OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adma: A Flexible Loss Function for Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Highly increased interest in Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have resulted in impressively wide-ranging improvements in its structure. In this work, we come up with the idea that instead of static plugins that the currently available loss functions are, they should by default be flexible in nature. A flexible loss function can be a more insightful navigator for neural networks leading to higher convergence rates and therefore reaching the optimum accuracy more quickly. The insights to help decide the degree of flexibility can be derived from the complexity of ANNs, the data distribution, selection of hyper-parameters and so on. In the wake of this, we introduce a novel flexible loss function for neural networks. The function is shown to characterize a range of fundamentally unique properties from which, much of the properties of other loss functions are only a subset and varying the flexibility parameter in the function allows it to emulate the loss curves and the learning behavior of prevalent static loss functions. The extensive experimentation performed with the loss function demonstrates that it is able to give state-of-the-art performance on selected data sets. Thus, in all the idea of flexibility itself and the proposed function built upon it carry the potential to open to a new interesting chapter in deep learning research.
Globally Optimal Solution to Inverse Kinematics of 7DOF Serial Manipulator
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

The Inverse Kinematics (IK) problem is to nd robot control parameters to bring it into the desired position under the kinematics and collision constraints. We present a global solution to the optimal IK problem for a general serial 7DOF manipulator with revolute joints and a quadratic polynomial objective function. We show that the kinematic constraints due to rotations can all be generated by second-degree polynomials. This is important since it signicantly simplies further step where we nd the optimal solution by Lasserre relaxations of non-convex polynomial systems. We demonstrate that the second relaxation is sucient to solve the 7DOF IK problem. Our approach is certiably globally optimal. We demonstrate the method on the 7DOF KUKA LBR IIWA manipulator and show that we are able to compute the optimal IK or certify in-feasibility in 99 % tested poses.
Introduction to Behavior Algorithms for Fighting Games
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

The quality of opponent Artificial Intelligence (AI) in fighting videogames is crucial. Some other game genres can rely on their story or visuals, but fighting games are all about the adversarial experience. In this paper, we will introduce standard behavior algorithms in videogames, such as Finite-State Machines and Behavior Trees, as well as more recent developments, such as Monte-Carlo Tree Search. We will also discuss the existing and potential combinations of these algorithms, and how they might be used in fighting games. Since we are at the financial peak of fighting games, both for casual players and in tournaments, it is important to build and expand on fighting game AI, as it is one of the pillars of this growing market.
What Malaysian Software Students Think about Testing?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Software testing is one of the crucial supporting processes of software life cycle. Unfortunately for the software industry, the role is stigmatized, partly due to misperception and partly due to treatment of the role in the software industry. The present study aims to analyse this situation to explore what inhibit an individual from taking up a software testing career. In order to investigate this issue, we surveyed 82 senior students taking a degree in information technology, information and communication technology, and computer science at two Malaysian universities. The subjects were asked the PROs and CONs of taking up a career in software testing and what were the chances that they would do so. The study identified 7 main PROs and 9 main CONSs for starting a testing career, and indicated that the role of software tester has been perceived as a social role, with more soft skills connotations than technical implications. The results also show that Malaysian students have a more positive attitude towards software testing than their counterparts where similar investigations have been carried out.
Scaling Graph Clustering with Distributed Sketches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The unsupervised learning of community structure, in particular the partitioning vertices into clusters or communities, is a canonical and well-studied problem in exploratory graph analysis. However, like most graph analyses the introduction of immense scale presents challenges to traditional methods. Spectral clustering in distributed memory, for example, requires hundreds of expensive bulk-synchronous communication rounds to compute an embedding of vertices to a few eigenvectors of a graph associated matrix. Furthermore, the whole computation may need to be repeated if the underlying graph changes some low percentage of edge updates. We present a method inspired by spectral clustering where we instead use matrix sketches derived from random dimension-reducing projections. We show that our method produces embeddings that yield performant clustering results given a fully-dynamic stochastic block model stream using both the fast Johnson-Lindenstrauss and CountSketch transforms. We also discuss the effects of stochastic block model parameters upon the required dimensionality of the subsequent embeddings, and show how random projections could significantly improve the performance of graph clustering in distributed memory.
Semantic Segmentation With Multi Scale Spatial Attention For Self Driving Cars
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we present a novel neural network using multi scale feature fusion at various scales for accurate and efficient semantic image segmentation. We used ResNet based feature extractor, dilated convolutional layers in downsampling part, atrous convolutional layers in the upsampling part and used concat operation to merge them. A new attention module is proposed to encode more contextual information and enhance the receptive field of the network. We present an in depth theoretical analysis of our network with training and optimization details. Our network was trained and tested on the Camvid dataset and Cityscapes dataset using mean accuracy per class and Intersection Over Union (IOU) as the evaluation metrics. Our model outperforms previous state of the art methods on semantic segmentation achieving mean IOU value of 74.12 while running at >100 FPS.
Genome Sequence Classification for Animal Diagnostics with Graph Representations and Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Bovine Respiratory Disease Complex (BRDC) is a complex respiratory disease in cattle with multiple etiologies, including bacterial and viral. It is estimated that mortality, morbidity, therapy, and quarantine resulting from BRDC account for significant losses in the cattle industry. Early detection and management of BRDC are crucial in mitigating economic losses. Current animal disease diagnostics is based on traditional tests such as bacterial culture, serolog, and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests. Even though these tests are validated for several diseases, their main challenge is their limited ability to detect the presence of multiple pathogens simultaneously. Advancements of data analytics and machine learning and applications over metagenome sequencing are setting trends on several applications. In this work, we demonstrate a machine learning approach to identify pathogen signatures present in bovine metagenome sequences using k-mer-based network embedding followed by a deep learning-based classification task. With experiments conducted on two different simulated datasets, we show that networks-based machine learning approaches can detect pathogen signature with up to 89.7% accuracy. We will make the data available publicly upon request to tackle this important problem in a difficult domain.
Joint Mind Modeling for Explanation Generation in Complex Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Human collaborators can effectively communicate with their partners to finish a common task by inferring each other's mental states (e.g., goals, beliefs, and desires). Such mind-aware communication minimizes the discrepancy among collaborators' mental states, and is crucial to the success in human ad-hoc teaming. We believe that robots collaborating with human users should demonstrate similar pedagogic behavior. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel explainable AI (XAI) framework for achieving human-like communication in human-robot collaborations, where the robot builds a hierarchical mind model of the human user and generates explanations of its own mind as a form of communications based on its online Bayesian inference of the user's mental state. To evaluate our framework, we conduct a user study on a real-time human-robot cooking task. Experimental results show that the generated explanations of our approach significantly improves the collaboration performance and user perception of the robot. Code and video demos are available on our project website: https://xfgao.github.io/xCookingWeb/.
Hierarchical Protein Function Prediction with Tail-GNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Protein function prediction may be framed as predicting subgraphs (with certain closure properties) of a directed acyclic graph describing the hierarchy of protein functions. Graph neural networks (GNNs), with their built-in inductive bias for relational data, are hence naturally suited for this task. However, in contrast with most GNN applications, the graph is not related to the input, but to the label space. Accordingly, we propose Tail-GNNs, neural networks which naturally compose with the output space of any neural network for multi-task prediction, to provide relationally-reinforced labels. For protein function prediction, we combine a Tail-GNN with a dilated convolutional network which learns representations of the protein sequence, making significant improvement in F_1 score and demonstrating the ability of Tail-GNNs to learn useful representations of labels and exploit them in real-world problem solving.
Variance Reduction for Deep Q-Learning using Stochastic Recursive Gradient
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep Q-learning algorithms often suffer from poor gradient estimations with an excessive variance, resulting in unstable training and poor sampling efficiency. Stochastic variance-reduced gradient methods such as SVRG have been applied to reduce the estimation variance (Zhao et al. 2019). However, due to the online instance generation nature of reinforcement learning, directly applying SVRG to deep Q-learning is facing the problem of the inaccurate estimation of the anchor points, which dramatically limits the potentials of SVRG. To address this issue and inspired by the recursive gradient variance reduction algorithm SARAH (Nguyen et al. 2017), this paper proposes to introduce the recursive framework for updating the stochastic gradient estimates in deep Q-learning, achieving a novel algorithm called SRG-DQN. Unlike the SVRG-based algorithms, SRG-DQN designs a recursive update of the stochastic gradient estimate. The parameter update is along an accumulated direction using the past stochastic gradient information, and therefore can get rid of the estimation of the full gradients as the anchors. Additionally, SRG-DQN involves the Adam process for further accelerating the training process. Theoretical analysis and the experimental results on well-known reinforcement learning tasks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed SRG-DQN algorithm.
Combating Misinformation in Bangladesh: Roles and Responsibilities as Perceived by Journalists, Fact-checkers, and Users
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

There has been a growing interest within CSCW community in understanding the characteristics of misinformation propagated through computational media, and the devising techniques to address the associated challenges. However, most work in this area has been concentrated on the cases in the western world leaving a major portion of this problem unaddressed that is situated in the Global South. This paper aims to broaden the scope of this discourse by focusing on this problem in the context of Bangladesh, a country in the Global South. The spread of misinformation on Facebook in Bangladesh, a country with a population over 163 million, has resulted in chaos, hate attacks, and killings. By interviewing journalists, fact-checkers, in addition to surveying the general public, we analyzed the current state of verifying misinformation in Bangladesh. Our findings show that most people in the `news audience' want the news media to verify the authenticity of online information that they see online. However, the newspaper journalists say that fact-checking online information is not a part of their job, and it is also beyond their capacity given the amount of information being published online everyday. We further find that the voluntary fact-checkers in Bangladesh are not equipped with sufficient infrastructural support to fill in this gap. We show how our findings are connected to some of the core concerns of CSCW community around social media, collaboration, infrastructural politics, and information inequality. From our analysis, we also suggest several pathways to increase the impact of fact-checking efforts through collaboration, technology design, and infrastructure development.
Applying Semantic Segmentation to Autonomous Cars in the Snowy Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This paper mainly focuses on environment perception in snowy situations which forms the backbone of the autonomous driving technology. For the purpose, semantic segmentation is employed to classify the objects while the vehicle is driven autonomously. We train the Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) on our own dataset and present the experimental results. Finally, the outcomes are analyzed to give a conclusion. It can be concluded that the database still needs to be optimized and a favorable algorithm should be proposed to get better results.
Catastrophe by Design in Population Games: Destabilizing Wasteful Locked-in Technologies
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2020
Year: 2020

In multi-agent environments in which coordination is desirable, the history of play often causes lock-in at sub-optimal outcomes. Notoriously, technologies with a significant environmental footprint or high social cost persist despite the successful development of more environmentally friendly and/or socially efficient alternatives. The displacement of the status quo is hindered by entrenched economic interests and network effects. To exacerbate matters, the standard mechanism design approaches based on centralized authorities with the capacity to use preferential subsidies to effectively dictate system outcomes are not always applicable to modern decentralized economies. What other types of mechanisms are feasible? In this paper, we develop and analyze a mechanism that induces transitions from inefficient lock-ins to superior alternatives. This mechanism does not exogenously favor one option over another -- instead, the phase transition emerges endogenously via a standard evolutionary learning model, Q-learning, where agents trade-off exploration and exploitation. Exerting the same transient influence to both the efficient and inefficient technologies encourages exploration and results in irreversible phase transitions and permanent stabilization of the efficient one. On a technical level, our work is based on bifurcation and catastrophe theory, a branch of mathematics that deals with changes in the number and stability properties of equilibria. Critically, our analysis is shown to be structurally robust to significant and even adversarially chosen perturbations to the parameters of both our game and our behavioral model.
MRGAN: Multi-Rooted 3D Shape Generation with Unsupervised Part Disentanglement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present MRGAN, a multi-rooted adversarial network which generates part-disentangled 3D point-cloud shapes without part-based shape supervision. The network fuses multiple branches of tree-structured graph convolution layers which produce point clouds, with learnable constant inputs at the tree roots. Each branch learns to grow a different shape part, offering control over the shape generation at the part level. Our network encourages disentangled generation of semantic parts via two key ingredients: a root-mixing training strategy which helps decorrelate the different branches to facilitate disentanglement, and a set of loss terms designed with part disentanglement and shape semantics in mind. Of these, a novel convexity loss incentivizes the generation of parts that are more convex, as semantic parts tend to be. In addition, a root-dropping loss further ensures that each root seeds a single part, preventing the degeneration or over-growth of the point-producing branches. We evaluate the performance of our network on a number of 3D shape classes, and offer qualitative and quantitative comparisons to previous works and baseline approaches. We demonstrate the controllability offered by our part-disentangled generation through two applications for shape modeling: part mixing and individual part variation, without receiving segmented shapes as input.
Duluth at SemEval-2020 Task 12: Offensive Tweet Identification in English with Logistic Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes the Duluth systems that participated in SemEval--2020 Task 12, Multilingual Offensive Language Identification in Social Media (OffensEval--2020). We participated in the three English language tasks. Our systems provide a simple Machine Learning baseline using logistic regression. We trained our models on the distantly supervised training data made available by the task organizers and used no other resources. As might be expected we did not rank highly in the comparative evaluation: 79th of 85 in Task A, 34th of 43 in Task B, and 24th of 39 in Task C. We carried out a qualitative analysis of our results and found that the class labels in the gold standard data are somewhat noisy. We hypothesize that the extremely high accuracy (> 90%) of the top ranked systems may reflect methods that learn the training data very well but may not generalize to the task of identifying offensive language in English. This analysis includes examples of tweets that despite being mildly redacted are still offensive.
Duluth at SemEval-2019 Task 6: Lexical Approaches to Identify and Categorize Offensive Tweets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes the Duluth systems that participated in SemEval--2019 Task 6, Identifying and Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Media (OffensEval). For the most part these systems took traditional Machine Learning approaches that built classifiers from lexical features found in manually labeled training data. However, our most successful system for classifying a tweet as offensive (or not) was a rule-based black--list approach, and we also experimented with combining the training data from two different but related SemEval tasks. Our best systems in each of the three OffensEval tasks placed in the middle of the comparative evaluation, ranking 57th of 103 in task A, 39th of 75 in task B, and 44th of 65 in task C.
Information Fusion on Belief Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

This paper will focus on the process of 'fusing' several observations or models of uncertainty into a single resultant model. Many existing approaches to fusion use subjective quantities such as 'strengths of belief' and process these quantities with heuristic algorithms. This paper argues in favor of quantities that can be objectively measured, as opposed to the subjective 'strength of belief' values. This paper will focus on probability distributions, and more importantly, structures that denote sets of probability distributions known as 'credal sets'. The novel aspect of this paper will be a taxonomy of models of fusion that use specific types of credal sets, namely probability interval distributions and Dempster-Shafer models. An objective requirement for information fusion algorithms is provided, and is satisfied by all models of fusion presented in this paper. Dempster's rule of combination is shown to not satisfy this requirement. This paper will also assess the computational challenges involved for the proposed fusion approaches.
Style is a Distribution of Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Neural style transfer (NST) is a powerful image generation technique that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to merge the content of one image with the style of another. Contemporary methods of NST use first or second order statistics of the CNN's features to achieve transfers with relatively little computational cost. However, these methods cannot fully extract the style from the CNN's features. We present a new algorithm for style transfer that fully extracts the style from the features by redefining the style loss as the Wasserstein distance between the distribution of features. Thus, we set a new standard in style transfer quality. In addition, we state two important interpretations of NST. The first is a re-emphasis from Li et al., which states that style is simply the distribution of features. The second states that NST is a type of generative adversarial network (GAN) problem.
Federated Self-Supervised Learning of Multi-Sensor Representations for Embedded Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Smartphones, wearables, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices produce a wealth of data that cannot be accumulated in a centralized repository for learning supervised models due to privacy, bandwidth limitations, and the prohibitive cost of annotations. Federated learning provides a compelling framework for learning models from decentralized data, but conventionally, it assumes the availability of labeled samples, whereas on-device data are generally either unlabeled or cannot be annotated readily through user interaction. To address these issues, we propose a self-supervised approach termed \textit{scalogram-signal correspondence learning} based on wavelet transform to learn useful representations from unlabeled sensor inputs, such as electroencephalography, blood volume pulse, accelerometer, and WiFi channel state information. Our auxiliary task requires a deep temporal neural network to determine if a given pair of a signal and its complementary viewpoint (i.e., a scalogram generated with a wavelet transform) align with each other or not through optimizing a contrastive objective. We extensively assess the quality of learned features with our multi-view strategy on diverse public datasets, achieving strong performance in all domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of representations learned from an unlabeled input collection on downstream tasks with training a linear classifier over pretrained network, usefulness in low-data regime, transfer learning, and cross-validation. Our methodology achieves competitive performance with fully-supervised networks, and it outperforms pre-training with autoencoders in both central and federated contexts. Notably, it improves the generalization in a semi-supervised setting as it reduces the volume of labeled data required through leveraging self-supervised learning.