OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
DawDreamer: Bridging the Gap Between Digital Audio Workstations and Python Interfaces
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Audio production techniques which previously only existed in GUI-constrained digital audio workstations, livecoding environments, or C++ APIs are now accessible with our new Python module called DawDreamer. DawDreamer therefore bridges the gap between real sound engineers and coders imitating them with offline batch-processing. Like contemporary modules in this domain, DawDreamer can create directed acyclic graphs of audio processors such as VSTs which generate or manipulate audio streams. DawDreamer can also dynamically compile and execute code from Faust, a powerful signal processing language which can be deployed to many platforms and microcontrollers. We discuss DawDreamer's unique features in detail and potential applications across music information retrieval including source separation, transcription, and audio effect parameter inference. We provide fully cross-platform PyPI installers, a Linux Dockerfile, and an example Jupyter notebook.
Explaining GNN over Evolving Graphs using Information Flow
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Graphs are ubiquitous in many applications, such as social networks, knowledge graphs, smart grids, etc.. Graph neural networks (GNN) are the current state-of-the-art for these applications, and yet remain obscure to humans. Explaining the GNN predictions can add transparency. However, as many graphs are not static but continuously evolving, explaining changes in predictions between two graph snapshots is different but equally important. Prior methods only explain static predictions or generate coarse or irrelevant explanations for dynamic predictions. We define the problem of explaining evolving GNN predictions and propose an axiomatic attribution method to uniquely decompose the change in a prediction to paths on computation graphs. The attribution to many paths involving high-degree nodes is still not interpretable, while simply selecting the top important paths can be suboptimal in approximating the change. We formulate a novel convex optimization problem to optimally select the paths that explain the prediction evolution. Theoretically, we prove that the existing method based on Layer-Relevance-Propagation (LRP) is a special case of the proposed algorithm when an empty graph is compared with. Empirically, on seven graph datasets, with a novel metric designed for evaluating explanations of prediction change, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over existing methods, including LRP, DeepLIFT, and other path selection methods.
Building a Question Answering System for the Manufacturing Domain
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The design or simulation analysis of special equipment products must follow the national standards, and hence it may be necessary to repeatedly consult the contents of the standards in the design process. However, it is difficult for the traditional question answering system based on keyword retrieval to give accurate answers to technical questions. Therefore, we use natural language processing techniques to design a question answering system for the decision-making process in pressure vessel design. To solve the problem of insufficient training data for the technology question answering system, we propose a method to generate questions according to a declarative sentence from several different dimensions so that multiple question-answer pairs can be obtained from a declarative sentence. In addition, we designed an interactive attention model based on a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network to improve the performance of the similarity comparison of two question sentences. Finally, the performance of the question answering system was tested on public and technical domain datasets.
YMIR: A Rapid Data-centric Development Platform for Vision Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper introduces an open source platform to support the rapid development of computer vision applications at scale. The platform puts the efficient data development at the center of the machine learning development process, integrates active learning methods, data and model version control, and uses concepts such as projects to enable fast iterations of multiple task specific datasets in parallel. This platform abstracts the development process into core states and operations, and integrates third party tools via open APIs as implementations of the operations. This open design reduces the development cost and adoption cost for ML teams with existing tools. At the same time, the platform supports recording project development histories, through which successful projects can be shared to further boost model production efficiency on similar tasks. The platform is open source and is already used internally to meet the increasing demand for different real world computer vision applications.
Data imputation and comparison of custom ensemble models with existing libraries like XGBoost, Scikit learn, etc. for Predictive Equipment failure
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents comparison of custom ensemble models with the models trained using existing libraries Like Xgboost, Scikit Learn, etc. in case of predictive equipment failure for the case of oil extracting equipment setup. The dataset that is used contains many missing values and the paper proposes different model-based data imputation strategies to impute the missing values. The architecture and the training and testing process of the custom ensemble models are explained in detail.
An Expectation-Maximization Perspective on Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning describes the distributed training of models across multiple clients while keeping the data private on-device. In this work, we view the server-orchestrated federated learning process as a hierarchical latent variable model where the server provides the parameters of a prior distribution over the client-specific model parameters. We show that with simple Gaussian priors and a hard version of the well known Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, learning in such a model corresponds to FedAvg, the most popular algorithm for the federated learning setting. This perspective on FedAvg unifies several recent works in the field and opens up the possibility for extensions through different choices for the hierarchical model. Based on this view, we further propose a variant of the hierarchical model that employs prior distributions to promote sparsity. By similarly using the hard-EM algorithm for learning, we obtain FedSparse, a procedure that can learn sparse neural networks in the federated learning setting. FedSparse reduces communication costs from client to server and vice-versa, as well as the computational costs for inference with the sparsified network - both of which are of great practical importance in federated learning.
A Survey on Rural Internet Connectivity in India
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Rural connectivity is widely research topic for several years. In India, around 70% of the population have poor or no connectivity to access digital services. Different solutions are being tested and trialled around the world, especially in India. They key driving factor for reducing digital divide is exploring different solutions both technologically and economically to lower the cost for the network deployments and improving service adoption rate. In this survey, we aim to study the rural connectivity use-cases, state of art projects and initiatives, challenges, and technologies to improve digital connectivity in rural parts of India. The strengths and weakness of different technologies which are being tested for rural connectivity is analyzed. We also explore the rural use-case of 6G communication system which would be suitable for rural Indian scenario.
Xp-GAN: Unsupervised Multi-object Controllable Video Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Video Generation is a relatively new and yet popular subject in machine learning due to its vast variety of potential applications and its numerous challenges. Current methods in Video Generation provide the user with little or no control over the exact specification of how the objects in the generate video are to be moved and located at each frame, that is, the user can't explicitly control how each object in the video should move. In this paper we propose a novel method that allows the user to move any number of objects of a single initial frame just by drawing bounding boxes over those objects and then moving those boxes in the desired path. Our model utilizes two Autoencoders to fully decompose the motion and content information in a video and achieves results comparable to well-known baseline and state of the art methods.
The Joy of Neural Painting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Neural Painters is a class of models that follows a GAN framework to generate brushstrokes, which are then composed to create paintings. GANs are great generative models for AI Art but they are known to be notoriously difficult to train. To overcome GAN's limitations and to speed up the Neural Painter training, we applied Transfer Learning to the process reducing it from days to only hours, while achieving the same level of visual aesthetics in the final paintings generated. We report our approach and results in this work.
Factorisation-based Image Labelling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Segmentation of brain magnetic resonance images (MRI) into anatomical regions is a useful task in neuroimaging. Manual annotation is time consuming and expensive, so having a fully automated and general purpose brain segmentation algorithm is highly desirable. To this end, we propose a patched-based label propagation approach based on a generative model with latent variables. Once trained, our Factorisation-based Image Labelling (FIL) model is able to label target images with a variety of image contrasts. We compare the effectiveness of our proposed model against the state-of-the-art using data from the MICCAI 2012 Grand Challenge and Workshop on Multi-Atlas Labeling. As our approach is intended to be general purpose, we also assess how well it can handle domain shift by labelling images of the same subjects acquired with different MR contrasts.
Faster Sparse Minimum Cost Flow by Electrical Flow Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We give an $\widetilde{O}({m^{3/2 - 1/762} \log (U+W))}$ time algorithm for minimum cost flow with capacities bounded by $U$ and costs bounded by $W$. For sparse graphs with general capacities, this is the first algorithm to improve over the $\widetilde{O}({m^{3/2} \log^{O(1)} (U+W)})$ running time obtained by an appropriate instantiation of an interior point method [Daitch-Spielman, 2008]. Our approach is extending the framework put forth in [Gao-Liu-Peng, 2021] for computing the maximum flow in graphs with large capacities and, in particular, demonstrates how to reduce the problem of computing an electrical flow with general demands to the same problem on a sublinear-sized set of vertices -- even if the demand is supported on the entire graph. Along the way, we develop new machinery to assess the importance of the graph's edges at each phase of the interior point method optimization process. This capability relies on establishing a new connections between the electrical flows arising inside that optimization process and vertex distances in the corresponding effective resistance metric.
Fast Discovery of Nested Dependencies on JSON Data
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Functional and inclusion dependencies are the most widely used classes of data dependencies in data profiling due to their ability to identify relationships in data such as primary and foreign keys. These relationships are equally important when dealing with nested data formats such as JSON. However, the definition of functional and inclusion dependencies makes use of a flat, unnested relational model which misses many useful types of dependencies on data which involve nested data models. In this work, we identify types of dependencies which are not captured by traditional functional and inclusion dependencies but which nevertheless capture meaningful relationships among nested data. We also demonstrate how algorithms for mining these traditional dependencies can be adapted to also mine nested dependencies. The first strategy simply flattens the input data and feeds into unmodified existing algorithms. We present a second strategy which instead adapts the algorithm to efficiently process JSON data as input which in some cases leads to a reduction in runtime by multiple orders of magnitude on real-world datasets. We further show how these algorithms can be adapted to produce useful results in the presence of a percentage of incomplete or invalid data.
Machine Learning for Mechanical Ventilation Control (Extended Abstract)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Mechanical ventilation is one of the most widely used therapies in the ICU. However, despite broad application from anaesthesia to COVID-related life support, many injurious challenges remain. We frame these as a control problem: ventilators must let air in and out of the patient's lungs according to a prescribed trajectory of airway pressure. Industry-standard controllers, based on the PID method, are neither optimal nor robust. Our data-driven approach learns to control an invasive ventilator by training on a simulator itself trained on data collected from the ventilator. This method outperforms popular reinforcement learning algorithms and even controls the physical ventilator more accurately and robustly than PID. These results underscore how effective data-driven methodologies can be for invasive ventilation and suggest that more general forms of ventilation (e.g., non-invasive, adaptive) may also be amenable.
INCHE: High-Performance Encoding for Relational Databases through Incrementally Homomorphic Encryption
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Homomorphic encryption (HE) offers data confidentiality by executing queries directly on encrypted fields in the database-as-a-service (DaaS) paradigm. While fully HE exhibits great expressiveness but prohibitive performance overhead, a better balance between flexibility and efficiency can be achieved by partially HE schemes. Performance-wise, however, the encryption rate of state-of-the-art HE schemes is still orders of magnitude lower than the I/O throughput, rendering the HE scheme the performance bottleneck. This paper proposes INCHE, an incrementally homomorphic encryption scheme, which aims to boost the performance of HE schemes by incrementally encrypting fields in relational databases. The key idea of INCHE is to explore the intrinsic correlation between plaintexts and cache them for future reuse such that expensive HE primitives from plaintexts to ciphertexts are avoided. We prove the semantic security of INCHE under the chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) model and show that its time complexity is linear in the plaintext length. We implement an INCHE prototype by extending the Symmetria cryptosystem and verify its effectiveness on both randomly-generated data and the TPC-H benchmark.
Innovative System Design for Remote Air Traffic Control Simulation Training on and beyond COVID19
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Remote ATC simulation training is an emerging technology in aviation education during COVID. Professional training institutions can learn from others, whereas the experiences of developing remote ATC simulation teaching/training with the Start-up company ByteProTeq will be beneficial for the rest of the world to understand the differences and similarities of current remote training and to improve their performance in building a safe and efficient remote training environment. In this paper, we will present three improvements to our remote ATC training: 1) infrastructure upgrading of hardware and software from an existing stand-alone system to a remote network that considers costs, cyber security, system compatibility, et cetera; 2) quality of remote ATC simulation training, compared with traditional face-to-face training, including students and instructors feedback; 3) enhancement of the current remote training system beyond COVID-19 regarding reliability, cyber security, and capacity. This foundation paper will support understanding of the current stage of remote ATC simulation training development with the Start-up company ByteProTeq, during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby providing an excellent example for the rest of the world.
Effects of context, complexity, and clustering on evaluation for math formula retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

There are now several test collections for the formula retrieval task, in which a system's goal is to identify useful mathematical formulae to show in response to a query posed as a formula. These test collections differ in query format, query complexity, number of queries, content source, and relevance definition. Comparisons among six formula retrieval test collections illustrate that defining relevance based on query and/or document context can be consequential, that system results vary markedly with formula complexity, and that judging relevance after clustering formulas with identical symbol layouts (i.e., Symbol Layout Trees) can affect system preference ordering.
ACR-Pose: Adversarial Canonical Representation Reconstruction Network for Category Level 6D Object Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, category-level 6D object pose estimation has achieved significant improvements with the development of reconstructing canonical 3D representations. However, the reconstruction quality of existing methods is still far from excellent. In this paper, we propose a novel Adversarial Canonical Representation Reconstruction Network named ACR-Pose. ACR-Pose consists of a Reconstructor and a Discriminator. The Reconstructor is primarily composed of two novel sub-modules: Pose-Irrelevant Module (PIM) and Relational Reconstruction Module (RRM). PIM tends to learn canonical-related features to make the Reconstructor insensitive to rotation and translation, while RRM explores essential relational information between different input modalities to generate high-quality features. Subsequently, a Discriminator is employed to guide the Reconstructor to generate realistic canonical representations. The Reconstructor and the Discriminator learn to optimize through adversarial training. Experimental results on the prevalent NOCS-CAMERA and NOCS-REAL datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Approximation Algorithms for LCS and LIS with Truly Improved Running Times
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Longest common subsequence ($\mathsf{LCS}$) is a classic and central problem in combinatorial optimization. While $\mathsf{LCS}$ admits a quadratic time solution, recent evidence suggests that solving the problem may be impossible in truly subquadratic time. A special case of $\mathsf{LCS}$ wherein each character appears at most once in every string is equivalent to the longest increasing subsequence problem ($\mathsf{LIS}$) which can be solved in quasilinear time. In this work, we present novel algorithms for approximating $\mathsf{LCS}$ in truly subquadratic time and $\mathsf{LIS}$ in truly sublinear time. Our approximation factors depend on the ratio of the optimal solution size over the input size. We denote this ratio by $λ$ and obtain the following results for $\mathsf{LCS}$ and $\mathsf{LIS}$ without any prior knowledge of $λ$. $\bullet$ A truly subquadratic time algorithm for $\mathsf{LCS}$ with approximation factor $Ω(λ^3)$. $\bullet$A truly sublinear time algorithm for $\mathsf{LIS}$ with approximation factor $Ω(λ^3)$. Triangle inequality was recently used by [Boroujeni, Ehsani, Ghodsi, HajiAghayi and Seddighin SODA 2018] and [Charkraborty, Das, Goldenberg, Koucky and Saks FOCS 2018] to present new approximation algorithms for edit distance. Our techniques for $\mathsf{LCS}$ extend the notion of triangle inequality to non-metric settings.
Oblivious Online Contention Resolution Schemes
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Contention resolution schemes (CRSs) are powerful tools for obtaining "ex post feasible" solutions from candidates that are drawn from "ex ante feasible" distributions. Online contention resolution schemes (OCRSs), the online version, have found myriad applications in Bayesian and stochastic problems, such as prophet inequalities and stochastic probing. When the ex ante distribution is unknown, it was unknown whether good CRSs/OCRSs exist with no sample (in which case the scheme is oblivious) or few samples from the distribution. In this work, we give a simple $\frac{1}{e}$-selectable oblivious single item OCRS by mixing two simple schemes evenly, and show, via a Ramsey theory argument, that it is optimal. On the negative side, we show that no CRS or OCRS with $O(1)$ samples can be $Ω(1)$-balanced/selectable (i.e., preserve every active candidate with a constant probability) for graphic or transversal matroids.
FlowVOS: Weakly-Supervised Visual Warping for Detail-Preserving and Temporally Consistent Single-Shot Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the task of semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS). Our approach mitigates shortcomings in previous VOS work by addressing detail preservation and temporal consistency using visual warping. In contrast to prior work that uses full optical flow, we introduce a new foreground-targeted visual warping approach that learns flow fields from VOS data. We train a flow module to capture detailed motion between frames using two weakly-supervised losses. Our object-focused approach of warping previous foreground object masks to their positions in the target frame enables detailed mask refinement with fast runtimes without using extra flow supervision. It can also be integrated directly into state-of-the-art segmentation networks. On the DAVIS17 and YouTubeVOS benchmarks, we outperform state-of-the-art offline methods that do not use extra data, as well as many online methods that use extra data. Qualitatively, we also show our approach produces segmentations with high detail and temporal consistency.
Learning algorithms versus automatability of Frege systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2021
Year: 2021

We connect learning algorithms and algorithms automating proof search in propositional proof systems: for every sufficiently strong, well-behaved propositional proof system $P$, we prove that the following statements are equivalent, 1. Provable learning: $P$ proves efficiently that p-size circuits are learnable by subexponential-size circuits over the uniform distribution with membership queries. 2. Provable automatability: $P$ proves efficiently that $P$ is automatable by non-uniform circuits on propositional formulas expressing p-size circuit lower bounds. Here, $P$ is sufficiently strong and well-behaved if I.-III. holds: I. $P$ p-simulates Jeřábek's system $WF$ (which strengthens the Extended Frege system $EF$ by a surjective weak pigeonhole principle); II. $P$ satisfies some basic properties of standard proof systems which p-simulate $WF$; III. $P$ proves efficiently for some Boolean function $h$ that $h$ is hard on average for circuits of subexponential size. For example, if III. holds for $P=WF$, then Items 1 and 2 are equivalent for $P=WF$. If there is a function $h\in NE\cap coNE$ which is hard on average for circuits of size $2^{n/4}$, for each sufficiently big $n$, then there is an explicit propositional proof system $P$ satisfying properties I.-III., i.e. the equivalence of Items 1 and 2 holds for $P$.