Models, code, and papers for "Wei Ping":

##### An Evaluation of Bitcoin Address Classification based on Transaction History Summarization

Mar 19, 2019
Yu-Jing Lin, Po-Wei Wu, Cheng-Han Hsu, I-Ping Tu, Shih-wei Liao

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that features a distributed, decentralized and trustworthy mechanism, which has made Bitcoin a popular global transaction platform. The transaction efficiency among nations and the privacy benefiting from address anonymity of the Bitcoin network have attracted many activities such as payments, investments, gambling, and even money laundering in the past decade. Unfortunately, some criminal behaviors which took advantage of this platform were not identified. This has discouraged many governments to support cryptocurrency. Thus, the capability to identify criminal addresses becomes an important issue in the cryptocurrency network. In this paper, we propose new features in addition to those commonly used in the literature to build a classification model for detecting abnormality of Bitcoin network addresses. These features include various high orders of moments of transaction time (represented by block height) which summarizes the transaction history in an efficient way. The extracted features are trained by supervised machine learning methods on a labeling category data set. The experimental evaluation shows that these features have improved the performance of Bitcoin address classification significantly. We evaluate the results under eight classifiers and achieve the highest Micro-F1/Macro-F1 of 87%/86% with LightGBM.

* 8 pages; accepted by ICBC 2019
##### ClariNet: Parallel Wave Generation in End-to-End Text-to-Speech

Jul 30, 2018
Wei Ping, Kainan Peng, Jitong Chen

In this work, we propose an alternative solution for parallel wave generation by WaveNet. In contrast to parallel WaveNet (Oord et al., 2018), we distill a Gaussian inverse autoregressive flow from the autoregressive WaveNet by minimizing a novel regularized KL divergence between their highly-peaked output distributions. Our method computes the KL divergence in closed-form, which simplifies the training algorithm and provides very efficient distillation. In addition, we propose the first text-to-wave neural architecture for speech synthesis, which is fully convolutional and enables fast end-to-end training from scratch. It significantly outperforms the previous pipeline that connects a text-to-spectrogram model to a separately trained WaveNet (Ping et al., 2018). We also successfully distill a parallel waveform synthesizer conditioned on the hidden representation in this end-to-end model.

* Fix a few typos in v2
##### Multi-Speaker End-to-End Speech Synthesis

Jul 09, 2019
Jihyun Park, Kexin Zhao, Kainan Peng, Wei Ping

In this work, we extend ClariNet (Ping et al., 2019), a fully end-to-end speech synthesis model (i.e., text-to-wave), to generate high-fidelity speech from multiple speakers. To model the unique characteristic of different voices, low dimensional trainable speaker embeddings are shared across each component of ClariNet and trained together with the rest of the model. We demonstrate that the multi-speaker ClariNet outperforms state-of-the-art systems in terms of naturalness, because the whole model is jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner.

##### Cancer Metastasis Detection With Neural Conditional Random Field

Jun 19, 2018
Yi Li, Wei Ping

Breast cancer diagnosis often requires accurate detection of metastasis in lymph nodes through Whole-slide Images (WSIs). Recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown significant successes in medical image analysis and particularly in computational histopathology. Because of the outrageous large size of WSIs, most of the methods divide one slide into lots of small image patches and perform classification on each patch independently. However, neighboring patches often share spatial correlations, and ignoring these spatial correlations may result in inconsistent predictions. In this paper, we propose a neural conditional random field (NCRF) deep learning framework to detect cancer metastasis in WSIs. NCRF considers the spatial correlations between neighboring patches through a fully connected CRF which is directly incorporated on top of a CNN feature extractor. The whole deep network can be trained end-to-end with standard back-propagation algorithm with minor computational overhead from the CRF component. The CNN feature extractor can also benefit from considering spatial correlations via the CRF component. Compared to the baseline method without considering spatial correlations, we show that the proposed NCRF framework obtains probability maps of patch predictions with better visual quality. We also demonstrate that our method outperforms the baseline in cancer metastasis detection on the Camelyon16 dataset and achieves an average FROC score of 0.8096 on the test set. NCRF is open sourced at https://github.com/baidu-research/NCRF.

* 9 pages, 5 figures, MIDL 2018
##### Belief Propagation in Conditional RBMs for Structured Prediction

Mar 02, 2017
Wei Ping, Alexander Ihler

Restricted Boltzmann machines~(RBMs) and conditional RBMs~(CRBMs) are popular models for a wide range of applications. In previous work, learning on such models has been dominated by contrastive divergence~(CD) and its variants. Belief propagation~(BP) algorithms are believed to be slow for structured prediction on conditional RBMs~(e.g., Mnih et al. [2011]), and not as good as CD when applied in learning~(e.g., Larochelle et al. [2012]). In this work, we present a matrix-based implementation of belief propagation algorithms on CRBMs, which is easily scalable to tens of thousands of visible and hidden units. We demonstrate that, in both maximum likelihood and max-margin learning, training conditional RBMs with BP as the inference routine can provide significantly better results than current state-of-the-art CD methods on structured prediction problems. We also include practical guidelines on training CRBMs with BP, and some insights on the interaction of learning and inference algorithms for CRBMs.

* Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS) 2017
##### Learning Infinite RBMs with Frank-Wolfe

Oct 15, 2017
Wei Ping, Qiang Liu, Alexander Ihler

In this work, we propose an infinite restricted Boltzmann machine~(RBM), whose maximum likelihood estimation~(MLE) corresponds to a constrained convex optimization. We consider the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve the program, which provides a sparse solution that can be interpreted as inserting a hidden unit at each iteration, so that the optimization process takes the form of a sequence of finite models of increasing complexity. As a side benefit, this can be used to easily and efficiently identify an appropriate number of hidden units during the optimization. The resulting model can also be used as an initialization for typical state-of-the-art RBM training algorithms such as contrastive divergence, leading to models with consistently higher test likelihood than random initialization.

* NIPS 2016
##### Decomposition Bounds for Marginal MAP

Nov 09, 2015
Wei Ping, Qiang Liu, Alexander Ihler

Marginal MAP inference involves making MAP predictions in systems defined with latent variables or missing information. It is significantly more difficult than pure marginalization and MAP tasks, for which a large class of efficient and convergent variational algorithms, such as dual decomposition, exist. In this work, we generalize dual decomposition to a generic power sum inference task, which includes marginal MAP, along with pure marginalization and MAP, as special cases. Our method is based on a block coordinate descent algorithm on a new convex decomposition bound, that is guaranteed to converge monotonically, and can be parallelized efficiently. We demonstrate our approach on marginal MAP queries defined on real-world problems from the UAI approximate inference challenge, showing that our framework is faster and more reliable than previous methods.

* NIPS 2015 (full-length)
##### Clothing Co-Parsing by Joint Image Segmentation and Labeling

Feb 03, 2015
Wei Yang, Ping Luo, Liang Lin

This paper aims at developing an integrated system of clothing co-parsing, in order to jointly parse a set of clothing images (unsegmented but annotated with tags) into semantic configurations. We propose a data-driven framework consisting of two phases of inference. The first phase, referred as "image co-segmentation", iterates to extract consistent regions on images and jointly refines the regions over all images by employing the exemplar-SVM (E-SVM) technique [23]. In the second phase (i.e. "region co-labeling"), we construct a multi-image graphical model by taking the segmented regions as vertices, and incorporate several contexts of clothing configuration (e.g., item location and mutual interactions). The joint label assignment can be solved using the efficient Graph Cuts algorithm. In addition to evaluate our framework on the Fashionista dataset [30], we construct a dataset called CCP consisting of 2098 high-resolution street fashion photos to demonstrate the performance of our system. We achieve 90.29% / 88.23% segmentation accuracy and 65.52% / 63.89% recognition rate on the Fashionista and the CCP datasets, respectively, which are superior compared with state-of-the-art methods.

* Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014 IEEE Conference on , vol., no., pp.3182,3189, 23-28 June 2014
* 8 pages, 5 figures, CVPR 2014
##### Marginal Structured SVM with Hidden Variables

Sep 05, 2014
Wei Ping, Qiang Liu, Alexander Ihler

In this work, we propose the marginal structured SVM (MSSVM) for structured prediction with hidden variables. MSSVM properly accounts for the uncertainty of hidden variables, and can significantly outperform the previously proposed latent structured SVM (LSSVM; Yu & Joachims (2009)) and other state-of-art methods, especially when that uncertainty is large. Our method also results in a smoother objective function, making gradient-based optimization of MSSVMs converge significantly faster than for LSSVMs. We also show that our method consistently outperforms hidden conditional random fields (HCRFs; Quattoni et al. (2007)) on both simulated and real-world datasets. Furthermore, we propose a unified framework that includes both our and several other existing methods as special cases, and provides insights into the comparison of different models in practice.

* Accepted by the 31st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2014). 12 pages version with supplement
##### WaveFlow: A Compact Flow-based Model for Raw Audio

Jan 10, 2020
Wei Ping, Kainan Peng, Kexin Zhao, Zhao Song

In this work, we propose WaveFlow, a small-footprint generative flow for raw audio, which is directly trained with maximum likelihood. WaveFlow handles the long-range structure of waveform with a dilated 2-D convolutional architecture, while modeling the local variations using compact autoregressive functions. It provides a unified view of likelihood-based models for raw audio, including WaveNet and WaveGlow as special cases. WaveFlow can generate high-fidelity speech as WaveNet, while synthesizing several orders of magnitude faster as it only requires a few sequential steps to generate waveforms with hundreds of thousands of time-steps. Furthermore, it can close the significant likelihood gap that has existed between autoregressive models and flow-based models for efficient synthesis. Finally, our small-footprint WaveFlow has 15$\times$ fewer parameters than WaveGlow and can generate 22.05 kHz high-fidelity audio 42.6$\times$ faster than real-time on a V100 GPU without engineered inference kernels.

##### Parallel Neural Text-to-Speech

Jun 05, 2019
Kainan Peng, Wei Ping, Zhao Song, Kexin Zhao

In this work, we propose a non-autoregressive seq2seq model that converts text to spectrogram. It is fully convolutional and obtains about 46.7 times speed-up over Deep Voice 3 at synthesis while maintaining comparable speech quality using a WaveNet vocoder. Interestingly, it has even fewer attention errors than the autoregressive model on the challenging test sentences. Furthermore, we build the first fully parallel neural text-to-speech system by applying the inverse autoregressive flow~(IAF) as the parallel neural vocoder. Our system can synthesize speech from text through a single feed-forward pass. We also explore a novel approach to train the IAF from scratch as a generative model for raw waveform, which avoids the need for distillation from a separately trained WaveNet.

* v2: we improve the synthesis speed of ParaNet by sharing the attention masking at all attention layers
##### Large Margin Neural Language Model

Aug 27, 2018
Jiaji Huang, Yi Li, Wei Ping, Liang Huang

We propose a large margin criterion for training neural language models. Conventionally, neural language models are trained by minimizing perplexity (PPL) on grammatical sentences. However, we demonstrate that PPL may not be the best metric to optimize in some tasks, and further propose a large margin formulation. The proposed method aims to enlarge the margin between the "good" and "bad" sentences in a task-specific sense. It is trained end-to-end and can be widely applied to tasks that involve re-scoring of generated text. Compared with minimum-PPL training, our method gains up to 1.1 WER reduction for speech recognition and 1.0 BLEU increase for machine translation.

* 9 pages. Accepted as a long paper in EMNLP2018
##### A Semantic QA-Based Approach for Text Summarization Evaluation

Apr 11, 2018
Ping Chen, Fei Wu, Tong Wang, Wei Ding

Many Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics applications involves the generation of new texts based on some existing texts, such as summarization, text simplification and machine translation. However, there has been a serious problem haunting these applications for decades, that is, how to automatically and accurately assess quality of these applications. In this paper, we will present some preliminary results on one especially useful and challenging problem in NLP system evaluation: how to pinpoint content differences of two text passages (especially for large pas-sages such as articles and books). Our idea is intuitive and very different from existing approaches. We treat one text passage as a small knowledge base, and ask it a large number of questions to exhaustively identify all content points in it. By comparing the correctly answered questions from two text passages, we will be able to compare their content precisely. The experiment using 2007 DUC summarization corpus clearly shows promising results.

* AAAI 2018
##### Predicting Human Activities Using Stochastic Grammar

Aug 02, 2017
Siyuan Qi, Siyuan Huang, Ping Wei, Song-Chun Zhu

This paper presents a novel method to predict future human activities from partially observed RGB-D videos. Human activity prediction is generally difficult due to its non-Markovian property and the rich context between human and environments. We use a stochastic grammar model to capture the compositional structure of events, integrating human actions, objects, and their affordances. We represent the event by a spatial-temporal And-Or graph (ST-AOG). The ST-AOG is composed of a temporal stochastic grammar defined on sub-activities, and spatial graphs representing sub-activities that consist of human actions, objects, and their affordances. Future sub-activities are predicted using the temporal grammar and Earley parsing algorithm. The corresponding action, object, and affordance labels are then inferred accordingly. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our model on both semantic event parsing and future activity prediction.

* ICCV 2017
##### Temporal Sequence Distillation: Towards Few-Frame Action Recognition in Videos

Aug 15, 2018
Zhaoyang Zhang, Zhanghui Kuang, Ping Luo, Litong Feng, Wei Zhang

Video Analytics Software as a Service (VA SaaS) has been rapidly growing in recent years. VA SaaS is typically accessed by users using a lightweight client. Because the transmission bandwidth between the client and cloud is usually limited and expensive, it brings great benefits to design cloud video analysis algorithms with a limited data transmission requirement. Although considerable research has been devoted to video analysis, to our best knowledge, little of them has paid attention to the transmission bandwidth limitation in SaaS. As the first attempt in this direction, this work introduces a problem of few-frame action recognition, which aims at maintaining high recognition accuracy, when accessing only a few frames during both training and test. Unlike previous work that processed dense frames, we present Temporal Sequence Distillation (TSD), which distills a long video sequence into a very short one for transmission. By end-to-end training with 3D CNNs for video action recognition, TSD learns a compact and discriminative temporal and spatial representation of video frames. On Kinetics dataset, TSD+I3D typically requires only 50\% of the number of frames compared to I3D, a state-of-the-art video action recognition algorithm, to achieve almost the same accuracies. The proposed TSD has three appealing advantages. Firstly, TSD has a lightweight architecture and can be deployed in the client, eg. mobile devices, to produce compressed representative frames to save transmission bandwidth. Secondly, TSD significantly reduces the computations to run video action recognition with compressed frames on the cloud, while maintaining high recognition accuracies. Thirdly, TSD can be plugged in as a preprocessing module of any existing 3D CNNs. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and characteristics of TSD.

* Accepted by ACM Multimedia
##### Bag-of-Words Method Applied to Accelerometer Measurements for the Purpose of Classification and Energy Estimation

Apr 12, 2017
Kevin M. Amaral, Ping Chen, Scott Crouter, Wei Ding

Accelerometer measurements are the prime type of sensor information most think of when seeking to measure physical activity. On the market, there are many fitness measuring devices which aim to track calories burned and steps counted through the use of accelerometers. These measurements, though good enough for the average consumer, are noisy and unreliable in terms of the precision of measurement needed in a scientific setting. The contribution of this paper is an innovative and highly accurate regression method which uses an intermediary two-stage classification step to better direct the regression of energy expenditure values from accelerometer counts. We show that through an additional unsupervised layer of intermediate feature construction, we can leverage latent patterns within accelerometer counts to provide better grounds for activity classification than expert-constructed timeseries features. For this, our approach utilizes a mathematical model originating in natural language processing, the bag-of-words model, that has in the past years been appearing in diverse disciplines outside of the natural language processing field such as image processing. Further emphasizing the natural language connection to stochastics, we use a gaussian mixture model to learn the dictionary upon which the bag-of-words model is built. Moreover, we show that with the addition of these features, we're able to improve regression root mean-squared error of energy expenditure by approximately 1.4 units over existing state-of-the-art methods.

* 10 pages, 6 tables, 2 figures. This paper has been withdrawn due to a few crucial errors in the early sections of the paper
##### Drug-Target Indication Prediction by Integrating End-to-End Learning and Fingerprints

Computer-Aided Drug Discovery research has proven to be a promising direction in drug discovery. In recent years, Deep Learning approaches have been applied to problems in the domain such as Drug-Target Interaction Prediction and have shown improvements over traditional screening methods. An existing challenge is how to represent compound-target pairs in deep learning models. While several representation methods exist, such descriptor schemes tend to complement one another in many instances, as reported in the literature. In this study, we propose a multi-view architecture trained adversarially to leverage this complementary behavior by integrating both differentiable and predefined molecular descriptors. We conduct experiments on clinically relevant benchmark datasets to demonstrate the potential of our approach.

* Accepted at IEEE ICCWAMTIP 2019