OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
QuadraLib: A Performant Quadratic Neural Network Library for Architecture Optimization and Design Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The significant success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is highly promoted by the multiple sophisticated DNN libraries. On the contrary, although some work have proved that Quadratic Deep Neuron Networks (QDNNs) show better non-linearity and learning capability than the first-order DNNs, their neuron design suffers certain drawbacks from theoretical performance to practical deployment. In this paper, we first proposed a new QDNN neuron architecture design, and further developed QuadraLib, a QDNN library to provide architecture optimization and design exploration for QDNNs. Extensive experiments show that our design has good performance regarding prediction accuracy and computation consumption on multiple learning tasks.
Leaders or Followers? A Temporal Analysis of Tweets from IRA Trolls
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

The Internet Research Agency (IRA) influences online political conversations in the United States, exacerbating existing partisan divides and sowing discord. In this paper we investigate the IRA's communication strategies by analyzing trending terms on Twitter to identify cases in which the IRA leads or follows other users. Our analysis focuses on over 38M tweets posted between 2016 and 2017 from IRA users (n=3,613), journalists (n=976), members of Congress (n=526), and politically engaged users from the general public (n=71,128). We find that the IRA tends to lead on topics related to the 2016 election, race, and entertainment, suggesting that these are areas both of strategic importance as well having the highest potential impact. Furthermore, we identify topics where the IRA has been relatively ineffective, such as tweets on military, political scandals, and violent attacks. Despite many tweets on these topics, the IRA rarely leads the conversation and thus has little opportunity to influence it. We offer our proposed methodology as a way to track the strategic choices of future influence operations in real-time.
Lightweight HDR Camera ISP for Robust Perception in Dynamic Illumination Conditions via Fourier Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The limited dynamic range of commercial compact camera sensors results in an inaccurate representation of scenes with varying illumination conditions, adversely affecting image quality and subsequently limiting the performance of underlying image processing algorithms. Current state-of-the-art (SoTA) convolutional neural networks (CNN) are developed as post-processing techniques to independently recover under-/over-exposed images. However, when applied to images containing real-world degradations such as glare, high-beam, color bleeding with varying noise intensity, these algorithms amplify the degradations, further degrading image quality. We propose a lightweight two-stage image enhancement algorithm sequentially balancing illumination and noise removal using frequency priors for structural guidance to overcome these limitations. Furthermore, to ensure realistic image quality, we leverage the relationship between frequency and spatial domain properties of an image and propose a Fourier spectrum-based adversarial framework (AFNet) for consistent image enhancement under varying illumination conditions. While current formulations of image enhancement are envisioned as post-processing techniques, we examine if such an algorithm could be extended to integrate the functionality of the Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline within the camera sensor benefiting from RAW sensor data and lightweight CNN architecture. Based on quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we also examine the practicality and effects of image enhancement techniques on the performance of common perception tasks such as object detection and semantic segmentation in varying illumination conditions.
Towards Infield Navigation: leveraging simulated data for crop row detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Agricultural datasets for crop row detection are often bound by their limited number of images. This restricts the researchers from developing deep learning based models for precision agricultural tasks involving crop row detection. We suggest the utilization of small real-world datasets along with additional data generated by simulations to yield similar crop row detection performance as that of a model trained with a large real world dataset. Our method could reach the performance of a deep learning based crop row detection model trained with real-world data by using 60% less labelled real-world data. Our model performed well against field variations such as shadows, sunlight and grow stages. We introduce an automated pipeline to generate labelled images for crop row detection in simulation domain. An extensive comparison is done to analyze the contribution of simulated data towards reaching robust crop row detection in various real-world field scenarios.
Product Market Demand Analysis Using NLP in Banglish Text with Sentiment Analysis and Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Product market demand analysis plays a significant role for originating business strategies due to its noticeable impact on the competitive business field. Furthermore, there are roughly 228 million native Bengali speakers, the majority of whom use Banglish text to interact with one another on social media. Consumers are buying and evaluating items on social media with Banglish text as social media emerges as an online marketplace for entrepreneurs. People use social media to find preferred smartphone brands and models by sharing their positive and bad experiences with them. For this reason, our goal is to gather Banglish text data and use sentiment analysis and named entity identification to assess Bangladeshi market demand for smartphones in order to determine the most popular smartphones by gender. We scraped product related data from social media with instant data scrapers and crawled data from Wikipedia and other sites for product information with python web scrapers. Using Python's Pandas and Seaborn libraries, the raw data is filtered using NLP methods. To train our datasets for named entity recognition, we utilized Spacey's custom NER model, Amazon Comprehend Custom NER. A tensorflow sequential model was deployed with parameter tweaking for sentiment analysis. Meanwhile, we used the Google Cloud Translation API to estimate the gender of the reviewers using the BanglaLinga library. In this article, we use natural language processing (NLP) approaches and several machine learning models to identify the most in-demand items and services in the Bangladeshi market. Our model has an accuracy of 87.99% in Spacy Custom Named Entity recognition, 95.51% in Amazon Comprehend Custom NER, and 87.02% in the Sequential model for demand analysis. After Spacy's study, we were able to manage 80% of mistakes related to misspelled words using a mix of Levenshtein distance and ratio algorithms.
Parallel Power System Restoration
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

Power system restoration is an essential activity for grid resilience, where grid operators restart generators, re-establish transmission paths, and restore loads after a blackout event. With a goal of restoring electric service in the shortest time, the core decisions in restoration planning are to partition the grid into sub-networks, each of which has an initial power source for black-start (called sectionalization problem), and then restart all generators in each network (called generator startup sequencing problem or GSS) as soon as possible. Due to the complexity of each problem, the sectionalization and GSS problems are usually solved separately, often resulting in a sub-optimal solution. Our paper develops models and computational methods to solve the two problems simultaneously. We first study the computational complexity of the GSS problem and develop an efficient integer linear programming formulation. We then integrate the GSS problem with the sectionalization problem and develop an integer linear programming formulation for the parallel power system restoration (PPSR) problem to find exact optimal solutions. To solve larger systems, we then develop bounding approaches that find good upper and lower bounds efficiently. Finally, to address computational challenges for very large power grids, we develop a randomized approach to find a high-quality feasible solution quickly. Our computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed approaches are able to find good solutions for PPSR in up to 2000-bus systems.
Probabilistic Embeddings with Laplacian Graph Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce probabilistic embeddings using Laplacian priors (PELP). The proposed model enables incorporating graph side-information into static word embeddings. We theoretically show that the model unifies several previously proposed embedding methods under one umbrella. PELP generalises graph-enhanced, group, dynamic, and cross-lingual static word embeddings. PELP also enables any combination of these previous models in a straightforward fashion. Furthermore, we empirically show that our model matches the performance of previous models as special cases. In addition, we demonstrate its flexibility by applying it to the comparison of political sociolects over time. Finally, we provide code as a TensorFlow implementation enabling flexible estimation in different settings.
Multilingual Abusiveness Identification on Code-Mixed Social Media Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Social Media platforms have been seeing adoption and growth in their usage over time. This growth has been further accelerated with the lockdown in the past year when people's interaction, conversation, and expression were limited physically. It is becoming increasingly important to keep the platform safe from abusive content for better user experience. Much work has been done on English social media content but text analysis on non-English social media is relatively underexplored. Non-English social media content have the additional challenges of code-mixing, transliteration and using different scripture in same sentence. In this work, we propose an approach for abusiveness identification on the multilingual Moj dataset which comprises of Indic languages. Our approach tackles the common challenges of non-English social media content and can be extended to other languages as well.
Four-dimensional Gait Surfaces for A Tilt-rotor -- Two Color Map Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This article presents the four-dimensional surfaces which instruct the gait plan for a tilt-rotor. The previous gaits analyzed in the tilt-rotor research are inspired by animals; no theoretical base backs the robustness of these gaits. This research deduces the gaits by diminishing the effect of the attitude of the tilt-rotor for the first time. Four-dimensional gait surfaces are subsequently found, on which the gaits are expected to be robust to the attitude. These surfaces provide the region where the gait is suggested to be planned. However, a discontinuous region may hinder the gait plan process while utilizing the proposal gait surfaces. A Two Color Map Theorem is then established to guarantee the continuity of each gait designed. The robustness of the typical gaits obeying the Two Color Map Theorem and on the gait surface is demonstrated by comparing the singular curve in attitude with the gaits not on the gait surface. The result shows that the acceptable attitudes enlarge for the gaits on the gait surface.
Almost-Linear Planted Cliques Elude the Metropolis Process
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

A seminal work of Jerrum (1992) showed that large cliques elude the Metropolis process. More specifically, Jerrum showed that the Metropolis algorithm cannot find a clique of size $k=Θ(n^α), α\in (0,1/2)$, which is planted in the Erdős-Rényi random graph $G(n,1/2)$, in polynomial time. Information theoretically it is possible to find such planted cliques as soon as $k \ge (2+ε) \log n$. Since the work of Jerrum, the computational problem of finding a planted clique in $G(n,1/2)$ was studied extensively and many polynomial time algorithms were shown to find the planted clique if it is of size $k = Ω(\sqrt{n})$, while no polynomial-time algorithm is known to work when $k=o(\sqrt{n})$. Notably, the first evidence of the problem's algorithmic hardness is commonly attributed to the result of Jerrum from 1992. In this paper we revisit the original Metropolis algorithm suggested by Jerrum. Interestingly, we find that the Metropolis algorithm actually fails to recover a planted clique of size $k=Θ(n^α)$ for any constant $0 \leq α< 1$. Moreover, we strengthen Jerrum's results in a number of other ways including: Like many results in the MCMC literature, the result of Jerrum shows that there exists a starting state (which may depend on the instance) for which the Metropolis algorithm fails. For a wide range of temperatures, we show that the algorithm fails when started at the most natural initial state, which is the empty clique. This answers an open problem stated in Jerrum (1992). We also show that the simulated tempering version of the Metropolis algorithm, a more sophisticated temperature-exchange variant of it, also fails at the same regime of parameters. Finally, our results confirm recent predictions by Gamarnik and Zadik (2019) and Angelini, Fachin, de Feo (2021).
Online No-regret Model-Based Meta RL for Personalized Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The interaction between a vehicle navigation system and the driver of the vehicle can be formulated as a model-based reinforcement learning problem, where the navigation systems (agent) must quickly adapt to the characteristics of the driver (environmental dynamics) to provide the best sequence of turn-by-turn driving instructions. Most modern day navigation systems (e.g, Google maps, Waze, Garmin) are not designed to personalize their low-level interactions for individual users across a wide range of driving styles (e.g., vehicle type, reaction time, level of expertise). Towards the development of personalized navigation systems that adapt to a variety of driving styles, we propose an online no-regret model-based RL method that quickly conforms to the dynamics of the current user. As the user interacts with it, the navigation system quickly builds a user-specific model, from which navigation commands are optimized using model predictive control. By personalizing the policy in this way, our method is able to give well-timed driving instructions that match the user's dynamics. Our theoretical analysis shows that our method is a no-regret algorithm and we provide the convergence rate in the agnostic setting. Our empirical analysis with 60+ hours of real-world user data using a driving simulator shows that our method can reduce the number of collisions by more than 60%.
Nonlocal optimization of binary neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We explore training Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) as a discrete variable inference problem over a factor graph. We study the behaviour of this conversion in an under-parameterized BNN setting and propose stochastic versions of Belief Propagation (BP) and Survey Propagation (SP) message passing algorithms to overcome the intractability of their current formulation. Compared to traditional gradient methods for BNNs, our results indicate that both stochastic BP and SP find better configurations of the parameters in the BNN.
Fault-Tolerant Deep Learning: A Hierarchical Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

With the rapid advancements of deep learning in the past decade, it can be foreseen that deep learning will be continuously deployed in more and more safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. In this context, reliability turns out to be critical to the deployment of deep learning in these applications and gradually becomes a first-class citizen among the major design metrics like performance and energy efficiency. Nevertheless, the back-box deep learning models combined with the diverse underlying hardware faults make resilient deep learning extremely challenging. In this special session, we conduct a comprehensive survey of fault-tolerant deep learning design approaches with a hierarchical perspective and investigate these approaches from model layer, architecture layer, circuit layer, and cross layer respectively.
PSDoodle: Searching for App Screens via Interactive Sketching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Keyword-based mobile screen search does not account for screen content and fails to operate as a universal tool for all levels of users. Visual searching (e.g., image, sketch) is structured and easy to adopt. Current visual search approaches count on a complete screen and are therefore slow and tedious. PSDoodle employs a deep neural network to recognize partial screen element drawings instantly on a digital drawing interface and shows results in real-time. PSDoodle is the first tool that utilizes partial sketches and searches for screens in an interactive iterative way. PSDoodle supports different drawing styles and retrieves search results that are relevant to the user's sketch query. A short video demonstration is available online at: https://youtu.be/3cVLHFm5pY4
Streaming Approximation Scheme for Minimizing Total Completion Time on Parallel Machines Subject to Varying Processing Capacity
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We study the problem of minimizing total completion time on parallel machines subject to varying processing capacity. In this paper, we develop an approximation scheme for the problem under the data stream model where the input data is massive and cannot fit into memory and thus can only be scanned for a few passes. Our algorithm can compute the approximate value of the optimal total completion time in one pass and output the schedule with the approximate value in two passes.
An End-to-End Integrated Computation and Communication Architecture for Goal-oriented Networking: A Perspective on Live Surveillance Video
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Real-time video surveillance has become a crucial technology for smart cities, made possible through the large-scale deployment of mobile and fixed video cameras. In this paper, we propose situation-aware streaming, for real-time identification of important events from live-feeds at the source rather than a cloud based analysis. For this, we first identify the frames containing a specific situation and assign them a high scale-of-importance (SI). The identification is made at the source using a tiny neural network (having a small number of hidden layers), which incurs a small computational resource, albeit at the cost of accuracy. The frames with a high SI value are then streamed with a certain required Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) to retain the frame quality, while the remaining ones are transmitted with a small SNR. The received frames are then analyzed using a deep neural network (with many hidden layers) to extract the situation accurately. We show that the proposed scheme is able to reduce the required power consumption of the transmitter by 38.5% for 2160p (UHD) video, while achieving a classification accuracy of 97.5%, for the given situation.
The COVMis-Stance dataset: Stance Detection on Twitter for COVID-19 Misinformation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic, large amounts of COVID-19 misinformation are spreading on social media. We are interested in the stance of Twitter users towards COVID-19 misinformation. However, due to the relative recent nature of the pandemic, only a few stance detection datasets fit our task. We have constructed a new stance dataset consisting of 2631 tweets annotated with the stance towards COVID-19 misinformation. In contexts with limited labeled data, we fine-tune our models by leveraging the MNLI dataset and two existing stance detection datasets (RumourEval and COVIDLies), and evaluate the model performance on our dataset. Our experimental results show that the model performs the best when fine-tuned sequentially on the MNLI dataset and the combination of the undersampled RumourEval and COVIDLies datasets. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/yanfangh/covid-rumor-stance
Micro-Behavior Encoding for Session-based Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Session-based Recommendation (SR) aims to predict the next item for recommendation based on previously recorded sessions of user interaction. The majority of existing approaches to SR focus on modeling the transition patterns of items. In such models, the so-called micro-behaviors describing how the user locates an item and carries out various activities on it (e.g., click, add-to-cart, and read-comments), are simply ignored. A few recent studies have tried to incorporate the sequential patterns of micro-behaviors into SR models. However, those sequential models still cannot effectively capture all the inherent interdependencies between micro-behavior operations. In this work, we aim to investigate the effects of the micro-behavior information in SR systematically. Specifically, we identify two different patterns of micro-behaviors: "sequential patterns" and "dyadic relational patterns". To build a unified model of user micro-behaviors, we first devise a multigraph to aggregate the sequential patterns from different items via a graph neural network, and then utilize an extended self-attention network to exploit the pair-wise relational patterns of micro-behaviors. Extensive experiments on three public real-world datasets show the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-theart baselines and confirm the usefulness of these two different micro-behavior patterns for SR.
Automating Reinforcement Learning with Example-based Resets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn motor skills from environmental interactions with minimal to no prior knowledge. However, existing reinforcement learning algorithms assume an episodic setting, in which the agent resets to a fixed initial state distribution at the end of each episode, to successfully train the agents from repeated trials. Such reset mechanism, while trivial for simulated tasks, can be challenging to provide for real-world robotics tasks. Resets in robotic systems often require extensive human supervision and task-specific workarounds, which contradicts the goal of autonomous robot learning. In this paper, we propose an extension to conventional reinforcement learning towards greater autonomy by introducing an additional agent that learns to reset in a self-supervised manner. The reset agent preemptively triggers a reset to prevent manual resets and implicitly imposes a curriculum for the forward agent. We apply our method to learn from scratch on a suite of simulated and real-world continuous control tasks and demonstrate that the reset agent successfully learns to reduce manual resets whilst also allowing the forward policy to improve gradually over time.