Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stacked Convolutional Deep Encoding Network For Video-Text Retrieval

Existing dominant approaches for cross-modal video-text retrieval task are to learn ajoint embedding space to measure the cross-modal similarity. However, these methods rarely explore long-range dependency inside video frames or textual words leading to insufficient textual and visual details. In this paper, we propose a stacked convolutional deep encoding network for video-text retrieval task, which considers to simultaneously encode long-range and short-range dependency in the videos and texts. Specifically, a multi-scale dilated convolutional (MSDC) block within our approach is able to encode short-range temporal cues between video frames or text words by adopting different scales of kernel size and dilation size of convolutional layer. A stacked structure is designed to expand the receptive fields by repeatedly adopting the MSD- C block, which further captures the long-range relations between these cues. Moreover, to obtain more robust textual representations, we fully utilize the powerful language model named Transformer in two stages: pretraining phrase and fine-tuning phrase. Extensive experiments on two different benchmark datasets (MSR-VTT, MSVD) show that our proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches.
SMART Paths for Latency Reduction in ReRAM Processing-In-Memory Architecture for CNN Inference

This research work proposes a design of an analog ReRAM-based PIM (processing-in-memory) architecture for fast and efficient CNN (convolutional neural network) inference. For the overall architecture, we use the basic hardware hierarchy such as node, tile, core, and subarray. On the top of that, we design intra-layer pipelining, inter-layer pipelining, and batch pipelining to exploit parallelism in the architecture and increase overall throughput for the inference of an input image stream. We also optimize the performance of the NoC (network-on-chip) routers by decreasing hop counts using SMART (single-cycle multi-hop asynchronous repeated traversal) flow control. Finally, we experiment with weight replications for different CNN layers in VGG (A-E) for large-scale data set ImageNet. In our simulation, we achieve 40.4027 TOPS (tera-operations per second) for the best-case performance, which corresponds to over 1029 FPS (frames per second). We also achieve 3.5914 TOPS/W (tera-operaions per second per watt) for the best-case energy efficiency. In addition, the architecture with aggressive pipelining and weight replications can achieve 14X speedup compared to the baseline architecture with basic pipelining, and SMART flow control achieves 1.08X speedup in this architecture compared to the baseline. Last but not least, we also evaluate the performance of SMART flow control using synthetic traffic.
Automatically Assessing Quality of Online Health Articles

Today Information in the world wide web is overwhelmed by unprecedented quantity of data on versatile topics with varied quality. However, the quality of information disseminated in the field of medicine has been questioned as the negative health consequences of health misinformation can be life-threatening. There is currently no generic automated tool for evaluating the quality of online health information spanned over broad range. To address this gap, in this paper, we applied data mining approach to automatically assess the quality of online health articles based on 10 quality criteria. We have prepared a labelled dataset with 53012 features and applied different feature selection methods to identify the best feature subset with which our trained classifier achieved an accuracy of $\text{84}\%-\text{90}\%$ varied over 10 criteria. Our semantic analysis of features shows the underpinning associations between the selected features & assessment criteria and further rationalize our assessment approach. Our findings will help in identifying high quality health articles and thus aiding users in shaping their opinion to make right choice while picking health related help from online.
An Empirical Study of Invariant Risk Minimization

Invariant risk minimization (IRM) (Arjovsky et al., 2019) is a recently proposed framework designed for learning predictors that are invariant to spurious correlations across different training environments. Yet, despite its theoretical justifications, IRM has not been extensively tested across various settings. In an attempt to gain a better understanding of the framework, we empirically investigate several research questions using IRMv1, which is the first practical algorithm proposed to approximately solve IRM. By extending the ColoredMNIST experiment in different ways, we find that IRMv1 (i) performs better as the spurious correlation varies more widely between training environments, (ii) learns an approximately invariant predictor when the underlying relationship is approximately invariant, and (iii) can be extended to an analogous setting for text classification.
Identifying Cultural Differences through Multi-Lingual Wikipedia

Understanding cross-cultural differences is an important application of natural language understanding. This problem is difficult due to the relativism between cultures. We present a computational approach to learn cultural models that encode the general opinions and values of cultures from multi-lingual Wikipedia. Specifically, we assume a language is a symbol of a culture and different languages represent different cultures. Our model can automatically identify statements that potentially reflect cultural differences. Experiments on English and Chinese languages show that on a held out set of diverse topics, including marriage, gun control, democracy, etc., our model achieves high correlation with human judgements regarding within-culture values and cultural differences.
Optical and Infrared Study of the Obscured B[e] Supergiant High-mass X-Ray Binary IGR J16318–4848

The supergiant high-mass X-ray binary IGR J16318–4848 was the first source detected by the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory satellite in 2003 and distinguishes itself by its high intrinsic absorption and B[e] phenomenon. It is the perfect candidate to study both binary interaction and the environment of supergiant B[e] stars. This study targets the local properties of IGR J16318–4848. We aim to clarify the geometry of this system and distinguish different key emitting regions in the binary. We provide optical to near-infrared (NIR) spectra from the Very Large Telescope/X-Shooter and analyze both fine structures of the lines and the broadband spectral energy distribution by adding archival mid-infrared Spitzer and Herschel data. We also perform a stellar atmosphere and wind modeling of the optical to NIR spectrum using the Potsdam Wolf–Rayet code. We determine the contribution of the irradiated inner edge of the dusty circumbinary disk, derive the velocity of an equatorial stellar wind, and suggest the compact object orbits within the cavity between the star and the disk. We report on flat-topped lines originating from a spherically symmetric disk wind, along with the first detection of what is likely the polar component of the stellar wind. Stellar atmosphere and wind modeling shows that the central star may have a helium-enhanced atmosphere, likely because of its intense wind shedding part of its hydrogen envelope. Finally, we compare the properties of IGR J16318–4848 with a similar source, CI Cameleopardis.
Socioeconomic correlations of urban patterns inferred from aerial images: interpreting activation maps of Convolutional Neural Networks

Urbanisation is a great challenge for modern societies, promising better access to economic opportunities while widening socioeconomic inequalities. Accurately tracking how this process unfolds has been challenging for traditional data collection methods, while remote sensing information offers an alternative to gather a more complete view on these societal changes. By feeding a neural network with satellite images one may recover the socioeconomic information associated to that area, however these models lack to explain how visual features contained in a sample, trigger a given prediction. Here we close this gap by predicting socioeconomic status across France from aerial images and interpreting class activation mappings in terms of urban topology. We show that the model disregards the spatial correlations existing between urban class and socioeconomic status to derive its predictions. These results pave the way to build interpretable models, which may help to better track and understand urbanisation and its consequences.
Towards Automatic Generation of Questions from Long Answers

Automatic question generation (AQG) has broad applicability in domains such as tutoring systems, conversational agents, healthcare literacy, and information retrieval. Existing efforts at AQG have been limited to short answer lengths of up to two or three sentences. However, several real-world applications require question generation from answers that span several sentences. Therefore, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark to assess the performance of existing AQG systems for long-text answers. We leverage the large-scale open-source Google Natural Questions dataset to create the aforementioned long-answer AQG benchmark. We empirically demonstrate that the performance of existing AQG methods significantly degrades as the length of the answer increases. Transformer-based methods outperform other existing AQG methods on long answers in terms of automatic as well as human evaluation. However, we still observe degradation in the performance of our best performing models with increasing sentence length, suggesting that long answer QA is a challenging benchmark task for future research.
Bayesian classification, anomaly detection, and survival analysis using network inputs with application to the microbiome

While the study of a single network is well-established, technological advances now allow for the collection of multiple networks with relative ease. Increasingly, anywhere from several to thousands of networks can be created from brain imaging, gene co-expression data, or microbiome measurements. And these networks, in turn, are being looked to as potentially powerful features to be used in modeling. However, with networks being non-Euclidean in nature, how best to incorporate networks into standard modeling tasks is not obvious. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian modeling framework that provides a unified approach to binary classification, anomaly detection, and survival analysis with network inputs. Our methodology exploits the theory of Gaussian processes and naturally requires the use of a kernel, which we obtain by modifying the well-known Hamming distance. Moreover, kernels provide a principled way to integrate data of mixed types. We motivate and demonstrate the whole of our methodology in the area of microbiome research, where network analysis is emerging as the standard approach for capturing the interconnectedness of microbial taxa across both time and space.
Entropy-Based Modeling for Estimating Soft Errors Impact on Binarized Neural Network Inference

Over past years, the easy accessibility to the large scale datasets has significantly shifted the paradigm for developing highly accurate prediction models that are driven from Neural Network (NN). These models can be potentially impacted by the radiation-induced transient faults that might lead to the gradual downgrade of the long-running expected NN inference accelerator. The crucial observation from our rigorous vulnerability assessment on the NN inference accelerator demonstrates that the weights and activation functions are unevenly susceptible to both single-event upset (SEU) and multi-bit upset (MBU), especially in the first five layers of our selected convolution neural network. In this paper, we present the relatively-accurate statistical models to delineate the impact of both undertaken SEU and MBU across layers and per each layer of the selected NN. These models can be used for evaluating the error-resiliency magnitude of NN topology before adopting them in the safety-critical applications.
Rephrasing visual questions by specifying the entropy of the answer distribution

Visual question answering (VQA) is a task of answering a visual question that is a pair of question and image. Some visual questions are ambiguous and some are clear, and it may be appropriate to change the ambiguity of questions from situation to situation. However, this issue has not been addressed by any prior work. We propose a novel task, rephrasing the questions by controlling the ambiguity of the questions. The ambiguity of a visual question is defined by the use of the entropy of the answer distribution predicted by a VQA model. The proposed model rephrases a source question given with an image so that the rephrased question has the ambiguity (or entropy) specified by users. We propose two learning strategies to train the proposed model with the VQA v2 dataset, which has no ambiguity information. We demonstrate the advantage of our approach that can control the ambiguity of the rephrased questions, and an interesting observation that it is harder to increase than to reduce ambiguity.
Model Uncertainty Quantification for Reliable Deep Vision Structural Health Monitoring

Computer vision leveraging deep learning has achieved significant success in the last decade. Despite the promising performance of the existing deep models in the recent literature, the extent of models' reliability remains unknown. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a crucial task for the safety and sustainability of structures, and thus prediction mistakes can have fatal outcomes. This paper proposes Bayesian inference for deep vision SHM models where uncertainty can be quantified using the Monte Carlo dropout sampling. Three independent case studies for cracks, local damage identification, and bridge component detection are investigated using Bayesian inference. Aside from better prediction results, mean class softmax variance and entropy, the two uncertainty metrics, are shown to have good correlations with misclassifications. While the uncertainty metrics can be used to trigger human intervention and potentially improve prediction results, interpretation of uncertainty masks can be challenging. Therefore, surrogate models are introduced to take the uncertainty as input such that the performance can be further boosted. The proposed methodology in this paper can be applied to future deep vision SHM frameworks to incorporate model uncertainty in the inspection processes.
The Permuted Striped Block Model and its Factorization - Algorithms with Recovery Guarantees

We introduce a novel class of matrices which are defined by the factorization $\textbf{Y} :=\textbf{A}\textbf{X}$, where $\textbf{A}$ is an $m \times n$ wide sparse binary matrix with a fixed number $d$ nonzeros per column and $\textbf{X}$ is an $n \times N$ sparse real matrix whose columns have at most $k$ nonzeros and are $\textit{dissociated}$. Matrices defined by this factorization can be expressed as a sum of $n$ rank one sparse matrices, whose nonzero entries, under the appropriate permutations, form striped blocks - we therefore refer to them as Permuted Striped Block (PSB) matrices. We define the $\textit{PSB data model}$ as a particular distribution over this class of matrices, motivated by its implications for community detection, provable binary dictionary learning with real valued sparse coding, and blind combinatorial compressed sensing. For data matrices drawn from the PSB data model, we provide computationally efficient factorization algorithms which recover the generating factors with high probability from as few as $N =O\left(\frac{n}{k}\log^2(n)\right)$ data vectors, where $k$, $m$ and $n$ scale proportionally. Notably, these algorithms achieve optimal sample complexity up to logarithmic factors.
Self-Punishment and Reward Backfill for Deep Q-Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn by encouraging behaviors, which maximizes their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single action, leading the agent to experience ambiguity in terms of whether those actions are effective, an issue known as the credit assignment problem. In this brief, we propose two strategies inspired by behavioral psychology to enable the agent to intrinsically estimate more informative reward values for actions with no reward. The first strategy, called self-punishment (SP), discourages the agent from making mistakes that lead to undesirable terminal states. The second strategy, called the reward backfill (RB), backpropagates the rewards between two rewarded actions. We prove that, under certain assumptions and regardless of the RL algorithm used, these two strategies maintain the order of policies in the space of all possible policies in terms of their total reward and, by extension, maintain the optimal policy. Hence, our proposed strategies integrate with any RL algorithm that learns a value or action-value function through experience. We incorporated these two strategies into three popular deep RL approaches and evaluated the results on 30 Atari games. After parameter tuning, our results indicate that the proposed strategies improve the tested methods in over 65% of tested games by up to over 25 times performance improvement.
CNN Encoder to Reduce the Dimensionality of Data Image for Motion Planning

Many real-world applications need path planning algorithms to solve tasks in different areas, such as social applications, autonomous cars, and tracking activities. And most importantly motion planning. Although the use of path planning is sufficient in most motion planning scenarios, they represent potential bottlenecks in large environments with dynamic changes. To tackle this problem, the number of possible routes could be reduced to make it easier for path planning algorithms to find the shortest path with less efforts. An traditional algorithm for path planning is the A*, it uses an heuristic to work faster than other solutions. In this work, we propose a CNN encoder capable of eliminating useless routes for motion planning problems, then we combine the proposed neural network output with A*. To measure the efficiency of our solution, we propose a database with different scenarios of motion planning problems. The evaluated metric is the number of the iterations to find the shortest path. The A* was compared with the CNN Encoder (proposal) with A*. In all evaluated scenarios, our solution reduced the number of iterations by more than 60\%.
Optimal User-Cell Association for 360 Video Streaming over Dense Wireless Networks

Delivering 360 degree video streaming for virtual and augmented reality presents many technical challenges especially in bandwidth starved wireless environments. Recently, a so-called two-tier approach has been proposed which delivers a basic-tier chunk and select enhancement-tier chunks to improve user experience while reducing network resources consumption. The video chunks are to be transmitted via unicast or multicast over an ultra-dense small cell infrastructure with enough bandwidth where small cells store video chunks in local caches. In this setup, user-cell association algorithms play a central role to efficiently deliver video since users may only download video chunks from the cell they are associated with. Motivated by this, we jointly formulate the problem of user-cell association and video chunk multicasting/unicasting as a mixed integer linear programming, prove its NP-hardness, and study the optimal solution via the Branch-and-Bound method. We then propose two polynomial-time, approximation algorithms and show via extensive simulations that they are near-optimal in practice and improve user experience by 30% compared to baseline user-cell association schemes.
A Simple Method for Computing Some Pseudo-Elliptic Integrals in Terms of Elementary Functions

We introduce a method for computing some pseudo-elliptic integrals in terms of elementary functions. The method is simple and fast in comparison to the algebraic case of the Risch-Trager-Bronstein algorithm. This method can quickly solve many pseudo-elliptic integrals which other well-known computer algebra systems (CAS) either fail, return an answer in terms of special functions, or require more than 20 seconds of computing time. Unlike the symbolic integration algorithms of Risch, Davenport, Trager, Bronstein and Miller; our method is not a decision process. The implementation of this method is less than 200 lines of Mathematica code and can be easily ported to other CAS that can solve systems of linear equations.
Entropy, Free Energy, and Work of Restricted Boltzmann Machines

A restricted Boltzmann machine is a generative probabilistic graphic network. A probability of finding the network in a certain configuration is given by the Boltzmann distribution. Given training data, its learning is done by optimizing the parameters of the energy function of the network. In this paper, we analyze the training process of the restricted Boltzmann machine in the context of statistical physics. As an illustration, for small size bar-and-stripe patterns, we calculate thermodynamic quantities such as entropy, free energy, and internal energy as a function of the training epoch. We demonstrate the growth of the correlation between the visible and hidden layers via the subadditivity of entropies as the training proceeds. Using the Monte-Carlo simulation of trajectories of the visible and hidden vectors in the configuration space, we also calculate the distribution of the work done on the restricted Boltzmann machine by switching the parameters of the energy function. We discuss the Jarzynski equality which connects the path average of the exponential function of the work and the difference in free energies before and after training.
An In-depth Walkthrough on Evolution of Neural Machine Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) methodologies have burgeoned from using simple feed-forward architectures to the state of the art; viz. BERT model. The use cases of NMT models have been broadened from just language translations to conversational agents (chatbots), abstractive text summarization, image captioning, etc. which have proved to be a gem in their respective applications. This paper aims to study the major trends in Neural Machine Translation, the state of the art models in the domain and a high level comparison between them.
Joint Visual Grounding with Language Scene Graphs

Visual grounding is a task to ground referring expressions in images, e.g., localize "the white truck in front of the yellow one". To resolve this task fundamentally, the model should first find out the contextual objects (e.g., the "yellow" truck) and then exploit them to disambiguate the referent from other similar objects by using the attributes and relationships (e.g., "white", "yellow", "in front of"). However, due to the lack of annotations on contextual objects and their relationships, existing methods degenerate the above joint grounding process into a holistic association between the expression and regions, thus suffering from unsatisfactory performance and limited interpretability. In this paper, we alleviate the missing-annotation problem and enable the joint reasoning by leveraging the language scene graph which covers both labeled referent and unlabeled contexts (other objects, attributes, and relationships). Specifically, the language scene graph is a graphical representation where the nodes are objects with attributes and the edges are relationships. We construct a factor graph based on it and then perform marginalization over the graph, such that we can ground both referent and contexts on corresponding image regions to achieve the joint visual grounding (JVG). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective and interpretable, e.g., on three benchmarks, it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods while offers a complete grounding of all the objects mentioned in the referring expression.