OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
IAFA: Instance-aware Feature Aggregation for 3D Object Detection from a Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

3D object detection from a single image is an important task in Autonomous Driving (AD), where various approaches have been proposed. However, the task is intrinsically ambiguous and challenging as single image depth estimation is already an ill-posed problem. In this paper, we propose an instance-aware approach to aggregate useful information for improving the accuracy of 3D object detection with the following contributions. First, an instance-aware feature aggregation (IAFA) module is proposed to collect local and global features for 3D bounding boxes regression. Second, we empirically find that the spatial attention module can be well learned by taking coarse-level instance annotations as a supervision signal. The proposed module has significantly boosted the performance of the baseline method on both 3D detection and 2D bird-eye's view of vehicle detection among all three categories. Third, our proposed method outperforms all single image-based approaches (even these methods trained with depth as auxiliary inputs) and achieves state-of-the-art 3D detection performance on the KITTI benchmark.
Pilot Investigation for a Comprehensive Taxonomy of Autonomous Entities
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper documents an exploratory pilot study to define the term Autonomous Entity, and any characteristics that are required to identify or classify an Autonomous Entity. Our solution builds on previous work with regard to philosophical and scientific classification methods but focuses on a novel Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) and model to help identify those characteristics which make any autonomous entity similar or different from others. We have solved the problem of not having an existing term to define our lens by creating a new combinatorial term: "Riskyishness". We present a DSRM and instrument for initial investigation, as well as observational and statistical descriptions of their use in the real world to solicit domain expertise and statistical evidence. Further, we demonstrate a specific application of the methodology by creating a second artifact - a tool to score existing and future technologies based on Riskyishness. The first artifact also provides a technique to disentangle miscellaneous existing technologies or add dimensions to the tools to capture future additions and paradigm shifts.
Adaptive Gaussian Fuzzy Classifier for Real-Time Emotion Recognition in Computer Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Human emotion recognition has become a need for more realistic and interactive machines and computer systems. The greatest challenge is the availability of high-performance algorithms to effectively manage individual differences and nonstationarities in physiological data streams, i.e., algorithms that self-customize to a user with no subject-specific calibration data. We describe an evolving Gaussian Fuzzy Classifier (eGFC), which is supported by an online semi-supervised learning algorithm to recognize emotion patterns from electroencephalogram (EEG) data streams. We extract features from the Fourier spectrum of EEG data. The data are provided by 28 individuals playing the games 'Train Sim World', 'Unravel', 'Slender The Arrival', and 'Goat Simulator' - a public dataset. Different emotions prevail, namely, boredom, calmness, horror and joy. We analyze the effect of individual electrodes, time window lengths, and frequency bands on the accuracy of user-independent eGFCs. We conclude that both brain hemispheres may assist classification, especially electrodes on the frontal (Af3-Af4), occipital (O1-O2), and temporal (T7-T8) areas. We observe that patterns may be eventually found in any frequency band; however, the Alpha (8-13Hz), Delta (1-4Hz), and Theta (4-8Hz) bands, in this order, are the highest correlated with emotion classes. eGFC has shown to be effective for real-time learning of EEG data. It reaches a 72.2% accuracy using a variable rule base, 10-second windows, and 1.8ms/sample processing time in a highly-stochastic time-varying 4-class classification problem.
NPT-Loss: A Metric Loss with Implicit Mining for Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Face recognition (FR) using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) has seen remarkable success in recent years. One key ingredient of DCNN-based FR is the appropriate design of a loss function that ensures discrimination between various identities. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) solutions utilise normalised Softmax loss with additive and/or multiplicative margins. Despite being popular, these Softmax+margin based losses are not theoretically motivated and the effectiveness of a margin is justified only intuitively. In this work, we utilise an alternative framework that offers a more direct mechanism of achieving discrimination among the features of various identities. We propose a novel loss that is equivalent to a triplet loss with proxies and an implicit mechanism of hard-negative mining. We give theoretical justification that minimising the proposed loss ensures a minimum separability between all identities. The proposed loss is simple to implement and does not require heavy hyper-parameter tuning as in the SOTA solutions. We give empirical evidence that despite its simplicity, the proposed loss consistently achieves SOTA performance in various benchmarks for both high-resolution and low-resolution FR tasks.
Interactively Constructing Knowledge Graphs from Messy User-Generated Spreadsheets
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

When spreadsheets are filled freely by knowledge workers, they can contain rather unstructured content. For humans and especially machines it becomes difficult to interpret such data properly. Therefore, spreadsheets are often converted to a more explicit, formal and structured form, for example, to a knowledge graph. However, if a data maintenance strategy has been missing and user-generated data becomes "messy", the construction of knowledge graphs will be a challenging task. In this paper, we catalog several of those challenges and propose an interactive approach to solve them. Our approach includes a graphical user interface which enables knowledge engineers to bulk-annotate spreadsheet cells with extracted information. Based on the cells' annotations a knowledge graph is ultimately formed. Using five spreadsheets from an industrial scenario, we built a 25k-triple graph during our evaluation. We compared our method with the state-of-the-art RDF Mapping Language (RML) attempt. The comparison highlights contributions of our approach.
WordBias: An Interactive Visual Tool for Discovering Intersectional Biases Encoded in Word Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Intersectional bias is a bias caused by an overlap of multiple social factors like gender, sexuality, race, disability, religion, etc. A recent study has shown that word embedding models can be laden with biases against intersectional groups like African American females, etc. The first step towards tackling such intersectional biases is to identify them. However, discovering biases against different intersectional groups remains a challenging task. In this work, we present WordBias, an interactive visual tool designed to explore biases against intersectional groups encoded in static word embeddings. Given a pretrained static word embedding, WordBias computes the association of each word along different groups based on race, age, etc. and then visualizes them using a novel interactive interface. Using a case study, we demonstrate how WordBias can help uncover biases against intersectional groups like Black Muslim Males, Poor Females, etc. encoded in word embedding. In addition, we also evaluate our tool using qualitative feedback from expert interviews. The source code for this tool can be publicly accessed for reproducibility at github.com/bhavyaghai/WordBias.
Democratic Forking: Choosing Sides with Social Choice
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

Any community in which membership is optional may eventually break apart, or fork. For example, forks may occur in political parties, business partnerships, social groups, cryptocurrencies, and federated governing bodies. Forking is typically the product of informal social processes or the organized action of an aggrieved minority, and it is not always amicable. Forks usually come at a cost, and can be seen as consequences of collective decisions that destabilize the community. Here, we provide a social choice setting in which agents can report preferences not only over a set of alternatives, but also over the possible forks that may occur in the face of disagreement. We study this social choice setting, concentrating on stability issues and concerns of strategic agent behavior.
GraphMineSuite: Enabling High-Performance and Programmable Graph Mining Algorithms with Set Algebra
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

We propose GraphMineSuite (GMS): the first benchmarking suite for graph mining that facilitates evaluating and constructing high-performance graph mining algorithms. First, GMS comes with a benchmark specification based on extensive literature review, prescribing representative problems, algorithms, and datasets. Second, GMS offers a carefully designed software platform for seamless testing of different fine-grained elements of graph mining algorithms, such as graph representations or algorithm subroutines. The platform includes parallel implementations of more than 40 considered baselines, and it facilitates developing complex and fast mining algorithms. High modularity is possible by harnessing set algebra operations such as set intersection and difference, which enables breaking complex graph mining algorithms into simple building blocks that can be separately experimented with. GMS is supported with a broad concurrency analysis for portability in performance insights, and a novel performance metric to assess the throughput of graph mining algorithms, enabling more insightful evaluation. As use cases, we harness GMS to rapidly redesign and accelerate state-of-the-art baselines of core graph mining problems: degeneracy reordering (by up to >2x), maximal clique listing (by up to >9x), k-clique listing (by 1.1x), and subgraph isomorphism (by up to 2.5x), also obtaining better theoretical performance bounds.
Addressing Research Software Sustainability via Institutes
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Research software is essential to modern research, but it requires ongoing human effort to sustain: to continually adapt to changes in dependencies, to fix bugs, and to add new features. Software sustainability institutes, amongst others, develop, maintain, and disseminate best practices for research software sustainability, and build community around them. These practices can both reduce the amount of effort that is needed and create an environment where the effort is appreciated and rewarded. The UK SSI is such an institute, and the US URSSI and the Australian AuSSI are planning to become institutes, and this extended abstract discusses them and the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.
Using Dual-Network Analyser for extracting communities from Dual Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

The representation of data and its relationships using networks is prevalent in many research fields such as computational biology, medical informatics and social networks. Recently, complex networks models have been introduced to better capture the insights of the modelled scenarios. Among others, dual networks -based models have been introduced, which consist in mapping information as pair of networks containing the same nodes but different edges. We focus on the use of a novel approach to visualise and analyse dual networks. The method uses two algorithms for community discovery, and it is provided as a Python-based tool with a graphical user interface. The tool is able to load dual networks and to extract both the densest connected subgraph as well as the common modular communities. The latter is obtained by using an adapted implementation of the Louvain algorithm. The proposed algorithm and graphical tool have been tested by using social, biological, and co-authorship networks. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach is efficient and is able to extract meaningful information from dual networks. Finally, as contribution, the proposed graphical user interface can be considered a valuable innovation to the context.
Online Graph Learning under Smoothness Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The growing success of graph signal processing (GSP) approaches relies heavily on prior identification of a graph over which network data admit certain regularity. However, adaptation to increasingly dynamic environments as well as demands for real-time processing of streaming data pose major challenges to this end. In this context, we develop novel algorithms for online network topology inference given streaming observations assumed to be smooth on the sought graph. Unlike existing batch algorithms, our goal is to track the (possibly) time-varying network topology while maintaining the memory and computational costs in check by processing graph signals sequentially-in-time. To recover the graph in an online fashion, we leverage proximal gradient (PG) methods to solve a judicious smoothness-regularized, time-varying optimization problem. Under mild technical conditions, we establish that the online graph learning algorithm converges to within a neighborhood of (i.e., it tracks) the optimal time-varying batch solution. Computer simulations using both synthetic and real financial market data illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in adapting to streaming signals to track slowly-varying network connectivity.
A Geometric Algebra Solution to Wahba's Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

We retrace Davenport's solution to Wahba's classic problem of aligning two pointclouds using the formalism of Geometric Algebra (GA). GA proves to be a natural backdrop for this problem involving three-dimensional rotations due to the isomorphism between unit-length quaternions and rotors. While the solution to this problem is not a new result, it is hoped that its treatment in GA will have tutorial value as well as open the door to addressing more complex problems in a similar way.
There Once Was a Really Bad Poet, It Was Automated but You Didn't Know It
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Limerick generation exemplifies some of the most difficult challenges faced in poetry generation, as the poems must tell a story in only five lines, with constraints on rhyme, stress, and meter. To address these challenges, we introduce LimGen, a novel and fully automated system for limerick generation that outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based poetry models, as well as prior rule-based poetry models. LimGen consists of three important pieces: the Adaptive Multi-Templated Constraint algorithm that constrains our search to the space of realistic poems, the Multi-Templated Beam Search algorithm which searches efficiently through the space, and the probabilistic Storyline algorithm that provides coherent storylines related to a user-provided prompt word. The resulting limericks satisfy poetic constraints and have thematically coherent storylines, which are sometimes even funny (when we are lucky).
Training a First-Order Theorem Prover from Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

A major challenge in applying machine learning to automated theorem proving is the scarcity of training data, which is a key ingredient in training successful deep learning models. To tackle this problem, we propose an approach that relies on training purely with synthetically generated theorems, without any human data aside from axioms. We use these theorems to train a neurally-guided saturation-based prover. Our neural prover outperforms the state-of-the-art E-prover on this synthetic data in both time and search steps, and shows significant transfer to the unseen human-written theorems from the TPTP library, where it solves 72\% of first-order problems without equality.
Fast Interactive Video Object Segmentation with Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Pixelwise annotation of image sequences can be very tedious for humans. Interactive video object segmentation aims to utilize automatic methods to speed up the process and reduce the workload of the annotators. Most contemporary approaches rely on deep convolutional networks to collect and process information from human annotations throughout the video. However, such networks contain millions of parameters and need huge amounts of labeled training data to avoid overfitting. Beyond that, label propagation is usually executed as a series of frame-by-frame inference steps, which is difficult to be parallelized and is thus time consuming. In this paper we present a graph neural network based approach for tackling the problem of interactive video object segmentation. Our network operates on superpixel-graphs which allow us to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by several magnitudes. We show, that our network possessing only a few thousand parameters is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance, while inference remains fast and can be trained quickly with very little data.
Genetic Algorithm based hyper-parameters optimization for transfer Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Hyperparameter optimization is a challenging problem in developing deep neural networks. Decision of transfer layers and trainable layers is a major task for design of the transfer convolutional neural networks (CNN). Conventional transfer CNN models are usually manually designed based on intuition. In this paper, a genetic algorithm is applied to select trainable layers of the transfer model. The filter criterion is constructed by accuracy and the counts of the trainable layers. The results show that the method is competent in this task. The system will converge with a precision of 97% in the classification of Cats and Dogs datasets, in no more than 15 generations. Moreover, backward inference according the results of the genetic algorithm shows that our method can capture the gradient features in network layers, which plays a part on understanding of the transfer AI models.
Fast On-Device Adaptation for Spiking Neural Networks via Online-Within-Online Meta-Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have recently gained popularity as machine learning models for on-device edge intelligence for applications such as mobile healthcare management and natural language processing due to their low power profile. In such highly personalized use cases, it is important for the model to be able to adapt to the unique features of an individual with only a minimal amount of training data. Meta-learning has been proposed as a way to train models that are geared towards quick adaptation to new tasks. The few existing meta-learning solutions for SNNs operate offline and require some form of backpropagation that is incompatible with the current neuromorphic edge-devices. In this paper, we propose an online-within-online meta-learning rule for SNNs termed OWOML-SNN, that enables lifelong learning on a stream of tasks, and relies on local, backprop-free, nested updates.
Logical foundations: Personal perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

This is an attempt to illustrate the glorious history of logical foundations and to discuss the uncertain future.
Pufferfish: Communication-efficient Models At No Extra Cost
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

To mitigate communication overheads in distributed model training, several studies propose the use of compressed stochastic gradients, usually achieved by sparsification or quantization. Such techniques achieve high compression ratios, but in many cases incur either significant computational overheads or some accuracy loss. In this work, we present Pufferfish, a communication and computation efficient distributed training framework that incorporates the gradient compression into the model training process via training low-rank, pre-factorized deep networks. Pufferfish not only reduces communication, but also completely bypasses any computation overheads related to compression, and achieves the same accuracy as state-of-the-art, off-the-shelf deep models. Pufferfish can be directly integrated into current deep learning frameworks with minimum implementation modification. Our extensive experiments over real distributed setups, across a variety of large-scale machine learning tasks, indicate that Pufferfish achieves up to 1.64x end-to-end speedup over the latest distributed training API in PyTorch without accuracy loss. Compared to the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis models, Pufferfish leads to equally accurate, small-parameter models while avoiding the burden of "winning the lottery". Pufferfish also leads to more accurate and smaller models than SOTA structured model pruning methods.
NF-GNN: Network Flow Graph Neural Networks for Malware Detection and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Malicious software (malware) poses an increasing threat to the security of communication systems as the number of interconnected mobile devices increases exponentially. While some existing malware detection and classification approaches successfully leverage network traffic data, they treat network flows between pairs of endpoints independently and thus fail to leverage rich communication patterns present in the complete network. Our approach first extracts flow graphs and subsequently classifies them using a novel edge feature-based graph neural network model. We present three variants of our base model, which support malware detection and classification in supervised and unsupervised settings. We evaluate our approach on flow graphs that we extract from a recently published dataset for mobile malware detection that addresses several issues with previously available datasets. Experiments on four different prediction tasks consistently demonstrate the advantages of our approach and show that our graph neural network model can boost detection performance by a significant margin.
Quartermaster: A Tool for Modeling and Simulating System Degradation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

It is essential that software systems be tolerant to degradations in components they rely on. There are patterns and techniques which software engineers use to ensure their systems gracefully degrade. Despite these techniques being available in practice, tuning and configuration is hard to get right and it is expensive to explore possible changes to components and techniques in complex systems. To fill these gaps, we propose Quartermaster to model and simulate systems and fault-tolerant techniques. We anticipate that Quartermaster will be useful to further research on graceful degradation and help inform software engineers about techniques that are most appropriate for their use cases.
Convolution Neural Network Hyperparameter Optimization Using Simplified Swarm Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely used in image recognition. Numerous CNN models, such as LeNet, AlexNet, VGG, ResNet, and GoogLeNet, have been proposed by increasing the number of layers, to improve the performance of CNNs. However, performance deteriorates beyond a certain number of layers. Hence, hyperparameter optimisation is a more efficient way to improve CNNs. To validate this concept, a new algorithm based on simplified swarm optimisation is proposed to optimise the hyperparameters of the simplest CNN model, which is LeNet. The results of experiments conducted on the MNIST, Fashion MNIST, and Cifar10 datasets showed that the accuracy of the proposed algorithm is higher than the original LeNet model and PSO-LeNet and that it has a high potential to be extended to more complicated models, such as AlexNet.