OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Understanding & Predicting User Lifetime with Machine Learning in an Anonymous Location-Based Social Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we predict the user lifetime within the anonymous and location-based social network Jodel in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Jodel's location-based nature yields to the establishment of disjoint communities country-wide and enables for the first time the study of user lifetime in the case of a large set of disjoint communities. A user's lifetime is an important measurement for evaluating and steering customer bases as it can be leveraged to predict churn and possibly apply suitable methods to circumvent potential user losses. We train and test off the shelf machine learning techniques with 5-fold crossvalidation to predict user lifetime as a regression and classification problem; identifying the Random Forest to provide very strong results. Discussing model complexity and quality trade-offs, we also dive deep into a time-dependent feature subset analysis, which does not work very well; Easing up the classification problem into a binary decision (lifetime longer than timespan $x$) enables a practical lifetime predictor with very good performance. We identify implicit similarities across community models according to strong correlations in feature importance. A single countrywide model generalizes the problem and works equally well for any tested community; the overall model internally works similar to others also indicated by its feature importances.
Brain Programming is Immune to Adversarial Attacks: Towards Accurate and Robust Image Classification using Symbolic Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, the security concerns about the vulnerability of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) to Adversarial Attacks (AA) in the form of small modifications to the input image almost invisible to human vision make their predictions untrustworthy. Therefore, it is necessary to provide robustness to adversarial examples in addition to an accurate score when developing a new classifier. In this work, we perform a comparative study of the effects of AA on the complex problem of art media categorization, which involves a sophisticated analysis of features to classify a fine collection of artworks. We tested a prevailing bag of visual words approach from computer vision, four state-of-the-art DCNN models (AlexNet, VGG, ResNet, ResNet101), and the Brain Programming (BP) algorithm. In this study, we analyze the algorithms' performance using accuracy. Besides, we use the accuracy ratio between adversarial examples and clean images to measure robustness. Moreover, we propose a statistical analysis of each classifier's predictions' confidence to corroborate the results. We confirm that BP predictions' change was below 2\% using adversarial examples computed with the fast gradient sign method. Also, considering the multiple pixel attack, BP obtained four out of seven classes without changes and the rest with a maximum error of 4\% in the predictions. Finally, BP also gets four categories using adversarial patches without changes and for the remaining three classes with a variation of 1\%. Additionally, the statistical analysis showed that the predictions' confidence of BP were not significantly different for each pair of clean and perturbed images in every experiment. These results prove BP's robustness against adversarial examples compared to DCNN and handcrafted features methods, whose performance on the art media classification was compromised with the proposed perturbations.
Hindi-Urdu Adposition and Case Supersenses v1.0
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

These are the guidelines for the application of SNACS (Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses; Schneider et al. 2018) to Modern Standard Hindi of Delhi. SNACS is an inventory of 50 supersenses (semantic labels) for labelling the use of adpositions and case markers with respect to both lexical-semantic function and relation to the underlying context. The English guidelines (Schneider et al., 2020) were used as a model for this document. Besides the case system, Hindi has an extremely rich adpositional system built on the oblique genitive, with productive incorporation of loanwords even in present-day Hinglish. This document is aligned with version 2.5 of the English guidelines.
BPActuators: Lightweight and Low-Cost Soft Actuators by Balloons and Plastics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

To increase the awareness and impact, soft robotics needs to go beyond the lab environment and should be readily accessible to those even with no robotic expertise. However, most prevailing manufacturing methodologies require either professional equipment or materials that are not usually available to common people, thereby constraining the accessibility of soft robotics. In this communication, we propose a lightweight and low-cost soft bending actuator, called BPActuator, that can be easily fabricated with plastics and balloons. We fabricated a range of actuators with various morphology for characterization in terms of deformation and load-bearing capacity, and demonstrated that they can bend up to 35 degrees and exert force at the tip around 0.070$\pm$0.015N, which is over 5 times higher than their average gravity. We further implemented a gripper with three fingers using the proposed actuators, and found that the gripper can realize human-like grasp of a range of daily objects. The gripper can lift objects at least 8 times heavier than its own weight. Furthermore, the BPActuator is cost effective and each costs about 0.22 USD. Given these advantages, the BPActuators are expected to significantly improve the accessibility of soft robotics to a wider group without robotic expertise.
TweetCOVID: A System for Analyzing Public Sentiments and Discussions about COVID-19 via Twitter Activities
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has created widespread health and economical impacts, affecting millions around the world. To better understand these impacts, we present the TweetCOVID system that offers the capability to understand the public reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of their sentiments, emotions, topics of interest and controversial discussions, over a range of time periods and locations, using public tweets. We also present three example use cases that illustrates the usefulness of our proposed TweetCOVID system.
Multi-Level Attention Pooling for Graph Neural Networks: Unifying Graph Representations with Multiple Localities
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used to learn vector representation of graph-structured data and achieved better task performance than conventional methods. The foundation of GNNs is the message passing procedure, which propagates the information in a node to its neighbors. Since this procedure proceeds one step per layer, the range of the information propagation among nodes is small in the lower layers, and it expands toward the higher layers. Therefore, a GNN model has to be deep enough to capture global structural information in a graph. On the other hand, it is known that deep GNN models suffer from performance degradation because they lose nodes' local information, which would be essential for good model performance, through many message passing steps. In this study, we propose multi-level attention pooling (MLAP) for graph-level classification tasks, which can adapt to both local and global structural information in a graph. It has an attention pooling layer for each message passing step and computes the final graph representation by unifying the layer-wise graph representations. The MLAP architecture allows models to utilize the structural information of graphs with multiple levels of localities because it preserves layer-wise information before losing them due to oversmoothing. Results of our experiments show that the MLAP architecture improves the graph classification performance compared to the baseline architectures. In addition, analyses on the layer-wise graph representations suggest that aggregating information from multiple levels of localities indeed has the potential to improve the discriminability of learned graph representations.
Mind Mappings: Enabling Efficient Algorithm-Accelerator Mapping Space Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Modern day computing increasingly relies on specialization to satiate growing performance and efficiency requirements. A core challenge in designing such specialized hardware architectures is how to perform mapping space search, i.e., search for an optimal mapping from algorithm to hardware. Prior work shows that choosing an inefficient mapping can lead to multiplicative-factor efficiency overheads. Additionally, the search space is not only large but also non-convex and non-smooth, precluding advanced search techniques. As a result, previous works are forced to implement mapping space search using expert choices or sub-optimal search heuristics. This work proposes Mind Mappings, a novel gradient-based search method for algorithm-accelerator mapping space search. The key idea is to derive a smooth, differentiable approximation to the otherwise non-smooth, non-convex search space. With a smooth, differentiable approximation, we can leverage efficient gradient-based search algorithms to find high-quality mappings. We extensively compare Mind Mappings to black-box optimization schemes used in prior work. When tasked to find mappings for two important workloads (CNN and MTTKRP), the proposed search finds mappings that achieve an average $1.40\times$, $1.76\times$, and $1.29\times$ (when run for a fixed number of steps) and $3.16\times$, $4.19\times$, and $2.90\times$ (when run for a fixed amount of time) better energy-delay product (EDP) relative to Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning, respectively. Meanwhile, Mind Mappings returns mappings with only $5.32\times$ higher EDP than a possibly unachievable theoretical lower-bound, indicating proximity to the global optima.
Memory Reclamation for Recoverable Mutual Exclusion
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Mutual exclusion (ME) is a commonly used technique to handle conflicts in concurrent systems. With recent advancements in non-volatile memory technology, there is an increased focus on the problem of recoverable mutual exclusion (RME), a special case of ME where processes can fail and recover. However, in order to ensure that the problem of RME is also of practical interest, and not just a theoretical one, memory reclamation poses as a major obstacle in several RME algorithms. Often RME algorithms need to allocate memory dynamically, which increases the memory footprint of the algorithm over time. These algorithms are typically not equipped with suitable garbage collection due to concurrency and failures. In this work, we present the first "general" recoverable algorithm for memory reclamation in the context of recoverable mutual exclusion. Our algorithm can be plugged into any RME algorithm very easily and preserves all correctness property and most desirable properties of the algorithm. The space overhead of our algorithm is $\mathcal{O}(n^2 * sizeof(node)\ )$, where $n$ is the total number of processes in the system. In terms of remote memory references (RMRs), our algorithm is RMR-optimal, i.e, it has a constant RMR overhead per passage. Our RMR and space complexities are applicable to both $CC$ and $DSM$ memory models.
FinMatcher at FinSim-2: Hypernym Detection in the Financial Services Domain using Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents the FinMatcher system and its results for the FinSim 2021 shared task which is co-located with the Workshop on Financial Technology on the Web (FinWeb) in conjunction with The Web Conference. The FinSim-2 shared task consists of a set of concept labels from the financial services domain. The goal is to find the most relevant top-level concept from a given set of concepts. The FinMatcher system exploits three publicly available knowledge graphs, namely WordNet, Wikidata, and WebIsALOD. The graphs are used to generate explicit features as well as latent features which are fed into a neural classifier to predict the closest hypernym.
A Comprehensive Study on Face Recognition Biases Beyond Demographics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Face recognition (FR) systems have a growing effect on critical decision-making processes. Recent works have shown that FR solutions show strong performance differences based on the user's demographics. However, to enable a trustworthy FR technology, it is essential to know the influence of an extended range of facial attributes on FR beyond demographics. Therefore, in this work, we analyse FR bias over a wide range of attributes. We investigate the influence of 47 attributes on the verification performance of two popular FR models. The experiments were performed on the publicly available MAADFace attribute database with over 120M high-quality attribute annotations. To prevent misleading statements about biased performances, we introduced control group based validity values to decide if unbalanced test data causes the performance differences. The results demonstrate that also many non-demographic attributes strongly affect the recognition performance, such as accessories, hair-styles and colors, face shapes, or facial anomalies. The observations of this work show the strong need for further advances in making FR system more robust, explainable, and fair. Moreover, our findings might help to a better understanding of how FR networks work, to enhance the robustness of these networks, and to develop more generalized bias-mitigating face recognition solutions.
Spatial Attention Point Network for Deep-learning-based Robust Autonomous Robot Motion Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning provides a powerful framework for automated acquisition of complex robotic motions. However, despite a certain degree of generalization, the need for vast amounts of training data depending on the work-object position is an obstacle to industrial applications. Therefore, a robot motion-generation model that can respond to a variety of work-object positions with a small amount of training data is necessary. In this paper, we propose a method robust to changes in object position by automatically extracting spatial attention points in the image for the robot task and generating motions on the basis of their positions. We demonstrate our method with an LBR iiwa 7R1400 robot arm on a picking task and a pick-and-place task at various positions in various situations. In each task, the spatial attention points are obtained for the work objects that are important to the task. Our method is robust to changes in object position. Further, it is robust to changes in background, lighting, and obstacles that are not important to the task because it only focuses on positions that are important to the task.
On Optimal $w$-gons in Convex Polygons
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2021
Year: 2021

Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^2$. For a given positive integer $w<n$, our objective is to find a set $C \subset P$ of points, such that $CH(P\setminus C)$ has the smallest number of vertices and $C$ has at most $n-w$ points. We discuss the $O(wn^3)$ time dynamic programming algorithm for monotone decomposable functions (MDF) introduced for finding a class of optimal convex $w$-gons, with vertices chosen from $P$, and improve it to $O(n^3 \log w)$ time, which gives an improvement to the existing algorithm for MDFs if their input is a convex polygon.
Self-supervised Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization (SNMF) has demonstrated to be a powerful method for data clustering. However, SNMF is mathematically formulated as a non-convex optimization problem, making it sensitive to the initialization of variables. Inspired by ensemble clustering that aims to seek a better clustering result from a set of clustering results, we propose self-supervised SNMF (S$^3$NMF), which is capable of boosting clustering performance progressively by taking advantage of the sensitivity to initialization characteristic of SNMF, without relying on any additional information. Specifically, we first perform SNMF repeatedly with a random nonnegative matrix for initialization each time, leading to multiple decomposed matrices. Then, we rank the quality of the resulting matrices with adaptively learned weights, from which a new similarity matrix that is expected to be more discriminative is reconstructed for SNMF again. These two steps are iterated until the stopping criterion/maximum number of iterations is achieved. We mathematically formulate S$^3$NMF as a constraint optimization problem, and provide an alternative optimization algorithm to solve it with the theoretical convergence guaranteed. Extensive experimental results on $10$ commonly used benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant advantage of our S$^3$NMF over $12$ state-of-the-art methods in terms of $5$ quantitative metrics. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/jyh-learning/SSSNMF.
SME: ReRAM-based Sparse-Multiplication-Engine to Squeeze-Out Bit Sparsity of Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

Resistive Random-Access-Memory (ReRAM) crossbar is a promising technique for deep neural network (DNN) accelerators, thanks to its in-memory and in-situ analog computing abilities for Vector-Matrix Multiplication-and-Accumulations (VMMs). However, it is challenging for crossbar architecture to exploit the sparsity in the DNN. It inevitably causes complex and costly control to exploit fine-grained sparsity due to the limitation of tightly-coupled crossbar structure. As the countermeasure, we developed a novel ReRAM-based DNN accelerator, named Sparse-Multiplication-Engine (SME), based on a hardware and software co-design framework. First, we orchestrate the bit-sparse pattern to increase the density of bit-sparsity based on existing quantization methods. Second, we propose a novel weigh mapping mechanism to slice the bits of a weight across the crossbars and splice the activation results in peripheral circuits. This mechanism can decouple the tightly-coupled crossbar structure and cumulate the sparsity in the crossbar. Finally, a superior squeeze-out scheme empties the crossbars mapped with highly-sparse non-zeros from the previous two steps. We design the SME architecture and discuss its use for other quantization methods and different ReRAM cell technologies. Compared with prior state-of-the-art designs, the SME shrinks the use of crossbars up to 8.7x and 2.1x using Resent-50 and MobileNet-v2, respectively, with less than 0.3% accuracy drop on ImageNet.
Self-restrained Triplet Loss for Accurate Masked Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Using the face as a biometric identity trait is motivated by the contactless nature of the capture process and the high accuracy of the recognition algorithms. After the current COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask has been imposed in public places to keep the pandemic under control. However, face occlusion due to wearing a mask presents an emerging challenge for face recognition systems. In this paper, we present a solution to improve masked face recognition performance. Specifically, we propose the Embedding Unmasking Model (EUM) operated on top of existing face recognition models. We also propose a novel loss function, the Self-restrained Triplet (SRT), which enabled the EUM to produce embeddings similar to these of unmasked faces of the same identities. The achieved evaluation results on three face recognition models, two real masked datasets, and two synthetically generated masked face datasets proved that our proposed approach significantly improves the performance in most experimental settings.
Image/Video Deep Anomaly Detection: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The considerable significance of Anomaly Detection (AD) problem has recently drawn the attention of many researchers. Consequently, the number of proposed methods in this research field has been increased steadily. AD strongly correlates with the important computer vision and image processing tasks such as image/video anomaly, irregularity and sudden event detection. More recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) offer a high performance set of solutions, but at the expense of a heavy computational cost. However, there is a noticeable gap between the previously proposed methods and an applicable real-word approach. Regarding the raised concerns about AD as an ongoing challenging problem, notably in images and videos, the time has come to argue over the pitfalls and prospects of methods have attempted to deal with visual AD tasks. Hereupon, in this survey we intend to conduct an in-depth investigation into the images/videos deep learning based AD methods. We also discuss current challenges and future research directions thoroughly.
Air taxi service for urban mobility: A critical review of recent developments, future challenges, and opportunities
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Expected to operate in the imminent future, air taxi service (ATS) is an aerial on-demand transport for a single passenger or a small group of riders, which seeks to transform the method of everyday commute. This uncharted territory in the emerging transportation world is anticipated to enable consumers bypass traffic congestion in urban road networks. By adopting an electric vertical takeoff and landing concept (eVTOL), air taxis could be operational from skyports retrofitted on building rooftops, thus gaining advantage from an implementation standpoint. Motivated by the potential impact of ATS, this study provides a review of air taxi systems and associated operations. We first discuss the current developments in the ATS (demand prediction, air taxi network design, and vehicle configuration). Next, we anticipate potential future challenges of ATS from an operations management perspective, and review the existing literature that could be leveraged to tackle these problems (ride-matching, pricing strategies, vehicle maintenance scheduling, and pilot training and recruitment). Finally, we detail future research opportunities in the air taxi domain.
IoT-Enabled Social Relationships Meet Artificial Social Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

With the recent advances of the Internet of Things, and the increasing accessibility of ubiquitous computing resources and mobile devices, the prevalence of rich media contents, and the ensuing social, economic, and cultural changes, computing technology and applications have evolved quickly over the past decade. They now go beyond personal computing, facilitating collaboration and social interactions in general, causing a quick proliferation of social relationships among IoT entities. The increasing number of these relationships and their heterogeneous social features have led to computing and communication bottlenecks that prevent the IoT network from taking advantage of these relationships to improve the offered services and customize the delivered content, known as relationship explosion. On the other hand, the quick advances in artificial intelligence applications in social computing have led to the emerging of a promising research field known as Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) that has the potential to tackle the social relationship explosion problem. This paper discusses the role of IoT in social relationships detection and management, the problem of social relationships explosion in IoT and reviews the proposed solutions using ASI, including social-oriented machine-learning and deep-learning techniques.