OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Algebraic and Geometric Characterizations Related to the Quantization Problem of the $C_{2,8}$ Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we consider the steps to be followed in the analysis and interpretation of the quantization problem related to the $C_{2,8}$ channel, where the Fuchsian differential equations, the generators of the Fuchsian groups, and the tessellations associated with the cases $g=2$ and $g=3$, related to the hyperbolic case, are determined. In order to obtain these results, it is necessary to determine the genus $g$ of each surface on which this channel may be embedded. After that, the procedure is to determine the algebraic structure (Fuchsian group generators) associated with the fundamental region of each surface. To achieve this goal, an associated linear second-order Fuchsian differential equation whose linearly independent solutions provide the generators of this Fuchsian group is devised. In addition, the tessellations associated with each analyzed case are identified. These structures are identified in four situations, divided into two cases $(g=2$ and $g=3)$, obtaining, therefore, both algebraic and geometric characterizations associated with quantizing the $C_{2,8}$ channel.
An Approximation Theory for Metric Space-Valued Functions With A View Towards Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Motivated by the developing mathematics of deep learning, we build universal functions approximators of continuous maps between arbitrary Polish metric spaces $\mathcal{X}$ and $\mathcal{Y}$ using elementary functions between Euclidean spaces as building blocks. Earlier results assume that the target space $\mathcal{Y}$ is a topological vector space. We overcome this limitation by ``randomization'': our approximators output discrete probability measures over $\mathcal{Y}$. When $\mathcal{X}$ and $\mathcal{Y}$ are Polish without additional structure, we prove very general qualitative guarantees; when they have suitable combinatorial structure, we prove quantitative guarantees for Hölder-like maps, including maps between finite graphs, solution operators to rough differential equations between certain Carnot groups, and continuous non-linear operators between Banach spaces arising in inverse problems. In particular, we show that the required number of Dirac measures is determined by the combinatorial structure of $\mathcal{X}$ and $\mathcal{Y}$. For barycentric $\mathcal{Y}$, including Banach spaces, $\mathbb{R}$-trees, Hadamard manifolds, or Wasserstein spaces on Polish metric spaces, our approximators reduce to $\mathcal{Y}$-valued functions. When the Euclidean approximators are neural networks, our constructions generalize transformer networks, providing a new probabilistic viewpoint of geometric deep learning.
MAC, a novel stochastic optimization method
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

A novel stochastic optimization method called MAC was suggested. The method is based on the calculation of the objective function at several random points and then an empirical expected value and an empirical covariance matrix are calculated. The empirical expected value is proven to converge to the optimum value of the problem. The MAC algorithm was encoded in Matlab and the code was tested on 20 test problems. Its performance was compared with those of the interior point method (Matlab name: fmincon), simplex, pattern search (PS), simulated annealing (SA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and genetic algorithm (GA) methods. The MAC method failed two test functions and provided inaccurate results on four other test functions. However, it provided accurate results and required much less CPU time than the widely used optimization methods on the other 14 test functions.
Enriching Source Code with Contextual Data for Code Completion Models: An Empirical Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Transformer-based pre-trained models have recently achieved great results in solving many software engineering tasks including automatic code completion which is a staple in a developer's toolkit. While many have striven to improve the code-understanding abilities of such models, the opposite -- making the code easier to understand -- has not been properly investigated. In this study, we aim to answer whether making code easier to understand through using contextual data improves the performance of pre-trained code language models for the task of code completion. We consider type annotations and comments as two common forms of additional contextual information that often help developers understand code better. For the experiments, we study code completion in two granularity levels; token and line completion and take three recent and large-scale language models for source code: UniXcoder, CodeGPT, and InCoder with five evaluation metrics. Finally, we perform the Wilcoxon Signed Rank test to gauge significance and measure the effect size. Contrary to our expectations, all models perform better if type annotations are removed (albeit the effect sizes are small). For comments, we find that the models perform better in the presence of multi-line comments (again with small effect sizes). Based on our observations, we recommend making proper design choices when training, fine-tuning, or simply selecting such models given the intended data and application. Better evaluations and multi-modal techniques can also be further investigated to improve the practicality and accuracy of auto-completions.
Parallel bootstrap-based on-policy deep reinforcement learning for continuous flow control applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The coupling of deep reinforcement learning to numerical flow control problems has recently received a considerable attention, leading to groundbreaking results and opening new perspectives for the domain. Due to the usually high computational cost of fluid dynamics solvers, the use of parallel environments during the learning process represents an essential ingredient to attain efficient control in a reasonable time. Yet, most of the deep reinforcement learning literature for flow control relies on on-policy algorithms, for which the massively parallel transition collection may break theoretical assumptions and lead to suboptimal control models. To overcome this issue, we propose a parallelism pattern relying on partial-trajectory buffers terminated by a return bootstrapping step, allowing a flexible use of parallel environments while preserving the on-policiness of the updates. This approach is illustrated on a CPU-intensive continuous flow control problem from the literature.
Neuroevolution of Recurrent Architectures on Control Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Modern artificial intelligence works typically train the parameters of fixed-sized deep neural networks using gradient-based optimization techniques. Simple evolutionary algorithms have recently been shown to also be capable of optimizing deep neural network parameters, at times matching the performance of gradient-based techniques, e.g. in reinforcement learning settings. In addition to optimizing network parameters, many evolutionary computation techniques are also capable of progressively constructing network architectures. However, constructing network architectures from elementary evolution rules has not yet been shown to scale to modern reinforcement learning benchmarks. In this paper we therefore propose a new approach in which the architectures of recurrent neural networks dynamically evolve according to a small set of mutation rules. We implement a massively parallel evolutionary algorithm and run experiments on all 19 OpenAI Gym state-based reinforcement learning control tasks. We find that in most cases, dynamic agents match or exceed the performance of gradient-based agents while utilizing orders of magnitude fewer parameters. We believe our work to open avenues for real-life applications where network compactness and autonomous design are of critical importance. We provide our source code, final model checkpoints and full results at github.com/MaximilienLC/nra.
Unsupervised Style-based Explicit 3D Face Reconstruction from Single Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Inferring 3D object structures from a single image is an ill-posed task due to depth ambiguity and occlusion. Typical resolutions in the literature include leveraging 2D or 3D ground truth for supervised learning, as well as imposing hand-crafted symmetry priors or using an implicit representation to hallucinate novel viewpoints for unsupervised methods. In this work, we propose a general adversarial learning framework for solving Unsupervised 2D to Explicit 3D Style Transfer (UE3DST). Specifically, we merge two architectures: the unsupervised explicit 3D reconstruction network of Wu et al.\ and the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) named StarGAN-v2. We experiment across three facial datasets (Basel Face Model, 3DFAW and CelebA-HQ) and show that our solution is able to outperform well established solutions such as DepthNet in 3D reconstruction and Pix2NeRF in conditional style transfer, while we also justify the individual contributions of our model components via ablation. In contrast to the aforementioned baselines, our scheme produces features for explicit 3D rendering, which can be manipulated and utilized in downstream tasks.
Deterministic Identification For MC Binomial Channel
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The Binomial channel serves as a fundamental model for molecular communication (MC) systems employing molecule-counting receivers. Here, deterministic identification (DI) is addressed for the discrete-time Binomial channels (DTBC), subject to an average and a peak constraint on the molecule release rate. We establish that the number of different messages that can be reliably identified for the DTBC scales as $2^{(n\log n)R}$, where $n$ and $R$ are the codeword length and coding rate, respectively. Lower and upper bounds on the DI capacity of the DTBC are developed.
Img2Vec: A Teacher of High Token-Diversity Helps Masked AutoEncoders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present a pipeline of Image to Vector (Img2Vec) for masked image modeling (MIM) with deep features. To study which type of deep features is appropriate for MIM as a learning target, we propose a simple MIM framework with serials of well-trained self-supervised models to convert an Image to a feature Vector as the learning target of MIM, where the feature extractor is also known as a teacher model. Surprisingly, we empirically find that an MIM model benefits more from image features generated by some lighter models (e.g., ResNet-50, 26M) than from those by a cumbersome teacher like Transformer-based models (e.g., ViT-Large, 307M). To analyze this remarkable phenomenon, we devise a novel attribute, token diversity, to evaluate the characteristics of generated features from different models. Token diversity measures the feature dissimilarity among different tokens. Through extensive experiments and visualizations, we hypothesize that beyond the acknowledgment that a large model can improve MIM, a high token-diversity of a teacher model is also crucial. Based on the above discussion, Img2Vec adopts a teacher model with high token-diversity to generate image features. Img2Vec pre-trained on ImageNet unlabeled data with ViT-B yields 85.1\% top-1 accuracy on fine-tuning. Moreover, we scale up Img2Vec on larger models, ViT-L and ViT-H, and get $86.7\%$ and $87.5\%$ accuracy respectively. It also achieves state-of-the-art results on other downstream tasks, e.g., 51.8\% mAP on COCO and 50.7\% mIoU on ADE20K. Img2Vec is a simple yet effective framework tailored to deep feature MIM learning, accomplishing superb comprehensive performance on representative vision tasks.
GARCIA: Powering Representations of Long-tail Query with Multi-granularity Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, the growth of service platforms brings great convenience to both users and merchants, where the service search engine plays a vital role in improving the user experience by quickly obtaining desirable results via textual queries. Unfortunately, users' uncontrollable search customs usually bring vast amounts of long-tail queries, which severely threaten the capability of search models. Inspired by recently emerging graph neural networks (GNNs) and contrastive learning (CL), several efforts have been made in alleviating the long-tail issue and achieve considerable performance. Nevertheless, they still face a few major weaknesses. Most importantly, they do not explicitly utilize the contextual structure between heads and tails for effective knowledge transfer, and intention-level information is commonly ignored for more generalized representations. To this end, we develop a novel framework GARCIA, which exploits the graph based knowledge transfer and intention based representation generalization in a contrastive setting. In particular, we employ an adaptive encoder to produce informative representations for queries and services, as well as hierarchical structure aware representations of intentions. To fully understand tail queries and services, we equip GARCIA with a novel multi-granularity contrastive learning module, which powers representations through knowledge transfer, structure enhancement and intention generalization. Subsequently, the complete GARCIA is well trained in a pre-training&fine-tuning manner. At last, we conduct extensive experiments on both offline and online environments, which demonstrates the superior capability of GARCIA in improving tail queries and overall performance in service search scenarios.
Fairness and Bias in Truth Discovery Algorithms: An Experimental Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Machine learning (ML) based approaches are increasingly being used in a number of applications with societal impact. Training ML models often require vast amounts of labeled data, and crowdsourcing is a dominant paradigm for obtaining labels from multiple workers. Crowd workers may sometimes provide unreliable labels, and to address this, truth discovery (TD) algorithms such as majority voting are applied to determine the consensus labels from conflicting worker responses. However, it is important to note that these consensus labels may still be biased based on sensitive attributes such as gender, race, or political affiliation. Even when sensitive attributes are not involved, the labels can be biased due to different perspectives of subjective aspects such as toxicity. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study of the bias and fairness of TD algorithms. Our findings using two existing crowd-labeled datasets, reveal that a non-trivial proportion of workers provide biased results, and using simple approaches for TD is sub-optimal. Our study also demonstrates that popular TD algorithms are not a panacea. Additionally, we quantify the impact of these unfair workers on downstream ML tasks and show that conventional methods for achieving fairness and correcting label biases are ineffective in this setting. We end the paper with a plea for the design of novel bias-aware truth discovery algorithms that can ameliorate these issues.
Shape-Net: Room Layout Estimation from Panoramic Images Robust to Occlusion using Knowledge Distillation with 3D Shapes as Additional Inputs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Estimating the layout of a room from a single-shot panoramic image is important in virtual/augmented reality and furniture layout simulation. This involves identifying three-dimensional (3D) geometry, such as the location of corners and boundaries, and performing 3D reconstruction. However, occlusion is a common issue that can negatively impact room layout estimation, and this has not been thoroughly studied to date. It is possible to obtain 3D shape information of rooms as drawings of buildings and coordinates of corners from image datasets, thus we propose providing both 2D panoramic and 3D information to a model to effectively deal with occlusion. However, simply feeding 3D information to a model is not sufficient to utilize the shape information for an occluded area. Therefore, we improve the model by introducing 3D Intersection over Union (IoU) loss to effectively use 3D information. In some cases, drawings are not available or the construction deviates from a drawing. Considering such practical cases, we propose a method for distilling knowledge from a model trained with both images and 3D information to a model that takes only images as input. The proposed model, which is called Shape-Net, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on benchmark datasets. We also confirmed its effectiveness in dealing with occlusion through significantly improved accuracy on images with occlusion compared with existing models.
LMSFC: A Novel Multidimensional Index based on Learned Monotonic Space Filling Curves
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

The recently proposed learned indexes have attracted much attention as they can adapt to the actual data and query distributions to attain better search efficiency. Based on this technique, several existing works build up indexes for multi-dimensional data and achieve improved query performance. A common paradigm of these works is to (i) map multi-dimensional data points to a one-dimensional space using a fixed space-filling curve (SFC) or its variant and (ii) then apply the learned indexing techniques. We notice that the first step typically uses a fixed SFC method, such as row-major order and z-order. It definitely limits the potential of learned multi-dimensional indexes to adapt variable data distributions via different query workloads. In this paper, we propose a novel idea of learning a space-filling curve that is carefully designed and actively optimized for efficient query processing. We also identify innovative offline and online optimization opportunities common to SFC-based learned indexes and offer optimal and/or heuristic solutions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method, LMSFC, outperforms state-of-the-art non-learned or learned methods across three commonly used real-world datasets and diverse experimental settings.
A Practical Algorithm for Max-Norm Optimal Binary Labeling of Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2023
Year: 2023

This paper concerns the efficient implementation of a method for optimal binary labeling of graph vertices, originally proposed by Malmberg and Ciesielski (2020). This method finds, in quadratic time with respect to graph size, a labeling that globally minimizes an objective function based on the $L_\infty$-norm. The method enables global optimization for a novel class of optimization problems, with high relevance in application areas such as image processing and computer vision. In the original formulation, the Malmberg-Ciesielski algorithm is unfortunately very computationally expensive, limiting its utility in practical applications. Here, we present a modified version of the algorithm that exploits redundancies in the original method to reduce computation time. While our proposed method has the same theoretical asymptotic time complexity, we demonstrate that is substantially more efficient in practice. Even for small problems, we observe a speedup of 4-5 orders of magnitude. This reduction in computation time makes the Malmberg-Ciesielski method a viable option for many practical applications.
THUIR at WSDM Cup 2023 Task 1: Unbiased Learning to Rank
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper introduces the approaches we have used to participate in the WSDM Cup 2023 Task 1: Unbiased Learning to Rank. In brief, we have attempted a combination of both traditional IR models and transformer-based cross-encoder architectures. To further enhance the ranking performance, we also considered a series of features for learning to rank. As a result, we won 2nd place on the final leaderboard.
Social media in the Global South: A Network Dataset of the Malian Twittersphere
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

With the expansion of mobile communications infrastructure, social media usage in the Global South is surging. Compared to the Global North, populations of the Global South have had less prior experience with social media from stationary computers and wired Internet. Many countries are experiencing violent conflicts that have a profound effect on their societies. As a result, social networks develop under different conditions than elsewhere, and our goal is to provide data for studying this phenomenon. In this dataset paper, we present a data collection of a national Twittersphere in a West African country of conflict. While not the largest social network in terms of users, Twitter is an important platform where people engage in public discussion. The focus is on Mali, a country beset by conflict since 2012 that has recently had a relatively precarious media ecology. The dataset consists of tweets and Twitter users in Mali and was collected in June 2022, when the Malian conflict became more violent internally both towards external and international actors. In a preliminary analysis, we assume that the conflictual context influences how people access social media and, therefore, the shape of the Twittersphere and its characteristics. The aim of this paper is to primarily invite researchers from various disciplines including complex networks and social sciences scholars to explore the data at hand further. We collected the dataset using a scraping strategy of the follower network and the identification of characteristics of a Malian Twitter user. The given snapshot of the Malian Twitter follower network contains around seven million accounts, of which 56,000 are clearly identifiable as Malian. In addition, we present the tweets. The dataset is available at: https://osf.io/mj2qt/
Compressing Sentence Representation with maximum Coding Rate Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In most natural language inference problems, sentence representation is needed for semantic retrieval tasks. In recent years, pre-trained large language models have been quite effective for computing such representations. These models produce high-dimensional sentence embeddings. An evident performance gap between large and small models exists in practice. Hence, due to space and time hardware limitations, there is a need to attain comparable results when using the smaller model, which is usually a distilled version of the large language model. In this paper, we assess the model distillation of the sentence representation model Sentence-BERT by augmenting the pre-trained distilled model with a projection layer additionally learned on the Maximum Coding Rate Reduction (MCR2)objective, a novel approach developed for general-purpose manifold clustering. We demonstrate that the new language model with reduced complexity and sentence embedding size can achieve comparable results on semantic retrieval benchmarks.