OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Improved Probability Propagation Algorithm for Density Peak Clustering Based on Natural Nearest Neighborhood
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Clustering by fast search and find of density peaks (DPC) (Since, 2014) has been proven to be a promising clustering approach that efficiently discovers the centers of clusters by finding the density peaks. The accuracy of DPC depends on the cutoff distance ($d_c$), the cluster number ($k$) and the selection of the centers of clusters. Moreover, the final allocation strategy is sensitive and has poor fault tolerance. The shortcomings above make the algorithm sensitive to parameters and only applicable for some specific datasets. To overcome the limitations of DPC, this paper presents an improved probability propagation algorithm for density peak clustering based on the natural nearest neighborhood (DPC-PPNNN). By introducing the idea of natural nearest neighborhood and probability propagation, DPC-PPNNN realizes the nonparametric clustering process and makes the algorithm applicable for more complex datasets. In experiments on several datasets, DPC-PPNNN is shown to outperform DPC, K-means and DBSCAN.
On the Effect of Ranking Axioms on IR Evaluation Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

The study of IR evaluation metrics through axiomatic analysis enables a better understanding of their numerical properties. Some works have modelled the effectiveness of retrieval metrics with axioms that capture desirable properties on the set of rankings of documents. This paper formally explores the effect of these ranking axioms on the numerical values of some IR evaluation metrics. It focuses on the set of ranked lists of documents with multigrade relevance. The possible orderings in this set are derived from three commonly accepted ranking axioms on retrieval metrics; then, they are classified by their latticial properties. When relevant documents are prioritised, a subset of document rankings are identified: the join-irreducible elements, which have some resemblance to the concept of basis in vector space. It is possible to compute the precision, recall, RBP or DCG values of any ranking from their values in the join-irreducible elements. However this is not the case when the swapping of documents is considered.
The Present and Future of Bots in Software Engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

We are witnessing a massive adoption of software engineering bots, applications that react to events triggered by tools and messages posted by users and run automated tasks in response, in a variety of domains. This thematic issues describes experiences and challenges with these bots.
Still Haven't Found What You're Looking For -- Detecting the Intent of Web Search Missions from User Interaction Features
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Web search is among the most frequent online activities. Whereas traditional information retrieval techniques focus on the information need behind a user query, previous work has shown that user behaviour and interaction can provide important signals for understanding the underlying intent of a search mission. An established taxonomy distinguishes between transactional, navigational and informational search missions, where in particular the latter involve a learning goal, i.e. the intent to acquire knowledge about a particular topic. We introduce a supervised approach for classifying online search missions into either of these categories by utilising a range of features obtained from the user interactions during an online search mission. Applying our model to a dataset of real-world query logs, we show that search missions can be categorised with an average F1 score of 63% and accuracy of 69%, while performance on informational and navigational missions is particularly promising (F1>75%). This suggests the potential to utilise such supervised classification during online search to better facilitate retrieval and ranking as well as to improve affiliated services, such as targeted online ads.
Fast Kötter-Nielsen-Høholdt Interpolation over Skew Polynomial Rings and its Application in Coding Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Skew polynomials are a class of non-commutative polynomials that have several applications in computer science, coding theory and cryptography. In particular, skew polynomials can be used to construct and decode evaluation codes in several metrics, like e.g. the Hamming, rank, sum-rank and skew metric. We propose a fast divide-and-conquer variant of Kötter-Nielsen-Høholdt (KNH) interpolation algorithm: it inputs a list of linear functionals on skew polynomial vectors, and outputs a reduced Gröbner basis of their kernel intersection. We show, that the proposed KNH interpolation can be used to solve the interpolation step of interpolation-based decoding of interleaved Gabidulin codes in the rank-metric, linearized Reed-Solomon codes in the sum-rank metric and skew Reed-Solomon codes in the skew metric requiring at most $\tilde{O}(s^ω M(n))$ operations in $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$ , where $n$ is the length of the code, $s$ the interleaving order, $M(n)$ the complexity for multiplying two skew polynomials of degree at most $n$, $ω$ the matrix multiplication exponent and $\tilde{O}(\cdot)$ the soft-O notation which neglects log factors. This matches the previous best speeds for these tasks, which were obtained by top-down minimal approximant bases techniques, and complements the theory of efficient interpolation over free skew polynomial modules by the bottom-up KNH approach. In contrast to the top-down approach the bottom-up KNH algorithm has no requirements on the interpolation points and thus does not require any pre-processing.
Spectral Power Profile Optimization of Field-Deployed WDM Network by Remote Link Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

A digital twin model of a multi-node WDM network is obtained from a single access point. The model is used to predict and optimize the transmit power profile for each link in the network and up to 2.2~dB of margin improvements are obtained w.r.t. unoptimized transmission.
Explore Faster Localization Learning For Scene Text Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Generally pre-training and long-time training computation are necessary for obtaining a good-performance text detector based on deep networks. In this paper, we present a new scene text detection network (called FANet) with a Fast convergence speed and Accurate text localization. The proposed FANet is an end-to-end text detector based on transformer feature learning and normalized Fourier descriptor modeling, where the Fourier Descriptor Proposal Network and Iterative Text Decoding Network are designed to efficiently and accurately identify text proposals. Additionally, a Dense Matching Strategy and a well-designed loss function are also proposed for optimizing the network performance. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed FANet can achieve the SOTA performance with fewer training epochs and no pre-training. When we introduce additional data for pre-training, the proposed FANet can achieve SOTA performance on MSRATD500, CTW1500 and TotalText. The ablation experiments also verify the effectiveness of our contributions.
Towards Real-World Video Denosing: A Practical Video Denosing Dataset and Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

To facilitate video denoising research, we construct a compelling dataset, namely, "Practical Video Denoising Dataset" (PVDD), containing 200 noisy-clean dynamic video pairs in both sRGB and RAW format. Compared with existing datasets consisting of limited motion information, PVDD covers dynamic scenes with varying and natural motion. Different from datasets using primarily Gaussian or Poisson distributions to synthesize noise in the sRGB domain, PVDD synthesizes realistic noise from the RAW domain with a physically meaningful sensor noise model followed by ISP processing. Moreover, we also propose a new video denoising framework, called Recurrent Video Denoising Transformer (RVDT), which can achieve SOTA performance on PVDD and other current video denoising benchmarks. RVDT consists of both spatial and temporal transformer blocks to conduct denoising with long-range operations on the spatial dimension and long-term propagation on the temporal dimension. Especially, RVDT exploits the attention mechanism to implement the bi-directional feature propagation with both implicit and explicit temporal modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 1) models trained on PVDD achieve superior denoising performance on many challenging real-world videos than on models trained on other existing datasets; 2) trained on the same dataset, our proposed RVDT can have better denoising performance than other types of networks.
Hessian-Free Second-Order Adversarial Examples for Adversarial Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recent studies show deep neural networks (DNNs) are extremely vulnerable to the elaborately designed adversarial examples. Adversarial learning with those adversarial examples has been proved as one of the most effective methods to defend against such an attack. At present, most existing adversarial examples generation methods are based on first-order gradients, which can hardly further improve models' robustness, especially when facing second-order adversarial attacks. Compared with first-order gradients, second-order gradients provide a more accurate approximation of the loss landscape with respect to natural examples. Inspired by this, our work crafts second-order adversarial examples and uses them to train DNNs. Nevertheless, second-order optimization involves time-consuming calculation for Hessian-inverse. We propose an approximation method through transforming the problem into an optimization in the Krylov subspace, which remarkably reduce the computational complexity to speed up the training procedure. Extensive experiments conducted on the MINIST and CIFAR-10 datasets show that our adversarial learning with second-order adversarial examples outperforms other fisrt-order methods, which can improve the model robustness against a wide range of attacks.
Satellite image data downlink scheduling problem with family attribute: Model &Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The asynchronous development between the observation capability and the transition capability results in that an original image data (OID) formed by one-time observation cannot be completely transmitted in one transmit chance between the EOS and GS (named as a visible time window, VTW). It needs to segment the OID to several segmented image data (SID) and then transmits them in several VTWs, which enriches the extension of satellite image data downlink scheduling problem (SIDSP). We define the novel SIDSP as satellite image data downlink scheduling problem with family attribute (SIDSPWFA), in which some big OID is segmented by a fast segmentation operator first, and all SID and other no-segmented OID is transmitted in the second step. Two optimization objectives, the image data transmission failure rate (FR) and the segmentation times (ST), are then designed to formalize SIDSPWFA as a bi-objective discrete optimization model. Furthermore, a bi-stage differential evolutionary algorithm(DE+NSGA-II) is developed holding several bi-stage operators. Extensive simulation instances show the efficiency of models, strategies, algorithms and operators is analyzed in detail.
A Robust Ensemble Model for Patasitic Egg Detection and Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Intestinal parasitic infections, as a leading causes of morbidity worldwide, still lacks time-saving, high-sensitivity and user-friendly examination method. The development of deep learning technique reveals its broad application potential in biological image. In this paper, we apply several object detectors such as YOLOv5 and variant cascadeRCNNs to automatically discriminate parasitic eggs in microscope images. Through specially-designed optimization including raw data augmentation, model ensemble, transfer learning and test time augmentation, our model achieves excellent performance on challenge dataset. In addition, our model trained with added noise gains a high robustness against polluted input, which further broaden its applicability in practice.
Breaking Bad News in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Medicine: An Exploration of Disclosure and its Ethical Justification using the Hedonic Calculus
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

An appropriate ethical framework around the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare has become a key desirable with the increasingly widespread deployment of this technology. Advances in AI hold the promise of improving the precision of outcome prediction at the level of the individual. However, the addition of these technologies to patient-clinician interactions, as with any complex human interaction, has potential pitfalls. While physicians have always had to carefully consider the ethical background and implications of their actions, detailed deliberations around fast-moving technological progress may not have kept up. We use a common but key challenge in healthcare interactions, the disclosure of bad news (likely imminent death), to illustrate how the philosophical framework of the 'Felicific Calculus' developed in the 18th century by Jeremy Bentham, may have a timely quasi-quantitative application in the age of AI. We show how this ethical algorithm can be used to assess, across seven mutually exclusive and exhaustive domains, whether an AI-supported action can be morally justified.
How Routing Strategies Impact Urban Emissions
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Navigation apps use routing algorithms to suggest the best path to reach a user's desired destination. Although undoubtedly useful, navigation apps' impact on the urban environment (e.g., carbon dioxide emissions and population exposure to pollution) is still largely unclear. In this work, we design a simulation framework to assess the impact of routing algorithms on carbon dioxide emissions within an urban environment. Using APIs from TomTom and OpenStreetMap, we find that settings in which either all vehicles or none of them follow a navigation app's suggestion lead to the worst impact in terms of CO2 emissions. In contrast, when just a portion (around half) of vehicles follow these suggestions, and some degree of randomness is added to the remaining vehicles' paths, we observe a reduction in the overall CO2 emissions over the road network. Our work is a first step towards designing next-generation routing principles that may increase urban well-being while satisfying individual needs.
Generalisable Methods for Early Prediction in Interactive Simulations for Education
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Interactive simulations allow students to discover the underlying principles of a scientific phenomenon through their own exploration. Unfortunately, students often struggle to learn effectively in these environments. Classifying students' interaction data in the simulations based on their expected performance has the potential to enable adaptive guidance and consequently improve students' learning. Previous research in this field has mainly focused on a-posteriori analyses or investigations limited to one specific predictive model and simulation. In this paper, we investigate the quality and generalisability of models for an early prediction of conceptual understanding based on clickstream data of students across interactive simulations. We first measure the students' conceptual understanding through their in-task performance. Then, we suggest a novel type of features that, starting from clickstream data, encodes both the state of the simulation and the action performed by the student. We finally propose to feed these features into GRU-based models, with and without attention, for prediction. Experiments on two different simulations and with two different populations show that our proposed models outperform shallow learning baselines and better generalise to different learning environments and populations. The inclusion of attention into the model increases interpretability in terms of effective inquiry. The source code is available on Github (https://github.com/epfl-ml4ed/beerslaw-lab.git).
Think About the Stakeholders First! Towards an Algorithmic Transparency Playbook for Regulatory Compliance
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Increasingly, laws are being proposed and passed by governments around the world to regulate Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems implemented into the public and private sectors. Many of these regulations address the transparency of AI systems, and related citizen-aware issues like allowing individuals to have the right to an explanation about how an AI system makes a decision that impacts them. Yet, almost all AI governance documents to date have a significant drawback: they have focused on what to do (or what not to do) with respect to making AI systems transparent, but have left the brunt of the work to technologists to figure out how to build transparent systems. We fill this gap by proposing a novel stakeholder-first approach that assists technologists in designing transparent, regulatory compliant systems. We also describe a real-world case-study that illustrates how this approach can be used in practice.
State of the Art of Audio- and Video-Based Solutions for AAL
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The report illustrates the state of the art of the most successful AAL applications and functions based on audio and video data, namely (i) lifelogging and self-monitoring, (ii) remote monitoring of vital signs, (iii) emotional state recognition, (iv) food intake monitoring, activity and behaviour recognition, (v) activity and personal assistance, (vi) gesture recognition, (vii) fall detection and prevention, (viii) mobility assessment and frailty recognition, and (ix) cognitive and motor rehabilitation. For these application scenarios, the report illustrates the state of play in terms of scientific advances, available products and research project. The open challenges are also highlighted.
Award rate inequities in biomedical research
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The analysis of existing institutional research proposal databases can provide novel insights into science funding parity. The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between race/ethnicity and extramural research proposal and award rates across a medical school faculty and to determine whether there was evidence that researchers changed their submission strategies because of differential inequities across submission categories. The authors performed an analysis of 14,263 biomedical research proposals with proposed start dates between 2010-2022 from the University of Michigan Medical School, measuring the proposal submission and award rates for each racial/ethnic group across 4 possible submission categories (R01 & Equivalent programs, other federal, industry, and non-profit). Biomedical researchers from different racial/ethnic groups follow markedly different proposal submission strategies within the University of Michigan Medical School. There is also a clear relationship between race/ethnicity and rates of proposal award. Black/African American and Asian researchers appear disadvantaged across all submission categories relative to White researchers. This study can be easily replicated by other academic research institutions, revealing opportunities for positive intervention.
Auxiliary Task Guided Interactive Attention Model for Question Difficulty Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Online learning platforms conduct exams to evaluate the learners in a monotonous way, where the questions in the database may be classified into Bloom's Taxonomy as varying levels in complexity from basic knowledge to advanced evaluation. The questions asked in these exams to all learners are very much static. It becomes important to ask new questions with different difficulty levels to each learner to provide a personalized learning experience. In this paper, we propose a multi-task method with an interactive attention mechanism, Qdiff, for jointly predicting Bloom's Taxonomy and difficulty levels of academic questions. We model the interaction between the predicted bloom taxonomy representations and the input representations using an attention mechanism to aid in difficulty prediction. The proposed learning method would help learn representations that capture the relationship between Bloom's taxonomy and difficulty labels. The proposed multi-task method learns a good input representation by leveraging the relationship between the related tasks and can be used in similar settings where the tasks are related. The results demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than training only on difficulty prediction. However, Bloom's labels may not always be given for some datasets. Hence we soft label another dataset with a model fine-tuned to predict Bloom's labels to demonstrate the applicability of our method to datasets with only difficulty labels.
Aligning Artificial Intelligence with Humans through Public Policy
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Given that Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly permeates our lives, it is critical that we systematically align AI objectives with the goals and values of humans. The human-AI alignment problem stems from the impracticality of explicitly specifying the rewards that AI models should receive for all the actions they could take in all relevant states of the world. One possible solution, then, is to leverage the capabilities of AI models to learn those rewards implicitly from a rich source of data describing human values in a wide range of contexts. The democratic policy-making process produces just such data by developing specific rules, flexible standards, interpretable guidelines, and generalizable precedents that synthesize citizens' preferences over potential actions taken in many states of the world. Therefore, computationally encoding public policies to make them legible to AI systems should be an important part of a socio-technical approach to the broader human-AI alignment puzzle. This Essay outlines research on AI that learn structures in policy data that can be leveraged for downstream tasks. As a demonstration of the ability of AI to comprehend policy, we provide a case study of an AI system that predicts the relevance of proposed legislation to any given publicly traded company and its likely effect on that company. We believe this represents the "comprehension" phase of AI and policy, but leveraging policy as a key source of human values to align AI requires "understanding" policy. Solving the alignment problem is crucial to ensuring that AI is beneficial both individually (to the person or group deploying the AI) and socially. As AI systems are given increasing responsibility in high-stakes contexts, integrating democratically-determined policy into those systems could align their behavior with human goals in a way that is responsive to a constantly evolving society.
Learning state machines via efficient hashing of future traces
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

State machines are popular models to model and visualize discrete systems such as software systems, and to represent regular grammars. Most algorithms that passively learn state machines from data assume all the data to be available from the beginning and they load this data into memory. This makes it hard to apply them to continuously streaming data and results in large memory requirements when dealing with large datasets. In this paper we propose a method to learn state machines from data streams using the count-min-sketch data structure to reduce memory requirements. We apply state merging using the well-known red-blue-framework to reduce the search space. We implemented our approach in an established framework for learning state machines, and evaluated it on a well know dataset to provide experimental data, showing the effectiveness of our approach with respect to quality of the results and run-time.