OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Real-time Human-Robot Collaborative Manipulations of Cylindrical and Cubic Objects via Geometric Primitives and Depth Information
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Many objects commonly found in household and industrial environments are represented by cylindrical and cubic shapes. Thus, it is available for robots to manipulate them through the real-time detection of elliptic and rectangle shape primitives formed by the circular and rectangle tops of these objects. We devise a robust grasping system that enables a robot to manipulate cylindrical and cubic objects in collaboration scenarios by the proposed perception strategy including the detection of elliptic and rectangle shape primitives and depth information. The proposed method of detecting ellipses and rectangles incorporates a one-stage detection backbone and then, accommodates the proposed adaptive multi-branch multi-scale net with a designed iterative feature pyramid network, local inception net, and multi-receptive-filed feature fusion net to generate object detection recommendations. In terms of manipulating objects with different shapes, we propose the grasp synthetic to align the grasp pose of the gripper with an object's pose based on the proposed detector and registered depth information. The proposed robotic perception algorithm has been integrated on a robot to demonstrate the ability to carry out human-robot collaborative manipulations of cylindrical and cubic objects in real-time. We show that the robotic manipulator, empowered by the proposed detector, performs well in practical manipulation scenarios.(An experiment video is available in YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Amcs8lwvNK8.)
Complexity-based partitioning of CSFI problem instances with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a two-steps approach to partition instances of the Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) Syntactic Formula Isomorphism problem (CSFI) into groups of different complexity. First, we build a model, based on the Transformer architecture, that attempts to solve instances of the CSFI problem. Then, we leverage the errors of such model and train a second Transformer-based model to partition the problem instances into groups of different complexity, thus detecting the ones that can be solved without using too expensive resources. We evaluate the proposed approach on a pseudo-randomly generated dataset and obtain promising results. Finally, we discuss the possibility of extending this approach to other problems based on the same type of textual representation.
Design of a user-friendly control system for planetary rovers with CPS feature
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present a user-friendly planetary rover's control system for low latency surface telerobotic. Thanks to the proposed system, an operator can comfortably give commands through the control base station to a rover using commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) joysticks or by command sequencing with interactive monitoring on the sensed map of the environment. During operations, high situational awareness is made possible thanks to 3D map visualization. The map of the environment is built on the on-board computer by processing the rover's camera images with a visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm. It is transmitted via Wi-Fi and displayed on the control base station screen in near real-time. The navigation stack takes as input the visual SLAM data to build a cost map to find the minimum cost path. By interacting with the virtual map, the rover exhibits properties of a Cyber Physical System (CPS) for its self-awareness capabilities. The software architecture is based on the Robot Operative System (ROS) middleware. The system design and the preliminary field test results are shown in the paper.
Active Safety System for Semi-Autonomous Teleoperated Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Autonomous cars can reduce road traffic accidents and provide a safer mode of transport. However, key technical challenges, such as safe navigation in complex urban environments, need to be addressed before deploying these vehicles on the market. Teleoperation can help smooth the transition from human operated to fully autonomous vehicles since it still has human in the loop providing the scope of fallback on driver. This paper presents an Active Safety System (ASS) approach for teleoperated driving. The proposed approach helps the operator ensure the safety of the vehicle in complex environments, that is, avoid collisions with static or dynamic obstacles. Our ASS relies on a model predictive control (MPC) formulation to control both the lateral and longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle. By exploiting the ability of the MPC framework to deal with constraints, our ASS restricts the controller's authority to intervene for lateral correction of the human operator's commands, avoiding counter-intuitive driving experience for the human operator. Further, we design a visual feedback to enhance the operator's trust over the ASS. In addition, we propose an MPC's prediction horizon data based novel predictive display to mitigate the effects of large latency in the teleoperation system. We tested the performance of the proposed approach on a high-fidelity vehicle simulator in the presence of dynamic obstacles and latency.
Modeling and Reasoning in Event Calculus using Goal-Directed Constraint Answer Set Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Automated commonsense reasoning is essential for building human-like AI systems featuring, for example, explainable AI. Event Calculus (EC) is a family of formalisms that model commonsense reasoning with a sound, logical basis. Previous attempts to mechanize reasoning using EC faced difficulties in the treatment of the continuous change in dense domains (e.g., time and other physical quantities), constraints among variables, default negation, and the uniform application of different inference methods, among others. We propose the use of s(CASP), a query-driven, top-down execution model for Predicate Answer Set Programming with Constraints, to model and reason using EC. We show how EC scenarios can be naturally and directly encoded in s(CASP) and how it enables deductive and abductive reasoning tasks in domains featuring constraints involving both dense time and dense fluents.
Neural Models for Offensive Language Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Offensive language detection is an ever-growing natural language processing (NLP) application. This growth is mainly because of the widespread usage of social networks, which becomes a mainstream channel for people to communicate, work, and enjoy entertainment content. Many incidents of sharing aggressive and offensive content negatively impacted society to a great extend. We believe contributing to improving and comparing different machine learning models to fight such harmful contents is an important and challenging goal for this thesis. We targeted the problem of offensive language detection for building efficient automated models for offensive language detection. With the recent advancements of NLP models, specifically, the Transformer model, which tackled many shortcomings of the standard seq-to-seq techniques. The BERT model has shown state-of-the-art results on many NLP tasks. Although the literature still exploring the reasons for the BERT achievements in the NLP field. Other efficient variants have been developed to improve upon the standard BERT, such as RoBERTa and ALBERT. Moreover, due to the multilingual nature of text on social media that could affect the model decision on a given tween, it is becoming essential to examine multilingual models such as XLM-RoBERTa trained on 100 languages and how did it compare to unilingual models. The RoBERTa based model proved to be the most capable model and achieved the highest F1 score for the tasks. Another critical aspect of a well-rounded offensive language detection system is the speed at which a model can be trained and make inferences. In that respect, we have considered the model run-time and fine-tuned the very efficient implementation of FastText called BlazingText that achieved good results, which is much faster than BERT-based models.
Overview of BioASQ 2020: The eighth BioASQ challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present an overview of the eighth edition of the BioASQ challenge, which ran as a lab in the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2020. BioASQ is a series of challenges aiming at the promotion of systems and methodologies for large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering. To this end, shared tasks are organized yearly since 2012, where different teams develop systems that compete on the same demanding benchmark datasets that represent the real information needs of experts in the biomedical domain. This year, the challenge has been extended with the introduction of a new task on medical semantic indexing in Spanish. In total, 34 teams with more than 100 systems participated in the three tasks of the challenge. As in previous years, the results of the evaluation reveal that the top-performing systems managed to outperform the strong baselines, which suggests that state-of-the-art systems keep pushing the frontier of research through continuous improvements.
Context-aware Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network for User Behavior Prediction in Local Consumer Service Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

As a new type of e-commerce platform developed in recent years, local consumer service platform provides users with software to consume service to the nearby store or to the home, such as Groupon and Koubei. Different from other common e-commerce platforms, the behavior of users on the local consumer service platform is closely related to their real-time local context information. Therefore, building a context-aware user behavior prediction system is able to provide both merchants and users better service in local consumer service platforms. However, most of the previous work just treats the contextual information as an ordinary feature into the prediction model to obtain the prediction list under a specific context, which ignores the fact that the interest of a user in different contexts is often significantly different. Hence, in this paper, we propose a context-aware heterogeneous graph attention network (CHGAT) to dynamically generate the representation of the user and to estimate the probability for future behavior. Specifically, we first construct the meta-path based heterogeneous graphs with the historical behaviors from multiple sources and comprehend heterogeneous vertices in the graph with a novel unified knowledge representing approach. Next, a multi-level attention mechanism is introduced for context-aware aggregation with graph vertices, which contains the vertex-level attention network and the path-level attention network. Both of them aim to capture the semantic correlation between information contained in the graph and the outside real-time contextual information in the search system. Then the model proposed in this paper aggregates specific graphs with their corresponding context features and obtains the representation of user interest under a specific context and input it into the prediction network to finally obtain the predicted probability of user behavior.
Using Issues to Explain Legal Decisions
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The need to explain the output from Machine Learning systems designed to predict the outcomes of legal cases has led to a renewed interest in the explanations offered by traditional AI and Law systems, especially those using factor based reasoning and precedent cases. In this paper we consider what sort of explanations we should expect from such systems, with a particular focus on the structure that can be provided by the use of issues in cases.
Fractal Pyramid Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a new network architecture, the Fractal Pyramid Networks (PFNs) for pixel-wise prediction tasks as an alternative to the widely used encoder-decoder structure. In the encoder-decoder structure, the input is processed by an encoding-decoding pipeline that tries to get a semantic large-channel feature. Different from that, our proposed PFNs hold multiple information processing pathways and encode the information to multiple separate small-channel features. On the task of self-supervised monocular depth estimation, even without ImageNet pretrained, our models can compete or outperform the state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI dataset with much fewer parameters. Moreover, the visual quality of the prediction is significantly improved. The experiment of semantic segmentation provides evidence that the PFNs can be applied to other pixel-wise prediction tasks, and demonstrates that our models can catch more global structure information.
Chat Room Using HTML, PHP, CSS, JS, AJAX
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Earlier there was no mode of online communication between users. In big or small organizations communication between users posed a challenge. There was a requirement to record these communications and store the data for further evaluation. The idea is to automate the existing Simple Chat Room system and make the users utilize the software so that their valuable information is stored digitally and can be retrieved for further management purposes. There was no online method of communicating with different users. There were many different interfaces available in the market but this method of using windows sockets to communicate between nodes would be fast and reliable. The main objective of our Simple Chat Room project is to create a chat application that helps different users to communicate with each other through a server connected. This is a simple chat program with a server and can have many clients. The server needs to be started first and clients can be connected later. Simple Chat Room provides bidirectional communication between client and server. It enables users to seamlessly communicate with each other. The user can chat using this chat application. If the user at the other end is active then they can start a chat session. The chat is recorded in this application.
On the Capacity of Quantum Private Information Retrieval from MDS-Coded and Colluding Servers
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In quantum private information retrieval (QPIR), a user retrieves a classical file from multiple servers by downloading quantum systems without revealing the identity of the file. The QPIR capacity is the maximal achievable ratio of the retrieved file size to the total download size. In this paper, the capacity of QPIR from MDS-coded and colluding servers is studied for the first time. Two general classes of QPIR, called stabilizer QPIR and dimension-squared QPIR induced from classical strongly linear PIR are defined, and the related QPIR capacities are derived. For the non-colluding case, the general QPIR capacity is derived when the number of files goes to infinity. A general statement on the converse bound for QPIR with coded and colluding servers is derived showing that the capacities of stabilizer QPIR and dimension-squared QPIR induced from any class of PIR are upper bounded by twice the classical capacity of the respective PIR class. The proposed capacity-achieving scheme combines the star-product scheme by Freij-Hollanti et al. and the stabilizer QPIR scheme by Song et al. by employing (weakly) self-dual Reed--Solomon codes.
What's in a Measurement? Using GPT-3 on SemEval 2021 Task 8 -- MeasEval
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In the summer of 2020 OpenAI released its GPT-3 autoregressive language model to much fanfare. While the model has shown promise on tasks in several areas, it has not always been clear when the results were cherry-picked or when they were the unvarnished output. We were particularly interested in what benefits GPT-3 could bring to the SemEval 2021 MeasEval task - identifying measurements and their associated attributes in scientific literature. We had already experimented with multi-turn questions answering as a solution to this task. We wanted to see if we could use GPT-3's few-shot learning capabilities to more easily develop a solution that would have better performance than our prior work. Unfortunately, we have not been successful in that effort. This paper discusses the approach we used, challenges we encountered, and results we observed. Some of the problems we encountered were simply due to the state of the art. For example, the limits on the size of the prompt and answer limited the amount of the training signal that could be offered. Others are more fundamental. We are unaware of generative models that excel in retaining factual information. Also, the impact of changes in the prompts is unpredictable, making it hard to reliably improve performance.
The DELICES project: Indexing scientific literature through semantic expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Scientific digital libraries play a critical role in the development and dissemination of scientific literature. Despite dedicated search engines, retrieving relevant publications from the ever-growing body of scientific literature remains challenging and time-consuming. Indexing scientific articles is indeed a difficult matter, and current models solely rely on a small portion of the articles (title and abstract) and on author-assigned keyphrases when available. This results in a frustratingly limited access to scientific knowledge. The goal of the DELICES project is to address this pitfall by exploiting semantic relations between scientific articles to both improve and enrich indexing. To this end, we will rely on the latest advances in semantic representations to both increase the relevance of keyphrases extracted from the documents, and extend indexing to new terms borrowed from semantically similar documents.
Multi-objective Evolutionary Approach for Efficient Kernel Size and Shape for CNN
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2021
Year: 2021

While state-of-the-art development in CNN topology, such as VGGNet and ResNet, have become increasingly accurate, these networks are computationally expensive involving billions of arithmetic operations and parameters. To improve the classification accuracy, state-of-the-art CNNs usually involve large and complex convolutional layers. However, for certain applications, e.g. Internet of Things (IoT), where such CNNs are to be implemented on resource-constrained platforms, the CNN architectures have to be small and efficient. To deal with this problem, reducing the resource consumption in convolutional layers has become one of the most significant solutions. In this work, a multi-objective optimisation approach is proposed to trade-off between the amount of computation and network accuracy by using Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs). The number of convolution kernels and the size of these kernels are proportional to computational resource consumption of CNNs. Therefore, this paper considers optimising the computational resource consumption by reducing the size and number of kernels in convolutional layers. Additionally, the use of unconventional kernel shapes has been investigated and results show these clearly outperform the commonly used square convolution kernels. The main contributions of this paper are therefore a methodology to significantly reduce computational cost of CNNs, based on unconventional kernel shapes, and provide different trade-offs for specific use cases. The experimental results further demonstrate that the proposed method achieves large improvements in resource consumption with no significant reduction in network performance. Compared with the benchmark CNN, the best trade-off architecture shows a reduction in multiplications of up to 6X and with slight increase in classification accuracy on CIFAR-10 dataset.
PhysiNet: A Combination of Physics-based Model and Neural Network Model for Digital Twins
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

As the real-time digital counterpart of a physical system or process, digital twins are utilized for system simulation and optimization. Neural networks are one way to build a digital twins model by using data especially when a physics-based model is not accurate or even not available. However, for a newly designed system, it takes time to accumulate enough data for neural network model and only an approximate physics-based model is available. To take advantage of both models, this paper proposed a model that combines the physics-based model and the neural network model to improve the prediction accuracy for the whole life cycle of a system. The proposed hybrid model (PhysiNet) was able to automatically combine the models and boost their prediction performance. Experiments showed that the PhysiNet outperformed both the physics-based model and the neural network model.
Mapping flows on weighted and directed networks with incomplete observations
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Detecting significant community structure in networks with incomplete observations is challenging because the evidence for specific solutions fades away with missing data. For example, recent research shows that flow-based community detection methods can highlight spurious communities in sparse undirected and unweighted networks with missing links. Current Bayesian approaches developed to overcome this problem do not work for incomplete observations in weighted and directed networks that describe network flows. To address this gap, we extend the idea behind the Bayesian estimate of the map equation for unweighted and undirected networks to enable more robust community detection in weighted and directed networks. We derive a weighted and directed prior network that can incorporate metadata information and show how an efficient implementation in the community-detection method Infomap provides more reliable communities even with a significant fraction of data missing.
Virtual Agents in Live Coding: A Short Review
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

AI and live coding has been little explored. This article contributes with a short review of different perspectives of using virtual agents in the practice of live coding looking at past and present as well as pointing to future directions.
Modeling Clothing as a Separate Layer for an Animatable Human Avatar
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We have recently seen great progress in building photorealistic animatable full-body codec avatars, but generating high-fidelity animation of clothing is still difficult. To address these difficulties, we propose a method to build an animatable clothed body avatar with an explicit representation of the clothing on the upper body from multi-view captured videos. We use a two-layer mesh representation to register each 3D scan separately with the body and clothing templates. In order to improve the photometric correspondence across different frames, texture alignment is then performed through inverse rendering of the clothing geometry and texture predicted by a variational autoencoder. We then train a new two-layer codec avatar with separate modeling of the upper clothing and the inner body layer. To learn the interaction between the body dynamics and clothing states, we use a temporal convolution network to predict the clothing latent code based on a sequence of input skeletal poses. We show photorealistic animation output for three different actors, and demonstrate the advantage of our clothed-body avatars over the single-layer avatars used in previous work. We also show the benefit of an explicit clothing model that allows the clothing texture to be edited in the animation output.