OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Dynamic Hierarchical Framework for IoT-assisted Metaverse Synchronization
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

Metaverse has recently attracted much attention from both academia and industry. Virtual services, ranging from virtual driver training to online route optimization for smart goods delivery, are emerging in the Metaverse. To make the human experience of virtual life more real, digital twins (DTs), namely digital replicas of physical objects, are key enablers. However, DT status may not always accurately reflect that of its real-world twin because the latter may be subject to changes with time. As such, it is necessary to synchronize a DT with its physical counterpart to ensure that its status is accurate for virtual businesses in the Metaverse. In this paper, we propose a dynamic hierarchical framework in which a group of IoT devices is incentivized to sense and collect physical objects' status information collectively so as to assists virtual service providers (VSPs) in synchronizing DTs. Based on the collected sensing data and the value decay rate of the DTs, the VSPs can determine synchronization intensities to maximize their payoffs. In our proposed dynamic hierarchical framework, the lower-level evolutionary game captures the VSPs selection by the IoT device population, and the upper-level differential game captures the VSPs payoffs, which are affected by the synchronization strategy, IoT devices selections, and the DTs value status, given VSPs are simultaneous decision makers. We further consider the case in which some VSPs are first movers and extend it as a Stackelberg differential game. We theoretically and experimentally show that the equilibrium to the lower-level game exists and is evolutionarily robust, and provide a sensitivity analysis with respect to various system parameters. Experiments show that the proposed dynamic hierarchical game outperform the baseline.
Predictive and Contrastive: Dual-Auxiliary Learning for Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Self-supervised learning (SSL) recently has achieved outstanding success on recommendation. By setting up an auxiliary task (either predictive or contrastive), SSL can discover supervisory signals from the raw data without human annotation, which greatly mitigates the problem of sparse user-item interactions. However, most SSL-based recommendation models rely on general-purpose auxiliary tasks, e.g., maximizing correspondence between node representations learned from the original and perturbed interaction graphs, which are explicitly irrelevant to the recommendation task. Accordingly, the rich semantics reflected by social relationships and item categories, which lie in the recommendation data-based heterogeneous graphs, are not fully exploited. To explore recommendation-specific auxiliary tasks, we first quantitatively analyze the heterogeneous interaction data and find a strong positive correlation between the interactions and the number of user-item paths induced by meta-paths. Based on the finding, we design two auxiliary tasks that are tightly coupled with the target task (one is predictive and the other one is contrastive) towards connecting recommendation with the self-supervision signals hiding in the positive correlation. Finally, a model-agnostic DUal-Auxiliary Learning (DUAL) framework which unifies the SSL and recommendation tasks is developed. The extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that DUAL can significantly improve recommendation, reaching the state-of-the-art performance.
Attention-Based Lip Audio-Visual Synthesis for Talking Face Generation in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Talking face generation with great practical significance has attracted more attention in recent audio-visual studies. How to achieve accurate lip synchronization is a long-standing challenge to be further investigated. Motivated by xxx, in this paper, an AttnWav2Lip model is proposed by incorporating spatial attention module and channel attention module into lip-syncing strategy. Rather than focusing on the unimportant regions of the face image, the proposed AttnWav2Lip model is able to pay more attention on the lip region reconstruction. To our limited knowledge, this is the first attempt to introduce attention mechanism to the scheme of talking face generation. An extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Compared to the baseline measured by LSE-D and LSE-C metrics, a superior performance has been demonstrated on the benchmark lip synthesis datasets, including LRW, LRS2 and LRS3.
Skating-Mixer: Long-Term Sport Audio-Visual Modeling with MLPs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Figure skating scoring is challenging because it requires judging the technical moves of the players as well as their coordination with the background music. Most learning-based methods cannot solve it well for two reasons: 1) each move in figure skating changes quickly, hence simply applying traditional frame sampling will lose a lot of valuable information, especially in 3 to 5 minutes long videos; 2) prior methods rarely considered the critical audio-visual relationship in their models. Due to these reasons, we introduce a novel architecture, named Skating-Mixer. It extends the MLP framework into a multimodal fashion and effectively learns long-term representations through our designed memory recurrent unit (MRU). Aside from the model, we collected a high-quality audio-visual FS1000 dataset, which contains over 1000 videos on 8 types of programs with 7 different rating metrics, overtaking other datasets in both quantity and diversity. Experiments show the proposed method achieves SOTAs over all major metrics on the public Fis-V and our FS1000 dataset. In addition, we include an analysis applying our method to the recent competitions in Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games, proving our method has strong applicability.
Sparsification and Filtering for Spatial-temporal GNN in Multivariate Time-series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We propose an end-to-end architecture for multivariate time-series prediction that integrates a spatial-temporal graph neural network with a matrix filtering module. This module generates filtered (inverse) correlation graphs from multivariate time series before inputting them into a GNN. In contrast with existing sparsification methods adopted in graph neural network, our model explicitly leverage time-series filtering to overcome the low signal-to-noise ratio typical of complex systems data. We present a set of experiments, where we predict future sales from a synthetic time-series sales dataset. The proposed spatial-temporal graph neural network displays superior performances with respect to baseline approaches, with no graphical information, and with fully connected, disconnected graphs and unfiltered graphs.
Gait Recognition with Mask-based Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Most gait recognition methods exploit spatial-temporal representations from static appearances and dynamic walking patterns. However, we observe that many part-based methods neglect representations at boundaries. In addition, the phenomenon of overfitting on training data is relatively common in gait recognition, which is perhaps due to insufficient data and low-informative gait silhouettes. Motivated by these observations, we propose a novel mask-based regularization method named ReverseMask. By injecting perturbation on the feature map, the proposed regularization method helps convolutional architecture learn the discriminative representations and enhances generalization. Also, we design an Inception-like ReverseMask Block, which has three branches composed of a global branch, a feature dropping branch, and a feature scaling branch. Precisely, the dropping branch can extract fine-grained representations when partial activations are zero-outed. Meanwhile, the scaling branch randomly scales the feature map, keeping structural information of activations and preventing overfitting. The plug-and-play Inception-like ReverseMask block is simple and effective to generalize networks, and it also improves the performance of many state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the ReverseMask regularization help baseline achieves higher accuracy and better generalization. Moreover, the baseline with Inception-like Block significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the two most popular datasets, CASIA-B and OUMVLP. The source code will be released.
Towards Generalized Models for Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Building robust and general dialogue models for spoken conversations is challenging due to the gap in distributions of spoken and written data. This paper presents our approach to build generalized models for the Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations Challenge of DSTC-10. In order to mitigate the discrepancies between spoken and written text, we mainly employ extensive data augmentation strategies on written data, including artificial error injection and round-trip text-speech transformation. To train robust models for spoken conversations, we improve pre-trained language models, and apply ensemble algorithms for each sub-task. Typically, for the detection task, we fine-tune \roberta and ELECTRA, and run an error-fixing ensemble algorithm. For the selection task, we adopt a two-stage framework that consists of entity tracking and knowledge ranking, and propose a multi-task learning method to learn multi-level semantic information by domain classification and entity selection. For the generation task, we adopt a cross-validation data process to improve pre-trained generative language models, followed by a consensus decoding algorithm, which can add arbitrary features like relative \rouge metric, and tune associated feature weights toward \bleu directly. Our approach ranks third on the objective evaluation and second on the final official human evaluation.
Lane Detection with Versatile AtrousFormer and Local Semantic Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Lane detection is one of the core functions in autonomous driving and has aroused widespread attention recently. The networks to segment lane instances, especially with bad appearance, must be able to explore lane distribution properties. Most existing methods tend to resort to CNN-based techniques. A few have a try on incorporating the recent adorable, the seq2seq Transformer \cite{transformer}. However, their innate drawbacks of weak global information collection ability and exorbitant computation overhead prohibit a wide range of the further applications. In this work, we propose Atrous Transformer (AtrousFormer) to solve the problem. Its variant local AtrousFormer is interleaved into feature extractor to enhance extraction. Their collecting information first by rows and then by columns in a dedicated manner finally equips our network with stronger information gleaning ability and better computation efficiency. To further improve the performance, we also propose a local semantic guided decoder to delineate the identities and shapes of lanes more accurately, in which the predicted Gaussian map of the starting point of each lane serves to guide the process. Extensive results on three challenging benchmarks (CULane, TuSimple, and BDD100K) show that our network performs favorably against the state of the arts.
Quantification of Occlusion Handling Capability of a 3D Human Pose Estimation Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

3D human pose estimation using monocular images is an important yet challenging task. Existing 3D pose detection methods exhibit excellent performance under normal conditions however their performance may degrade due to occlusion. Recently some occlusion aware methods have also been proposed, however, the occlusion handling capability of these networks has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In the current work, we propose an occlusion-guided 3D human pose estimation framework and quantify its occlusion handling capability by using different protocols. The proposed method estimates more accurate 3D human poses using 2D skeletons with missing joints as input. Missing joints are handled by introducing occlusion guidance that provides extra information about the absence or presence of a joint. Temporal information has also been exploited to better estimate the missing joints. A large number of experiments are performed for the quantification of occlusion handling capability of the proposed method on three publicly available datasets in various settings including random missing joints, fixed body parts missing, and complete frames missing, using mean per joint position error criterion. In addition to that, the quality of the predicted 3D poses is also evaluated using action classification performance as a criterion. 3D poses estimated by the proposed method achieved significantly improved action recognition performance in the presence of missing joints. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for handling the missing joints as well as quantification of the occlusion handling capability of the deep neural networks.
A study on joint modeling and data augmentation of multi-modalities for audio-visual scene classification
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose two techniques, namely joint modeling and data augmentation, to improve system performances for audio-visual scene classification (AVSC). We employ pre-trained networks trained only on image data sets to extract video embedding; whereas for audio embedding models, we decide to train them from scratch. We explore different neural network architectures for joint modeling to effectively combine the video and audio modalities. Moreover, data augmentation strategies are investigated to increase audio-visual training set size. For the video modality the effectiveness of several operations in RandAugment is verified. An audio-video joint mixup scheme is proposed to further improve AVSC performances. Evaluated on the development set of TAU Urban Audio Visual Scenes 2021, our final system can achieve the best accuracy of 94.2% among all single AVSC systems submitted to DCASE 2021 Task 1b.
NeReF: Neural Refractive Field for Fluid Surface Reconstruction and Implicit Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing neural reconstruction schemes such as Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) are largely focused on modeling opaque objects. We present a novel neural refractive field(NeReF) to recover wavefront of transparent fluids by simultaneously estimating the surface position and normal of the fluid front. Unlike prior arts that treat the reconstruction target as a single layer of the surface, NeReF is specifically formulated to recover a volumetric normal field with its corresponding density field. A query ray will be refracted by NeReF according to its accumulated refractive point and normal, and we employ the correspondences and uniqueness of refracted ray for NeReF optimization. We show NeReF, as a global optimization scheme, can more robustly tackle refraction distortions detrimental to traditional methods for correspondence matching. Furthermore, the continuous NeReF representation of wavefront enables view synthesis as well as normal integration. We validate our approach on both synthetic and real data and show it is particularly suitable for sparse multi-view acquisition. We hence build a small light field array and experiment on various surface shapes to demonstrate high fidelity NeReF reconstruction.
Robust Local Preserving and Global Aligning Network for Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) requires source domain samples with clean ground truth labels during training. Accurately labeling a large number of source domain samples is time-consuming and laborious. An alternative is to utilize samples with noisy labels for training. However, training with noisy labels can greatly reduce the performance of UDA. In this paper, we address the problem that learning UDA models only with access to noisy labels and propose a novel method called robust local preserving and global aligning network (RLPGA). RLPGA improves the robustness of the label noise from two aspects. One is learning a classifier by a robust informative-theoretic-based loss function. The other is constructing two adjacency weight matrices and two negative weight matrices by the proposed local preserving module to preserve the local topology structures of input data. We conduct theoretical analysis on the robustness of the proposed RLPGA and prove that the robust informative-theoretic-based loss and the local preserving module are beneficial to reduce the empirical risk of the target domain. A series of empirical studies show the effectiveness of our proposed RLPGA.
Robustly-reliable learners under poisoning attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Data poisoning attacks, in which an adversary corrupts a training set with the goal of inducing specific desired mistakes, have raised substantial concern: even just the possibility of such an attack can make a user no longer trust the results of a learning system. In this work, we show how to achieve strong robustness guarantees in the face of such attacks across multiple axes. We provide robustly-reliable predictions, in which the predicted label is guaranteed to be correct so long as the adversary has not exceeded a given corruption budget, even in the presence of instance targeted attacks, where the adversary knows the test example in advance and aims to cause a specific failure on that example. Our guarantees are substantially stronger than those in prior approaches, which were only able to provide certificates that the prediction of the learning algorithm does not change, as opposed to certifying that the prediction is correct, as we are able to achieve in our work. Remarkably, we provide a complete characterization of learnability in this setting, in particular, nearly-tight matching upper and lower bounds on the region that can be certified, as well as efficient algorithms for computing this region given an ERM oracle. Moreover, for the case of linear separators over logconcave distributions, we provide efficient truly polynomial time algorithms (i.e., non-oracle algorithms) for such robustly-reliable predictions. We also extend these results to the active setting where the algorithm adaptively asks for labels of specific informative examples, and the difficulty is that the adversary might even be adaptive to this interaction, as well as to the agnostic learning setting where there is no perfect classifier even over the uncorrupted data.
Distributed Control using Reinforcement Learning with Temporal-Logic-Based Reward Shaping
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

We present a computational framework for synthesis of distributed control strategies for a heterogeneous team of robots in a partially observable environment. The goal is to cooperatively satisfy specifications given as Truncated Linear Temporal Logic (TLTL) formulas. Our approach formulates the synthesis problem as a stochastic game and employs a policy graph method to find a control strategy with memory for each agent. We construct the stochastic game on the product between the team transition system and a finite state automaton (FSA) that tracks the satisfaction of the TLTL formula. We use the quantitative semantics of TLTL as the reward of the game, and further reshape it using the FSA to guide and accelerate the learning process. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed solution under demanding task specifications and the effectiveness of reward shaping in significantly accelerating the speed of learning.
A Survey on Privacy for B5G/6G: New Privacy Challenges, and Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Massive developments in mobile wireless telecommunication networks have been made during the last few decades. At present, mobile users are getting familiar with the latest 5G networks, and the discussion for the next generation of Beyond 5G (B5G)/6G networks has already been initiated. It is expected that B5G/6G will push the existing network capabilities to the next level, with higher speeds, enhanced reliability and seamless connectivity. To make these expectations a reality, research is progressing on new technologies, architectures, and intelligence-based decision-making processes related to B5G/6G. Privacy considerations are a crucial aspect that requires further attention in such developments, as billions of people and devices will be transmitting data through the upcoming network. However, the main recognition remains biased towards the network security. A discussion focused on privacy of B5G/6G is lacking at the moment. To address the gap, this paper provides a comprehensive survey on privacy-related aspects of B5G/6G networks. First, it discusses a taxonomy of different privacy perspectives. Based on the taxonomy, the paper then conceptualizes a set of challenges that appear as barriers to reach privacy preservation. Next, this work provides a set of solutions applicable to the proposed architecture of B5G/6G networks to mitigate the challenges. It also provides an overview of standardization initiatives for privacy preservation. Finally, the paper concludes with a roadmap of future directions, which will be an arena for new research towards privacy-enhanced B5G/6G networks. This work provides a basis for privacy aspects that will significantly impact peoples' daily lives when using these future networks.
Leveraging Initial Hints for Free in Stochastic Linear Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We study the setting of optimizing with bandit feedback with additional prior knowledge provided to the learner in the form of an initial hint of the optimal action. We present a novel algorithm for stochastic linear bandits that uses this hint to improve its regret to $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ when the hint is accurate, while maintaining a minimax-optimal $\tilde O(d\sqrt{T})$ regret independent of the quality of the hint. Furthermore, we provide a Pareto frontier of tight tradeoffs between best-case and worst-case regret, with matching lower bounds. Perhaps surprisingly, our work shows that leveraging a hint shows provable gains without sacrificing worst-case performance, implying that our algorithm adapts to the quality of the hint for free. We also provide an extension of our algorithm to the case of $m$ initial hints, showing that we can achieve a $\tilde O(m^{2/3}\sqrt{T})$ regret.
CaSS: A Channel-aware Self-supervised Representation Learning Framework for Multivariate Time Series Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Self-supervised representation learning of Multivariate Time Series (MTS) is a challenging task and attracts increasing research interests in recent years. Many previous works focus on the pretext task of self-supervised learning and usually neglect the complex problem of MTS encoding, leading to unpromising results. In this paper, we tackle this challenge from two aspects: encoder and pretext task, and propose a unified channel-aware self-supervised learning framework CaSS. Specifically, we first design a new Transformer-based encoder Channel-aware Transformer (CaT) to capture the complex relationships between different time channels of MTS. Second, we combine two novel pretext tasks Next Trend Prediction (NTP) and Contextual Similarity (CS) for the self-supervised representation learning with our proposed encoder. Extensive experiments are conducted on several commonly used benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our framework achieves new state-of-the-art comparing with previous self-supervised MTS representation learning methods (up to +7.70\% improvement on LSST dataset) and can be well applied to the downstream MTS classification.