synchronous client-edge model aggregation and asynchronous edge-cloud model aggregation together to greatly reduce the traffic volumes of WAN transmissions. Specifically, we first analyze the convergence bound of HiFL theoretically and identify the key controllable factors for model performance improvement. We then advocate an enhanced design of HiFlash by innovatively integrating deep reinforcement learning based adaptive staleness control and heterogeneity-aware client-edge association strategy to boost the system efficiency and mitigate the staleness effect without compromising model accuracy. Extensive experiments corroborate the superior performance of HiFlash in model accuracy, communication reduction, and system efficiency.
Simplex Autoencoders
Authors: Aymene Mohammed Bouayed, David Naccache
Date: 2023-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Synthetic Data Generation

Synthetic data generation is increasingly important due to privacy concerns. While Autoencoder-based approaches have been widely used for this purpose, sampling from their latent spaces can be challenging. Mixture models are currently the most efficient way to sample from these spaces. In this work, we propose a new approach that models the latent space of an Autoencoder as a simplex, allowing for a novel heuristic for determining the number of components in the mixture model. This heuristic is independent of the number of classes and produces comparable results. We also introduce a sampling method based on probability mass functions, taking advantage of the compactness of the latent space. We evaluate our approaches on a synthetic dataset and demonstrate their performance on three benchmark datasets: MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Celeba. Our approach achieves an image generation FID of 4.29, 13.55, and 11.90 on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Celeba datasets, respectively. The best AE FID results to date on those datasets are respectively 6.3, 85.3 and 35.6 we hence substantially improve those figures (the lower is the FID the better). However, AEs are not the best performing algorithms on the concerned datasets and all FID records are currently held by GANs. While we do not perform better than GANs on CIFAR and Celeba we do manage to squeeze-out a non-negligible improvement (of 0.21) over the current GAN-held record for the MNIST dataset.
Error-related Potential Variability: Exploring the Effects on Classification and Transferability
Authors: Benjamin Poole, Minwoo Lee
Date: 2023-01-16 00:00:00

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) have allowed for direct communication from the brain to external applications for the automatic detection of cognitive processes such as error recognition. Error-related potentials (ErrPs) are a particular brain signal elicited when one commits or observes an erroneous event. However, due to the noisy properties of the brain and recording devices, ErrPs vary from instance to instance as they are combined with an assortment of other brain signals, biological noise, and external noise, making the classification of ErrPs a non-trivial problem. Recent works have revealed particular cognitive processes such as awareness, embodiment, and predictability that contribute to ErrP variations. In this paper, we explore the performance of classifier transferability when trained on different ErrP variation datasets generated by varying the levels of awareness and embodiment for a given task. In particular, we look at transference between observational and interactive ErrP categories when elicited by similar and differing tasks. Our empirical results provide an exploratory analysis into the ErrP transferability problem from a data perspective.
Neuromorphic High-Frequency 3D Dancing Pose Estimation in Dynamic Environment
Authors: Zhongyang Zhang, Kaidong Chai, Haowen Yu, Ramzi Majaj, Francesca Walsh, Edward Wang, Upal Mahbub, Hava Siegelmann, Donghyun Kim, Tauhidur Rahman
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

As a beloved sport worldwide, dancing is getting integrated into traditional and virtual reality-based gaming platforms nowadays. It opens up new opportunities in the technology-mediated dancing space. These platforms primarily rely on passive and continuous human pose estimation as an input capture mechanism. Existing solutions are mainly based on RGB or RGB-Depth cameras for dance games. The former suffers in low-lighting conditions due to the motion blur and low sensitivity, while the latter is too power-hungry, has a low frame rate, and has limited working distance. With ultra-low latency, energy efficiency, and wide dynamic range characteristics, the event camera is a promising solution to overcome these shortcomings. We propose YeLan, an event camera-based 3-dimensional high-frequency human pose estimation(HPE) system that survives low-lighting conditions and dynamic backgrounds. We collected the world's first event camera dance dataset and developed a fully customizable motion-to-event physics-aware simulator. YeLan outperforms the baseline models in these challenging conditions and demonstrated robustness against different types of clothing, background motion, viewing angle, occlusion, and lighting fluctuations.
Multi-fidelity surrogate modeling for temperature field prediction using deep convolution neural network
Authors: Yunyang Zhang, Zhiqiang Gong, Weien Zhou, Xiaoyu Zhao, Xiaohu Zheng, Wen Yao
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Self-Supervised Learning

Temperature field prediction is of great importance in the thermal design of systems engineering, and building the surrogate model is an effective way for the task. Generally, large amounts of labeled data are required to guarantee a good prediction performance of the surrogate model, especially the deep learning model, which have more parameters and better representational ability. However, labeled data, especially high-fidelity labeled data, are usually expensive to obtain and sometimes even impossible. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a pithy deep multi-fidelity model (DMFM) for temperature field prediction, which takes advantage of low-fidelity data to boost the performance with less high-fidelity data. First, a pre-train and fine-tune paradigm are developed in DMFM to train the low-fidelity and high-fidelity data, which significantly reduces the complexity of the deep surrogate model. Then, a self-supervised learning method for training the physics-driven deep multi-fidelity model (PD-DMFM) is proposed, which fully utilizes the physics characteristics of the engineering systems and reduces the dependence on large amounts of labeled low-fidelity data in the training process. Two diverse temperature field prediction problems are constructed to validate the effectiveness of DMFM and PD-DMFM, and the result shows that the proposed method can greatly reduce the dependence of the model on high-fidelity data.
DQNAS: Neural Architecture Search using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Anshumaan Chauhan, Siddhartha Bhattacharyya, S. Vadivel
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Neural Architecture Search, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Convolutional Neural Networks have been used in a variety of image related applications after their rise in popularity due to ImageNet competition. Convolutional Neural Networks have shown remarkable results in applications including face recognition, moving target detection and tracking, classification of food based on the calorie content and many more. Designing of Convolutional Neural Networks requires experts having a cross domain knowledge and it is laborious, which requires a lot of time for testing different values for different hyperparameter along with the consideration of different configurations of existing architectures. Neural Architecture Search is an automated way of generating Neural Network architectures which saves researchers from all the brute-force testing trouble, but with the drawback of consuming a lot of computational resources for a prolonged period. In this paper, we propose an automated Neural Architecture Search framework DQNAS, guided by the principles of Reinforcement Learning along with One-shot Training which aims to generate neural network architectures that show superior performance and have minimum scalability problem.
Bag of States: A Non-sequential Approach to Video-based Engagement Measurement
Authors: Ali Abedi, Chinchu Thomas, Dinesh Babu Jayagopi, Shehroz S. Khan
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00

Automatic measurement of student engagement provides helpful information for instructors to meet learning program objectives and individualize program delivery. Students' behavioral and emotional states need to be analyzed at fine-grained time scales in order to measure their level of engagement. Many existing approaches have developed sequential and spatiotemporal models, such as recurrent neural networks, temporal convolutional networks, and three-dimensional convolutional neural networks, for measuring student engagement from videos. These models are trained to incorporate the order of behavioral and emotional states of students into video analysis and output their level of engagement. In this paper, backed by educational psychology, we question the necessity of modeling the order of behavioral and emotional states of students in measuring their engagement. We develop bag-of-words-based models in which only the occurrence of behavioral and emotional states of students is modeled and analyzed and not the order in which they occur. Behavioral and affective features are extracted from videos and analyzed by the proposed models to determine the level of engagement in an ordinal-output classification setting. Compared to the existing sequential and spatiotemporal approaches for engagement measurement, the proposed non-sequential approach improves the state-of-the-art results. According to experimental results, our method significantly improved engagement level classification accuracy on the IIITB Online SE dataset by 26% compared to sequential models and achieved engagement level classification accuracy as high as 66.58% on the DAiSEE student engagement dataset.
FedCliP: Federated Learning with Client Pruning
Authors: Beibei Li, Zerui Shao, Ao Liu, Peiran Wang
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

The prevalent communication efficient federated learning (FL) frameworks usually take advantages of model gradient compression or model distillation. However, the unbalanced local data distributions (either in quantity or quality) of participating clients, contributing non-equivalently to the global model training, still pose a big challenge to these works. In this paper, we propose FedCliP, a novel communication efficient FL framework that allows faster model training, by adaptively learning which clients should remain active for further model training and pruning those who should be inactive with less potential contributions. We also introduce an alternative optimization method with a newly defined contribution score measure to facilitate active and inactive client determination. We empirically evaluate the communication efficiency of FL frameworks with extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets under both IID and non-IID settings. Numerical results demonstrate the outperformance of the porposed FedCliP framework over state-of-the-art FL frameworks, i.e., FedCliP can save 70% of communication overhead with only 0.2% accuracy loss on MNIST datasets, and save 50% and 15% of communication overheads with less than 1% accuracy loss on FMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, respectively.
Pathfinding Neural Cellular Automata
Authors: Sam Earle, Ozlem Yildiz, Julian Togelius, Chinmay Hegde
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00

Pathfinding makes up an important sub-component of a broad range of complex tasks in AI, such as robot path planning, transport routing, and game playing. While classical algorithms can efficiently compute shortest paths, neural networks could be better suited to adapting these sub-routines to more complex and intractable tasks. As a step toward developing such networks, we hand-code and learn models for Breadth-First Search (BFS), i.e. shortest path finding, using the unified architectural framework of Neural Cellular Automata, which are iterative neural networks with equal-size inputs and outputs. Similarly, we present a neural implementation of Depth-First Search (DFS), and outline how it can be combined with neural BFS to produce an NCA for computing diameter of a graph. We experiment with architectural modifications inspired by these hand-coded NCAs, training networks from scratch to solve the diameter problem on grid mazes while exhibiting strong generalization ability. Finally, we introduce a scheme in which data points are mutated adversarially during training. We find that adversarially evolving mazes leads to increased generalization on out-of-distribution examples, while at the same time generating data-sets with significantly more complex solutions for reasoning tasks.
Knowledge Acquisition and Completion for Long-Term Human-Robot Interactions using Knowledge Graph Embedding
Authors: E. Bartoli, F. Argenziano, V. Suriani, D. Nardi
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Graph Embedding, Incremental Learning, Knowledge Graph Embedding

In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems, a challenging task is sharing the representation of the operational environment, fusing symbolic knowledge and perceptions, between users and robots. With the existing HRI pipelines, users can teach the robots some concepts to increase their knowledge base. Unfortunately, the data coming from the users are usually not enough dense for building a consistent representation. Furthermore, the existing approaches are not able to incrementally build up their knowledge base, which is very important when robots have to deal with dynamic contexts. To this end, we propose an architecture to gather data from users and environments in long-runs of continual learning. We adopt Knowledge Graph Embedding techniques to generalize the acquired information with the goal of incrementally extending the robot's inner representation of the environment. We evaluate the performance of the overall continual learning architecture by measuring the capabilities of the robot of learning entities and relations coming from unknown contexts through a series of incremental learning sessions.
Learning to solve arithmetic problems with a virtual abacus
Authors: Flavio Petruzzellis, Ling Xuan Chen, Alberto Testolin
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Acquiring mathematical skills is considered a key challenge for modern Artificial Intelligence systems. Inspired by the way humans discover numerical knowledge, here we introduce a deep reinforcement learning framework that allows to simulate how cognitive agents could gradually learn to solve arithmetic problems by interacting with a virtual abacus. The proposed model successfully learn to perform multi-digit additions and subtractions, achieving an error rate below 1% even when operands are much longer than those observed during training. We also compare the performance of learning agents receiving a different amount of explicit supervision, and we analyze the most common error patterns to better understand the limitations and biases resulting from our design choices.
Mean-Field Control based Approximation of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Presence of a Non-decomposable Shared Global State
Authors: Washim Uddin Mondal, Vaneet Aggarwal, Satish V. Ukkusuri
Date: 2023-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Mean Field Control (MFC) is a powerful approximation tool to solve large-scale Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems. However, the success of MFC relies on the presumption that given the local states and actions of all the agents, the next (local) states of the agents evolve conditionally independent of each other. Here we demonstrate that even in a MARL setting where agents share a common global state in addition to their local states evolving conditionally independently (thus introducing a correlation between the state transition processes of individual agents), the MFC can still be applied as a good approximation tool. The global state is assumed to be non-decomposable i.e., it cannot be expressed as a collection of local states of the agents. We compute the approximation error as $\mathcal{O}(e)$ where $e=\frac{1}{\sqrt{N}}\left[\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|} +\sqrt{|\mathcal{U}|}\right]$. The size of the agent population is denoted by the term $N$, and $|\mathcal{X}|, |\mathcal{U}|$ respectively indicate the sizes of (local) state and action spaces of individual agents. The approximation error is found to be independent of the size of the shared global state space. We further demonstrate that in a special case if the reward and state transition functions are independent of the action distribution of the population, then the error can be improved to $e=\frac{\sqrt{|\mathcal{X}|}}{\sqrt{N}}$. Finally, we devise a Natural Policy Gradient based algorithm that solves the MFC problem with $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity and obtains a policy that is within $\mathcal{O}(\max\{e,\epsilon\})$ error of the optimal MARL policy for any $\epsilon>0$.
AI-Based Affective Music Generation Systems: A Review of Methods, and Challenges
Authors: Adyasha Dash, Kat R. Agres
Date: 2023-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

Music is a powerful medium for altering the emotional state of the listener. In recent years, with significant advancement in computing capabilities, artificial intelligence-based (AI-based) approaches have become popular for creating affective music generation (AMG) systems that are empowered with the ability to generate affective music. Entertainment, healthcare, and sensor-integrated interactive system design are a few of the areas in which AI-based affective music generation (AI-AMG) systems may have a significant impact. Given the surge of interest in this topic, this article aims to provide a comprehensive review of AI-AMG systems. The main building blocks of an AI-AMG system are discussed, and existing systems are formally categorized based on the core algorithm used for music generation. In addition, this article discusses the main musical features employed to compose affective music, along with the respective AI-based approaches used for tailoring them. Lastly, the main challenges and open questions in this field, as well as their potential solutions, are presented to guide future research. We hope that this review will be useful for readers seeking to understand the state-of-the-art in AI-AMG systems, and gain an overview of the methods used for developing them, thereby helping them explore this field in the future.
Cooperation Learning Enhanced Colonic Polyp Segmentation Based on Transformer-CNN Fusion
Authors: Yuanyuan Wang, Zhaohong Deng, Qiongdan Lou, Shudong Hu, Kup-Sze Choi, Shitong Wang
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00

Traditional segmentation methods for colonic polyps are mainly designed based on low-level features. They could not accurately extract the location of small colonic polyps. Although the existing deep learning methods can improve the segmentation accuracy, their effects are still unsatisfied. To meet the above challenges, we propose a hybrid network called Fusion-Transformer-HardNetMSEG (i.e., Fu-TransHNet) in this study. Fu-TransHNet uses deep learning of different mechanisms to fuse each other and is enhanced with multi-view collaborative learning techniques. Firstly, the Fu-TransHNet utilizes the Transformer branch and the CNN branch to realize the global feature learning and local feature learning, respectively. Secondly, a fusion module is designed to integrate the features from two branches. The fusion module consists of two parts: 1) the Global-Local Feature Fusion (GLFF) part and 2) the Dense Fusion of Multi-scale features (DFM) part. The former is built to compensate the feature information mission from two branches at the same scale; the latter is constructed to enhance the feature representation. Thirdly, the above two branches and fusion modules utilize multi-view cooperative learning techniques to obtain their respective weights that denote their importance and then make a final decision comprehensively. Experimental results showed that the Fu-TransHNet network was superior to the existing methods on five widely used benchmark datasets. In particular, on the ETIS-LaribPolypDB dataset containing many small-target colonic polyps, the mDice obtained by Fu-TransHNet were 12.4% and 6.2% higher than the state-of-the-art methods HardNet-MSEG and TransFuse-s, respectively.
Towards Estimating Transferability using Hard Subsets
Authors: Tarun Ram Menta, Surgan Jandial, Akash Patil, Vimal KB, Saketh Bachu, Balaji Krishnamurthy, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian, Chirag Agarwal, Mausoom Sarkar
Date: 2023-01-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

As transfer learning techniques are increasingly used to transfer knowledge from the source model to the target task, it becomes important to quantify which source models are suitable for a given target task without performing computationally expensive fine tuning. In this work, we propose HASTE (HArd Subset TransfErability), a new strategy to estimate the transferability of a source model to a particular target task using only a harder subset of target data. By leveraging the internal and output representations of model, we introduce two techniques, one class agnostic and another class specific, to identify harder subsets and show that HASTE can be used with any existing transferability metric to improve their reliability. We further analyze the relation between HASTE and the optimal average log likelihood as well as negative conditional entropy and empirically validate our theoretical bounds. Our experimental results across multiple source model architectures, target datasets, and transfer learning tasks show that HASTE modified metrics are consistently better or on par with the state of the art transferability metrics.