OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Trust-Aware Planning: Modeling Trust Evolution in Iterated Human-Robot Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Trust between team members is an essential requirement for any successful cooperation. Thus, engendering and maintaining the fellow team members' trust becomes a central responsibility for any member trying to not only successfully participate in the task but to ensure the team achieves its goals. The problem of trust management is particularly challenging in mixed human-robot teams where the human and the robot may have different models about the task at hand and thus may have different expectations regarding the current course of action, thereby forcing the robot to focus on the costly explicable behavior. We propose a computational model for capturing and modulating trust in such iterated human-robot interaction settings, where the human adopts a supervisory role. In our model, the robot integrates human's trust and their expectations about the robot into its planning process to build and maintain trust over the interaction horizon. By establishing the required level of trust, the robot can focus on maximizing the team goal by eschewing explicit explanatory or explicable behavior without worrying about the human supervisor monitoring and intervening to stop behaviors they may not necessarily understand. We model this reasoning about trust levels as a meta reasoning process over individual planning tasks. We additionally validate our model through a human subject experiment.
Engineering Blockchain Based Software Systems: Foundations, Survey, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Many scientific and practical areas have shown increasing interest in reaping the benefits of blockchain technology to empower software systems. However, the unique characteristics and requirements associated with Blockchain Based Software (BBS) systems raise new challenges across the development lifecycle that entail an extensive improvement of conventional software engineering. This article presents a systematic literature review of the state-of-the-art in BBS engineering research from a software engineering perspective. We characterize BBS engineering from the theoretical foundations, processes, models, and roles and discuss a rich repertoire of key development activities, principles, challenges, and techniques. The focus and depth of this survey not only gives software engineering practitioners and researchers a consolidated body of knowledge about current BBS development but also underpins a starting point for further research in this field.
Finite volume method network for acceleration of unsteady computational fluid dynamics: non-reacting and reacting flows
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Despite rapid improvements in the performance of central processing unit (CPU), the calculation cost of simulating chemically reacting flow using CFD remains infeasible in many cases. The application of the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) specialized in image processing in flow field prediction has been studied, but the need to develop a neural netweork design fitted for CFD is recently emerged. In this study, a neural network model introducing the finite volume method (FVM) with a unique network architecture and physics-informed loss function was developed to accelerate CFD simulations. The developed network model, considering the nature of the CFD flow field where the identical governing equations are applied to all grids, can predict the future fields with only two previous fields unlike the CNNs requiring many field images (>10,000). The performance of this baseline model was evaluated using CFD time series data from non-reacting flow and reacting flow simulation; counterflow and hydrogen flame with 20 detailed chemistries. Consequently, we demonstrated that (1) the FVM-based network architecture provided improved accuracy of multistep time series prediction compared to the previous MLP model (2) the physic-informed loss function prevented non-physical overfitting problem and ultimately reduced the error in time series prediction (3) observing the calculated residuals in an unsupervised manner could indirectly estimate the network accuracy. Additionally, under the reacting flow dataset, the computational speed of this network model was measured to be about 10 times faster than that of the CFD solver.
CASA: Bridging the Gap between Policy Improvement and Policy Evaluation with Conflict Averse Policy Iteration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We study the problem of model-free reinforcement learning, which is often solved following the principle of Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI). While GPI is typically an interplay between policy evaluation and policy improvement, most conventional model-free methods assume the independence of the granularity and other details of the GPI steps, despite of the inherent connections between them. In this paper, we present a method that regularizes the inconsistency between policy evaluation and policy improvement, leading to a conflict averse GPI solution with reduced functional approximation error. To this end, we formulate a novel learning paradigm where taking the policy evaluation step is equivalent to some compensation of performing policy improvement, and thus effectively alleviates the gradient conflict between the two GPI steps. We also show that the form of our proposed solution is equivalent to performing entropy-regularized policy improvement and therefore prevents the policy from being trapped into suboptimal solutions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our method on the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). Empirical results show that our method outperforms several strong baselines in major evaluation domains.
Transitioning to human interaction with AI systems: New challenges and opportunities for HCI professionals to enable human-centered AI
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

While AI has benefited humans, it may also harm humans if not appropriately developed. The focus of HCI work is transiting from conventional human interaction with non-AI computing systems to interaction with AI systems. We conducted a high-level literature review and a holistic analysis of current work in developing AI systems from an HCI perspective. Our review and analysis highlight the new changes introduced by AI technology and the new challenges that HCI professionals face when applying the human-centered AI (HCAI) approach in the development of AI systems. We also identified seven main issues in human interaction with AI systems, which HCI professionals did not encounter when developing non-AI computing systems. To further enable the implementation of the HCAI approach, we identified new HCI opportunities tied to specific HCAI-driven design goals to guide HCI professionals in addressing these new issues. Finally, our assessment of current HCI methods shows the limitations of these methods in support of developing AI systems. We propose alternative methods that can help overcome these limitations and effectively help HCI professionals apply the HCAI approach to the development of AI systems. We also offer strategic recommendations for HCI professionals to effectively influence the development of AI systems with the HCAI approach, eventually developing HCAI systems.
Two Influence Maximization Games on Graphs Made Temporal
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

To address the dynamic nature of real-world networks, we generalize competitive diffusion games and Voronoi games from static to temporal graphs, where edges may appear or disappear over time. This establishes a new direction of studies in the area of graph games, motivated by applications such as influence spreading. As a first step, we investigate the existence of Nash equilibria in 2-player competitive diffusion and Voronoi games on different temporal graph classes. Even when restricting our studies to temporal trees and cycles, this turns out to be a challenging undertaking, revealing significant differences between the two games in the temporal setting. Notably, both games are equivalent on static trees and cycles. Our two main technical results are (algorithmic) proofs for the existence of Nash equilibria in 2-player competitive diffusion and temporal Voronoi games when the edges are restricted not to disappear over time.
A Comprehensive Taxonomy for Explainable Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Survey of Surveys on Methods and Concepts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In the meantime, a wide variety of terminologies, motivations, approaches, and evaluation criteria have been developed within the research field of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). With the amount of XAI methods vastly growing, a taxonomy of methods is needed by researchers as well as practitioners: To grasp the breadth of the topic, compare methods, and to select the right XAI method based on traits required by a specific use-case context. Many taxonomies for XAI methods of varying level of detail and depth can be found in the literature. While they often have a different focus, they also exhibit many points of overlap. This paper unifies these efforts and provides a complete taxonomy of XAI methods with respect to notions present in the current state of research. In a structured literature analysis and meta-study, we identified and reviewed more than 50 of the most cited and current surveys on XAI methods, metrics, and method traits. After summarizing them in a survey of surveys, we merge terminologies and concepts of the articles into a unified structured taxonomy. Single concepts therein are illustrated by more than 50 diverse selected example methods in total, which we categorize accordingly. The taxonomy may serve both beginners, researchers, and practitioners as a reference and wide-ranging overview of XAI method traits and aspects. Hence, it provides foundations for targeted, use-case-oriented, and context-sensitive future research.
Brain Inspired Face Recognition: A Computational Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a new proposal of an efficient computational model of face recognition which uses cues from the distributed face recognition mechanism of the brain, and by gathering engineering equivalent of these cues from existing literature. Three distinct and widely used features: Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), Local Binary Patterns (LBP), and Principal components (PCs) extracted from target images are used in a manner which is simple, and yet effective. The HOG and LBP features further undergo principal component analysis for dimensionality reduction. Our model uses multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) to classify these three features and fuse them at the decision level using sum rule. A computational theory is first developed by using concepts from the information processing mechanism of the brain. Extensive experiments are carried out using ten publicly available datasets to validate our proposed model's performance in recognizing faces with extreme variation of illumination, pose angle, expression, and background. Results obtained are extremely promising when compared with other face recognition algorithms including CNN and deep learning-based methods. This highlights that simple computational processes, if clubbed properly, can produce competing performance with best algorithms.
Enhancing Flexibility and Adaptability in Conjoined Human-Robot Industrial Tasks with a Minimalist Physical Interface
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a physical interface for collaborative mobile manipulators in industrial manufacturing and logistics applications. The proposed work builds on our earlier MOCA-MAN interface, through which an operator could be physically coupled to a mobile manipulator to be assisted in performing daily activities. The previous interface was based on a magnetic clamp attached to one arm of the user for the coupling stage, and a bracelet based on EMG sensors on the other arm for human-robot communication via gestures. The new interface instead presents the following additions: i) An industrial-like design that allows the worker to couple/decouple easily and to operate mobile manipulators locally; ii) A simplistic communication channel via a simple buttons board that allows controlling the robot with one hand only; iii) The interface offers enhanced loco-manipulation capabilities that do not compromise the worker mobility. In addition, an experimental evaluation with six human subjects is carried out to analyze the enhanced locomotion and flexibility of the proposed interface in terms of mobility constraint, usability, and physical load reduction.
Fact-driven Logical Reasoning for Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in training machines with reasoning ability, which deeply relies on accurately and clearly presented clue forms. The clues are usually modeled as entity-aware knowledge in existing studies. However, those entity-aware clues are primarily focused on commonsense, making them insufficient for tasks that require knowledge of temporary facts or events, particularly in logical reasoning for reading comprehension. To address this challenge, we are motivated to cover both commonsense and temporary knowledge clues hierarchically. Specifically, we propose a general formalism of knowledge units by extracting backbone constituents of the sentence, such as the subject-verb-object formed ``facts''. We then construct a supergraph on top of the fact units, allowing for the benefit of sentence-level (relations among fact groups) and entity-level interactions (concepts or actions inside a fact). Experimental results on logical reasoning benchmarks and dialogue modeling datasets show that our approach improves the baselines substantially, and it is general across backbone models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ozyyshr/FocalReasoner}.
Nash-Bargaining-Based Models for Matching Markets: One-Sided and Two-Sided; Fisher and Arrow-Debreu
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper addresses two deficiencies of models in the area of matching-based market design. The first arises from the recent realization that the most prominent solution that uses cardinal utilities, namely the Hylland-Zeckhauser (HZ) mechanism, is intractable; computation of even an approximate equilibrium is PPAD-complete. The second is the extreme paucity of models that use cardinal utilities. Our paper addresses both these issues by proposing Nash-bargaining-based matching market models. Since the Nash bargaining solution is captured by a convex program, efficiency follows. In addition, it possesses several desirable game-theoretic properties. Our approach yields a rich collection of models: for one-sided as well as two-sided markets, for Fisher as well as Arrow-Debreu settings, and for a wide range of utility functions, all the way from linear to Leontief. We give very fast implementations for these models using Frank-Wolfe and Cutting Plane algorithms. These help solve large instances with several thousand agents and goods in a matter of minutes on a PC, even for a one-sided matching market under piecewise-linear concave utility functions and a two-sided matching market under linear utility functions. In contrast, using HZ, going beyond even $n = 10$ is prohibitive. Several new ideas were needed, beyond the standard methods, to obtain these implementations. In particular, we present several lower bounding schemes, which not only help improve the convergence of our solution methods but also shed light on fairness properties of the Nash-bargaining-based models.
Can We Faithfully Represent Masked States to Compute Shapley Values on a DNN?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Masking some input variables of a deep neural network (DNN) and computing output changes on the masked input sample represent a typical way to compute attributions of input variables in the sample. People usually mask an input variable using its baseline value. However, there is no theory to examine whether baseline value faithfully represents the absence of an input variable, \emph{i.e.,} removing all signals from the input variable. Fortunately, recent studies show that the inference score of a DNN can be strictly disentangled into a set of causal patterns (or concepts) encoded by the DNN. Therefore, we propose to use causal patterns to examine the faithfulness of baseline values. More crucially, it is proven that causal patterns can be explained as the elementary rationale of the Shapley value. Furthermore, we propose a method to learn optimal baseline values, and experimental results have demonstrated its effectiveness.
Policy Mirror Descent for Regularized Reinforcement Learning: A Generalized Framework with Linear Convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Policy optimization, which finds the desired policy by maximizing value functions via optimization techniques, lies at the heart of reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to value maximization, other practical considerations arise as well, including the need of encouraging exploration, and that of ensuring certain structural properties of the learned policy due to safety, resource and operational constraints. These can often be accounted for via regularized RL, which augments the target value function with a structure-promoting regularizer. Focusing on discounted infinite-horizon Markov decision processes, we propose a generalized policy mirror descent (GPMD) algorithm for solving regularized RL. As a generalization of policy mirror descent (arXiv:2102.00135), our algorithm accommodates a general class of convex regularizers and promotes the use of Bregman divergence in cognizant of the regularizer in use. We demonstrate that our algorithm converges linearly to the global solution over an entire range of learning rates, in a dimension-free fashion, even when the regularizer lacks strong convexity and smoothness. In addition, this linear convergence feature is provably stable in the face of inexact policy evaluation and imperfect policy updates. Numerical experiments are provided to corroborate the appealing performance of GPMD.
AirNet: Neural Network Transmission over the Air
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

State-of-the-art performance for many edge applications is achieved by deep neural networks (DNNs). Often, these DNNs are location- and time-sensitive, and must be delivered over a wireless channel rapidly and efficiently. In this paper, we introduce AirNet, a family of novel training and transmission methods that allow DNNs to be efficiently delivered over wireless channels under stringent transmit power and latency constraints. This corresponds to a new class of joint source-channel coding problems, aimed at delivering DNNs with the goal of maximizing their accuracy at the receiver, rather than recovering them with high fidelity. In AirNet, we propose the direct mapping of the DNN parameters to transmitted channel symbols, while the network is trained to meet the channel constraints, and exhibit robustness against channel noise. AirNet achieves higher accuracy compared to separation-based alternatives. We further improve the performance of AirNet by pruning the network below the available bandwidth, and expanding it for improved robustness. We also benefit from unequal error protection by selectively expanding important layers of the network. Finally, we develop an approach, which simultaneously trains a spectrum of DNNs, each targeting a different channel condition, resolving the impractical memory requirements of training distinct networks for different channel conditions.
Exploring Autoencoder-based Error-bounded Compression for Scientific Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Error-bounded lossy compression is becoming an indispensable technique for the success of today's scientific projects with vast volumes of data produced during simulations or instrument data acquisitions. Not only can it significantly reduce data size, but it also can control the compression errors based on user-specified error bounds. Autoencoder (AE) models have been widely used in image compression, but few AE-based compression approaches support error-bounding features, which are highly required by scientific applications. To address this issue, we explore using convolutional autoencoders to improve error-bounded lossy compression for scientific data, with the following three key contributions. (1) We provide an in-depth investigation of the characteristics of various autoencoder models and develop an error-bounded autoencoder-based framework in terms of the SZ model. (2) We optimize the compression quality for the main stages in our designed AE-based error-bounded compression framework, fine-tuning the block sizes and latent sizes and also optimizing the compression efficiency of latent vectors. (3) We evaluate our proposed solution using five real-world scientific datasets and compare them with six other related works. Experiments show that our solution exhibits a very competitive compression quality among all the compressors in our tests. In absolute terms, it can obtain a much better compression quality (100% ~ 800% improvement in compression ratio with the same data distortion) compared with SZ2.1 and ZFP in cases with a high compression ratio.
An Integrated Dynamic Method for Allocating Roles and Planning Tasks for Mixed Human-Robot Teams
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes a novel integrated dynamic method based on Behavior Trees for planning and allocating tasks in mixed human robot teams, suitable for manufacturing environments. The Behavior Tree formulation allows encoding a single job as a compound of different tasks with temporal and logic constraints. In this way, instead of the well-studied offline centralized optimization problem, the role allocation problem is solved with multiple simplified online optimization sub-problem, without complex and cross-schedule task dependencies. These sub-problems are defined as Mixed-Integer Linear Programs, that, according to the worker-actions related costs and the workers' availability, allocate the yet-to-execute tasks among the available workers. To characterize the behavior of the developed method, we opted to perform different simulation experiments in which the results of the action-worker allocation and computational complexity are evaluated. The obtained results, due to the nature of the algorithm and to the possibility of simulating the agents' behavior, should describe well also how the algorithm performs in real experiments.
Structural Causal Models Reveal Confounder Bias in Linear Program Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The recent years have been marked by extended research on adversarial attacks, especially on deep neural networks. With this work we intend on posing and investigating the question of whether the phenomenon might be more general in nature, that is, adversarial-style attacks outside classical classification tasks. Specifically, we investigate optimization problems as they constitute a fundamental part of modern AI research. To this end, we consider the base class of optimizers namely Linear Programs (LPs). On our initial attempt of a naïve mapping between the formalism of adversarial examples and LPs, we quickly identify the key ingredients missing for making sense of a reasonable notion of adversarial examples for LPs. Intriguingly, the formalism of Pearl's notion to causality allows for the right description of adversarial like examples for LPs. Characteristically, we show the direct influence of the Structural Causal Model (SCM) onto the subsequent LP optimization, which ultimately exposes a notion of confounding in LPs (inherited by said SCM) that allows for adversarial-style attacks. We provide both the general proof formally alongside existential proofs of such intriguing LP-parameterizations based on SCM for three combinatorial problems, namely Linear Assignment, Shortest Path and a real world problem of energy systems.