OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Communication-Efficient Multisensor Track Association via Measurement Transformation (Extended Version)
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Multisensor track-to-track fusion for target tracking involves two primary operations: track association and estimation fusion. For estimation fusion, lossless measurement transformation of sensor measurements has been proposed for single target tracking. In this paper, we investigate track association which is a fundamental and important problem for multitarget tracking. First, since the optimal track association problem is a multi-dimensional assignment (MDA) problem, we demonstrate that MDA-based data association (with and without prior track information) using linear transformations of track measurements is lossless, and is equivalent to that using raw track measurements. Second, recent superior scalability and performance of belief propagation (BP) algorithms enable new real-time applications of multitarget tracking with resource-limited devices. Thus, we present a BP-based multisensor track association method with transformed measurements and show that it is equivalent to that with raw measurements. Third, considering communication constraints, it is more beneficial for local sensors to send in compressed data. Two analytical lossless transformations for track association are provided, and it is shown that their communication requirements from each sensor to the fusion center are less than those of fusion with raw track measurements. Numerical examples for tracking an unknown number of targets verify that track association with transformed track measurements has the same performance as that with raw measurements and requires fewer communication bandwidths.
Self-accumulative Vision Transformer for Bone Age Assessment Using the Sauvegrain Method
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This study presents a novel approach to bone age assessment (BAA) using a multi-view, multi-task classification model based on the Sauvegrain method. A straightforward solution to automating the Sauvegrain method, which assesses a maturity score for each landmark in the elbow and predicts the bone age, is to train classifiers independently to score each region of interest (RoI), but this approach limits the accessible information to local morphologies and increases computational costs. As a result, this work proposes a self-accumulative vision transformer (SAT) that mitigates anisotropic behavior, which usually occurs in multi-view, multi-task problems and limits the effectiveness of a vision transformer, by applying token replay and regional attention bias. A number of experiments show that SAT successfully exploits the relationships between landmarks and learns global morphological features, resulting in a mean absolute error of BAA that is 0.11 lower than that of the previous work. Additionally, the proposed SAT has four times reduced parameters than an ensemble of individual classifiers of the previous work. Lastly, this work also provides informative implications for clinical practice, improving the accuracy and efficiency of BAA in diagnosing abnormal growth in adolescents.
DORT: Modeling Dynamic Objects in Recurrent for Multi-Camera 3D Object Detection and Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recent multi-camera 3D object detectors usually leverage temporal information to construct multi-view stereo that alleviates the ill-posed depth estimation. However, they typically assume all the objects are static and directly aggregate features across frames. This work begins with a theoretical and empirical analysis to reveal that ignoring the motion of moving objects can result in serious localization bias. Therefore, we propose to model Dynamic Objects in RecurrenT (DORT) to tackle this problem. In contrast to previous global Bird-Eye-View (BEV) methods, DORT extracts object-wise local volumes for motion estimation that also alleviates the heavy computational burden. By iteratively refining the estimated object motion and location, the preceding features can be precisely aggregated to the current frame to mitigate the aforementioned adverse effects. The simple framework has two significant appealing properties. It is flexible and practical that can be plugged into most camera-based 3D object detectors. As there are predictions of object motion in the loop, it can easily track objects across frames according to their nearest center distances. Without bells and whistles, DORT outperforms all the previous methods on the nuScenes detection and tracking benchmarks with 62.5\% NDS and 57.6\% AMOTA, respectively. The source code will be released.
Structured Epipolar Matcher for Local Feature Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Local feature matching is challenging due to textureless and repetitive patterns. Existing methods focus on using appearance features and global interaction and matching, while the importance of geometry priors in local feature matching has not been fully exploited. Different from these methods, in this paper, we delve into the importance of geometry prior and propose Structured Epipolar Matcher (SEM) for local feature matching, which can leverage the geometric information in an iterative matching way. The proposed model enjoys several merits. First, our proposed Structured Feature Extractor can model the relative positional relationship between pixels and high-confidence anchor points. Second, our proposed Epipolar Attention and Matching can filter out irrelevant areas by utilizing the epipolar constraint. Extensive experimental results on five standard benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of our SEM compared to state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://sem2023.github.io.
Summarizing Indian Languages using Multilingual Transformers based Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

With the advent of multilingual models like mBART, mT5, IndicBART etc., summarization in low resource Indian languages is getting a lot of attention now a days. But still the number of datasets is low in number. In this work, we (Team HakunaMatata) study how these multilingual models perform on the datasets which have Indian languages as source and target text while performing summarization. We experimented with IndicBART and mT5 models to perform the experiments and report the ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-3 and ROUGE-4 scores as a performance metric.
Neuro-symbolic Rule Learning in Real-world Classification Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Neuro-symbolic rule learning has attracted lots of attention as it offers better interpretability than pure neural models and scales better than symbolic rule learning. A recent approach named pix2rule proposes a neural Disjunctive Normal Form (neural DNF) module to learn symbolic rules with feed-forward layers. Although proved to be effective in synthetic binary classification, pix2rule has not been applied to more challenging tasks such as multi-label and multi-class classifications over real-world data. In this paper, we address this limitation by extending the neural DNF module to (i) support rule learning in real-world multi-class and multi-label classification tasks, (ii) enforce the symbolic property of mutual exclusivity (i.e. predicting exactly one class) in multi-class classification, and (iii) explore its scalability over large inputs and outputs. We train a vanilla neural DNF model similar to pix2rule's neural DNF module for multi-label classification, and we propose a novel extended model called neural DNF-EO (Exactly One) which enforces mutual exclusivity in multi-class classification. We evaluate the classification performance, scalability and interpretability of our neural DNF-based models, and compare them against pure neural models and a state-of-the-art symbolic rule learner named FastLAS. We demonstrate that our neural DNF-based models perform similarly to neural networks, but provide better interpretability by enabling the extraction of logical rules. Our models also scale well when the rule search space grows in size, in contrast to FastLAS, which fails to learn in multi-class classification tasks with 200 classes and in all multi-label settings.
Communication Load Balancing via Efficient Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2023
Year: 2023

Communication load balancing aims to balance the load between different available resources, and thus improve the quality of service for network systems. After formulating the load balancing (LB) as a Markov decision process problem, reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven effective in addressing the LB problem. To leverage the benefits of classical RL for load balancing, however, we need an explicit reward definition. Engineering this reward function is challenging, because it involves the need for expert knowledge and there lacks a general consensus on the form of an optimal reward function. In this work, we tackle the communication load balancing problem from an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) approach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time IRL has been successfully applied in the field of communication load balancing. Specifically, first, we infer a reward function from a set of demonstrations, and then learn a reinforcement learning load balancing policy with the inferred reward function. Compared to classical RL-based solution, the proposed solution can be more general and more suitable for real-world scenarios. Experimental evaluations implemented on different simulated traffic scenarios have shown our method to be effective and better than other baselines by a considerable margin.
Latent Feature Relation Consistency for Adversarial Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks have been applied in many computer vision tasks and achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, misclassification will occur when DNN predicts adversarial examples which add human-imperceptible adversarial noise to natural examples. This limits the application of DNN in security-critical fields. To alleviate this problem, we first conducted an empirical analysis of the latent features of both adversarial and natural examples and found the similarity matrix of natural examples is more compact than those of adversarial examples. Motivated by this observation, we propose \textbf{L}atent \textbf{F}eature \textbf{R}elation \textbf{C}onsistency (\textbf{LFRC}), which constrains the relation of adversarial examples in latent space to be consistent with the natural examples. Importantly, our LFRC is orthogonal to the previous method and can be easily combined with them to achieve further improvement. To demonstrate the effectiveness of LFRC, we conduct extensive experiments using different neural networks on benchmark datasets. For instance, LFRC can bring 0.78\% further improvement compared to AT, and 1.09\% improvement compared to TRADES, against AutoAttack on CIFAR10. Code is available at https://github.com/liuxingbin/LFRC.
Evaluating NLG systems: A brief introduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

This year the International Conference on Natural Language Generation (INLG) will feature an award for the paper with the best evaluation. The purpose of this award is to provide an incentive for NLG researchers to pay more attention to the way they assess the output of their systems. This essay provides a short introduction to evaluation in NLG, explaining key terms and distinctions.
Judicial Intelligent Assistant System: Extracting Events from Divorce Cases to Detect Disputes for the Judge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In formal procedure of civil cases, the textual materials provided by different parties describe the development process of the cases. It is a difficult but necessary task to extract the key information for the cases from these textual materials and to clarify the dispute focus of related parties. Currently, officers read the materials manually and use methods, such as keyword searching and regular matching, to get the target information. These approaches are time-consuming and heavily depending on prior knowledge and carefulness of the officers. To assist the officers to enhance working efficiency and accuracy, we propose an approach to detect disputes from divorce cases based on a two-round-labeling event extracting technique in this paper. We implement the Judicial Intelligent Assistant (JIA) system according to the proposed approach to 1) automatically extract focus events from divorce case materials, 2) align events by identifying co-reference among them, and 3) detect conflicts among events brought by the plaintiff and the defendant. With the JIA system, it is convenient for judges to determine the disputed issues. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach and system can obtain the focus of cases and detect conflicts more effectively and efficiently comparing with existing method.
Exploring celebrity influence on public attitude towards the COVID-19 pandemic: social media shared sentiment analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new opportunities for health communication, including an increase in the public use of online outlets for health-related emotions. People have turned to social media networks to share sentiments related to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we examine the role of social messaging shared by Persons in the Public Eye (i.e. athletes, politicians, news personnel) in determining overall public discourse direction. We harvested approximately 13 million tweets ranging from 1 January 2020 to 1 March 2022. The sentiment was calculated for each tweet using a fine-tuned DistilRoBERTa model, which was used to compare COVID-19 vaccine-related Twitter posts (tweets) that co-occurred with mentions of People in the Public Eye. Our findings suggest the presence of consistent patterns of emotional content co-occurring with messaging shared by Persons in the Public Eye for the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced public opinion and largely stimulated online public discourse. We demonstrate that as the pandemic progressed, public sentiment shared on social networks was shaped by risk perceptions, political ideologies and health-protective behaviours shared by Persons in the Public Eye, often in a negative light.
ACO-tagger: A Novel Method for Part-of-Speech Tagging using Ant Colony Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Swarm Intelligence algorithms have gained significant attention in recent years as a means of solving complex and non-deterministic problems. These algorithms are inspired by the collective behavior of natural creatures, and they simulate this behavior to develop intelligent agents for computational tasks. One such algorithm is Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which is inspired by the foraging behavior of ants and their pheromone laying mechanism. ACO is used for solving difficult problems that are discrete and combinatorial in nature. Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is a fundamental task in natural language processing that aims to assign a part-of-speech role to each word in a sentence. In this research paper, proposed a high-performance POS-tagging method based on ACO called ACO-tagger. This method achieved a high accuracy rate of 96.867%, outperforming several state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method is fast and efficient, making it a viable option for practical applications.
Sketch-an-Anchor: Sub-epoch Fast Model Adaptation for Zero-shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Sketch-an-Anchor is a novel method to train state-of-the-art Zero-shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval (ZSSBIR) models in under an epoch. Most studies break down the problem of ZSSBIR into two parts: domain alignment between images and sketches, inherited from SBIR, and generalization to unseen data, inherent to the zero-shot protocol. We argue one of these problems can be considerably simplified and re-frame the ZSSBIR problem around the already-stellar yet underexplored Zero-shot Image-based Retrieval performance of off-the-shelf models. Our fast-converging model keeps the single-domain performance while learning to extract similar representations from sketches. To this end we introduce our Semantic Anchors -- guiding embeddings learned from word-based semantic spaces and features from off-the-shelf models -- and combine them with our novel Anchored Contrastive Loss. Empirical evidence shows we can achieve state-of-the-art performance on all benchmark datasets while training for 100x less iterations than other methods.
On the Impact of Control Signaling in RIS-Empowered Wireless Communications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The research on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) has dominantly been focused on physical-layer aspects and analyses of the achievable adaptation of the wireless propagation environment. Compared to that, questions related to system-level integration of RISs have received less attention. We address this research gap by analyzing the necessary control/signaling operations that are necessary to integrate RIS as a new type of wireless infrastructure element. We build a general model for evaluating the impact of control operations along two dimensions: i) the allocated bandwidth of the control channels (in-band and out-of-band), and ii) the rate selection for the data channel (multiplexing or diversity). Specifically, the second dimension results in two generic transmission schemes, one based on channel estimation and the subsequent optimization of the RIS, while the other is based on sweeping through predefined RIS phase configurations. We analyze the communication performance in multiple setups built along these two dimensions. While necessarily simplified, our analysis reveals the basic trade-offs in RIS-assisted communication and the associated control operations. The main contribution of the paper is a methodology for systematic evaluation of the control overhead in RIS-aided networks, regardless of the specific control schemes used.
Decision Making for Autonomous Driving in Interactive Merge Scenarios via Learning-based Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Autonomous agents that drive on roads shared with human drivers must reason about the nuanced interactions among traffic participants. This poses a highly challenging decision making problem since human behavior is influenced by a multitude of factors (e.g., human intentions and emotions) that are hard to model. This paper presents a decision making approach for autonomous driving, focusing on the complex task of merging into moving traffic where uncertainty emanates from the behavior of other drivers and imperfect sensor measurements. We frame the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solve it online with Monte Carlo tree search. The solution to the POMDP is a policy that performs high-level driving maneuvers, such as giving way to an approaching car, keeping a safe distance from the vehicle in front or merging into traffic. Our method leverages a model learned from data to predict the future states of traffic while explicitly accounting for interactions among the surrounding agents. From these predictions, the autonomous vehicle can anticipate the future consequences of its actions on the environment and optimize its trajectory accordingly. We thoroughly test our approach in simulation, showing that the autonomous vehicle can adapt its behavior to different situations. We also compare against other methods, demonstrating an improvement with respect to the considered performance metrics.
Uniting General-Graph and Geometric-Based Radio Networks via Independence Number Parametrization
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

In the study of radio networks, the tasks of broadcasting (propagating a message throughout the network) and leader election (having the network agree on a node to designate `leader') are two of the most fundamental global problems, and have a long history of work devoted to them. This work has two divergent strands: some works focus on exploiting the geometric properties of wireless networks based in physical space, while others consider general graphs. Algorithmic results in each of these avenues have often used quite different techniques, and produced bounds using incomparable parametrizations. In this work, we unite the study of general-graph and geometric-based radio networks, by adapting the broadcast and leader election algorithm of Czumaj and Davies (JACM '21) to achieve a running-time parametrized by the independence number of the network (i.e., the size of the maximum independent set). This parametrization preserves the running time on general graphs, matching the best known, but also improves running times to near-optimality across a wide range of geometric-based graph classes. As part of this algorithm, we also provide the first algorithm for computing a maximal independent set in general-graph radio networks. This algorithm runs in $O(\log^3 n)$ time-steps, only a $\log n$ factor away from the $Ω(\log^2 n)$ lower bound.
Peer Prediction for Peer Review: Designing a Marketplace for Ideas
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

The paper describes a potential platform to facilitate academic peer review with emphasis on early-stage research. This platform aims to make peer review more accurate and timely by rewarding reviewers on the basis of peer prediction algorithms. The algorithm uses a variation of Peer Truth Serum for Crowdsourcing (Radanovic et al., 2016) with human raters competing against a machine learning benchmark. We explain how our approach addresses two large productive inefficiencies in science: mismatch between research questions and publication bias. Better peer review for early research creates additional incentives for sharing it, which simplifies matching ideas to teams and makes negative results and p-hacking more visible.
Physical Deep Reinforcement Learning Towards Safety Guarantee
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved tremendous success in many complex decision-making tasks of autonomous systems with high-dimensional state and/or action spaces. However, the safety and stability still remain major concerns that hinder the applications of DRL to safety-critical autonomous systems. To address the concerns, we proposed the Phy-DRL: a physical deep reinforcement learning framework. The Phy-DRL is novel in two architectural designs: i) Lyapunov-like reward, and ii) residual control (i.e., integration of physics-model-based control and data-driven control). The concurrent physical reward and residual control empower the Phy-DRL the (mathematically) provable safety and stability guarantees. Through experiments on the inverted pendulum, we show that the Phy-DRL features guaranteed safety and stability and enhanced robustness, while offering remarkably accelerated training and enlarged reward.
A Video-based End-to-end Pipeline for Non-nutritive Sucking Action Recognition and Segmentation in Young Infants
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present an end-to-end computer vision pipeline to detect non-nutritive sucking (NNS) -- an infant sucking pattern with no nutrition delivered -- as a potential biomarker for developmental delays, using off-the-shelf baby monitor video footage. One barrier to clinical (or algorithmic) assessment of NNS stems from its sparsity, requiring experts to wade through hours of footage to find minutes of relevant activity. Our NNS activity segmentation algorithm solves this problem by identifying periods of NNS with high certainty -- up to 94.0\% average precision and 84.9\% average recall across 30 heterogeneous 60 s clips, drawn from our manually annotated NNS clinical in-crib dataset of 183 hours of overnight baby monitor footage from 19 infants. Our method is based on an underlying NNS action recognition algorithm, which uses spatiotemporal deep learning networks and infant-specific pose estimation, achieving 94.9\% accuracy in binary classification of 960 2.5 s balanced NNS vs. non-NNS clips. Tested on our second, independent, and public NNS in-the-wild dataset, NNS recognition classification reaches 92.3\% accuracy, and NNS segmentation achieves 90.8\% precision and 84.2\% recall.