pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mind Your Bias: A Critical Review of Bias Detection Methods for Contextual Language Models
Authors: Silke Husse, Andreas Spitz
Date: 2022-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bias Detection, Word Embeddings

The awareness and mitigation of biases are of fundamental importance for the fair and transparent use of contextual language models, yet they crucially depend on the accurate detection of biases as a precursor. Consequently, numerous bias detection methods have been proposed, which vary in their approach, the considered type of bias, and the data used for evaluation. However, while most detection methods are derived from the word embedding association test for static word embeddings, the reported results are heterogeneous, inconsistent, and ultimately inconclusive. To address this issue, we conduct a rigorous analysis and comparison of bias detection methods for contextual language models. Our results show that minor design and implementation decisions (or errors) have a substantial and often significant impact on the derived bias scores. Overall, we find the state of the field to be both worse than previously acknowledged due to systematic and propagated errors in implementations, yet better than anticipated since divergent results in the literature homogenize after accounting for implementation errors. Based on our findings, we conclude with a discussion of paths towards more robust and consistent bias detection methods.
kogito: A Commonsense Knowledge Inference Toolkit
Authors: Mete Ismayilzada, Antoine Bosselut
Date: 2022-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

In this paper, we present kogito, an open-source tool for generating commonsense inferences about situations described in text. kogito provides an intuitive and extensible interface to interact with natural language generation models that can be used for hypothesizing commonsense knowledge inference from a textual input. In particular, kogito offers several features for targeted, multi-granularity knowledge generation. These include a standardized API for training and evaluating knowledge models, and generating and filtering inferences from them. We also include helper functions for converting natural language texts into a format ingestible by knowledge models - intermediate pipeline stages such as knowledge head extraction from text, heuristic and model-based knowledge head-relation matching, and an ability to define and use custom knowledge relations. We make the code for kogito available at https://github.com/epfl-nlp/kogito along with thorough documentation at https://kogito.readthedocs.io.
SexWEs: Domain-Aware Word Embeddings via Cross-lingual Semantic Specialisation for Chinese Sexism Detection in Social Media
Authors: Aiqi Jiang, Arkaitz Zubiaga
Date: 2022-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Transfer Learning, Word Embeddings, Word Similarity

The goal of sexism detection is to mitigate negative online content targeting certain gender groups of people. However, the limited availability of labeled sexism-related datasets makes it problematic to identify online sexism for low-resource languages. In this paper, we address the task of automatic sexism detection in social media for one low-resource language -- Chinese. Rather than collecting new sexism data or building cross-lingual transfer learning models, we develop a cross-lingual domain-aware semantic specialisation system in order to make the most of existing data. Semantic specialisation is a technique for retrofitting pre-trained distributional word vectors by integrating external linguistic knowledge (such as lexico-semantic relations) into the specialised feature space. To do this, we leverage semantic resources for sexism from a high-resource language (English) to specialise pre-trained word vectors in the target language (Chinese) to inject domain knowledge. We demonstrate the benefit of our sexist word embeddings (SexWEs) specialised by our framework via intrinsic evaluation of word similarity and extrinsic evaluation of sexism detection. Compared with other specialisation approaches and Chinese baseline word vectors, our SexWEs shows an average score improvement of 0.033 and 0.064 in both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations, respectively. The ablative results and visualisation of SexWEs also prove the effectiveness of our framework on retrofitting word vectors in low-resource languages.
Distributed Node Covering Optimization for Large Scale Networks and Its Application on Social Advertising
Authors: Qiang Liu
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00

Combinatorial optimizations are usually complex and inefficient, which limits their applications in large-scale networks with billions of links. We introduce a distributed computational method for solving a node-covering problem at the scale of factual scenarios. We first construct a genetic algorithm and then design a two-step strategy to initialize the candidate solutions. All the computational operations are designed and developed in a distributed form on \textit{Apache Spark} enabling fast calculation for practical graphs. We apply our method to social advertising of recalling back churn users in online mobile games, which was previously only treated as a traditional item recommending or ranking problem.
The scaling of goals via homeostasis: an evolutionary simulation, experiment and analysis
Authors: Leo Pio-Lopez, Johanna Bischof, Jennifer V. LaPalme, Michael Levin
Date: 2022-11-15 00:00:00

All cognitive agents are composite beings. Specifically, complex living agents consist of cells, which are themselves competent sub-agents navigating physiological and metabolic spaces. Behavior science, evolutionary developmental biology, and the field of machine intelligence all seek an answer to the scaling of biological cognition: what evolutionary dynamics enable individual cells to integrate their activities to result in the emergence of a novel, higher-level intelligence that has goals and competencies that belong to it and not to its parts? Here, we report the results of simulations based on the TAME framework, which proposes that evolution pivoted the collective intelligence of cells during morphogenesis of the body into traditional behavioral intelligence by scaling up the goal states at the center of homeostatic processes. We tested the hypothesis that a minimal evolutionary framework is sufficient for small, low-level setpoints of metabolic homeostasis in cells to scale up into collectives (tissues) which solve a problem in morphospace: the organization of a body-wide positional information axis (the classic French Flag problem). We found that these emergent morphogenetic agents exhibit a number of predicted features, including the use of stress propagation dynamics to achieve its target morphology as well as the ability to recover from perturbation (robustness) and long-term stability (even though neither of these was directly selected for). Moreover we observed unexpected behavior of sudden remodeling long after the system stabilizes. We tested this prediction in a biological system - regenerating planaria - and observed a very similar phenomenon. We propose that this system is a first step toward a quantitative understanding of how evolution scales minimal goal-directed behavior (homeostatic loops) into higher-level problem-solving agents in morphogenetic and other spaces.
On the Accuracy of Hotelling-Type Tensor Deflation: A Random Tensor Analysis
Authors: Mohamed El Amine Seddik, Maxime Guillaud, Alexis Decurninge
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00

Leveraging on recent advances in random tensor theory, we consider in this paper a rank-$r$ asymmetric spiked tensor model of the form $\sum_{i=1}^r \beta_i A_i + W$ where $\beta_i\geq 0$ and the $A_i$'s are rank-one tensors such that $\langle A_i, A_j \rangle\in [0, 1]$ for $i\neq j$, based on which we provide an asymptotic study of Hotelling-type tensor deflation in the large dimensional regime. Specifically, our analysis characterizes the singular values and alignments at each step of the deflation procedure, for asymptotically large tensor dimensions. This can be used to construct consistent estimators of different quantities involved in the underlying problem, such as the signal-to-noise ratios $\beta_i$ or the alignments between the different signal components $\langle A_i, A_j \rangle$.
Learning linear operators: Infinite-dimensional regression as a well-behaved non-compact inverse problem
Authors: Mattes Mollenhauer, Nicole Mücke, T. J. Sullivan
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We consider the problem of learning a linear operator $\theta$ between two Hilbert spaces from empirical observations, which we interpret as least squares regression in infinite dimensions. We show that this goal can be reformulated as an inverse problem for $\theta$ with the feature that its forward operator is generally non-compact (even if $\theta$ is assumed to be compact or of $p$-Schatten class). However, we prove that, in terms of spectral properties and regularisation theory, this inverse problem is equivalent to the known compact inverse problem associated with scalar response regression. Our framework allows for the elegant derivation of dimension-free rates for generic learning algorithms under H\"older-type source conditions. The proofs rely on the combination of techniques from kernel regression with recent results on concentration of measure for sub-exponential Hilbertian random variables. The obtained rates hold for a variety of practically-relevant scenarios in functional regression as well as nonlinear regression with operator-valued kernels and match those of classical kernel regression with scalar response.
Minimum information divergence of Q-functions for dynamic treatment resumes
Authors: Shinto Eguchi
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper aims at presenting a new application of information geometry to reinforcement learning focusing on dynamic treatment resumes. In a standard framework of reinforcement learning, a Q-function is defined as the conditional expectation of a reward given a state and an action for a single-stage situation. We introduce an equivalence relation, called the policy equivalence, in the space of all the Q-functions. A class of information divergence is defined in the Q-function space for every stage. The main objective is to propose an estimator of the optimal policy function by a method of minimum information divergence based on a dataset of trajectories. In particular, we discuss the $\gamma$-power divergence that is shown to have an advantageous property such that the $\gamma$-power divergence between policy-equivalent Q-functions vanishes. This property essentially works to seek the optimal policy, which is discussed in a framework of a semiparametric model for the Q-function. The specific choices of power index $\gamma$ give interesting relationships of the value function, and the geometric and harmonic means of the Q-function. A numerical experiment demonstrates the performance of the minimum $\gamma$-power divergence method in the context of dynamic treatment regimes.
Sparse Signal Detection in Heteroscedastic Gaussian Sequence Models: Sharp Minimax Rates
Authors: Julien Chhor, Rajarshi Mukherjee, Subhabrata Sen
Date: 2022-11-15 00:00:00

Given a heterogeneous Gaussian sequence model with unknown mean $\theta \in \mathbb R^d$ and known covariance matrix $\Sigma = \operatorname{diag}(\sigma_1^2,\dots, \sigma_d^2)$, we study the signal detection problem against sparse alternatives, for known sparsity $s$. Namely, we characterize how large $\epsilon^*>0$ should be, in order to distinguish with high probability the null hypothesis $\theta=0$ from the alternative composed of $s$-sparse vectors in $\mathbb R^d$, separated from $0$ in $L^t$ norm ($t \in [1,\infty]$) by at least $\epsilon^*$. We find minimax upper and lower bounds over the minimax separation radius $\epsilon^*$ and prove that they are always matching. We also derive the corresponding minimax tests achieving these bounds. Our results reveal new phase transitions regarding the behavior of $\epsilon^*$ with respect to the level of sparsity, to the $L^t$ metric, and to the heteroscedasticity profile of $\Sigma$. In the case of the Euclidean (i.e. $L^2$) separation, we bridge the remaining gaps in the literature.
Annotation of Soft Onsets in String Ensemble Recordings
Authors: Maciej Tomczak, Min Susan Li, Adrian Bradbury, Mark Elliott, Ryan Stables, Maria Witek, Tom Goodman, Diar Abdlkarim, Massimiliano Di Luca, Alan Wing, Jason Hockman
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Onset Detection

Onset detection is the process of identifying the start points of musical note events within an audio recording. While the detection of percussive onsets is often considered a solved problem, soft onsets-as found in string instrument recordings-still pose a significant challenge for state-of-the-art algorithms. The problem is further exacerbated by a paucity of data containing expert annotations and research related to best practices for curating soft onset annotations for string instruments. To this end, we investigate inter-annotator agreement between 24 participants, extend an algorithm for determining the most consistent annotator, and compare the performance of human annotators and state-of-the-art onset detection algorithms. Experimental results reveal a positive trend between musical experience and both inter-annotator agreement and performance in comparison with automated systems. Additionally, onsets produced by changes in fingering as well as those from the cello were found to be particularly challenging for both human annotators and automatic approaches. To promote research in best practices for annotation of soft onsets, we have made all experimental data associated with this study publicly available. In addition, we publish the ARME Virtuoso Strings dataset, consisting of over 144 recordings of professional performances of an excerpt from Haydn's string quartet Op. 74 No. 1 Finale, each with corresponding individual instrumental onset annotations.
Topology of cognitive maps
Authors: Konstantin Sorokin, Anton Ayzenberg, Konstantin Anokhin, Vladimir Sotskov, Maxim Beketov, Andrey Zaitsew, Robert Drynkin
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Hippocampus

In present paper we discuss several approaches to reconstructing the topology of the physical space from neural activity data of CA1 fields in mice hippocampus, in particular, having Cognitome theory of brain function in mind. In our experiments, animals were placed in different new environments and discovered these moving freely while their physical and neural activity was recorded. We test possible approaches to identifying place cell groups out of the observed CA1 neurons. We also test and discuss various methods of dimension reduction and topology reconstruction. In particular, two main strategies we focus on are the Nerve theorem and point cloud-based methods. Conclusions on the results of reconstruction are supported with illustrations and mathematical background which is also briefly discussed.
H2-Golden-Retriever: Methodology and Tool for an Evidence-Based Hydrogen Research Grantsmanship
Authors: Paul Seurin, Olusola Olabanjo, Joseph Wiggins, Lorien Pratt, Loveneesh Rana, Rozhin Yasaei, Gregory Renard
Date: 2022-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Lemmatization, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Hydrogen is poised to play a major role in decarbonizing the economy. The need to discover, develop, and understand low-cost, high-performance, durable materials that can help maximize the cost of electrolysis as well as the need for an intelligent tool to make evidence-based Hydrogen research funding decisions relatively easier warranted this study.In this work, we developed H2 Golden Retriever (H2GR) system for Hydrogen knowledge discovery and representation using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Knowledge Graph and Decision Intelligence. This system represents a novel methodology encapsulating state-of-the-art technique for evidence-based research grantmanship. Relevant Hydrogen papers were scraped and indexed from the web and preprocessing was done using noise and stop-words removal, language and spell check, stemming and lemmatization. The NLP tasks included Named Entity Recognition using Stanford and Spacy NER, topic modeling using Latent Dirichlet Allocation and TF-IDF. The Knowledge Graph module was used for the generation of meaningful entities and their relationships, trends and patterns in relevant H2 papers, thanks to an ontology of the hydrogen production domain. The Decision Intelligence component provides stakeholders with a simulation environment for cost and quantity dependencies. PageRank algorithm was used to rank papers of interest. Random searches were made on the proposed H2GR and the results included a list of papers ranked by relevancy score, entities, graphs of relationships between the entities, ontology of H2 production and Causal Decision Diagrams showing component interactivity. Qualitative assessment was done by the experts and H2GR is deemed to function to a satisfactory level.
Peer-to-peer energy trading in smart grid through blockchain: A double auction-based game theoretic approach
Authors: HT Doan, J Cho, D Kim
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: journal 2021 4
Tasks: energy management, energy trading

In a smart grid, each residential unit with renewable energy sources can trade energy with others for profit. Buyers with insufficient energy meet their demand by buying the required energy from other houses with surplus energy. However, they will not be willing to engage in the trade if it is not beneficial. With the aim of improving participants’ profits and reducing the impacts on the grid, we study a peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading system among prosumers using a double auction-based game theoretic approach, where the buyer adjusts the amount of energy to buy according to varying electricity price in order to maximize benefit, the auctioneer controls the game, and the seller does not participate in the game but finally achieves the maximum social welfare. The proposed method not only benefits the participants but also hides their information, such as their bids and asks, for privacy. We further study individual rationality and incentive compatibility properties in the proposed method’s auction process at the game’s unique Stackelberg equilibrium. For practical applicability, we implement our proposed energy trading system using blockchain technology to show the feasibility of real-time P2P trading. Finally, simulation results under different scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
CineScale: A dataset of cinematic shot scale in movies
Authors: Mattia Savardi, András Bálint Kovács, Alberto Signoroni, Sergio Benini
Date: 2021-04-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Data in Brief 2021 4

We provide a database containing shot scale annotations (i.e., the apparent distance of the camera from the subject of a filmed scene) for more than 792,000 image frames. Frames belong to 124 full movies from the entire filmographies by 6 important directors: Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, Béla Tarr, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Ingmar Bergman. Each frame, extracted from videos at 1 frame per second, is annotated on the following scale categories: Extreme Close Up (ECU), Close Up (CU), Medium Close Up (MCU), Medium Shot (MS), Medium Long Shot (MLS), Long Shot (LS), Extreme Long Shot (ELS), Foreground Shot (FS), and Insert Shots (IS). Two independent coders annotated all frames from the 124 movies, whilst a third one checked their coding and made decisions in cases of disagreement. The CineScale database enables AI-driven interpretation of shot scale data and opens to a large set of research activities related to the automatic visual analysis of cinematic material, such as the automatic recognition of the director’s style, or the unfolding of the relationship between shot scale and the viewers’ emotional experience. To these purposes, we also provide the model and the code for building a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for automated shot scale recognition. All this material is provided through the project website, where video frames can also be requested to authors, for research purposes under fair use.
An Open Source and Reproducible Implementation of LSTM and GRU Networks for Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Gissel Velarde, Pedro Brañez, Alejandro Bueno, Rodrigo Heredia, Mateo Lopez-Ledezma
Date: 2022-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: Eng. Proc. 2022 6
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

This paper introduces an open source and reproducible implementation of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks for time series forecasting. We evaluated LSTM and GRU networks because of their performance reported in related work. We describe our method and its results on two datasets. The first dataset is the S&P BSE BANKEX, composed of stock time series (closing prices) of ten financial institutions. The second dataset, called Activities, comprises ten synthetic time series resembling weekly activities with five days of high activity and two days of low activity. We report Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) between actual and predicted values, as well as Directional Accuracy (DA). We show that a single time series from a dataset can be used to adequately train the networks if the sequences in the dataset contain patterns that repeat, even with certain variation, and are properly processed. For 1-step ahead and 20-step ahead forecasts, LSTM and GRU networks significantly outperform a baseline on the Activities dataset. The baseline simply repeats the last available value. On the stock market dataset, the networks perform just as the baseline, possibly due to the nature of these series. We release the datasets used as well as the implementation with all experiments performed to enable future comparisons and to make our research reproducible.
A
Authors: Ruipeng Zhang, Chen Xu, Mengjun Xie
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: Sensors 2022 10
Tasks: Management

Although many studies have been devoted to integrating blockchain into IoT device management, access control, data integrity, security, and privacy, blockchain-facilitated IoT communication is still much less studied. Blockchain has great potential in decentralizing and securing IoT communications. In this paper, we propose an innovative IoT service platform powered by the consortium blockchain technology. The proposed platform abstracts machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-machine (H2M) communications into services provided by IoT devices. Then, it materializes the data exchange of the IoT network through smart contracts and blockchain transactions. Additionally, we introduce the auxiliary storage layer to the proposed platform to address various off-chain data storage needs. Our proof-of-concept implementation was tested against various workloads and connection sizes under different block configurations to evaluate the platform’s transaction throughput, latency, and hardware utilization. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution can maintain high performance with a throughput of approximately 800 reads per second (RPS), 50–80 transactions per second (TPS), and a latency of 50 ms–2 s under light to moderate workloads. Our extensive evaluation of the performance impact of batch size, batch timeout, and connection size also provides valuable insights into the optimization of blockchain configuration for achieving high performance.