OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Unifying Human Motion Synthesis and Style Transfer with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Generating realistic motions for digital humans is a core but challenging part of computer animations and games, as human motions are both diverse in content and rich in styles. While the latest deep learning approaches have made significant advancements in this domain, they mostly consider motion synthesis and style manipulation as two separate problems. This is mainly due to the challenge of learning both motion contents that account for the inter-class behaviour and styles that account for the intra-class behaviour effectively in a common representation. To tackle this challenge, we propose a denoising diffusion probabilistic model solution for styled motion synthesis. As diffusion models have a high capacity brought by the injection of stochasticity, we can represent both inter-class motion content and intra-class style behaviour in the same latent. This results in an integrated, end-to-end trained pipeline that facilitates the generation of optimal motion and exploration of content-style coupled latent space. To achieve high-quality results, we design a multi-task architecture of diffusion model that strategically generates aspects of human motions for local guidance. We also design adversarial and physical regulations for global guidance. We demonstrate superior performance with quantitative and qualitative results and validate the effectiveness of our multi-task architecture.
MURMUR: Modular Multi-Step Reasoning for Semi-Structured Data-to-Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Prompting large language models has enabled significant recent progress in multi-step reasoning over text. However, when applied to text generation from semi-structured data (e.g., graphs or tables), these methods typically suffer from low semantic coverage, hallucination, and logical inconsistency. We propose MURMUR, a neuro-symbolic modular approach to text generation from semi-structured data with multi-step reasoning. MURMUR is a best-first search method that generates reasoning paths using: (1) neural and symbolic modules with specific linguistic and logical skills, (2) a grammar whose production rules define valid compositions of modules, and (3) value functions that assess the quality of each reasoning step. We conduct experiments on two diverse data-to-text generation tasks like WebNLG and LogicNLG. These tasks differ in their data representations (graphs and tables) and span multiple linguistic and logical skills. MURMUR obtains significant improvements over recent few-shot baselines like direct prompting and chain-of-thought prompting, while also achieving comparable performance to fine-tuned GPT-2 on out-of-domain data. Moreover, human evaluation shows that MURMUR generates highly faithful and correct reasoning paths that lead to 26% more logically consistent summaries on LogicNLG, compared to direct prompting.
Huruf: An Application for Arabic Handwritten Character Recognition Using Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Handwriting Recognition has been a field of great interest in the Artificial Intelligence domain. Due to its broad use cases in real life, research has been conducted widely on it. Prominent work has been done in this field focusing mainly on Latin characters. However, the domain of Arabic handwritten character recognition is still relatively unexplored. The inherent cursive nature of the Arabic characters and variations in writing styles across individuals makes the task even more challenging. We identified some probable reasons behind this and proposed a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network-based architecture for recognizing Arabic characters and digits. The proposed pipeline consists of a total of 18 layers containing four layers each for convolution, pooling, batch normalization, dropout, and finally one Global average pooling and a Dense layer. Furthermore, we thoroughly investigated the different choices of hyperparameters such as the choice of the optimizer, kernel initializer, activation function, etc. Evaluating the proposed architecture on the publicly available 'Arabic Handwritten Character Dataset (AHCD)' and 'Modified Arabic handwritten digits Database (MadBase)' datasets, the proposed model respectively achieved an accuracy of 96.93% and 99.35% which is comparable to the state-of-the-art and makes it a suitable solution for real-life end-level applications.
Translating Social Media Crisis Narratives into Road Network Utilization Metrics: The Case of 2020 Oklahoma Ice Storm
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Risk communication in times of disasters is complex, involving rapid and diverse communication in social networks (i.e., public and/or private agencies; local residents) as well as limited mobilization capacity and operational constraints of physical infrastructure networks. Despite a growing literature on infrastructure interdependencies and co-dependent social-physical systems, an in-depth understanding of how risk communication in online social networks weighs into physical infrastructure networks during a major disaster remains limited, let alone in compounding risk events. This study analyzes large-scale datasets of crisis mobility and activity-related social interactions and concerns available through social media (Twitter) for communities that were impacted by an ice storm (Oct. 2020) in Oklahoma. Compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, Oklahoma residents faced this historic ice storm (Oct. 26, 2020-Oct. 29, 2020) that caused devastating traffic impacts (among others) due to excessive ice accumulation. By using the recently released academic Application Programming Interface (API) by Twitter that provides complete and unbiased data, geotagged tweets (approx. 210K) were collected covering the entire state of Oklahoma, and ice storm-related tweets (approx. 14.2K) were considered. First, the study uses natural language processing and text quantification techniques to translate crisis narratives (i.e., tweets). Next, geo-tagged tweets are mapped into co-located road networks using traditional GIS techniques. Finally, insights are generated using network science theories and quantified social narratives to interpret different elements of road networks (e.g., local roads, freeways, etc.) for the Oklahoma communities that were impacted by the ice storm event during the pandemic.
Control and Placement of Finite-Resolution Intelligent Surfaces in IoT Systems with Imperfect CSI
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we study the advantages of using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) for interference suppression in single-input single-output (SISO) distributed Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Implementing RIS-assisted networks confronts various problems, mostly related to the control and placement of the RIS. To tackle the control-related challenges, we consider noisy and local channel knowledge, based on which we devise algorithms to optimize the potentially distributed RISs to achieve an overall network objective, such as the sum-rate. We use a network with a centralized RIS as a benchmark for our comparisons. We further assume low-bit phase shifters at the RIS to capture real-world hardware limitations. We also study the placement of the RIS and analytically quantify the minimum required degrees-of-control for the RIS as a function of its location to guarantee a specific network performance metric and verify the results via simulations.
On the Optimum Scenarios for Single Row Equidistant Facility Layout Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Single Row Equidistant Facility Layout Problem SREFLP is with an NP-Hard nature to mimic material handling costs along with equally spaced straight-line facilities layout. Based on literature, it is obvious that efforts of researchers for solving SREFLP turn from exact methods into release the running time tracing the principle of the approximate methods in time race, regardless searching their time complexity release in conjunction with a provable quality of solutions. This study focuses on Lower bounding LB techniques as an independent potential solution tool for SREFLP. In particular, Best-known SREFLP LBs are reported from literature and significantly LBs optimum scenarios are highlighted. Initially, one gap of the SREFLP bidirectional LB is enhanced. From the integration between the enhanced LB and the best-known Gilmore-Lawler GL bounding, a new SREFLP optimum scenario is provided. Further improvements to GLB lead to guarantee an exact Shipping/Receiving Facility assignment and propose a conjecture of at most 4/3 approximation scheme for SREFLP.
Speech Aware Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC11)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Most research on task oriented dialog modeling is based on written text input. However, users interact with practical dialog systems often using speech as input. Typically, systems convert speech into text using an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, introducing errors. Furthermore, these systems do not address the differences in written and spoken language. The research on this topic is stymied by the lack of a public corpus. Motivated by these considerations, our goal in hosting the speech-aware dialog state tracking challenge was to create a public corpus or task which can be used to investigate the performance gap between the written and spoken forms of input, develop models that could alleviate this gap, and establish whether Text-to-Speech-based (TTS) systems is a reasonable surrogate to the more-labor intensive human data collection. We created three spoken versions of the popular written-domain MultiWoz task -- (a) TTS-Verbatim: written user inputs were converted into speech waveforms using a TTS system, (b) Human-Verbatim: humans spoke the user inputs verbatim, and (c) Human-paraphrased: humans paraphrased the user inputs. Additionally, we provided different forms of ASR output to encourage wider participation from teams that may not have access to state-of-the-art ASR systems. These included ASR transcripts, word time stamps, and latent representations of the audio (audio encoder outputs). In this paper, we describe the corpus, report results from participating teams, provide preliminary analyses of their results, and summarize the current state-of-the-art in this domain.
Point-E: A System for Generating 3D Point Clouds from Complex Prompts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

While recent work on text-conditional 3D object generation has shown promising results, the state-of-the-art methods typically require multiple GPU-hours to produce a single sample. This is in stark contrast to state-of-the-art generative image models, which produce samples in a number of seconds or minutes. In this paper, we explore an alternative method for 3D object generation which produces 3D models in only 1-2 minutes on a single GPU. Our method first generates a single synthetic view using a text-to-image diffusion model, and then produces a 3D point cloud using a second diffusion model which conditions on the generated image. While our method still falls short of the state-of-the-art in terms of sample quality, it is one to two orders of magnitude faster to sample from, offering a practical trade-off for some use cases. We release our pre-trained point cloud diffusion models, as well as evaluation code and models, at https://github.com/openai/point-e.
Occupancy Grid Based Reactive Planner
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper proposes a perception and path planning pipeline for autonomous racing in an unknown bounded course. The pipeline was initially created for the 2021 evGrandPrix autonomous division and was further improved for the 2022 event, both of which resulting in first place finishes. Using a simple LiDAR-based perception pipeline feeding into an occupancy grid based expansion algorithm, we determine a goal point to drive. This pipeline successfully achieved reliable and consistent laps in addition with occupancy grid algorithm to know the ways around a cone-defined track with an averaging speeds of 6.85 m/s over a distance 434.2 meters for a total lap time of 63.4 seconds.
Improving Cross-task Generalization of Unified Table-to-text Models with Compositional Task Configurations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

There has been great progress in unifying various table-to-text tasks using a single encoder-decoder model trained via multi-task learning (Xie et al., 2022). However, existing methods typically encode task information with a simple dataset name as a prefix to the encoder. This not only limits the effectiveness of multi-task learning, but also hinders the model's ability to generalize to new domains or tasks that were not seen during training, which is crucial for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose compositional task configurations, a set of prompts prepended to the encoder to improve cross-task generalization of unified models. We design the task configurations to explicitly specify the task type, as well as its input and output types. We show that this not only allows the model to better learn shared knowledge across different tasks at training, but also allows us to control the model by composing new configurations that apply novel input-output combinations in a zero-shot manner. We demonstrate via experiments over ten table-to-text tasks that our method outperforms the UnifiedSKG baseline by noticeable margins in both in-domain and zero-shot settings, with average improvements of +0.5 and +12.6 from using a T5-large backbone, respectively.
Accurate Open-set Recognition for Memory Workload
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

How can we accurately identify new memory workloads while classifying known memory workloads? Verifying DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) using various workloads is an important task to guarantee the quality of DRAM. A crucial component in the process is open-set recognition which aims to detect new workloads not seen in the training phase. Despite its importance, however, existing open-set recognition methods are unsatisfactory in terms of accuracy since they fail to exploit the characteristics of workload sequences. In this paper, we propose Acorn, an accurate open-set recognition method capturing the characteristics of workload sequences. Acorn extracts two types of feature vectors to capture sequential patterns and spatial locality patterns in memory access. Acorn then uses the feature vectors to accurately classify a subsequence into one of the known classes or identify it as the unknown class. Experiments show that Acorn achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, giving up to 37% points higher unknown class detection accuracy while achieving comparable known class classification accuracy than existing methods.
Automata and automatic sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

In the following pages we discuss infinite sequences defined on a finite alphabet, and more specially those which are generated by finite automata. We have divided our paper into seven parts which are more or less self-contained. Needless to say, we feel that the order we propose is the most natural one. References appear at the end of each one of the parts which implies some redundancy. Extra references are listed at the very end of our paper.
Pilot Reuse in Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems: A Diverse Clustering Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Distributed or Cell-free (CF) massive Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (mMIMO), has been recently proposed as an answer to the limitations of the current network-centric systems in providing high-rate ubiquitous transmission. The capability of providing uniform service level makes CF mMIMO a potential technology for beyond-5G and 6G networks. The acquisition of accurate Channel State Information (CSI) is critical for different CF mMIMO operations. Hence, an uplink pilot training phase is used to efficiently estimate transmission channels. The number of available orthogonal pilot signals is limited, and reusing these pilots will increase co-pilot interference. This causes an undesirable effect known as pilot contamination that could reduce the system performance. Hence, a proper pilot reuse strategy is needed to mitigate the effects of pilot contamination. In this paper, we formulate pilot assignment in CF mMIMO as a diverse clustering problem and propose an iterative maxima search scheme to solve it. In this approach, we first form the clusters of User Equipments (UEs) so that the intra-cluster diversity maximizes and then assign the same pilots for all UEs in the same cluster. The numerical results show the proposed techniques' superiority over other methods concerning the achieved uplink and downlink average and per-user data rate.
ProNet: Adaptive Process Noise Estimation for INS/DVL Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Inertial and Doppler velocity log sensors are commonly used to provide the navigation solution for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). To this end, a nonlinear filter is adopted for the fusion task. The filter's process noise covariance matrix is critical for filter accuracy and robustness. While this matrix varies over time during the AUV mission, the filter assumes a constant matrix. Several models and learning approaches in the literature suggest tuning the process noise covariance during operation. In this work, we propose ProNet, a hybrid, adaptive process, noise estimation approach for a velocity-aided navigation filter. ProNet requires only the inertial sensor reading to regress the process noise covariance. Once learned, it is fed into the model-based navigation filter, resulting in a hybrid filter. Simulation results show the benefits of our approach compared to other models and learning adaptive approaches.
TCFimt: Temporal Counterfactual Forecasting from Individual Multiple Treatment Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Determining causal effects of temporal multi-intervention assists decision-making. Restricted by time-varying bias, selection bias, and interactions of multiple interventions, the disentanglement and estimation of multiple treatment effects from individual temporal data is still rare. To tackle these challenges, we propose a comprehensive framework of temporal counterfactual forecasting from an individual multiple treatment perspective (TCFimt). TCFimt constructs adversarial tasks in a seq2seq framework to alleviate selection and time-varying bias and designs a contrastive learning-based block to decouple a mixed treatment effect into separated main treatment effects and causal interactions which further improves estimation accuracy. Through implementing experiments on two real-world datasets from distinct fields, the proposed method shows satisfactory performance in predicting future outcomes with specific treatments and in choosing optimal treatment type and timing than state-of-the-art methods.
IoT Device Identification Based on Network Traffic Characteristics
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

IoT device identification plays an important role in monitoring and improving the performance and security of IoT devices. Compared to traditional non-IoT devices, IoT devices provide us with both unique challenges and opportunities in detecting the types of IoT devices. Based on critical insights obtained in our previous work on understanding the network traffic characteristics of IoT devices, in this paper we develop an effective machine-learning based IoT device identification scheme, named iotID. In developing iotID, we extract 70 features of TCP flows from three complementary aspects: remote network servers and port numbers, packet-level traffic characteristics such as packet inter-arrival times, and flow-level traffic characteristics such as flow duration. Different from existing work, we take into account the imbalance nature of network traffic generated by various devices in both the learning and evaluation phases of iotID. Our performance studies based on network traffic collected on a typical smart home environment consisting of both IoT and non-IoT devices show that iotID can achieve a balanced accuracy score of above 99%.
Increasing Physical Layer Security through Hyperchaos in VLC Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Visible Light Communication (VLC) systems have relatively higher security compared with traditional Radio Frequency (RF) channels due to line-of-sight (LOS) propagation. However, they still are susceptible to eavesdropping. The proposed solution of the papers have been built on existing work on hyperchaos-based security measure to increase physical layer security from eavesdroppers. A fourth-order Henon map is used to scramble the constellation diagrams of the transmitted signals. The scramblers change the constellation symbol of the system using a key. That key on the receiver side de-scrambles the received data. The presented modulation scheme takes advantage of a higher degree of the map to isolate the data transmission to a single dimension, allowing for better scrambling and synchronization. A sliding mode controller is used at the receiver in a master-slave configuration for projective synchronization of the two Henon maps, which helps de-scramble the received data. The data is only isolated for the users aware of the key for synchronization, providing security against eavesdroppers. The proposed VLC system is compared against various existing approaches based on various metrics. An improved Bit Error Rate and a lower information leakage are achieved for a variety of modulation schemes at an acceptable Signal-to-Noise Ratio.
A Brief Survey on Person Recognition at a Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Person recognition at a distance entails recognizing the identity of an individual appearing in images or videos collected by long-range imaging systems such as drones or surveillance cameras. Despite recent advances in deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), this remains challenging. Images or videos collected by long-range cameras often suffer from atmospheric turbulence, blur, low-resolution, unconstrained poses, and poor illumination. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of recent advances in person recognition at a distance. In particular, we review recent work in multi-spectral face verification, person re-identification, and gait-based analysis techniques. Furthermore, we discuss the merits and drawbacks of existing approaches and identify important, yet under explored challenges for deploying remote person recognition systems in-the-wild.