OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Can you even tell left from right? Presenting a new challenge for VQA
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual Question Answering (VQA) needs a means of evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of models. One aspect of such an evaluation is the evaluation of compositional generalisation, or the ability of a model to answer well on scenes whose scene-setups are different from the training set. Therefore, for this purpose, we need datasets whose train and test sets differ significantly in composition. In this work, we present several quantitative measures of compositional separation and find that popular datasets for VQA are not good evaluators. To solve this, we present Uncommon Objects in Unseen Configurations (UOUC), a synthetic dataset for VQA. UOUC is at once fairly complex while also being well-separated, compositionally. The object-class of UOUC consists of 380 clasess taken from 528 characters from the Dungeons and Dragons game. The train set of UOUC consists of 200,000 scenes; whereas the test set consists of 30,000 scenes. In order to study compositional generalisation, simple reasoning and memorisation, each scene of UOUC is annotated with up to 10 novel questions. These deal with spatial relationships, hypothetical changes to scenes, counting, comparison, memorisation and memory-based reasoning. In total, UOUC presents over 2 million questions. UOUC also finds itself as a strong challenge to well-performing models for VQA. Our evaluation of recent models for VQA shows poor compositional generalisation, and comparatively lower ability towards simple reasoning. These results suggest that UOUC could lead to advances in research by being a strong benchmark for VQA.
One Agent To Rule Them All: Towards Multi-agent Conversational AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The increasing volume of commercially available conversational agents (CAs) on the market has resulted in users being burdened with learning and adopting multiple agents to accomplish their tasks. Though prior work has explored supporting a multitude of domains within the design of a single agent, the interaction experience suffers due to the large action space of desired capabilities. To address these problems, we introduce a new task BBAI: Black-Box Agent Integration, focusing on combining the capabilities of multiple black-box CAs at scale. We explore two techniques: question agent pairing and question response pairing aimed at resolving this task. Leveraging these techniques, we design One For All (OFA), a scalable system that provides a unified interface to interact with multiple CAs. Additionally, we introduce MARS: Multi-Agent Response Selection, a new encoder model for question response pairing that jointly encodes user question and agent response pairs. We demonstrate that OFA is able to automatically and accurately integrate an ensemble of commercially available CAs spanning disparate domains. Specifically, using the MARS encoder we achieve the highest accuracy on our BBAI task, outperforming strong baselines.
Energy-efficient Dense DNN Acceleration with Signed Bit-slice Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

As the number of deep neural networks (DNNs) to be executed on a mobile system-on-chip (SoC) increases, the mobile SoC suffers from the real-time DNN acceleration within its limited hardware resources and power budget. Although the previous mobile neural processing units (NPUs) take advantage of low-bit computing and exploitation of the sparsity, it is incapable of accelerating high-precision and dense DNNs. This paper proposes energy-efficient signed bit-slice architecture which accelerates both high-precision and dense DNNs by exploiting a large number of zero values of signed bit-slices. Proposed signed bit-slice representation (SBR) changes signed $1111_{2}$ bit-slice to $0000_{2}$ by borrowing a $1$ value from its lower order of bit-slice. As a result, it generates a large number of zero bit-slices even in dense DNNs. Moreover, it balances the positive and negative values of 2's complement data, allowing bit-slice based output speculation which pre-computes high order of bit-slices and skips the remaining dense low order of bit-slices. The signed bit-slice architecture compresses and skips the zero input signed bit-slices, and the zero skipping unit also supports the output skipping by masking the speculated inputs as zero. Additionally, the heterogeneous network-on-chip (NoC) benefits the exploitation of data reusability and reduction of transmission bandwidth. The paper introduces a specialized instruction set architecture (ISA) and a hierarchical instruction decoder for the control of the signed bit-slice architecture. Finally, the signed bit-slice architecture outperforms the previous bit-slice accelerator, Bit-fusion, over $\times3.65$ higher area-efficiency, $\times3.88$ higher energy-efficiency, and $\times5.35$ higher throughput.
Maximizing Modular plus Non-monotone Submodular Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

The research problem in this work is the relaxation of maximizing non-negative submodular plus modular with the entire real number domain as its value range over a family of down-closed sets. We seek a feasible point $\mathbf{x}^*$ in the polytope of the given constraint such that $\mathbf{x}^*\in\arg\max_{\mathbf{x}\in\mathcal{P}\subseteq[0,1]^n}F(\mathbf{x})+L(\mathbf{x})$, where $F$, $L$ denote the extensions of the underlying submodular function $f$ and modular function $\ell$. We provide an approximation algorithm named \textsc{Measured Continuous Greedy with Adaptive Weights}, which yields a guarantee $F(\mathbf{x})+L(\mathbf{x})\geq \left(1/e-\mathcal{O}(ε)\right)\cdot f(OPT)+\left(\frac{β-e}{e(β-1)}-\mathcal{O}(ε)\right)\cdot\ell(OPT)$ under the assumption that the ratio of non-negative part within $\ell(OPT)$ to the absolute value of its negative part is demonstrated by a parameter $β\in[0, \infty]$, where $OPT$ is the optimal integral solution for the discrete problem. It is obvious that the factor of $\ell(OPT)$ is $1$ when $β=0$, which means the negative part is completely dominant at this time; otherwise the factor is closed to $1/e$ whe $β\rightarrow\infty$. Our work first breaks the restriction on the specific value range of the modular function without assuming non-positivity or non-negativity as previous results and quantifies the relative variation of the approximation guarantee for optimal solutions with arbitrary structure. Moreover, we also give an analysis for the inapproximability of the problem we consider. We show a hardness result that there exists no polynomial algorithm whose output $S$ satisfies $f(S)+\ell(S)\geq0.478\cdot f(OPT)+\ell(OPT)$.
S2F2: Self-Supervised High Fidelity Face Reconstruction from Monocular Image
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present a novel face reconstruction method capable of reconstructing detailed face geometry, spatially varying face reflectance from a single monocular image. We build our work upon the recent advances of DNN-based auto-encoders with differentiable ray tracing image formation, trained in self-supervised manner. While providing the advantage of learning-based approaches and real-time reconstruction, the latter methods lacked fidelity. In this work, we achieve, for the first time, high fidelity face reconstruction using self-supervised learning only. Our novel coarse-to-fine deep architecture allows us to solve the challenging problem of decoupling face reflectance from geometry using a single image, at high computational speed. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our method achieves more visually appealing reconstruction.
A Framework for Verifiable and Auditable Federated Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated Leaning is an emerging approach to manage cooperation between a group of agents for the solution of Machine Learning tasks, with the goal of improving each agent's performance without disclosing any data. In this paper we present a novel algorithmic architecture that tackle this problem in the particular case of Anomaly Detection (or classification or rare events), a setting where typical applications often comprise data with sensible information, but where the scarcity of anomalous examples encourages collaboration. We show how Random Forests can be used as a tool for the development of accurate classifiers with an effective insight-sharing mechanism that does not break the data integrity. Moreover, we explain how the new architecture can be readily integrated in a blockchain infrastructure to ensure the verifiable and auditable execution of the algorithm. Furthermore, we discuss how this work may set the basis for a more general approach for the design of federated ensemble-learning methods beyond the specific task and architecture discussed in this paper.
Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2022
Year: 2022

Programming is a powerful and ubiquitous problem-solving tool. Developing systems that can assist programmers or even generate programs independently could make programming more productive and accessible, yet so far incorporating innovations in AI has proven challenging. Recent large-scale language models have demonstrated an impressive ability to generate code, and are now able to complete simple programming tasks. However, these models still perform poorly when evaluated on more complex, unseen problems that require problem-solving skills beyond simply translating instructions into code. For example, competitive programming problems which require an understanding of algorithms and complex natural language remain extremely challenging. To address this gap, we introduce AlphaCode, a system for code generation that can create novel solutions to these problems that require deeper reasoning. In simulated evaluations on recent programming competitions on the Codeforces platform, AlphaCode achieved on average a ranking of top 54.3% in competitions with more than 5,000 participants. We found that three key components were critical to achieve good and reliable performance: (1) an extensive and clean competitive programming dataset for training and evaluation, (2) large and efficient-to-sample transformer-based architectures, and (3) large-scale model sampling to explore the search space, followed by filtering based on program behavior to a small set of submissions.
K-VQG: Knowledge-aware Visual Question Generation for Common-sense Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual Question Generation (VQG) is a task to generate questions from images. When humans ask questions about an image, their goal is often to acquire some new knowledge. However, existing studies on VQG have mainly addressed question generation from answers or question categories, overlooking the objectives of knowledge acquisition. To introduce a knowledge acquisition perspective into VQG, we constructed a novel knowledge-aware VQG dataset called K-VQG. This is the first large, humanly annotated dataset in which questions regarding images are tied to structured knowledge. We also developed a new VQG model that can encode and use knowledge as the target for a question. The experiment results show that our model outperforms existing models on the K-VQG dataset.
NINNs: Nudging Induced Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

New algorithms called nudging induced neural networks (NINNs), to control and improve the accuracy of deep neural networks (DNNs), are introduced. The NINNs framework can be applied to almost all pre-existing DNNs, with forward propagation, with costs comparable to existing DNNs. NINNs work by adding a feedback control term to the forward propagation of the network. The feedback term nudges the neural network towards a desired quantity of interest. NINNs offer multiple advantages, for instance, they lead to higher accuracy when compared with existing data assimilation algorithms such as nudging. Rigorous convergence analysis is established for NINNs. The algorithmic and theoretical findings are illustrated on examples from data assimilation and chemically reacting flows.
MOBDrone: a Drone Video Dataset for Man OverBoard Rescue
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Modern Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) equipped with cameras can play an essential role in speeding up the identification and rescue of people who have fallen overboard, i.e., man overboard (MOB). To this end, Artificial Intelligence techniques can be leveraged for the automatic understanding of visual data acquired from drones. However, detecting people at sea in aerial imagery is challenging primarily due to the lack of specialized annotated datasets for training and testing detectors for this task. To fill this gap, we introduce and publicly release the MOBDrone benchmark, a collection of more than 125K drone-view images in a marine environment under several conditions, such as different altitudes, camera shooting angles, and illumination. We manually annotated more than 180K objects, of which about 113K man overboard, precisely localizing them with bounding boxes. Moreover, we conduct a thorough performance analysis of several state-of-the-art object detectors on the MOBDrone data, serving as baselines for further research.
Approximability and Generalisation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Approximate learning machines have become popular in the era of small devices, including quantised, factorised, hashed, or otherwise compressed predictors, and the quest to explain and guarantee good generalisation abilities for such methods has just begun. In this paper we study the role of approximability in learning, both in the full precision and the approximated settings of the predictor that is learned from the data, through a notion of sensitivity of predictors to the action of the approximation operator at hand. We prove upper bounds on the generalisation of such predictors, yielding the following main findings, for any PAC-learnable class and any given approximation operator. 1) We show that under mild conditions, approximable target concepts are learnable from a smaller labelled sample, provided sufficient unlabelled data. 2) We give algorithms that guarantee a good predictor whose approximation also enjoys the same generalisation guarantees. 3) We highlight natural examples of structure in the class of sensitivities, which reduce, and possibly even eliminate the otherwise abundant requirement of additional unlabelled data, and henceforth shed new light onto what makes one problem instance easier to learn than another. These results embed the scope of modern model compression approaches into the general goal of statistical learning theory, which in return suggests appropriate algorithms through minimising uniform bounds.
UofA-Truth at Factify 2022 : Transformer And Transfer Learning Based Multi-Modal Fact-Checking
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2022
Year: 2022

Identifying fake news is a very difficult task, especially when considering the multiple modes of conveying information through text, image, video and/or audio. We attempted to tackle the problem of automated misinformation/disinformation detection in multi-modal news sources (including text and images) through our simple, yet effective, approach in the FACTIFY shared task at De-Factify@AAAI2022. Our model produced an F1-weighted score of 74.807%, which was the fourth best out of all the submissions. In this paper we will explain our approach to undertake the shared task.
Sensor Object Plausibilization with Boids Flocking Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Driver assistance systems are increasingly becoming part of the standard equipment of vehicles and thus contribute to road safety. However, as they become more widespread, the requirements for cost efficiency are also increasing, and so few and inexpensive sensors are used in these systems. Especially in challenging situations, this leads to the fact that target discrimination cannot be ensured which in turn leads to a false reaction of the driver assistance system. Typically, the interaction between moving traffic participants is not modeled directly in the environmental model so that tracked objects can split, merge or disappear. The Boids flocking algorithm is used to model the interaction between road users on already tracked objects by applying the movement rules (separation, cohesion, alignment) on the boids. This facilitates the creation of semantic neighborhood information between road users. We show in a comprehensive simulation that with only 7 boids per traffic participant, the estimated median separatation between objects can improve from 2.4 m to 3 m for a ground truth of 3.7 m. The bottom percentile improves from 1.85 m to 2.8 m.
Representation Learning for Resource-Constrained Keyphrase Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

State-of-the-art keyphrase generation methods generally depend on large annotated datasets, limiting their performance in domains with limited annotated data. To overcome this challenge, we design a data-oriented approach that first identifies salient information using retrieval-based corpus-level statistics, and then learns a task-specific intermediate representation based on a pre-trained language model using large-scale unlabeled documents. We introduce salient span recovery and salient span prediction as denoising training objectives that condense the intra-article and inter-article knowledge essential for keyphrase generation. Through experiments on multiple keyphrase generation benchmarks, we show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for facilitating low-resource keyphrase generation and zero-shot domain adaptation. Our method especially benefits the generation of absent keyphrases, approaching the performance of models trained with large training sets.
The Design and Implementation of a Broadly Applicable Algorithm for Optimizing Intra-Day Surgical Scheduling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Surgical scheduling optimization is an active area of research. However, few algorithms to optimize surgical scheduling are implemented and see sustained use. An algorithm is more likely to be implemented, if it allows for surgeon autonomy, i.e., requires only limited scheduling centralization, and functions in the limited technical infrastructure of widely used electronic medical records (EMRs). In order for an algorithm to see sustained use, it must be compatible with changes to hospital capacity, patient volumes, and scheduling practices. To meet these objectives, we developed the BEDS (better elective day of surgery) algorithm, a greedy heuristic for smoothing unit-specific surgical admissions across days. We implemented BEDS in the EMR of a large pediatric academic medical center. The use of BEDS was associated with a reduction in the variability in the number of admissions. BEDS is freely available as a dashboard in Tableau, a commercial software used by numerous hospitals. BEDS is readily implementable with the limited tools available to most hospitals, does not require reductions to surgeon autonomy or centralized scheduling, and is compatible with changes to hospital capacity or patient volumes. We present a general algorithmic framework from which BEDS is derived based on a particular choice of objectives and constraints. We argue that algorithms generated by this framework retain many of the desirable characteristics of BEDS while being compatible with a wide range of objectives and constraints.
CrowdMLP: Weakly-Supervised Crowd Counting via Multi-Granularity MLP
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Existing state-of-the-art crowd counting algorithms rely excessively on location-level annotations, which are burdensome to acquire. When only count-level (weak) supervisory signals are available, it is arduous and error-prone to regress total counts due to the lack of explicit spatial constraints. To address this issue, a novel and efficient counter (referred to as CrowdMLP) is presented, which probes into modelling global dependencies of embeddings and regressing total counts by devising a multi-granularity MLP regressor. In specific, a locally-focused pre-trained frontend is cascaded to extract crude feature maps with intrinsic spatial cues, which prevent the model from collapsing into trivial outcomes. The crude embeddings, along with raw crowd scenes, are tokenized at different granularity levels. The multi-granularity MLP then proceeds to mix tokens at the dimensions of cardinality, channel, and spatial for mining global information. An effective proxy task, namely Split-Counting, is also proposed to evade the barrier of limited samples and the shortage of spatial hints in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CrowdMLP significantly outperforms existing weakly-supervised counting algorithms and performs on par with state-of-the-art location-level supervised approaches.
Sex Trouble: Common pitfalls in incorporating sex/gender in medical machine learning and how to avoid them
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

False assumptions about sex and gender are deeply embedded in the medical system, including that they are binary, static, and concordant. Machine learning researchers must understand the nature of these assumptions in order to avoid perpetuating them. In this perspectives piece, we identify three common mistakes that researchers make when dealing with sex/gender data: "sex confusion", the failure to identity what sex in a dataset does or doesn't mean; "sex obsession", the belief that sex, specifically sex assigned at birth, is the relevant variable for most applications; and "sex/gender slippage", the conflation of sex and gender even in contexts where only one or the other is known. We then discuss how these pitfalls show up in machine learning studies based on electronic health record data, which is commonly used for everything from retrospective analysis of patient outcomes to the development of algorithms to predict risk and administer care. Finally, we offer a series of recommendations about how machine learning researchers can produce both research and algorithms that more carefully engage with questions of sex/gender, better serving all patients, including transgender people.
A Deep Dive into Dataset Imbalance and Bias in Face Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

As the deployment of automated face recognition (FR) systems proliferates, bias in these systems is not just an academic question, but a matter of public concern. Media portrayals often center imbalance as the main source of bias, i.e., that FR models perform worse on images of non-white people or women because these demographic groups are underrepresented in training data. Recent academic research paints a more nuanced picture of this relationship. However, previous studies of data imbalance in FR have focused exclusively on the face verification setting, while the face identification setting has been largely ignored, despite being deployed in sensitive applications such as law enforcement. This is an unfortunate omission, as 'imbalance' is a more complex matter in identification; imbalance may arise in not only the training data, but also the testing data, and furthermore may affect the proportion of identities belonging to each demographic group or the number of images belonging to each identity. In this work, we address this gap in the research by thoroughly exploring the effects of each kind of imbalance possible in face identification, and discuss other factors which may impact bias in this setting.