OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Depth Contrast: Self-Supervised Pretraining on 3DPM Images for Mining Material Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This work presents a novel self-supervised representation learning method to learn efficient representations without labels on images from a 3DPM sensor (3-Dimensional Particle Measurement; estimates the particle size distribution of material) utilizing RGB images and depth maps of mining material on the conveyor belt. Human annotations for material categories on sensor-generated data are scarce and cost-intensive. Currently, representation learning without human annotations remains unexplored for mining materials and does not leverage on utilization of sensor-generated data. The proposed method, Depth Contrast, enables self-supervised learning of representations without labels on the 3DPM dataset by exploiting depth maps and inductive transfer. The proposed method outperforms material classification over ImageNet transfer learning performance in fully supervised learning settings and achieves an F1 score of 0.73. Further, The proposed method yields an F1 score of 0.65 with an 11% improvement over ImageNet transfer learning performance in a semi-supervised setting when only 20% of labels are used in fine-tuning. Finally, the Proposed method showcases improved performance generalization on linear evaluation. The implementation of proposed method is available on GitHub.
Robot Navigation with Reinforcement Learned Path Generation and Fine-Tuned Motion Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) based path generation (RL-PG) approach for mobile robot navigation without a prior exploration of an unknown environment. Multiple predictive path points are dynamically generated by a deep Markov model optimized using RL approach for robot to track. To ensure the safety when tracking the predictive points, the robot's motion is fine-tuned by a motion fine-tuning module. Such an approach, using the deep Markov model with RL algorithm for planning, focuses on the relationship between adjacent path points. We analyze the benefits that our proposed approach are more effective and are with higher success rate than RL-Based approach DWA-RL and a traditional navigation approach APF. We deploy our model on both simulation and physical platforms and demonstrate our model performs robot navigation effectively and safely.
Review of the state of the art in autonomous artificial intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

This article presents a new design for autonomous artificial intelligence (AI), based on the state-of-the-art algorithms, and describes a new autonomous AI system called AutoAI. The methodology is used to assemble the design founded on self-improved algorithms that use new and emerging sources of data (NEFD). The objective of the article is to conceptualise the design of a novel AutoAI algorithm. The conceptual approach is used to advance into building new and improved algorithms. The article integrates and consolidates the findings from existing literature and advances the AutoAI design into (1) using new and emerging sources of data for teaching and training AI algorithms and (2) enabling AI algorithms to use automated tools for training new and improved algorithms. This approach is going beyond the state-of-the-art in AI algorithms and suggests a design that enables autonomous algorithms to self-optimise and self-adapt, and on a higher level, be capable to self-procreate.
Towards Practical Explainability with Cluster Descriptors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With the rapid development of machine learning, improving its explainability has become a crucial research goal. We study the problem of making the clusters more explainable by investigating the cluster descriptors. Given a set of objects $S$, a clustering of these objects $π$, and a set of tags $T$ that have not participated in the clustering algorithm. Each object in $S$ is associated with a subset of $T$. The goal is to find a representative set of tags for each cluster, referred to as the cluster descriptors, with the constraint that these descriptors we find are pairwise disjoint, and the total size of all the descriptors is minimized. In general, this problem is NP-hard. We propose a novel explainability model that reinforces the previous models in such a way that tags that do not contribute to explainability and do not sufficiently distinguish between clusters are not added to the optimal descriptors. The proposed model is formulated as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem which makes it suitable for solving on modern optimization hardware accelerators. We experimentally demonstrate how a proposed explainability model can be solved on specialized hardware for accelerating combinatorial optimization, the Fujitsu Digital Annealer, and use real-life Twitter and PubMed datasets for use cases.
Towards Procedural Fairness: Uncovering Biases in How a Toxic Language Classifier Uses Sentiment Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Previous works on the fairness of toxic language classifiers compare the output of models with different identity terms as input features but do not consider the impact of other important concepts present in the context. Here, besides identity terms, we take into account high-level latent features learned by the classifier and investigate the interaction between these features and identity terms. For a multi-class toxic language classifier, we leverage a concept-based explanation framework to calculate the sensitivity of the model to the concept of sentiment, which has been used before as a salient feature for toxic language detection. Our results show that although for some classes, the classifier has learned the sentiment information as expected, this information is outweighed by the influence of identity terms as input features. This work is a step towards evaluating procedural fairness, where unfair processes lead to unfair outcomes. The produced knowledge can guide debiasing techniques to ensure that important concepts besides identity terms are well-represented in training datasets.
Separating Grains from the Chaff: Using Data Filtering to Improve Multilingual Translation for Low-Resourced African Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We participated in the WMT 2022 Large-Scale Machine Translation Evaluation for the African Languages Shared Task. This work describes our approach, which is based on filtering the given noisy data using a sentence-pair classifier that was built by fine-tuning a pre-trained language model. To train the classifier, we obtain positive samples (i.e. high-quality parallel sentences) from a gold-standard curated dataset and extract negative samples (i.e. low-quality parallel sentences) from automatically aligned parallel data by choosing sentences with low alignment scores. Our final machine translation model was then trained on filtered data, instead of the entire noisy dataset. We empirically validate our approach by evaluating on two common datasets and show that data filtering generally improves overall translation quality, in some cases even significantly.
Autoregressive Generative Modeling with Noise Conditional Maximum Likelihood Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce a simple modification to the standard maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) framework. Rather than maximizing a single unconditional likelihood of the data under the model, we maximize a family of \textit{noise conditional} likelihoods consisting of the data perturbed by a continuum of noise levels. We find that models trained this way are more robust to noise, obtain higher test likelihoods, and generate higher quality images. They can also be sampled from via a novel score-based sampling scheme which combats the classical \textit{covariate shift} problem that occurs during sample generation in autoregressive models. Applying this augmentation to autoregressive image models, we obtain 3.32 bits per dimension on the ImageNet 64x64 dataset, and substantially improve the quality of generated samples in terms of the Frechet Inception distance (FID) -- from 37.50 to 12.09 on the CIFAR-10 dataset.
UniNL: Aligning Representation Learning with Scoring Function for OOD Detection via Unified Neighborhood Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents from user queries is essential for avoiding wrong operations in task-oriented dialogue systems. The key challenge is how to distinguish in-domain (IND) and OOD intents. Previous methods ignore the alignment between representation learning and scoring function, limiting the OOD detection performance. In this paper, we propose a unified neighborhood learning framework (UniNL) to detect OOD intents. Specifically, we design a K-nearest neighbor contrastive learning (KNCL) objective for representation learning and introduce a KNN-based scoring function for OOD detection. We aim to align representation learning with scoring function. Experiments and analysis on two benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method.
DL based analysis of movie reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Undoubtedly, social media are brainstormed by a tremendous volume of stories, feedback, reviews, and reactions expressed in various languages and idioms, even though some are factually incorrect. These motifs make assessing such data challenging, time-consuming, and vulnerable to misinterpretation. This paper describes a classification model for movie reviews founded on deep learning approaches. Almost 500KB pairs of balanced data from the IMDb movie review databases are employed to train the model. People's perspectives regarding movies were classified using both the long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) strategies. According to the findings, the CNN algorithm's prediction accuracy rate would be almost 97.4%. Furthermore, the model trained by LSTM resulted in accuracies of around and applying 99.2% within the Keras library. The model is investigated more by modification of model parameters. According to the outcomes, LTSM outperforms CNN in assessing IMDb movie reviews and is computationally less costly than LSTM.
Two-level Data Augmentation for Calibrated Multi-view Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Data augmentation has proven its usefulness to improve model generalization and performance. While it is commonly applied in computer vision application when it comes to multi-view systems, it is rarely used. Indeed geometric data augmentation can break the alignment among views. This is problematic since multi-view data tend to be scarce and it is expensive to annotate. In this work we propose to solve this issue by introducing a new multi-view data augmentation pipeline that preserves alignment among views. Additionally to traditional augmentation of the input image we also propose a second level of augmentation applied directly at the scene level. When combined with our simple multi-view detection model, our two-level augmentation pipeline outperforms all existing baselines by a significant margin on the two main multi-view multi-person detection datasets WILDTRACK and MultiviewX.
Self-learning locally-optimal hypertuning using maximum entropy, and comparison of machine learning approaches for estimating fatigue life in composite materials
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Applications of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) combined with Machine Learning (ML) techniques enhance real-time performance tracking and increase structural integrity awareness of civil, aerospace and automotive infrastructures. This SHM-ML synergy has gained popularity in the last years thanks to the anticipation of maintenance provided by arising ML algorithms and their ability of handling large quantities of data and considering their influence in the problem. In this paper we develop a novel ML nearest-neighbors-alike algorithm based on the principle of maximum entropy to predict fatigue damage (Palmgren-Miner index) in composite materials by processing the signals of Lamb Waves -- a non-destructive SHM technique -- with other meaningful features such as layup parameters and stiffness matrices calculated from the Classical Laminate Theory (CLT). The full data analysis cycle is applied to a dataset of delamination experiments in composites. The predictions achieve a good level of accuracy, similar to other ML algorithms, e.g. Neural Networks or Gradient-Boosted Trees, and computation times are of the same order of magnitude. The key advantages of our proposal are: (1) The automatic determination of all the parameters involved in the prediction, so no hyperparameters have to be set beforehand, which saves time devoted to hypertuning the model and also represents an advantage for autonomous, self-supervised SHM. (2) No training is required, which, in an \textit{online learning} context where streams of data are fed continuously to the model, avoids repeated training -- essential for reliable real-time, continuous monitoring.
Decoding Polar Codes via Noisy Quantum Gates: Quantum Circuits and Insights
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The use of quantum computation for wireless network applications is emerging as a promising paradigm to bridge the performance gap between in-practice and optimal wireless algorithms. While today's quantum technology offers limited number of qubits and low fidelity gates, application-based quantum solutions help us to understand and improve the performance of such technology even further. This paper introduces QGateD-Polar, a novel Quantum Gate-based Maximum-Likelihood Decoder design for Polar error correction codes, which are becoming widespread in today's 5G and tomorrow's NextG wireless networks. QGateD-Polar uses quantum gates to dictate the time evolution of Polar code decoding -- from the received wireless soft data to the final decoded solution -- by leveraging quantum phenomena such as superposition, entanglement, and interference, making it amenable to quantum gate-based computers. Our early results show that QGateD-Polar achieves the Maximum Likelihood performance in ideal quantum simulations, demonstrating how performance varies with noise.
Exiting the Simulation: The Road to Robust and Resilient Autonomous Vehicles at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In the past two decades, autonomous driving has been catalyzed into reality by the growing capabilities of machine learning. This paradigm shift possesses significant potential to transform the future of mobility and reshape our society as a whole. With the recent advances in perception, planning, and control capabilities, autonomous driving technologies are being rolled out for public trials, yet we remain far from being able to rigorously ensure the resilient operations of these systems across the long-tailed nature of the driving environment. Given the limitations of real-world testing, autonomous vehicle simulation stands as the critical component in exploring the edge of autonomous driving capabilities, developing the robust behaviors required for successful real-world operation, and enabling the extraction of hidden risks from these complex systems prior to deployment. This paper presents the current state-of-the-art simulation frameworks and methodologies used in the development of autonomous driving systems, with a focus on outlining how simulation is used to build the resiliency required for real-world operation and the methods developed to bridge the gap between simulation and reality. A synthesis of the key challenges surrounding autonomous driving simulation is presented, specifically highlighting the opportunities to further advance the ability to continuously learn in simulation and effectively transfer the learning into the real-world - enabling autonomous vehicles to exit the guardrails of simulation and deliver robust and resilient operations at scale.
Competitive Online Truthful Time-Sensitive-Valued Data Auction
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we investigate online mechanisms for trading time-sensitive valued data. We adopt a continuous function $d(t)$ to represent the data value fluctuation over time $t$. Our objective is to design an \emph{online} mechanism achieving \emph{truthfulness} and \emph{revenue-competitiveness}. We first prove several lower bounds on the revenue competitive ratios under various assumptions. We then propose several online truthful auction mechanisms for various adversarial models, such as a randomized observe-then-select mechanism $\mathcal{M}_1$ and prove that it is \textit{truthful} and $Θ(\log n)$-competitive under some assumptions. Then we present an effective truthful weighted-selection mechanism $\mathcal{M'}_W$ by relaxing the assumptions on the sizes of the discount-classes. We prove that it achieves a competitive ratio $Θ(n\log n)$ for any known non-decreasing discount function $d(t)$, and the number of buyers in each discount class $n_c \ge 2$. When the optimum expected revenue $OPT_1$ can be estimated within a constant factor, i.e. $c_0 \cdot OPT_1 \le Z \le OPT_1 $ for some constant $c_0 \in(0,1)$, we propose a truthful online posted-price mechanism that achieves a constant competitive ratio $\frac{4}{c_0}$. Our extensive numerical evaluations demonstrate that our mechanisms perform very well in most cases.
Improving Chinese Spelling Check by Character Pronunciation Prediction: The Effects of Adaptivity and Granularity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a fundamental NLP task that detects and corrects spelling errors in Chinese texts. As most of these spelling errors are caused by phonetic similarity, effectively modeling the pronunciation of Chinese characters is a key factor for CSC. In this paper, we consider introducing an auxiliary task of Chinese pronunciation prediction (CPP) to improve CSC, and, for the first time, systematically discuss the adaptivity and granularity of this auxiliary task. We propose SCOPE which builds on top of a shared encoder two parallel decoders, one for the primary CSC task and the other for a fine-grained auxiliary CPP task, with a novel adaptive weighting scheme to balance the two tasks. In addition, we design a delicate iterative correction strategy for further improvements during inference. Empirical evaluation shows that SCOPE achieves new state-of-the-art on three CSC benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the auxiliary CPP task. Comprehensive ablation studies further verify the positive effects of adaptivity and granularity of the task. Code and data used in this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/jiahaozhenbang/SCOPE.
Confiabilidad en la capa de transporte para la red de sensores antártica
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The SHETLAND-NET research project aims to develop an Internet of Things (IoT) telemetry service in Antarctica by interconnecting Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) through Near Vertical Incidence Skywave radio links (NVIS) that build a Long Fat Network (LFN). This architecture presents some typical properties of the so-called challenging networks, which require an evaluation of the viability of the proposed solution and an analysis of which transport protocol can provide greater reliability for this use case. For this purpose, a layer-based heterogeneous trustworthiness model is defined and presented. Through extensive simulations, the model is validated, different transport protocols are compared, and the reliability of the system is evaluated.
Robustcaps: a transformation-robust capsule network for image classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Geometric transformations of the training data as well as the test data present challenges to the use of deep neural networks to vision-based learning tasks. In order to address this issue, we present a deep neural network model that exhibits the desirable property of transformation-robustness. Our model, termed RobustCaps, uses group-equivariant convolutions in an improved capsule network model. RobustCaps uses a global context-normalised procedure in its routing algorithm to learn transformation-invariant part-whole relationships within image data. This learning of such relationships allows our model to outperform both capsule and convolutional neural network baselines on transformation-robust classification tasks. Specifically, RobustCaps achieves state-of-the-art accuracies on CIFAR-10, FashionMNIST, and CIFAR-100 when the images in these datasets are subjected to train and test-time rotations and translations.
Toward Multiple Specialty Learners for Explaining GNNs via Online Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly ubiquitous in numerous applications and systems, necessitating explanations of their predictions, especially when making critical decisions. However, explaining GNNs is challenging due to the complexity of graph data and model execution. Despite additional computational costs, post-hoc explanation approaches have been widely adopted due to the generality of their architectures. Intrinsically interpretable models provide instant explanations but are usually model-specific, which can only explain particular GNNs. Therefore, we propose a novel GNN explanation framework named SCALE, which is general and fast for explaining predictions. SCALE trains multiple specialty learners to explain GNNs since constructing one powerful explainer to examine attributions of interactions in input graphs is complicated. In training, a black-box GNN model guides learners based on an online knowledge distillation paradigm. In the explanation phase, explanations of predictions are provided by multiple explainers corresponding to trained learners. Specifically, edge masking and random walk with restart procedures are executed to provide structural explanations for graph-level and node-level predictions, respectively. A feature attribution module provides overall summaries and instance-level feature contributions. We compare SCALE with state-of-the-art baselines via quantitative and qualitative experiments to prove its explanation correctness and execution performance. We also conduct a series of ablation studies to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed framework.
Minimum Age of Information in Internet of Things with Opportunistic Channel Access
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

This paper investigates an Internet of Things (IoT) system in which multiple devices are observing some object's physical parameters and then offloading their observations back to the BS in time with opportunistic channel access. Specifically, each device accesses the common channel through contention with a certain probability firstly and then the winner evaluates the instant channel condition and decides to accept the right of channel access or not. We analyze this system through the perspective of Age of Information (AoI), which describes the freshness of observed information. The target is to minimize average AoI by optimizing the probability of device participation in contention and the transmission rate threshold. The problem is hard to solve since the AoI expression in fractional form is complex. We first decompose the original problem into two single-variable optimization sub-problems through Dinkelbach method and Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) method. And then we transform them to Monotonic optimization problems by proving the monotonicity of the objective functions, whose global optimal solution is able to be found through Polyblock algorithm. Numerical results verify the validity of our proposed method.