arXiv subjects

Jing Xie

Publications and source records attributed to Jing Xie.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Radically Lower Data-Labeling Costs for Visually Rich Document Extraction Models

A key bottleneck in building automatic extraction models for visually rich documents like invoices is the cost of acquiring the several thousand high-quality labeled documents that are needed to train a model with acceptable accuracy. We propose Selective Labeling to simplify the labeling task to provide "yes/no" labels for candidate extractions predicted by a model trained on partially labeled documents. We combine this with a custom active learning strategy to find the predictions that the model is most uncertain about. We show through experiments on document types drawn from 3 different domains that selective labeling can reduce the cost of acquiring labeled data by $10\times$ with a negligible loss in accuracy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Towards lifelong learning of Recurrent Neural Networks for control design

This paper proposes a method for lifelong learning of Recurrent Neural Networks, such as NNARX, ESN, LSTM, and GRU, to be used as plant models in control system synthesis. The problem is significant because in many practical applications it is required to adapt the model when new information is available and/or the system undergoes changes, without the need to store an increasing amount of data as time proceeds. Indeed, in this context, many problems arise, such as the well known Catastrophic Forgetting and Capacity Saturation ones. We propose an adaptation algorithm inspired by Moving Horizon Estimators, deriving conditions for its convergence. The described method is applied to a simulated chemical plant, already adopted as a challenging benchmark in the existing literature. The main results achieved are discussed.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

On Recurrent Neural Networks for learning-based control: recent results and ideas for future developments

This paper aims to discuss and analyze the potentialities of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) in control design applications. The main families of RNN are considered, namely Neural Nonlinear AutoRegressive eXogenous, (NNARX), Echo State Networks (ESN), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU). The goal is twofold. Firstly, to survey recent results concerning the training of RNN that enjoy Input-to-State Stability (ISS) and Incremental Input-to-State Stability ($δ$ISS) guarantees. Secondly, to discuss the issues that still hinder the widespread use of RNN for control, namely their robustness, verifiability, and interpretability. The former properties are related to the so-called generalization capabilities of the networks, i.e. their consistency with the underlying real plants, even in presence of unseen or perturbed input trajectories. The latter is instead related to the possibility of providing a clear formal connection between the RNN model and the plant. In this context, we illustrate how ISS and $δ$ISS represent a significant step towards the robustness and verifiability of the RNN models, while the requirement of interpretability paves the way to the use of physics-based networks. The design of model predictive controllers with RNN as plant's model is also briefly discussed. Lastly, some of the main topics of the paper are illustrated on a simulated chemical system.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Data-Efficient Information Extraction from Form-Like Documents

Automating information extraction from form-like documents at scale is a pressing need due to its potential impact on automating business workflows across many industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare. The key challenge is that form-like documents in these business workflows can be laid out in virtually infinitely many ways; hence, a good solution to this problem should generalize to documents with unseen layouts and languages. A solution to this problem requires a holistic understanding of both the textual segments and the visual cues within a document, which is non-trivial. While the natural language processing and computer vision communities are starting to tackle this problem, there has not been much focus on (1) data-efficiency, and (2) ability to generalize across different document types and languages. In this paper, we show that when we have only a small number of labeled documents for training (~50), a straightforward transfer learning approach from a considerably structurally-different larger labeled corpus yields up to a 27 F1 point improvement over simply training on the small corpus in the target domain. We improve on this with a simple multi-domain transfer learning approach, that is currently in production use, and show that this yields up to a further 8 F1 point improvement. We make the case that data efficiency is critical to enable information extraction systems to scale to handle hundreds of different document-types, and learning good representations is critical to accomplishing this.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

PPKE: Knowledge Representation Learning by Path-based Pre-training

Entities may have complex interactions in a knowledge graph (KG), such as multi-step relationships, which can be viewed as graph contextual information of the entities. Traditional knowledge representation learning (KRL) methods usually treat a single triple as a training unit, and neglect most of the graph contextual information exists in the topological structure of KGs. In this study, we propose a Path-based Pre-training model to learn Knowledge Embeddings, called PPKE, which aims to integrate more graph contextual information between entities into the KRL model. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets for link prediction and relation prediction tasks, indicating that our model provides a feasible way to take advantage of graph contextual information in KGs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Active Learning for Skewed Data Sets

Consider a sequential active learning problem where, at each round, an agent selects a batch of unlabeled data points, queries their labels and updates a binary classifier. While there exists a rich body of work on active learning in this general form, in this paper, we focus on problems with two distinguishing characteristics: severe class imbalance (skew) and small amounts of initial training data. Both of these problems occur with surprising frequency in many web applications. For instance, detecting offensive or sensitive content in online communities (pornography, violence, and hate-speech) is receiving enormous attention from industry as well as research communities. Such problems have both the characteristics we describe -- a vast majority of content is not offensive, so the number of positive examples for such content is orders of magnitude smaller than the negative examples. Furthermore, there is usually only a small amount of initial training data available when building machine-learned models to solve such problems. To address both these issues, we propose a hybrid active learning algorithm (HAL) that balances exploiting the knowledge available through the currently labeled training examples with exploring the large amount of unlabeled data available. Through simulation results, we show that HAL makes significantly better choices for what points to label when compared to strong baselines like margin-sampling. Classifiers trained on the examples selected for labeling by HAL easily out-perform the baselines on target metrics (like area under the precision-recall curve) given the same budget for labeling examples. We believe HAL offers a simple, intuitive, and computationally tractable way to structure active learning for a wide range of machine learning applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Medical Knowledge Embedding Based on Recursive Neural Network for Multi-Disease Diagnosis

The representation of knowledge based on first-order logic captures the richness of natural language and supports multiple probabilistic inference models. Although symbolic representation enables quantitative reasoning with statistical probability, it is difficult to utilize with machine learning models as they perform numerical operations. In contrast, knowledge embedding (i.e., high-dimensional and continuous vectors) is a feasible approach to complex reasoning that can not only retain the semantic information of knowledge but also establish the quantifiable relationship among them. In this paper, we propose recursive neural knowledge network (RNKN), which combines medical knowledge based on first-order logic with recursive neural network for multi-disease diagnosis. After RNKN is efficiently trained from manually annotated Chinese Electronic Medical Records (CEMRs), diagnosis-oriented knowledge embeddings and weight matrixes are learned. Experimental results verify that the diagnostic accuracy of RNKN is superior to that of some classical machine learning models and Markov logic network (MLN). The results also demonstrate that the more explicit the evidence extracted from CEMRs is, the better is the performance achieved. RNKN gradually exhibits the interpretation of knowledge embeddings as the number of training epochs increases.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2011

A Temporal Approach to Stochastic Network Calculus

Stochastic network calculus is a newly developed theory for stochastic service guarantee analysis of computer networks. In the current stochastic network calculus literature, its fundamental models are based on the cumulative amount of traffic or cumulative amount of service. However, there are network scenarios where direct application of such models is difficult. This paper presents a temporal approach to stochastic network calculus. The key idea is to develop models and derive results from the time perspective. Particularly, we define traffic models and service models based on the cumulative packet inter-arrival time and the cumulative packet service time, respectively. Relations among these models as well as with the existing models in the literature are established. In addition, we prove the basic properties of the proposed models, such as delay bound and backlog bound, output characterization, concatenation property and superposition property. These results form a temporal stochastic network calculus and compliment the existing results.

cs.PF↗