OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Point Cloud Denoising via Gradient Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

3D dynamic point clouds provide a discrete representation of real-world objects or scenes in motion, which have been widely applied in immersive telepresence, autonomous driving, surveillance, etc. However, point clouds acquired from sensors are usually perturbed by noise, which affects downstream tasks such as surface reconstruction and analysis. Although many efforts have been made for static point cloud denoising, dynamic point cloud denoising remains under-explored. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient-field-based dynamic point cloud denoising method, exploiting the temporal correspondence via the estimation of gradient fields -- a fundamental problem in dynamic point cloud processing and analysis. The gradient field is the gradient of the log-probability function of the noisy point cloud, based on which we perform gradient ascent so as to converge each point to the underlying clean surface. We estimate the gradient of each surface patch and exploit the temporal correspondence, where the temporally corresponding patches are searched leveraging on rigid motion in classical mechanics. In particular, we treat each patch as a rigid object, which moves in the gradient field of an adjacent frame via force until reaching a balanced state, i.e., when the sum of gradients over the patch reaches 0. Since the gradient would be smaller when the point is closer to the underlying surface, the balanced patch would fit the underlying surface well, thus leading to the temporal correspondence. Finally, the position of each point in the patch is updated along the direction of the gradient averaged from corresponding patches in adjacent frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods under both synthetic noise and simulated real-world noise.
Binary Multi Channel Morphological Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Neural networks and particularly Deep learning have been comparatively little studied from the theoretical point of view. Conversely, Mathematical Morphology is a discipline with solid theoretical foundations. We combine these domains to propose a new type of neural architecture that is theoretically more explainable. We introduce a Binary Morphological Neural Network (BiMoNN) built upon the convolutional neural network. We design it for learning morphological networks with binary inputs and outputs. We demonstrate an equivalence between BiMoNNs and morphological operators that we can use to binarize entire networks. These can learn classical morphological operators and show promising results on a medical imaging application.
Strategies for Asymptotic Normalization
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

We present a technique to study normalizing strategies when termination is asymptotic, that is, it appears as a limit, as opposite to reaching a normal form in a finite number of steps. Asymptotic termination occurs in several settings, such as effectful, and in particular probabilistic computation -- where the limits are distributions over the possible outputs -- or infinitary lambda-calculi -- where the limits are infinitary normal forms such as Boehm trees. As a concrete application, we obtain a result which is of independent interest: a normalization theorem for Call-by-Value (and -- in a uniform way -- for Call-by-Name) probabilistic lambda-calculus.
Multi-level Cross-view Contrastive Learning for Knowledge-aware Recommender System
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Knowledge graph (KG) plays an increasingly important role in recommender systems. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) based model has gradually become the theme of knowledge-aware recommendation (KGR). However, there is a natural deficiency for GNN-based KGR models, that is, the sparse supervised signal problem, which may make their actual performance drop to some extent. Inspired by the recent success of contrastive learning in mining supervised signals from data itself, in this paper, we focus on exploring the contrastive learning in KG-aware recommendation and propose a novel multi-level cross-view contrastive learning mechanism, named MCCLK. Different from traditional contrastive learning methods which generate two graph views by uniform data augmentation schemes such as corruption or dropping, we comprehensively consider three different graph views for KG-aware recommendation, including global-level structural view, local-level collaborative and semantic views. Specifically, we consider the user-item graph as a collaborative view, the item-entity graph as a semantic view, and the user-item-entity graph as a structural view. MCCLK hence performs contrastive learning across three views on both local and global levels, mining comprehensive graph feature and structure information in a self-supervised manner. Besides, in semantic view, a k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) item-item semantic graph construction module is proposed, to capture the important item-item semantic relation which is usually ignored by previous work. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets show the superior performance of our proposed method over the state-of-the-arts. The implementations are available at: https://github.com/CCIIPLab/MCCLK.
Core Box Image Recognition and its Improvement with a New Augmentation Technique
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Most methods for automated full-bore rock core image analysis (description, colour, properties distribution, etc.) are based on separate core column analyses. The core is usually imaged in a box because of the significant amount of time taken to get an image for each core column. The work presents an innovative method and algorithm for core columns extraction from core boxes. The conditions for core boxes imaging may differ tremendously. Such differences are disastrous for machine learning algorithms which need a large dataset describing all possible data variations. Still, such images have some standard features - a box and core. Thus, we can emulate different environments with a unique augmentation described in this work. It is called template-like augmentation (TLA). The method is described and tested on various environments, and results are compared on an algorithm trained on both 'traditional' data and a mix of traditional and TLA data. The algorithm trained with TLA data provides better metrics and can detect core on most new images, unlike the algorithm trained on data without TLA. The algorithm for core column extraction implemented in an automated core description system speeds up the core box processing by a factor of 20.
OpenGlue: Open Source Graph Neural Net Based Pipeline for Image Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present OpenGlue: a free open-source framework for image matching, that uses a Graph Neural Network-based matcher inspired by SuperGlue \cite{sarlin20superglue}. We show that including additional geometrical information, such as local feature scale, orientation, and affine geometry, when available (e.g. for SIFT features), significantly improves the performance of the OpenGlue matcher. We study the influence of the various attention mechanisms on accuracy and speed. We also present a simple architectural improvement by combining local descriptors with context-aware descriptors. The code and pretrained OpenGlue models for the different local features are publicly available.
Heterogeneous Feature Augmentation for Ponzi Detection in Ethereum
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

While blockchain technology triggers new industrial and technological revolutions, it also brings new challenges. Recently, a large number of new scams with a "blockchain" sock-puppet continue to emerge, such as Ponzi schemes, money laundering, etc., seriously threatening financial security. Existing fraud detection methods in blockchain mainly concentrate on manual feature and graph analytics, which first construct a homogeneous transaction graph using partial blockchain data and then use graph analytics to detect anomaly, resulting in a loss of pattern information. In this paper, we mainly focus on Ponzi scheme detection and propose HFAug, a generic Heterogeneous Feature Augmentation module that can capture the heterogeneous information associated with account behavior patterns and can be combined with existing Ponzi detection methods. HFAug learns the metapath-based behavior characteristics in an auxiliary heterogeneous interaction graph, and aggregates the heterogeneous features to corresponding account nodes in the homogeneous one where the Ponzi detection methods are performed. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that our HFAug can help existing Ponzi detection methods achieve significant performance improvement on Ethereum datasets, suggesting the effectiveness of heterogeneous information on detecting Ponzi schemes.
CodexDB: Generating Code for Processing SQL Queries using GPT-3 Codex
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

CodexDB is an SQL processing engine whose internals can be customized via natural language instructions. CodexDB is based on OpenAI's GPT-3 Codex model which translates text into code. It is a framework on top of GPT-3 Codex that decomposes complex SQL queries into a series of simple processing steps, described in natural language. Processing steps are enriched with user-provided instructions and descriptions of database properties. Codex translates the resulting text into query processing code. An early prototype of CodexDB is able to generate correct code for a majority of queries of the WikiSQL benchmark and can be customized in various ways.
Optimal Layered Defense For Site Protection
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2022
Year: 2022

We present a model for layered security with applications to the protection of sites such as stadiums or large gathering places. We formulate the problem as one of maximizing the capture of illegal contraband. The objective function is indefinite and only limited information can be gained when the problem is solved by standard convex optimization methods. In order to solve the model, we develop a dynamic programming approach, and study its convergence properties. Additionally, we formulate a version of the problem aimed at addressing intelligent adversaries who can adjust their direction of attack as they observe changes in the site security. Furthermore, we also develop a method for the solution of the latter model. Finally, we perform computational experiments to demonstrate the use of our methods.
Co-evolutionary Probabilistic Structured Grammatical Evolution
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

This work proposes an extension to Structured Grammatical Evolution (SGE) called Co-evolutionary Probabilistic Structured Grammatical Evolution (Co-PSGE). In Co-PSGE each individual in the population is composed by a grammar and a genotype, which is a list of dynamic lists, each corresponding to a non-terminal of the grammar containing real numbers that correspond to the probability of choosing a derivation rule. Each individual uses its own grammar to map the genotype into a program. During the evolutionary process, both the grammar and the genotype are subject to variation operators. The performance of the proposed approach is compared to 3 different methods, namely, Grammatical Evolution (GE), Probabilistic Grammatical Evolution (PGE), and SGE on four different benchmark problems. The results show the effectiveness of the approach since Co-PSGE is able to outperform all the methods with statistically significant differences in the majority of the problems.
Unit-Disk Range Searching and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2022
Year: 2022

Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, we consider the problem of computing the number of points of $P$ in a query unit disk (i.e., all query disks have the same radius). We show that the main techniques for simplex range searching in the plane can be adapted to this problem. For example, by adapting Matoušek's results, we can build a data structure of $O(n)$ space so that each query can be answered in $O(\sqrt{n})$ time. Our techniques lead to improvements for several other classical problems, such as batched range searching, counting/reporting intersecting pairs of unit circles, distance selection, discrete 2-center, etc. For example, given a set of $n$ unit disks and a set of $n$ points in the plane, the batched range searching problem is to compute for each disk the number of points in it. Previous work [Katz and Sharir, 1997] solved the problem in $O(n^{4/3}\log n)$ time while our new algorithm runs in $O(n^{4/3})$ time.
Write a Line: Tests with Answer Templates and String Completion Hints for Self-Learning in a CS1 Course
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

One of the important scaffolding tasks in programming learning is writing a line of code performing the necessary action. This allows students to practice skills in a playground with instant feedback before writing more complex programs and increases their proficiency when solving programming problems. However, answers in the form of program code have high variability. Among the possible approaches to grading and providing feedback, we chose template matching. This paper reports the results of using regular-expression-based questions with string completion hints in a CS1 course for 4 years with 497 students. The evaluation results show that Perl-compatible regular expressions provide good precision and recall (more than 99\%) when used for questions requiring writing a single line of code while being able to provide string-completion feedback regardless of how wrong the initial student's answer is. After introducing formative quizzes with string-completion hints to the course, the number of questions that teachers and teaching assistants received about questions in the formative quizzes dropped considerably: most of the training question attempts resulted in finding the correct answer without help from the teaching staff. However, some of the students use formative quizzes just to learn correct answers without actually trying to answer the questions.
Unsupervised detection of ash dieback disease (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) using diffusion-based hyperspectral image clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Ash dieback (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus) is an introduced fungal disease that is causing the widespread death of ash trees across Europe. Remote sensing hyperspectral images encode rich structure that has been exploited for the detection of dieback disease in ash trees using supervised machine learning techniques. However, to understand the state of forest health at landscape-scale, accurate unsupervised approaches are needed. This article investigates the use of the unsupervised Diffusion and VCA-Assisted Image Segmentation (D-VIS) clustering algorithm for the detection of ash dieback disease in a forest site near Cambridge, United Kingdom. The unsupervised clustering presented in this work has high overlap with the supervised classification of previous work on this scene (overall accuracy = 71%). Thus, unsupervised learning may be used for the remote detection of ash dieback disease without the need for expert labeling.
Named Entity Recognition for Partially Annotated Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The most common Named Entity Recognizers are usually sequence taggers trained on fully annotated corpora, i.e. the class of all words for all entities is known. Partially annotated corpora, i.e. some but not all entities of some types are annotated, are too noisy for training sequence taggers since the same entity may be annotated one time with its true type but not another time, misleading the tagger. Therefore, we are comparing three training strategies for partially annotated datasets and an approach to derive new datasets for new classes of entities from Wikipedia without time-consuming manual data annotation. In order to properly verify that our data acquisition and training approaches are plausible, we manually annotated test datasets for two new classes, namely food and drugs.
From Spoken Thoughts to Automated Driving Commentary: Predicting and Explaining Intelligent Vehicles' Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

In commentary driving, drivers verbalise their observations, assessments and intentions. By speaking out their thoughts, both learning and expert drivers are able to create a better understanding and awareness of their surroundings. In the intelligent vehicle context, automated driving commentary can provide intelligible explanations about driving actions, thereby assisting a driver or an end-user during driving operations in challenging and safety-critical scenarios. In this paper, we conducted a field study in which we deployed a research vehicle in an urban environment to obtain data. While collecting sensor data of the vehicle's surroundings, we obtained driving commentary from a driving instructor using the think-aloud protocol. We analysed the driving commentary and uncovered an explanation style; the driver first announces his observations, announces his plans, and then makes general remarks. He also makes counterfactual comments. We successfully demonstrated how factual and counterfactual natural language explanations that follow this style could be automatically generated using a transparent tree-based approach. Generated explanations for longitudinal actions (e.g., stop and move) were deemed more intelligible and plausible by human judges compared to lateral actions, such as lane changes. We discussed how our approach can be built on in the future to realise more robust and effective explainability for driver assistance as well as partial and conditional automation of driving functions.
Test suite effectiveness metric evaluation: what do we know and what should we do?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Comparing test suite effectiveness metrics has always been a research hotspot. However, prior studies have different conclusions or even contradict each other for comparing different test suite effectiveness metrics. The problem we found most troubling to our community is that researchers tend to oversimplify the description of the ground truth they use. For example, a common expression is that "we studied the correlation between real faults and the metric to evaluate (MTE)". However, the meaning of "real faults" is not clear-cut. As a result, there is a need to scrutinize the meaning of "real faults". Without this, it will be half-knowledgeable with the conclusions. To tackle this challenge, we propose a framework ASSENT (evAluating teSt Suite EffectiveNess meTrics) to guide the follow-up research. In nature, ASSENT consists of three fundamental components: ground truth, benchmark test suites, and agreement indicator. First, materialize the ground truth for determining the real order in effectiveness among test suites. Second, generate a set of benchmark test suites and derive their ground truth order in effectiveness. Third, for the benchmark test suites, generate the MTE order in effectiveness by the metric to evaluate (MTE). Finally, calculate the agreement indicator between the two orders. Under ASSENT, we are able to compare the accuracy of different test suite effectiveness metrics. We apply ASSENT to evaluate representative test suite effectiveness metrics, including mutation score metrics and code coverage metrics. Our results show that, based on the real faults, mutation score and subsuming mutation score are the best metrics to quantify test suite effectiveness. Meanwhile, by using mutants instead of real faults, MTEs will be overestimated by more than 20% in values.
Performance Evaluation of Action Recognition Models on Low Quality Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In the design of action recognition models, the quality of videos is an important issue; however, the trade-off between the quality and performance is often ignored. In general, action recognition models are trained on high-quality videos, hence it is not known how the model performance degrades when tested on low-quality videos, and how much the quality of training videos affects the performance. The issue of video quality is important, however, it has not been studied so far. The goal of this study is to show the trade-off between the performance and the quality of training and test videos by quantitative performance evaluation of several action recognition models for transcoded videos in different qualities. First, we show how the video quality affects the performance of pre-trained models. We transcode the original validation videos of Kinetics400 by changing quality control parameters of JPEG (compression strength) and H.264/AVC (CRF). Then we use the transcoded videos to validate the pre-trained models. Second, we show how the models perform when trained on transcoded videos. We transcode the original training videos of Kinetics400 by changing the quality parameters of JPEG and H.264/AVC. Then we train the models on the transcoded training videos and validate them with the original and transcoded validation videos. Experimental results with JPEG transcoding show that there is no severe performance degradation (up to -1.5%) for compression strength smaller than 70 where no quality degradation is visually observed, and for larger than 80 the performance degrades linearly with respect to the quality index. Experiments with H.264/AVC transcoding show that there is no significant performance loss (up to -1%) with CRF30 while the total size of video files is reduced to 30%.
NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Stereo Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we summarize the 1st NTIRE challenge on stereo image super-resolution (restoration of rich details in a pair of low-resolution stereo images) with a focus on new solutions and results. This challenge has 1 track aiming at the stereo image super-resolution problem under a standard bicubic degradation. In total, 238 participants were successfully registered, and 21 teams competed in the final testing phase. Among those participants, 20 teams successfully submitted results with PSNR (RGB) scores better than the baseline. This challenge establishes a new benchmark for stereo image SR.
Who Is Missing? Characterizing the Participation of Different Demographic Groups in a Korean Nationwide Daily Conversation Corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

A conversation corpus is essential to build interactive AI applications. However, the demographic information of the participants in such corpora is largely underexplored mainly due to the lack of individual data in many corpora. In this work, we analyze a Korean nationwide daily conversation corpus constructed by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) to characterize the participation of different demographic (age and sex) groups in the corpus.
Reinforcement Learning with Intrinsic Affinity for Personalized Prosperity Management
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The common purpose of applying reinforcement learning (RL) to asset management is the maximization of profit. The extrinsic reward function used to learn an optimal strategy typically does not take into account any other preferences or constraints. We have developed a regularization method that ensures that strategies have global intrinsic affinities, i.e., different personalities may have preferences for certain assets which may change over time. We capitalize on these intrinsic policy affinities to make our RL model inherently interpretable. We demonstrate how RL agents can be trained to orchestrate such individual policies for particular personality profiles and still achieve high returns.