OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Lack of Fluency is Hurting Your Translation Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Many machine translation models are trained on bilingual corpus, which consist of aligned sentence pairs from two different languages with same semantic. However, there is a qualitative discrepancy between train and test set in bilingual corpus. While the most train sentences are created via automatic techniques such as crawling and sentence-alignment methods, the test sentences are annotated with the consideration of fluency by human. We suppose this discrepancy in training corpus will yield performance drop of translation model. In this work, we define \textit{fluency noise} to determine which parts of train sentences cause them to seem unnatural. We show that \textit{fluency noise} can be detected by simple gradient-based method with pre-trained classifier. By removing \textit{fluency noise} in train sentences, our final model outperforms the baseline on WMT-14 DE$\rightarrow$EN and RU$\rightarrow$EN. We also show the compatibility with back-translation augmentation, which has been commonly used to improve the fluency of the translation model. At last, the qualitative analysis of \textit{fluency noise} provides the insight of what points we should focus on.
Collaborative 3D Object Detection for Automatic Vehicle Systems via Learnable Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Accurate detection of objects in 3D point clouds is a key problem in autonomous driving systems. Collaborative perception can incorporate information from spatially diverse sensors and provide significant benefits for improving the perception accuracy of autonomous driving systems. In this work, we consider that the autonomous vehicle uses local point cloud data and combines information from neighboring infrastructures through wireless links for cooperative 3D object detection. However, information sharing among vehicle and infrastructures in predefined communication schemes may result in communication congestion and/or bring limited performance improvement. To this end, we propose a novel collaborative 3D object detection framework that consists of three components: feature learning networks that map point clouds into feature maps; an efficient communication block that propagates compact and fine-grained query feature maps from vehicle to support infrastructures and optimizes attention weights between query and key to refine support feature maps; a region proposal network that fuses local feature maps and weighted support feature maps for 3D object detection. We evaluate the performance of the proposed framework using a synthetic cooperative dataset created in two complex driving scenarios: a roundabout and a T-junction. Experiment results and bandwidth usage analysis demonstrate that our approach can save communication and computation costs and significantly improve detection performance under different detection difficulties in all scenarios.
Approximation speed of quantized vs. unquantized ReLU neural networks and beyond
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We deal with two complementary questions about approximation properties of ReLU networks. First, we study how the uniform quantization of ReLU networks with real-valued weights impacts their approximation properties. We establish an upper-bound on the minimal number of bits per coordinate needed for uniformly quantized ReLU networks to keep the same polynomial asymptotic approximation speeds as unquantized ones. We also characterize the error of nearest-neighbour uniform quantization of ReLU networks. This is achieved using a new lower-bound on the Lipschitz constant of the map that associates the parameters of ReLU networks to their realization, and an upper-bound generalizing classical results. Second, we investigate when ReLU networks can be expected, or not, to have better approximation properties than other classical approximation families. Indeed, several approximation families share the following common limitation: their polynomial asymptotic approximation speed of any set is bounded from above by the encoding speed of this set. We introduce a new abstract property of approximation families, called infinite-encodability, which implies this upper-bound. Many classical approximation families, defined with dictionaries or ReLU networks, are shown to be infinite-encodable. This unifies and generalizes several situations where this upper-bound is known.
Accuracy on In-Domain Samples Matters When Building Out-of-Domain detectors: A Reply to Marek et al. (2021)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We have noticed that Marek et al. (2021) try to re-implement our paper Zheng et al. (2020a) in their work "OodGAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Out-of-Domain Data Generation". Our paper proposes a model to generate pseudo OOD samples that are akin to IN-Domain (IND) input utterances. These pseudo OOD samples can be used to improve the OOD detection performance by optimizing an entropy regularization term when building the IND classifier. Marek et al. (2021) report a large gap between their re-implemented results and ours on the CLINC150 dataset (Larson et al., 2019). This paper discusses some key observations that may have led to such a large gap. Most of these observations originate from our experiments because Marek et al. (2021) have not released their codes1. One of the most important observations is that stronger IND classifiers usually exhibit a more robust ability to detect OOD samples. We hope these observations help other researchers, including Marek et al. (2021), to develop better OOD detectors in their applications.
Mind The Gap: Alleviating Local Imbalance for Unsupervised Cross-Modality Medical Image Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Unsupervised cross-modality medical image adaptation aims to alleviate the severe domain gap between different imaging modalities without using the target domain label. A key in this campaign relies upon aligning the distributions of source and target domain. One common attempt is to enforce the global alignment between two domains, which, however, ignores the fatal local-imbalance domain gap problem, i.e., some local features with larger domain gap are harder to transfer. Recently, some methods conduct alignment focusing on local regions to improve the efficiency of model learning. While this operation may cause a deficiency of critical information from contexts. To tackle this limitation, we propose a novel strategy to alleviate the domain gap imbalance considering the characteristics of medical images, namely Global-Local Union Alignment. Specifically, a feature-disentanglement style-transfer module first synthesizes the target-like source-content images to reduce the global domain gap. Then, a local feature mask is integrated to reduce the 'inter-gap' for local features by prioritizing those discriminative features with larger domain gap. This combination of global and local alignment can precisely localize the crucial regions in segmentation target while preserving the overall semantic consistency. We conduct a series of experiments with two cross-modality adaptation tasks, i,e. cardiac substructure and abdominal multi-organ segmentation. Experimental results indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both tasks.
Building an Effective Automated Assessment System for C/C++ Introductory Programming Courses in ODL Environment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Assessments help in evaluating the knowledge gained by a learner at any specific point as well as in continuous improvement of the curriculum design and the whole learning process. However, with the increase in students' enrollment at University level in either conventional or distance education environment, traditional ways of assessing students' work are becoming insufficient in terms of both time and effort. In distance education environment, such assessments become additionally more challenging in terms of hefty remuneration for hiring large number of tutors. The availability of automated tools to assist the evaluation of students' work and providing students with appropriate and timely feedback can really help in overcoming these problems. We believe that building such tools for assessing students' work for all kinds of courses in not yet possible. However, courses that involve some formal language of expression can be automated, such as, programming courses in Computer Science (CS) discipline. Instructors provide various practical exercises to students as assignments to build these skills. Usually, instructors manually grade and provide feedbacks on these assignments. Although in literature, various tools have been reported to automate this process, but most of these tools have been developed by the host institutions themselves for their own use. We at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore are conducting a pioneer effort in Pakistan to automate the marking of assignments of introductory programming courses that involve C or C++ languages with the capability of associating appropriate feedbacks for students. In this paper, we basically identify different components that we believe are necessary in building an effective automated assessment system in the context of introductory programming courses that involve C/C++ programming.
Highly Accurate FMRI ADHD Classification using time distributed multi modal 3D CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This work proposes an algorithm for fMRI data analysis for the classification of ADHD disorders. There have been several breakthroughs in the analysis of fMRI via 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs). With these new techniques it is possible to preserve the 3D spatial data of fMRI data. Additionally there have been recent advances in the use of 3D generative adversarial neural networks (GANs) for the generation of normal MRI data. This work utilizes multi modal 3D CNNs with data augmentation from 3D GAN for ADHD prediction from fMRI. By leveraging a 3D-GAN it would be possible to use deepfake data to enhance the accuracy of 3D CNN classification of brain disorders. A comparison will be made between a time distributed single modal 3D CNN model for classification and the modified multi modal model with MRI data as well.
PatchNR: Learning from Very Few Images by Patch Normalizing Flow Regularization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Learning neural networks using only few available information is an important ongoing research topic with tremendous potential for applications. In this paper, we introduce a powerful regularizer for the variational modeling of inverse problems in imaging. Our regularizer, called patch normalizing flow regularizer (patchNR), involves a normalizing flow learned on small patches of very few images. In particular, the training is independent of the considered inverse problem such that the same regularizer can be applied for different forward operators acting on the same class of images. By investigating the distribution of patches versus those of the whole image class, we prove that our model is indeed a MAP approach. Numerical examples for low-dose and limited-angle computed tomography (CT) as well as superresolution of material images demonstrate that our method provides very high quality results. The training set consists of just six images for CT and one image for superresolution. Finally, we combine our patchNR with ideas from internal learning for performing superresolution of natural images directly from the low-resolution observation without knowledge of any high-resolution image.
Effect of Gender, Pose and Camera Distance on Human Body Dimensions Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Human Body Dimensions Estimation (HBDE) is a task that an intelligent agent can perform to attempt to determine human body information from images (2D) or point clouds or meshes (3D). More specifically, if we define the HBDE problem as inferring human body measurements from images, then HBDE is a difficult, inverse, multi-task regression problem that can be tackled with machine learning techniques, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNN). Despite the community's tremendous effort to advance human shape analysis, there is a lack of systematic experiments to assess CNNs estimation of human body dimensions from images. Our contribution lies in assessing a CNN estimation performance in a series of controlled experiments. To that end, we augment our recently published neural anthropometer dataset by rendering images with different camera distance. We evaluate the network inference absolute and relative mean error between the estimated and actual HBDs. We train and evaluate the CNN in four scenarios: (1) training with subjects of a specific gender, (2) in a specific pose, (3) sparse camera distance and (4) dense camera distance. Not only our experiments demonstrate that the network can perform the task successfully, but also reveal a number of relevant facts that contribute to better understand the task of HBDE.
The Laplacian Paradigm in the Broadcast Congested Clique
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we bring the main tools of the Laplacian paradigm to the Broadcast Congested Clique. We introduce an algorithm to compute spectral sparsifiers in a polylogarithmic number of rounds, which directly leads to an efficient Laplacian solver. Based on this primitive, we consider the linear program solver of Lee and Sidford (FOCS 2014). We show how to solve certain linear programs up to additive error $ε$ with $n$ constraints on an $n$-vertex Broadcast Congested Clique network in $\tilde O(\sqrt{n}\log(1/ε))$ rounds. Using this, we show how to find an exact solution to the minimum cost flow problem in $\tilde O(\sqrt{n})$ rounds.
Classification of Phonological Parameters in Sign Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Signers compose sign language phonemes that enable communication by combining phonological parameters such as handshape, orientation, location, movement, and non-manual features. Linguistic research often breaks down signs into their constituent parts to study sign languages and often a lot of effort is invested into the annotation of the videos. In this work we show how a single model can be used to recognise the individual phonological parameters within sign languages with the aim of either to assist linguistic annotations or to describe the signs for the sign recognition models. We use Danish Sign Language data set `Ordbog over Dansk Tegnsprog' to generate multiple data sets using pose estimation model, which are then used for training the multi-label Fast R-CNN model to support multi-label modelling. Moreover, we show that there is a significant co-dependence between the orientation and location phonological parameters in the generated data and we incorporate this co-dependence in the model to achieve better performance.
KQGC: Knowledge Graph Embedding with Smoothing Effects of Graph Convolutions for Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Leveraging graphs on recommender systems has gained popularity with the development of graph representation learning (GRL). In particular, knowledge graph embedding (KGE) and graph neural networks (GNNs) are representative GRL approaches, which have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on several recommendation tasks. Furthermore, combination of KGE and GNNs (KG-GNNs) has been explored and found effective in many academic literatures. One of the main characteristics of GNNs is their ability to retain structural properties among neighbors in the resulting dense representation, which is usually coined as smoothing. The smoothing is specially desired in the presence of homophilic graphs, such as the ones we find on recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a new model for recommender systems named Knowledge Query-based Graph Convolution (KQGC). In contrast to exisiting KG-GNNs, KQGC focuses on the smoothing, and leverages a simple linear graph convolution for smoothing KGE. A pre-trained KGE is fed into KQGC, and it is smoothed by aggregating neighbor knowledge queries, which allow entity-embeddings to be aligned on appropriate vector points for smoothing KGE effectively. We apply the proposed KQGC to a recommendation task that aims prospective users for specific products. Extensive experiments on a real E-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of KQGC.
Memory based neural networks for end-to-end autonomous driving
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Recent works in end-to-end control for autonomous driving have investigated the use of vision-based exteroceptive perception. Inspired by such results, we propose a new end-to-end memory-based neural architecture for robot steering and throttle control. We describe and compare this architecture with previous approaches using fundamental error metrics (MAE, MSE) and several external metrics based on their performance on simulated test circuits. The presented work demonstrates the advantages of using internal memory for better generalization capabilities of the model and allowing it to drive in a broader amount of circuits/situations. We analyze the algorithm in a wide range of environments and conclude that the proposed pipeline is robust to varying camera configurations. All the present work, including datasets, network models architectures, weights, simulator, and comparison software, is open source and easy to replicate and extend.
Do it Like the Doctor: How We Can Design a Model That Uses Domain Knowledge to Diagnose Pneumothorax
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Computer-aided diagnosis for medical imaging is a well-studied field that aims to provide real-time decision support systems for physicians. These systems attempt to detect and diagnose a plethora of medical conditions across a variety of image diagnostic technologies including ultrasound, x-ray, MRI, and CT. When designing AI models for these systems, we are often limited by little training data, and for rare medical conditions, positive examples are difficult to obtain. These issues often cause models to perform poorly, so we needed a way to design an AI model in light of these limitations. Thus, our approach was to incorporate expert domain knowledge into the design of an AI model. We conducted two qualitative think-aloud studies with doctors trained in the interpretation of lung ultrasound diagnosis to extract relevant domain knowledge for the condition Pneumothorax. We extracted knowledge of key features and procedures used to make a diagnosis. With this knowledge, we employed knowledge engineering concepts to make recommendations for an AI model design to automatically diagnose Pneumothorax.
A Dynamic, Interpreted CheckList for Meaning-oriented NLG Metric Evaluation -- through the Lens of Semantic Similarity Rating
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Evaluating the quality of generated text is difficult, since traditional NLG evaluation metrics, focusing more on surface form than meaning, often fail to assign appropriate scores. This is especially problematic for AMR-to-text evaluation, given the abstract nature of AMR. Our work aims to support the development and improvement of NLG evaluation metrics that focus on meaning, by developing a dynamic CheckList for NLG metrics that is interpreted by being organized around meaning-relevant linguistic phenomena. Each test instance consists of a pair of sentences with their AMR graphs and a human-produced textual semantic similarity or relatedness score. Our CheckList facilitates comparative evaluation of metrics and reveals strengths and weaknesses of novel and traditional metrics. We demonstrate the usefulness of CheckList by designing a new metric GraCo that computes lexical cohesion graphs over AMR concepts. Our analysis suggests that GraCo presents an interesting NLG metric worth future investigation and that meaning-oriented NLG metrics can profit from graph-based metric components using AMR.
Merkel Podcast Corpus: A Multimodal Dataset Compiled from 16 Years of Angela Merkel's Weekly Video Podcasts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce the Merkel Podcast Corpus, an audio-visual-text corpus in German collected from 16 years of (almost) weekly Internet podcasts of former German chancellor Angela Merkel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first single speaker corpus in the German language consisting of audio, visual and text modalities of comparable size and temporal extent. We describe the methods used with which we have collected and edited the data which involves downloading the videos, transcripts and other metadata, forced alignment, performing active speaker recognition and face detection to finally curate the single speaker dataset consisting of utterances spoken by Angela Merkel. The proposed pipeline is general and can be used to curate other datasets of similar nature, such as talk show contents. Through various statistical analyses and applications of the dataset in talking face generation and TTS, we show the utility of the dataset. We argue that it is a valuable contribution to the research community, in particular, due to its realistic and challenging material at the boundary between prepared and spontaneous speech.
Autonomous Driving From the Sky: Design and End-to-End Performance Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

For autonomous vehicles to operate without human intervention, information sharing from local sensors plays a fundamental role. This can be challenging to handle with bandwidth-constrained communication systems, which calls for the adoption of new wireless technologies, like in the mmwave bands, to solve capacity issues. Another approach is to exploit uav, able to provide human users and their cars with an aerial bird's-eye view of the scene otherwise unavailable, thus offering broader and more centralized observations. In this article we combine both aspects and design a novel framework in which uav, operating at mmwave, broadcast sensory information to the ground as a means to extend the (local) perception range of vehicles. To do so, we conduct a full-stack end-to-end simulation campaign with ns-3 considering real UAV data from the Stanford Drone Dataset, and study four scenarios representing different uav-to-ground communication strategies. Our results focus on the trade-off between centralized data processing in the sky vs. distributed local processing on the ground, with considerations related to the throughput, latency and reliability of the communication process.
EdiT5: Semi-Autoregressive Text-Editing with T5 Warm-Start
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We present EdiT5 - a novel semi-autoregressive text-editing model designed to combine the strengths of non-autoregressive text-editing and autoregressive decoding. EdiT5 is faster during inference than conventional sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, while being capable of modelling flexible input-output transformations. This is achieved by decomposing the generation process into three sub-tasks: (1) tagging to decide on the subset of input tokens to be preserved in the output, (2) re-ordering to define their order in the output text, and (3) insertion to infill the missing tokens that are not present in the input. The tagging and re-ordering steps, which are responsible for generating the largest portion of the output, are non-autoregressive, while the insertion step uses an autoregressive decoder. Depending on the task, EdiT5 on average requires significantly fewer autoregressive steps, demonstrating speedups of up to 25x when compared to seq2seq models. Quality-wise, EdiT5 is initialized with a pre-trained T5 checkpoint yielding comparable performance to T5 in high-resource settings when evaluated on three NLG tasks: Sentence Fusion, Grammatical Error Correction, and Decontextualization while clearly outperforming T5 in low-resource settings.