Publications

DsMLP: A Learning-Based Multi-Layer Perception for MIMO Detection Implemented by Dynamic Stochastic Computing
Qidie Wu
Jinsheng Kuang
Jiyun Tao
Jienan Chen
Warren Gross
As the number of antennas increases in multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) systems, even linear detection methods suffer from sharply increa… (see more)sing complexity. This paper proposes a learning-based multi-layer perception (MLP), named dynamic stochastic multi-layer perception (DsMLP), which is implemented by dynamic stochastic computing (DSC). We first establish a similar form between the MLP structure and minimum mean square error (MMSE) matrix operations. Consequently, DsMLP transforms the complex computation problem into an optimization problem of MLP training. Due to the specific design of MLP structure, e.g., same input/output dimension and single layer without activation function, the mathematical representation of DsMLP is identical to the MMSE matrix operations. Therefore, DsMLP guarantees sound model explainability in mathematics, fast convergence in training, and low complexity in computation. Furthermore, we transform the MLP training process to the DSC domain and propose a hardware-efficient scheme for DsMLP. Compared with other state-of-the-art MIMO detectors, DsMLP achieves 1.2× energy efficiency and 1.74× area efficiency.
2022-01-01
IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (published)
doi.org
Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking
Yifei Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
Reihaneh Rabbany
2022-01-01
Findings (published)
doi.org
Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking
Yifei Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
Reihaneh Rabbany
Online escort advertisement websites are widely used for advertising victims of human trafficking. Domain experts agree that advertising mul… (see more)tiple people in the same ad is a strong indicator of trafficking. Thus, extracting person names from the text of these ads can provide valuable clues for further analysis. However, Named-Entity Recognition (NER) on escort ads is challenging because the text can be noisy, colloquial and often lacking proper grammar and punctuation. Most existing state-of-the-art NER models fail to demonstrate satisfactory performance in this task. In this paper, we propose NEAT (Name Extraction Against Trafficking) for extracting person names. It effectively combines classic rule-based and dictionary extractors with a contextualized language model to capture ambiguous names (e.g penny, hazel) and adapts to adversarial changes in the text by expanding its dictionary. NEAT shows 19% improvement on average in the F1 classification score for name extraction compared to previous state-of-the-art in two domain-specific datasets.
2022-01-01
Findings (published)
doi.org
Feeding What You Need by Understanding What You Learned
Xiaoqiang Wang
Bang Liu
Fangli Xu
Bo Long
Siliang Tang
Lingfei Wu
2022-01-01
ACL (1) (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Few-Shot Pidgin Text Adaptation via Contrastive Fine-Tuning
Ernie Chang
Jesujoba Oluwadara Alabi
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Vera Demberg
The surging demand for multilingual dialogue systems often requires a costly labeling process for each language addition. For low resource l… (see more)anguages, human annotators are continuously tasked with the adaptation of resource-rich language utterances for each new domain. However, this prohibitive and impractical process can often be a bottleneck for low resource languages that are still without proper translation systems nor parallel corpus. In particular, it is difficult to obtain task-specific low resource language annotations for the English-derived creoles (e.g. Nigerian and Cameroonian Pidgin). To address this issue, we utilize the pretrained language models i.e. BART which has shown great potential in language generation/understanding – we propose to finetune the BART model to generate utterances in Pidgin by leveraging the proximity of the source and target languages, and utilizing positive and negative examples in constrastive training objectives. We collected and released the first parallel Pidgin-English conversation corpus in two dialogue domains and showed that this simple and effective technique is suffice to yield impressive results for English-to-Pidgin generation, which are two closely-related languages.
2022-01-01
COLING (published)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Findings of the WMT’22 Shared Task on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages
David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam
Antonios Anastasopoulos
Akshita Bhagia
Marta R. Costa-jussa
Jesse Dodge
Fahim Faisal
Christian Federmann
Natalia N. Fedorova
Francisco S. Guzm'an
Sergey Koshelev
Jean Maillard
Vukosi Marivate
Jonathan Mbuya
Alexandre Mourachko
Safiyyah Saleem
Holger Schwenk
Guillaume Wenzek
We present the results of the WMT’22 SharedTask on Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for African Languages. The shared taskinclud… (see more)ed both a data and a systems track, alongwith additional innovations, such as a focus onAfrican languages and extensive human evaluation of submitted systems. We received 14system submissions from 8 teams, as well as6 data track contributions. We report a largeprogress in the quality of translation for Africanlanguages since the last iteration of this sharedtask: there is an increase of about 7.5 BLEUpoints across 72 language pairs, and the average BLEU scores went from 15.09 to 22.60.
2022-01-01
Conference on Machine Translation (published)
dblp.uni-trier.de
A general class of surrogate functions for stable and efficient reinforcement learning
Sharan Vaswani
Olivier Bachem
Simone Totaro
Robert Lynn Mueller
Shivam Garg
Matthieu Geist
Marlos C. Machado
Pablo Samuel Castro
Nicolas Le Roux
2022-01-01
AISTATS (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
arxiv.org
GitHub repositories with links to academic papers: Public access, traceability, and evolution
Supatsara Wattanakriengkrai
Bodin Chinthanet
Hideaki Hata
Raula Gaikovina Kula
Christoph Treude
Jin Guo
Kenichi Matsumoto
2022-01-01
Journal of Systems and Software (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Goal-driven optimization of single-neuron properties in artificial networks reveals regularization role of neural diversity and adaptation in the brain
Victor Geadah
Stefan Horoi
Giancarlo Kerg
Guy Wolf
Guillaume Lajoie
Neurons in the brain have rich and adaptive input-output properties. Features such as diverse f-I curves and spike frequency adaptation are … (see more)known to place single neurons in optimal coding regimes when facing changing stimuli. Yet, it is still unclear how brain circuits exploit single neuron flexibility, and how network-level requirements may have shaped such cellular function. To answer this question, a multi-scaled approach is needed where the computations of single neurons and of neural circuits must be considered as a complete system. In this work, we use artificial neural networks to systematically investigate single neuron input-output adaptive mechanisms, optimized in an end-to-end fashion. Throughout the optimization process, each neuron has the liberty to modify its nonlinear activation function, parametrized to mimic f-I curves of biological neurons, and to learn adaptation strategies to modify activation functions in real-time during a task. We find that such networks show much-improved robustness to noise and changes in input statistics. Importantly, we find that this procedure recovers precise coding strategies found in biological neurons, such as gain scaling and fractional order differentiation/integration. Using tools from dynamical systems theory, we analyze the role of these emergent single neuron properties and argue that neural diversity and adaptation plays an active regularization role that enables neural circuits to optimally propagate information across time.
2022-01-01
(published)
www.semanticscholar.org
Goal-driven optimization of single-neuron properties in artificial networks reveals regularization role of neural diversity and adaptation in the brain
Victor Geadah
Stefan Horoi
Giancarlo Kerg
Guy Wolf
Guillaume Lajoie
Neurons in the brain have rich and adaptive input-output properties. Features such as diverse f-I curves and spike frequency adaptation are … (see more)known to place single neurons in optimal coding regimes when facing changing stimuli. Yet, it is still unclear how brain circuits exploit single neuron flexibility, and how network-level requirements may have shaped such cellular function. To answer this question, a multi-scaled approach is needed where the computations of single neurons and of neural circuits must be considered as a complete system. In this work, we use artificial neural networks to systematically investigate single neuron input-output adaptive mechanisms, optimized in an end-to-end fashion. Throughout the optimization process, each neuron has the liberty to modify its nonlinear activation function, parametrized to mimic f-I curves of biological neurons, and to learn adaptation strategies to modify activation functions in real-time during a task. We find that such networks show much-improved robustness to noise and changes in input statistics. Importantly, we find that this procedure recovers precise coding strategies found in biological neurons, such as gain scaling and fractional order differentiation/integration. Using tools from dynamical systems theory, we analyze the role of these emergent single neuron properties and argue that neural diversity and adaptation plays an active regularization role that enables neural circuits to optimally propagate information across time.
2022-01-01
(published)
www.semanticscholar.org
Gradient Descent Is Optimal Under Lower Restricted Secant Inequality And Upper Error Bound
Charles Guille-Escuret
Baptiste Goujaud
Adam Ibrahim
Ioannis Mitliagkas
The study of first-order optimization is sensitive to the assumptions made on the objective functions. These assumptions induce complexity c… (see more)lasses which play a key role in worst-case analysis, including the fundamental concept of algorithm optimality. Recent work argues that strong convexity and smoothness—popular assumptions in literature—lead to a pathological definition of the condition number. Motivated by this result, we focus on the class of functions satisfying a lower restricted secant inequality and an upper error bound. On top of being robust to the aforementioned pathological behavior and including some non-convex functions, this pair of conditions displays interesting geometrical properties. In particular, the necessary and sufficient conditions to interpolate a set of points and their gradients within the class can be separated into simple conditions on each sampled gradient. This allows the performance estimation problem (PEP) to be solved analytically, leading to a lower bound on the convergence rate that proves gradient descent to be exactly optimal on this class of functions among all first-order algorithms.
openreview.net
GrowSpace: Learning How to Shape Plants
Yasmeen Hitti
Ionelia Buzatu
Manuel Del Verme
Mark Lefsrud
Florian Golemo
Audrey Durand
Plants are dynamic systems that are integral to our existence and survival. Plants face environment changes and adapt over time to their sur… (see more)rounding conditions. We argue that plant responses to an environmental stimulus are a good example of a real-world problem that can be approached within a reinforcement learning (RL)framework. With the objective of controlling a plant by moving the light source, we propose GrowSpace, as a new RL benchmark. The back-end of the simulator is implemented using the Space Colonisation Algorithm, a plant growing model based on competition for space. Compared to video game RL environments, this simulator addresses a real-world problem and serves as a test bed to visualize plant growth and movement in a faster way than physical experiments. GrowSpace is composed of a suite of challenges that tackle several problems such as control, multi-stage learning,fairness and multi-objective learning. We provide agent baselines alongside case studies to demonstrate the difficulty of the proposed benchmark.
2022-01-01
AAAI.org/2022/Workshop/AIAFS (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net