OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Quality-Based Conditional Processing in Multi-Biometrics: Application to Sensor Interoperability
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

As biometric technology is increasingly deployed, it will be common to replace parts of operational systems with newer designs. The cost and inconvenience of reacquiring enrolled users when a new vendor solution is incorporated makes this approach difficult and many applications will require to deal with information from different sources regularly. These interoperability problems can dramatically affect the performance of biometric systems and thus, they need to be overcome. Here, we describe and evaluate the ATVS-UAM fusion approach submitted to the quality-based evaluation of the 2007 BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation Campaign, whose aim was to compare fusion algorithms when biometric signals were generated using several biometric devices in mismatched conditions. Quality measures from the raw biometric data are available to allow system adjustment to changing quality conditions due to device changes. This system adjustment is referred to as quality-based conditional processing. The proposed fusion approach is based on linear logistic regression, in which fused scores tend to be log-likelihood-ratios. This allows the easy and efficient combination of matching scores from different devices assuming low dependence among modalities. In our system, quality information is used to switch between different system modules depending on the data source (the sensor in our case) and to reject channels with low quality data during the fusion. We compare our fusion approach to a set of rule-based fusion schemes over normalized scores. Results show that the proposed approach outperforms all the rule-based fusion schemes. We also show that with the quality-based channel rejection scheme, an overall improvement of 25% in the equal error rate is obtained.
How "open" are the conversations with open-domain chatbots? A proposal for Speech Event based evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Open-domain chatbots are supposed to converse freely with humans without being restricted to a topic, task or domain. However, the boundaries and/or contents of open-domain conversations are not clear. To clarify the boundaries of "openness", we conduct two studies: First, we classify the types of "speech events" encountered in a chatbot evaluation data set (i.e., Meena by Google) and find that these conversations mainly cover the "small talk" category and exclude the other speech event categories encountered in real life human-human communication. Second, we conduct a small-scale pilot study to generate online conversations covering a wider range of speech event categories between two humans vs. a human and a state-of-the-art chatbot (i.e., Blender by Facebook). A human evaluation of these generated conversations indicates a preference for human-human conversations, since the human-chatbot conversations lack coherence in most speech event categories. Based on these results, we suggest (a) using the term "small talk" instead of "open-domain" for the current chatbots which are not that "open" in terms of conversational abilities yet, and (b) revising the evaluation methods to test the chatbot conversations against other speech events.
The Westermo test results data set
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

There is a growing body of knowledge in the computer science, software engineering, software testing and software test automation disciplines. However, there is a challenge for researchers to evaluate their research findings, innovations and tools due to lack of realistic data. This paper presents the Westermo test results data set, more than one million verdicts from testing of embedded systems, from more than five hundred consecutive days of nightly testing. The data also contains information on code changes in both the software under test and the test framework used for testing. This data set can support the research community in particular with respect to the regression test selection problem, flaky tests, test results visualization, etc.
CasFusionNet: A Cascaded Network for Point Cloud Semantic Scene Completion by Dense Feature Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Semantic scene completion (SSC) aims to complete a partial 3D scene and predict its semantics simultaneously. Most existing works adopt the voxel representations, thus suffering from the growth of memory and computation cost as the voxel resolution increases. Though a few works attempt to solve SSC from the perspective of 3D point clouds, they have not fully exploited the correlation and complementarity between the two tasks of scene completion and semantic segmentation. In our work, we present CasFusionNet, a novel cascaded network for point cloud semantic scene completion by dense feature fusion. Specifically, we design (i) a global completion module (GCM) to produce an upsampled and completed but coarse point set, (ii) a semantic segmentation module (SSM) to predict the per-point semantic labels of the completed points generated by GCM, and (iii) a local refinement module (LRM) to further refine the coarse completed points and the associated labels from a local perspective. We organize the above three modules via dense feature fusion in each level, and cascade a total of four levels, where we also employ feature fusion between each level for sufficient information usage. Both quantitative and qualitative results on our compiled two point-based datasets validate the effectiveness and superiority of our CasFusionNet compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of both scene completion and semantic segmentation. The codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/JinfengX/CasFusionNet.
Question Answering and Question Generation for Finnish
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent advances in the field of language modeling have improved the state-of-the-art in question answering (QA) and question generation (QG). However, the development of modern neural models, their benchmarks, and datasets for training them has mainly focused on English. Finnish, like many other languages, faces a shortage of large QA/QG model training resources, which has prevented experimenting with state-of-the-art QA/QG fine-tuning methods. We present the first neural QA and QG models that work with Finnish. To train the models, we automatically translate the SQuAD dataset and then use normalization methods to reduce the amount of problematic data created during the translation. Using the synthetic data, together with the Finnish partition of the TyDi-QA dataset, we fine-tune several transformer-based models to both QA and QG and evaluate their performance. To the best of our knowledge, the resulting dataset is the first large-scale QA/QG resource for Finnish. This paper also sets the initial benchmarks for Finnish-language QA and QG.
Using Selective Masking as a Bridge between Pre-training and Fine-tuning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Pre-training a language model and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has demonstrated state-of-the-art results for various NLP tasks. Pre-training is usually independent of the downstream task, and previous works have shown that this pre-training alone might not be sufficient to capture the task-specific nuances. We propose a way to tailor a pre-trained BERT model for the downstream task via task-specific masking before the standard supervised fine-tuning. For this, a word list is first collected specific to the task. For example, if the task is sentiment classification, we collect a small sample of words representing both positive and negative sentiments. Next, a word's importance for the task, called the word's task score, is measured using the word list. Each word is then assigned a probability of masking based on its task score. We experiment with different masking functions that assign the probability of masking based on the word's task score. The BERT model is further trained on MLM objective, where masking is done using the above strategy. Following this standard supervised fine-tuning is done for different downstream tasks. Results on these tasks show that the selective masking strategy outperforms random masking, indicating its effectiveness.
Joint segmentation and discontinuity-preserving deformable registration: Application to cardiac cine-MR images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Medical image registration is a challenging task involving the estimation of spatial transformations to establish anatomical correspondence between pairs or groups of images. Recently, deep learning-based image registration methods have been widely explored, and demonstrated to enable fast and accurate image registration in a variety of applications. However, most deep learning-based registration methods assume that the deformation fields are smooth and continuous everywhere in the image domain, which is not always true, especially when registering images whose fields of view contain discontinuities at tissue/organ boundaries. In such scenarios, enforcing smooth, globally continuous deformation fields leads to incorrect/implausible registration results. We propose a novel discontinuity-preserving image registration method to tackle this challenge, which ensures globally discontinuous and locally smooth deformation fields, leading to more accurate and realistic registration results. The proposed method leverages the complementary nature of image segmentation and registration and enables joint segmentation and pair-wise registration of images. A co-attention block is proposed in the segmentation component of the network to learn the structural correlations in the input images, while a discontinuity-preserving registration strategy is employed in the registration component of the network to ensure plausibility in the estimated deformation fields at tissue/organ interfaces. We evaluate our method on the task of intra-subject spatio-temporal image registration using large-scale cinematic cardiac magnetic resonance image sequences, and demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art for medical image registration, and produces high-quality segmentation masks for the regions of interest.
Adaptive Attention Link-based Regularization for Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Although transformer networks are recently employed in various vision tasks with outperforming performance, extensive training data and a lengthy training time are required to train a model to disregard an inductive bias. Using trainable links between the channel-wise spatial attention of a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the attention head of Vision Transformers (ViT), we present a regularization technique to improve the training efficiency of ViT. The trainable links are referred to as the attention augmentation module, which is trained simultaneously with ViT, boosting the training of ViT and allowing it to avoid the overfitting issue caused by a lack of data. From the trained attention augmentation module, we can extract the relevant relationship between each CNN activation map and each ViT attention head, and based on this, we also propose an advanced attention augmentation module. Consequently, even with a small amount of data, the suggested method considerably improves the performance of ViT while achieving faster convergence during training.
TPA-Net: Generate A Dataset for Text to Physics-based Animation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Recent breakthroughs in Vision-Language (V&L) joint research have achieved remarkable results in various text-driven tasks. High-quality Text-to-video (T2V), a task that has been long considered mission-impossible, was proven feasible with reasonably good results in latest works. However, the resulting videos often have undesired artifacts largely because the system is purely data-driven and agnostic to the physical laws. To tackle this issue and further push T2V towards high-level physical realism, we present an autonomous data generation technique and a dataset, which intend to narrow the gap with a large number of multi-modal, 3D Text-to-Video/Simulation (T2V/S) data. In the dataset, we provide high-resolution 3D physical simulations for both solids and fluids, along with textual descriptions of the physical phenomena. We take advantage of state-of-the-art physical simulation methods (i) Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) and (ii) Material Point Method (MPM) to simulate diverse scenarios, including elastic deformations, material fractures, collisions, turbulence, etc. Additionally, high-quality, multi-view rendering videos are supplied for the benefit of T2V, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), and other communities. This work is the first step towards fully automated Text-to-Video/Simulation (T2V/S). Live examples and subsequent work are at https://sites.google.com/view/tpa-net.
Comparison Study Between Token Classification and Sequence Classification In Text Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised Machine Learning techniques have been applied to Natural Language Processing tasks and surpasses the benchmarks such as GLUE with great success. Building language models approach achieves good results in one language and it can be applied to multiple NLP task such as classification, summarization, generation and etc as an out of box model. Among all the of the classical approaches used in NLP, the masked language modeling is the most used. In general, the only requirement to build a language model is presence of the large corpus of textual data. Text classification engines uses a variety of models from classical and state of art transformer models to classify texts for in order to save costs. Sequence Classifiers are mostly used in the domain of text classification. However Token classifiers also are viable candidate models as well. Sequence Classifiers and Token Classifier both tend to improve the classification predictions due to the capturing the context information differently. This work aims to compare the performance of Sequence Classifier and Token Classifiers and evaluate each model on the same set of data. In this work, we are using a pre-trained model as the base model and Token Classifier and Sequence Classier heads results of these two scoring paradigms with be compared..
TRAC: A Textual Benchmark for Reasoning about Actions and Change
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Reasoning about actions and change (RAC) is essential to understand and interact with the ever-changing environment. Previous AI research has shown the importance of fundamental and indispensable knowledge of actions, i.e., preconditions and effects. However, traditional methods rely on logical formalization which hinders practical applications. With recent transformer-based language models (LMs), reasoning over text is desirable and seemingly feasible, leading to the question of whether LMs can effectively and efficiently learn to solve RAC problems. We propose four essential RAC tasks as a comprehensive textual benchmark and generate problems in a way that minimizes the influence of other linguistic requirements (e.g., grounding) to focus on RAC. The resulting benchmark, TRAC, encompassing problems of various complexities, facilitates a more granular evaluation of LMs, precisely targeting the structural generalization ability much needed for RAC. Experiments with three high-performing transformers indicates that additional efforts are needed to tackle challenges raised by TRAC.
Enhanced Tracking and Beamforming Codebook Design for Wideband Terahertz Massive MIMO System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

True-time-delay (TTD) lines are recently applied inside Terahertz (THz) hybrid-precoding transceiver to acquire high beamforming gain against beam squint effect. However, beam tracking turns into a challenging puzzle where enormous potential beam directions bring about unacceptable overhead consumption. Frequency-scanning-based beam tracking is initially explored but still imperfect in previous studies. In this paper, based on TTD-aided hybrid precoding structure, we give an enhanced frequency-scanning-based tracking scheme. Multiple beams are generated and utilized simultaneously via several subcarriers for tracking at one timeslot. The squint beams' angular coverage at all subcarriers can be flexibly controlled by two different subcarrier-angular mapping policies, named forward-pairing and backward-pairing. Then multiple physical directions can be simultaneously searched in one timeslot for lower overhead consumption. Besides, closed-form searching radius bound, parameter configuration and interferences are theoretically analyzed. Furthermore, we provide the coupled codebook design for TTDs and phase shifters (PSs), with joint consideration of both beamforming and tracking. Analytical and numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the new frequency-scanning-based tracking scheme and beamforming codebook.
Efficient Incremental Text-to-Speech on GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Incremental text-to-speech, also known as streaming TTS, has been increasingly applied to online speech applications that require ultra-low response latency to provide an optimal user experience. However, most of the existing speech synthesis pipelines deployed on GPU are still non-incremental, which uncovers limitations in high-concurrency scenarios, especially when the pipeline is built with end-to-end neural network models. To address this issue, we present a highly efficient approach to perform real-time incremental TTS on GPUs with Instant Request Pooling and Module-wise Dynamic Batching. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of producing high-quality speech with a first-chunk latency lower than 80ms under 100 QPS on a single NVIDIA A10 GPU and significantly outperforms the non-incremental twin in both concurrency and latency. Our work reveals the effectiveness of high-performance incremental TTS on GPUs.
Video on Demand Streaming Using RL-based Edge Caching in 5G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Edge caching can significantly improve the 5G networks' performance both in terms of delay and backhaul traffic. We use a reinforcement learning-based (RL-based) caching technique that can adapt to time-location-dependent popularity patterns for on-demand video contents. In a private 5G, we implement the proposed caching scheme as two virtual network functions (VNFs), edge and remote servers, and measure the cache hit ratio as a KPI. Combined with the HLS protocol, the proposed video-on-demand (VoD) streaming is a reliable and scalable service that can adapt to content popularity.
FedGS: Federated Graph-based Sampling with Arbitrary Client Availability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

While federated learning has shown strong results in optimizing a machine learning model without direct access to the original data, its performance may be hindered by intermittent client availability which slows down the convergence and biases the final learned model. There are significant challenges to achieve both stable and bias-free training under arbitrary client availability. To address these challenges, we propose a framework named Federated Graph-based Sampling (FedGS), to stabilize the global model update and mitigate the long-term bias given arbitrary client availability simultaneously. First, we model the data correlations of clients with a Data-Distribution-Dependency Graph (3DG) that helps keep the sampled clients data apart from each other, which is theoretically shown to improve the approximation to the optimal model update. Second, constrained by the far-distance in data distribution of the sampled clients, we further minimize the variance of the numbers of times that the clients are sampled, to mitigate long-term bias. To validate the effectiveness of FedGS, we conduct experiments on three datasets under a comprehensive set of seven client availability modes. Our experimental results confirm FedGS's advantage in both enabling a fair client-sampling scheme and improving the model performance under arbitrary client availability. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/WwZzz/FedGS}.
Collection and Evaluation of a Long-Term 4D Agri-Robotic Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Long-term autonomy is one of the most demanded capabilities looked into a robot. The possibility to perform the same task over and over on a long temporal horizon, offering a high standard of reproducibility and robustness, is appealing. Long-term autonomy can play a crucial role in the adoption of robotics systems for precision agriculture, for example in assisting humans in monitoring and harvesting crops in a large orchard. With this scope in mind, we report an ongoing effort in the long-term deployment of an autonomous mobile robot in a vineyard for data collection across multiple months. The main aim is to collect data from the same area at different points in time so to be able to analyse the impact of the environmental changes in the mapping and localisation tasks. In this work, we present a map-based localisation study taking 4 data sessions. We identify expected failures when the pre-built map visually differs from the environment's current appearance and we anticipate LTS-Net, a solution pointed at extracting stable temporal features for improving long-term 4D localisation results.
Cross-network transferable neural models for WLAN interference estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Airtime interference is a key performance indicator for WLANs, measuring, for a given time period, the percentage of time during which a node is forced to wait for other transmissions before to transmitting or receiving. Being able to accurately estimate interference resulting from a given state change (e.g., channel, bandwidth, power) would allow a better control of WLAN resources, assessing the impact of a given configuration before actually implementing it. In this paper, we adopt a principled approach to interference estimation in WLANs. We first use real data to characterize the factors that impact it, and derive a set of relevant synthetic workloads for a controlled comparison of various deep learning architectures in terms of accuracy, generalization and robustness to outlier data. We find, unsurprisingly, that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) yield the best performance overall, leveraging the graph structure inherent to campus WLANs. We notice that, unlike e.g. LSTMs, they struggle to learn the behavior of specific nodes, unless given the node indexes in addition. We finally verify GCN model generalization capabilities, by applying trained models on operational deployments unseen at training time.
EDGAR: Embedded Detection of Gunshots by AI in Real-time
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Electronic shot counters allow armourers to perform preventive and predictive maintenance based on quantitative measurements, improving reliability, reducing the frequency of accidents, and reducing maintenance costs. To answer a market pressure for both low lead time to market and increased customisation, we aim to solve the shot detection and shot counting problem in a generic way through machine learning. In this study, we describe a method allowing one to construct a dataset with minimal labelling effort by only requiring the total number of shots fired in a time series. To our knowledge, this is the first study to propose a technique, based on learning from label proportions, that is able to exploit these weak labels to derive an instance-level classifier able to solve the counting problem and the more general discrimination problem. We also show that this technique can be deployed in heavily constrained microcontrollers while still providing hard real-time (<100ms) inference. We evaluate our technique against a state-of-the-art unsupervised algorithm and show a sizeable improvement, suggesting that the information from the weak labels is successfully leveraged. Finally, we evaluate our technique against human-generated state-of-the-art algorithms and show that it provides comparable performance and significantly outperforms them in some offline and real-world benchmarks.