pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PyTAIL: Interactive and Incremental Learning of NLP Models with Human in the Loop for Online Data
Authors: Shubhanshu Mishra, Jana Diesner
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Incremental Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Online data streams make training machine learning models hard because of distribution shift and new patterns emerging over time. For natural language processing (NLP) tasks that utilize a collection of features based on lexicons and rules, it is important to adapt these features to the changing data. To address this challenge we introduce PyTAIL, a python library, which allows a human in the loop approach to actively train NLP models. PyTAIL enhances generic active learning, which only suggests new instances to label by also suggesting new features like rules and lexicons to label. Furthermore, PyTAIL is flexible enough for users to accept, reject, or update rules and lexicons as the model is being trained. Finally, we simulate the performance of PyTAIL on existing social media benchmark datasets for text classification. We compare various active learning strategies on these benchmarks. The model closes the gap with as few as 10% of the training data. Finally, we also highlight the importance of tracking evaluation metric on remaining data (which is not yet merged with active learning) alongside the test dataset. This highlights the effectiveness of the model in accurately annotating the remaining dataset, which is especially suitable for batch processing of large unlabelled corpora. PyTAIL will be available at https://github.com/socialmediaie/pytail.
PuzzleFusion: Unleashing the Power of Diffusion Models for Spatial Puzzle Solving
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

This paper presents an end-to-end neural architecture based on Diffusion Models for spatial puzzle solving, particularly jigsaw puzzle and room arrangement tasks. In the latter task, for instance, the proposed system "PuzzleFusion" takes a set of room layouts as polygonal curves in the top-down view and aligns the room layout pieces by estimating their 2D translations and rotations, akin to solving the jigsaw puzzle of room layouts. A surprising discovery of the paper is that the simple use of a Diffusion Model effectively solves these challenging spatial puzzle tasks as a conditional generation process. To enable learning of an end-to-end neural system, the paper introduces new datasets with ground-truth arrangements: 1) 2D Voronoi jigsaw dataset, a synthetic one where pieces are generated by Voronoi diagram of 2D pointset; and 2) MagicPlan dataset, a real one offered by MagicPlan from its production pipeline, where pieces are room layouts constructed by augmented reality App by real-estate consumers. The qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms the competing methods by significant margins in all the tasks.
Generative Joint Source-Channel Coding for Semantic Image Transmission
Authors: Ecenaz Erdemir, Tze-Yang Tung, Pier Luigi Dragotti, Deniz Gunduz
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Generative Adversarial Network

Recent works have shown that joint source-channel coding (JSCC) schemes using deep neural networks (DNNs), called DeepJSCC, provide promising results in wireless image transmission. However, these methods mostly focus on the distortion of the reconstructed signals with respect to the input image, rather than their perception by humans. However, focusing on traditional distortion metrics alone does not necessarily result in high perceptual quality, especially in extreme physical conditions, such as very low bandwidth compression ratio (BCR) and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. In this work, we propose two novel JSCC schemes that leverage the perceptual quality of deep generative models (DGMs) for wireless image transmission, namely InverseJSCC and GenerativeJSCC. While the former is an inverse problem approach to DeepJSCC, the latter is an end-to-end optimized JSCC scheme. In both, we optimize a weighted sum of mean squared error (MSE) and learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) losses, which capture more semantic similarities than other distortion metrics. InverseJSCC performs denoising on the distorted reconstructions of a DeepJSCC model by solving an inverse optimization problem using style-based generative adversarial network (StyleGAN). Our simulation results show that InverseJSCC significantly improves the state-of-the-art (SotA) DeepJSCC in terms of perceptual quality in edge cases. In GenerativeJSCC, we carry out end-to-end training of an encoder and a StyleGAN-based decoder, and show that GenerativeJSCC significantly outperforms DeepJSCC both in terms of distortion and perceptual quality.
On Designing Light-Weight Object Trackers through Network Pruning: Use CNNs or Transformers?
Authors: Saksham Aggarwal, Taneesh Gupta, Pawan Kumar Sahu, Arnav Chavan, Rishabh Tiwari, Dilip K. Prasad, Deepak K. Gupta
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning, Object, Object Tracking

Object trackers deployed on low-power devices need to be light-weight, however, most of the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods rely on using compute-heavy backbones built using CNNs or transformers. Large sizes of such models do not allow their deployment in low-power conditions and designing compressed variants of large tracking models is of great importance. This paper demonstrates how highly compressed light-weight object trackers can be designed using neural architectural pruning of large CNN and transformer based trackers. Further, a comparative study on architectural choices best suited to design light-weight trackers is provided. A comparison between SOTA trackers using CNNs, transformers as well as the combination of the two is presented to study their stability at various compression ratios. Finally results for extreme pruning scenarios going as low as 1% in some cases are shown to study the limits of network pruning in object tracking. This work provides deeper insights into designing highly efficient trackers from existing SOTA methods.
Melting Pot 2.0
Authors: John P. Agapiou, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, Jayd Matyas, Yiran Mao, Peter Sunehag, Raphael Köster, Udari Madhushani, Kavya Kopparapu, Ramona Comanescu, DJ Strouse, Michael B. Johanson, Sukhdeep Singh, Julia Haas, Igor Mordatch, Dean Mobbs, Joel Z. Leibo
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Artificial Life, Navigate

Multi-agent artificial intelligence research promises a path to develop intelligent technologies that are more human-like and more human-compatible than those produced by "solipsistic" approaches, which do not consider interactions between agents. Melting Pot is a research tool developed to facilitate work on multi-agent artificial intelligence, and provides an evaluation protocol that measures generalization to novel social partners in a set of canonical test scenarios. Each scenario pairs a physical environment (a "substrate") with a reference set of co-players (a "background population"), to create a social situation with substantial interdependence between the individuals involved. For instance, some scenarios were inspired by institutional-economics-based accounts of natural resource management and public-good-provision dilemmas. Others were inspired by considerations from evolutionary biology, game theory, and artificial life. Melting Pot aims to cover a maximally diverse set of interdependencies and incentives. It includes the commonly-studied extreme cases of perfectly-competitive (zero-sum) motivations and perfectly-cooperative (shared-reward) motivations, but does not stop with them. As in real-life, a clear majority of scenarios in Melting Pot have mixed incentives. They are neither purely competitive nor purely cooperative and thus demand successful agents be able to navigate the resulting ambiguity. Here we describe Melting Pot 2.0, which revises and expands on Melting Pot. We also introduce support for scenarios with asymmetric roles, and explain how to integrate them into the evaluation protocol. This report also contains: (1) details of all substrates and scenarios; (2) a complete description of all baseline algorithms and results. Our intention is for it to serve as a reference for researchers using Melting Pot 2.0.
SkillS: Adaptive Skill Sequencing for Efficient Temporally-Extended Exploration
Authors: Giulia Vezzani, Dhruva Tirumala, Markus Wulfmeier, Dushyant Rao, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Ben Moran, Tuomas Haarnoja, Jan Humplik, Roland Hafner, Michael Neunert, Claudio Fantacci, Tim Hertweck, Thomas Lampe, Fereshteh Sadeghi, Nicolas Heess, Martin Riedmiller
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The ability to effectively reuse prior knowledge is a key requirement when building general and flexible Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Skill reuse is one of the most common approaches, but current methods have considerable limitations.For example, fine-tuning an existing policy frequently fails, as the policy can degrade rapidly early in training. In a similar vein, distillation of expert behavior can lead to poor results when given sub-optimal experts. We compare several common approaches for skill transfer on multiple domains including changes in task and system dynamics. We identify how existing methods can fail and introduce an alternative approach to mitigate these problems. Our approach learns to sequence existing temporally-extended skills for exploration but learns the final policy directly from the raw experience. This conceptual split enables rapid adaptation and thus efficient data collection but without constraining the final solution.It significantly outperforms many classical methods across a suite of evaluation tasks and we use a broad set of ablations to highlight the importance of differentc omponents of our method.
Assessing Quality-Diversity Neuro-Evolution Algorithms Performance in Hard Exploration Problems
Authors: Felix Chalumeau, Thomas Pierrot, Valentin Macé, Arthur Flajolet, Karim Beguir, Antoine Cully, Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Evolutionary Algorithms

A fascinating aspect of nature lies in its ability to produce a collection of organisms that are all high-performing in their niche. Quality-Diversity (QD) methods are evolutionary algorithms inspired by this observation, that obtained great results in many applications, from wing design to robot adaptation. Recently, several works demonstrated that these methods could be applied to perform neuro-evolution to solve control problems in large search spaces. In such problems, diversity can be a target in itself. Diversity can also be a way to enhance exploration in tasks exhibiting deceptive reward signals. While the first aspect has been studied in depth in the QD community, the latter remains scarcer in the literature. Exploration is at the heart of several domains trying to solve control problems such as Reinforcement Learning and QD methods are promising candidates to overcome the challenges associated. Therefore, we believe that standardized benchmarks exhibiting control problems in high dimension with exploration difficulties are of interest to the QD community. In this paper, we highlight three candidate benchmarks and explain why they appear relevant for systematic evaluation of QD algorithms. We also provide open-source implementations in Jax allowing practitioners to run fast and numerous experiments on few compute resources.
Question-type Identification for Academic Questions in Online Learning Platform
Authors: Azam Rabiee, Alok Goel, Johnson D'Souza, Saurabh Khanwalkar
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Multiple-choice, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Online learning platforms provide learning materials and answers to students' academic questions by experts, peers, or systems. This paper explores question-type identification as a step in content understanding for an online learning platform. The aim of the question-type identifier is to categorize question types based on their structure and complexity, using the question text, subject, and structural features. We have defined twelve question-type classes, including Multiple-Choice Question (MCQ), essay, and others. We have compiled an internal dataset of students' questions and used a combination of weak-supervision techniques and manual annotation. We then trained a BERT-based ensemble model on this dataset and evaluated this model on a separate human-labeled test set. Our experiments yielded an F1-score of 0.94 for MCQ binary classification and promising results for 12-class multilabel classification. We deployed the model in our online learning platform as a crucial enabler for content understanding to enhance the student learning experience.
Improving Multi-task Learning via Seeking Task-based Flat Regions
Authors: Hoang Phan, Lam Tran, Quyen Tran, Ngoc N. Tran, Tuan Truong, Nhat Ho, Dinh Phung, Trung Le
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a widely-used and powerful learning paradigm for training deep neural networks that allows learning more than one objective by a single backbone. Compared to training tasks separately, MTL significantly reduces computational costs, improves data efficiency, and potentially enhances model performance by leveraging knowledge across tasks. Hence, it has been adopted in a variety of applications, ranging from computer vision to natural language processing and speech recognition. Among them, there is an emerging line of work in MTL that focuses on manipulating the task gradient to derive an ultimate gradient descent direction to benefit all tasks. Despite achieving impressive results on many benchmarks, directly applying these approaches without using appropriate regularization techniques might lead to suboptimal solutions on real-world problems. In particular, standard training that minimizes the empirical loss on the training data can easily suffer from overfitting to low-resource tasks or be spoiled by noisy-labeled ones, which can cause negative transfer between tasks and overall performance drop. To alleviate such problems, we propose to leverage a recently introduced training method, named Sharpness-aware Minimization, which can enhance model generalization ability on single-task learning. Accordingly, we present a novel MTL training methodology, encouraging the model to find task-based flat minima for coherently improving its generalization capability on all tasks. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on a variety of applications to demonstrate the merit of our proposed approach to existing gradient-based MTL methods, as suggested by our developed theory.
Trust Your $\nabla$: Gradient-based Intervention Targeting for Causal Discovery
Authors: Mateusz Olko, Michał Zając, Aleksandra Nowak, Nino Scherrer, Yashas Annadani, Stefan Bauer, Łukasz Kuciński, Piotr Miłoś
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Experimental Design

Inferring causal structure from data is a challenging task of fundamental importance in science. Observational data are often insufficient to identify a system's causal structure uniquely. While conducting interventions (i.e., experiments) can improve the identifiability, such samples are usually challenging and expensive to obtain. Hence, experimental design approaches for causal discovery aim to minimize the number of interventions by estimating the most informative intervention target. In this work, we propose a novel Gradient-based Intervention Targeting method, abbreviated GIT, that 'trusts' the gradient estimator of a gradient-based causal discovery framework to provide signals for the intervention acquisition function. We provide extensive experiments in simulated and real-world datasets and demonstrate that GIT performs on par with competitive baselines, surpassing them in the low-data regime.
Undesirable Biases in NLP: Addressing Challenges of Measurement
Authors: Oskar van der Wal, Dominik Bachmann, Alina Leidinger, Leendert van Maanen, Willem Zuidema, Katrin Schulz
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00

As Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology rapidly develop and spread into daily life, it becomes crucial to anticipate how their use could harm people. One problem that has received a lot of attention in recent years is that this technology has displayed harmful biases, from generating derogatory stereotypes to producing disparate outcomes for different social groups. Although a lot of effort has been invested in assessing and mitigating these biases, our methods of measuring the biases of NLP models have serious problems and it is often unclear what they actually measure. In this paper, we provide an interdisciplinary approach to discussing the issue of NLP model bias by adopting the lens of psychometrics -- a field specialized in the measurement of concepts like bias that are not directly observable. In particular, we will explore two central notions from psychometrics, the construct validity and the reliability of measurement tools, and discuss how they can be applied in the context of measuring model bias. Our goal is to provide NLP practitioners with methodological tools for designing better bias measures, and to inspire them more generally to explore tools from psychometrics when working on bias measurement tools.
Collaborative Training of Medical Artificial Intelligence Models with non-uniform Labels
Authors: Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Peter Isfort, Marwin Saehn, Gustav Mueller-Franzes, Firas Khader, Jakob Nikolas Kather, Christiane Kuhl, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Medical Diagnosis, Medical Image Analysis, Multi-Label Classification, Privacy Preserving, Privacy Preserving Deep Learning

Due to the rapid advancements in recent years, medical image analysis is largely dominated by deep learning (DL). However, building powerful and robust DL models requires training with large multi-party datasets. While multiple stakeholders have provided publicly available datasets, the ways in which these data are labeled vary widely. For Instance, an institution might provide a dataset of chest radiographs containing labels denoting the presence of pneumonia, while another institution might have a focus on determining the presence of metastases in the lung. Training a single AI model utilizing all these data is not feasible with conventional federated learning (FL). This prompts us to propose an extension to the widespread FL process, namely flexible federated learning (FFL) for collaborative training on such data. Using 695,000 chest radiographs from five institutions from across the globe - each with differing labels - we demonstrate that having heterogeneously labeled datasets, FFL-based training leads to significant performance increase compared to conventional FL training, where only the uniformly annotated images are utilized. We believe that our proposed algorithm could accelerate the process of bringing collaborative training methods from research and simulation phase to the real-world applications in healthcare.
Self-supervised vision-language pretraining for Medical visual question answering
Authors: Pengfei Li, Gang Liu, Lin Tan, Jinying Liao, Shenjun Zhong
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image-text matching, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Medical Visual Question Answering, Question Answering, Text Matching, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Medical image visual question answering (VQA) is a task to answer clinical questions, given a radiographic image, which is a challenging problem that requires a model to integrate both vision and language information. To solve medical VQA problems with a limited number of training data, pretrain-finetune paradigm is widely used to improve the model generalization. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised method that applies Masked image modeling, Masked language modeling, Image text matching and Image text alignment via contrastive learning (M2I2) for pretraining on medical image caption dataset, and finetunes to downstream medical VQA tasks. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on all the three public medical VQA datasets. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/pengfeiliHEU/M2I2.
Learning Invariant Rules from Data for Interpretable Anomaly Detection
Authors: Cheng Feng, Pingge Hu
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decision Making

In the research area of anomaly detection, novel and promising methods are frequently developed. However, most existing studies exclusively focus on the detection task only and ignore the interpretability of the underlying models as well as their detection results. Nevertheless, anomaly interpretation, which aims to provide explanation of why specific data instances are identified as anomalies, is an equally important task in many real-world applications. In this work, we propose a novel framework which synergizes several machine learning and data mining techniques to automatically learn invariant rules that are consistently satisfied in a given dataset. The learned invariant rules can provide explicit explanation of anomaly detection results in the inference phase and thus are extremely useful for subsequent decision-making regarding reported anomalies. Furthermore, our empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method can also achieve comparable or even better performance in terms of AUC and partial AUC on public benchmark datasets across various application domains compared with start-of-the-art anomaly detection models.
TSGP: Two-Stage Generative Prompting for Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering
Authors: Yueqing Sun, Yu Zhang, Le Qi, Qi Shi
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Question Answering, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Unsupervised commonsense question answering requires mining effective commonsense knowledge without the rely on the labeled task data. Previous methods typically retrieved from traditional knowledge bases or used pre-trained language models (PrLMs) to generate fixed types of knowledge, which have poor generalization ability. In this paper, we aim to address the above limitation by leveraging the implicit knowledge stored in PrLMs and propose a two-stage prompt-based unsupervised commonsense question answering framework (TSGP). Specifically, we first use knowledge generation prompts to generate the knowledge required for questions with unlimited types and possible candidate answers independent of specified choices. Then, we further utilize answer generation prompts to generate possible candidate answers independent of specified choices. Experimental results and analysis on three different commonsense reasoning tasks, CommonsenseQA, OpenBookQA, and SocialIQA, demonstrate that TSGP significantly improves the reasoning ability of language models in unsupervised settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yueqing-Sun/TSGP.