OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Search Query Intent Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Understanding a user's query intent behind a search is critical for modern search engine success. Accurate query intent prediction allows the search engine to better serve the user's need by rendering results from more relevant categories. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive learning framework for modeling query intent under different stages of a search. We focus on the design for 1) predicting users' intents as they type in queries on-the-fly in typeahead search using character-level models; and 2) accurate word-level intent prediction models for complete queries. Various deep learning components for query text understanding are experimented. Offline evaluation and online A/B test experiments show that the proposed methods are effective in understanding query intent and efficient to scale for online search systems.
Model Patching: Closing the Subgroup Performance Gap with Data Augmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Classifiers in machine learning are often brittle when deployed. Particularly concerning are models with inconsistent performance on specific subgroups of a class, e.g., exhibiting disparities in skin cancer classification in the presence or absence of a spurious bandage. To mitigate these performance differences, we introduce model patching, a two-stage framework for improving robustness that encourages the model to be invariant to subgroup differences, and focus on class information shared by subgroups. Model patching first models subgroup features within a class and learns semantic transformations between them, and then trains a classifier with data augmentations that deliberately manipulate subgroup features. We instantiate model patching with CAMEL, which (1) uses a CycleGAN to learn the intra-class, inter-subgroup augmentations, and (2) balances subgroup performance using a theoretically-motivated subgroup consistency regularizer, accompanied by a new robust objective. We demonstrate CAMEL's effectiveness on 3 benchmark datasets, with reductions in robust error of up to 33% relative to the best baseline. Lastly, CAMEL successfully patches a model that fails due to spurious features on a real-world skin cancer dataset.
Finding Fast Transformers: One-Shot Neural Architecture Search by Component Composition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Transformer-based models have achieved stateof-the-art results in many tasks in natural language processing. However, such models are usually slow at inference time, making deployment difficult. In this paper, we develop an efficient algorithm to search for fast models while maintaining model quality. We describe a novel approach to decompose the Transformer architecture into smaller components, and propose a sampling-based one-shot architecture search method to find an optimal model for inference. The model search process is more efficient than alternatives, adding only a small overhead to training time. By applying our methods to BERT-base architectures, we achieve 10% to 30% speedup for pre-trained BERT and 70% speedup on top of a previous state-of-the-art distilled BERT model on Cloud TPU-v2 with a generally acceptable drop in performance.
Detection of Gait Abnormalities caused by Neurological Disorders
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we leverage gait to potentially detect some of the important neurological disorders, namely Parkinson's disease, Diplegia, Hemiplegia, and Huntington's Chorea. Persons with these neurological disorders often have a very abnormal gait, which motivates us to target gait for their potential detection. Some of the abnormalities involve the circumduction of legs, forward-bending, involuntary movements, etc. To detect such abnormalities in gait, we develop gait features from the key-points of the human pose, namely shoulders, elbows, hips, knees, ankles, etc. To evaluate the effectiveness of our gait features in detecting the abnormalities related to these diseases, we build a synthetic video dataset of persons mimicking the gait of persons with such disorders, considering the difficulty in finding a sufficient number of people with these disorders. We name it \textit{NeuroSynGait} video dataset. Experiments demonstrated that our gait features were indeed successful in detecting these abnormalities.
Discovering Lexical Similarity Through Articulatory Feature-based Phonetic Edit Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Lexical Similarity (LS) between two languages uncovers many interesting linguistic insights such as genetic relationship, mutual intelligibility, and the usage of one's vocabulary into other. There are various methods through which LS is evaluated. In the same regard, this paper presents a method of Phonetic Edit Distance (PED) that uses a soft comparison of letters using the articulatory features associated with them. The system converts the words into the corresponding International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), followed by the conversion of IPA into its set of articulatory features. Later, the lists of the set of articulatory features are compared using the proposed method. As an example, PED gives edit distance of German word vater and Persian word pidar as 0.82; and similarly, Hebrew word shalom and Arabic word salaam as 0.93, whereas for a juxtapose comparison, their IPA based edit distances are 4 and 2 respectively. Experiments are performed with six languages (Arabic, Hindi, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu). In this regard, we extracted part of speech wise word-lists from the Universal Dependency corpora and evaluated the LS for every pair of language. Thus, with the proposed approach, we find the genetic affinity, similarity, and borrowing/loan-words despite having script differences and sound variation phenomena among these languages.
SECODA: Segmentation- and Combination-Based Detection of Anomalies
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

This study introduces SECODA, a novel general-purpose unsupervised non-parametric anomaly detection algorithm for datasets containing continuous and categorical attributes. The method is guaranteed to identify cases with unique or sparse combinations of attribute values. Continuous attributes are discretized repeatedly in order to correctly determine the frequency of such value combinations. The concept of constellations, exponentially increasing weights and discretization cut points, as well as a pruning heuristic are used to detect anomalies with an optimal number of iterations. Moreover, the algorithm has a low memory imprint and its runtime performance scales linearly with the size of the dataset. An evaluation with simulated and real-life datasets shows that this algorithm is able to identify many different types of anomalies, including complex multidimensional instances. An evaluation in terms of a data quality use case with a real dataset demonstrates that SECODA can bring relevant and practical value to real-world settings.
TopicBERT: A Transformer transfer learning based memory-graph approach for multimodal streaming social media topic detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Real time nature of social networks with bursty short messages and their respective large data scale spread among vast variety of topics are research interest of many researchers. These properties of social networks which are known as 5'Vs of big data has led to many unique and enlightenment algorithms and techniques applied to large social networking datasets and data streams. Many of these researches are based on detection and tracking of hot topics and trending social media events that help revealing many unanswered questions. These algorithms and in some cases software products mostly rely on the nature of the language itself. Although, other techniques such as unsupervised data mining methods are language independent but many requirements for a comprehensive solution are not met. Many research issues such as noisy sentences that adverse grammar and new online user invented words are challenging maintenance of a good social network topic detection and tracking methodology; The semantic relationship between words and in most cases, synonyms are also ignored by many of these researches. In this research, we use Transformers combined with an incremental community detection algorithm. Transformer in one hand, provides the semantic relation between words in different contexts. On the other hand, the proposed graph mining technique enhances the resulting topics with aid of simple structural rules. Named entity recognition from multimodal data, image and text, labels the named entities with entity type and the extracted topics are tuned using them. All operations of proposed system has been applied with big social data perspective under NoSQL technologies. In order to present a working and systematic solution, we combined MongoDB with Neo4j as two major database systems of our work. The proposed system shows higher precision and recall compared to other methods in three different datasets.
Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Natural Language Goals
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Humans generally use natural language to communicate task requirements to each other. Ideally, natural language should also be usable for communicating goals to autonomous machines (e.g., robots) to minimize friction in task specification. However, understanding and mapping natural language goals to sequences of states and actions is challenging. Specifically, existing work along these lines has encountered difficulty in generalizing learned policies to new natural language goals and environments. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to learn a language-conditioned policy and reward function. To improve generalization of the learned policy and reward function, we use a variational goal generator to relabel trajectories and sample diverse goals during training. Our algorithm outperforms multiple baselines by a large margin on a vision-based natural language instruction following dataset (Room-2-Room), demonstrating a promising advance in enabling the use of natural language instructions in specifying agent goals.
Visual stream connectivity predicts assessments of image quality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Some biological mechanisms of early vision are comparatively well understood, but they have yet to be evaluated for their ability to accurately predict and explain human judgments of image similarity. From well-studied simple connectivity patterns in early vision, we derive a novel formalization of the psychophysics of similarity, showing the differential geometry that provides accurate and explanatory accounts of perceptual similarity judgments. These predictions then are further improved via simple regression on human behavioral reports, which in turn are used to construct more elaborate hypothesized neural connectivity patterns. Both approaches outperform standard successful measures of perceived image fidelity from the literature, as well as providing explanatory principles of similarity perception.
Spectrum-Based Log Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

We present and evaluate Spectrum-Based Log Diagnosis (SBLD), a method to help developers quickly diagnose problems found in complex integration and deployment runs. Inspired by Spectrum-Based Fault Localization, SBLD leverages the differences in event occurrences between logs for failing and passing runs, to highlight events that are stronger associated with failing runs. Using data provided by our industrial partner, we empirically investigate the following questions: (i) How well does SBLD reduce the effort needed to identify all failure-relevant events in the log for a failing run? (ii) How is the performance of SBLD affected by available data? (iii) How does SBLD compare to searching for simple textual patterns that often occur in failure-relevant events? We answer (i) and (ii) using summary statistics and heatmap visualizations, and for (iii) we compare three configurations of SBLD (with resp. minimum, median and maximum data) against a textual search using Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and the Vargha-Delaney measure of stochastic superiority. Our evaluation shows that (i) SBLD achieves a significant effort reduction for the dataset used, (ii) SBLD benefits from additional logs for passing runs in general, and it benefits from additional logs for failing runs when there is a proportional amount of logs for passing runs in the data. Finally, (iii) SBLD and textual search are roughly equally effective at effort-reduction, while textual search has a slightly better recall. We investigate the cause, and discuss how it is due to the characteristics of a specific part of our data. We conclude that SBLD shows promise as a method for diagnosing failing runs, that its performance is positively affected by additional data, but that it does not outperform textual search on the dataset considered. Future work includes investigating SBLD's generalizability on additional datasets.
Image Stylization for Robust Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Local features that are robust to both viewpoint and appearance changes are crucial for many computer vision tasks. In this work we investigate if photorealistic image stylization improves robustness of local features to not only day-night, but also weather and season variations. We show that image stylization in addition to color augmentation is a powerful method of learning robust features. We evaluate learned features on visual localization benchmarks, outperforming state of the art baseline models despite training without ground-truth 3D correspondences using synthetic homographies only. We use trained feature networks to compete in Long-Term Visual Localization and Map-based Localization for Autonomous Driving challenges achieving competitive scores.
An adaptive synchronization approach for weights of deep reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep Q-Networks (DQN) is one of the most well-known methods of deep reinforcement learning, which uses deep learning to approximate the action-value function. Solving numerous Deep reinforcement learning challenges such as moving targets problem and the correlation between samples are the main advantages of this model. Although there have been various extensions of DQN in recent years, they all use a similar method to DQN to overcome the problem of moving targets. Despite the advantages mentioned, synchronizing the network weight in a fixed step size, independent of the agent's behavior, may in some cases cause the loss of some properly learned networks. These lost networks may lead to states with more rewards, hence better samples stored in the replay memory for future training. In this paper, we address this problem from the DQN family and provide an adaptive approach for the synchronization of the neural weights used in DQN. In this method, the synchronization of weights is done based on the recent behavior of the agent, which is measured by a criterion at the end of the intervals. To test this method, we adjusted the DQN and rainbow methods with the proposed adaptive synchronization method. We compared these adjusted methods with their standard form on well-known games, which results confirm the quality of our synchronization methods.
OCEAN: Online Task Inference for Compositional Tasks with Context Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Real-world tasks often exhibit a compositional structure that contains a sequence of simpler sub-tasks. For instance, opening a door requires reaching, grasping, rotating, and pulling the door knob. Such compositional tasks require an agent to reason about the sub-task at hand while orchestrating global behavior accordingly. This can be cast as an online task inference problem, where the current task identity, represented by a context variable, is estimated from the agent's past experiences with probabilistic inference. Previous approaches have employed simple latent distributions, e.g., Gaussian, to model a single context for the entire task. However, this formulation lacks the expressiveness to capture the composition and transition of the sub-tasks. We propose a variational inference framework OCEAN to perform online task inference for compositional tasks. OCEAN models global and local context variables in a joint latent space, where the global variables represent a mixture of sub-tasks required for the task, while the local variables capture the transitions between the sub-tasks. Our framework supports flexible latent distributions based on prior knowledge of the task structure and can be trained in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results show that OCEAN provides more effective task inference with sequential context adaptation and thus leads to a performance boost on complex, multi-stage tasks.
Spherical coordinates transformation pre-processing in Deep Convolution Neural Networks for brain tumor segmentation in MRI
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is used in everyday clinical practice to assess brain tumors. Several automatic or semi-automatic segmentation algorithms have been introduced to segment brain tumors and achieve an expert-like accuracy. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN) have recently shown very promising results, however, DCNN models are still far from achieving clinically meaningful results mainly because of the lack of generalization of the models. DCNN models need large annotated datasets to achieve good performance. Models are often optimized on the domain dataset on which they have been trained, and then fail the task when the same model is applied to different datasets from different institutions. One of the reasons is due to the lack of data standardization to adjust for different models and MR machines. In this work, a 3D Spherical coordinates transform during the pre-processing phase has been hypothesized to improve DCNN models' accuracy and to allow more generalizable results even when the model is trained on small and heterogeneous datasets and translated into different domains. Indeed, the spherical coordinate system avoids several standardization issues since it works independently of resolution and imaging settings. Both Cartesian and spherical volumes were evaluated in two DCNN models with the same network structure using the BraTS 2019 dataset. The model trained on spherical transform pre-processed inputs resulted in superior performance over the Cartesian-input trained model on predicting gliomas' segmentation on tumor core and enhancing tumor classes (increase of 0.011 and 0.014 respectively on the validation dataset), achieving a further improvement in accuracy by merging the two models together. Furthermore, the spherical transform is not resolution-dependent and achieve same results on different input resolution.
An Efficient Transition Algorithm For Seamless Drone Multicasting
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Many drone-related applications (e.g., drone-aided video capture, drone traffic and safety management) require group communications between drones to efficiently disseminate data or reliably deliver critical information, making use of the line-of-sight coverage of drones to realise services that ground devices may not be capable of. This paper studies highperformance yet resource-efficient mobile drone multicasting via trajectory adjustment. We first analyse the trajectory adjustment condition to determine whether a straight-line trajectory is fully covered by the multicast or not, by conducting simple computation tasks and with controlled overhead traffic. We then propose the trajectory adjustment scheme to provide a new trajectory with controlled travel distances. The ETTA algorithm is finally presented to apply the trajectory adjustment condition and scheme to a drone transiting between forwarders whose coverage do not overlap. The algorithm relies on multicasting forwarders, instead of additional transition forwarders, to fully cover the adjusted trajectory, helping to control interference and network traffic load. Our NS2 simulation results demonstrate that ETTA, as compared to other mobile multicasts, can achieve guaranteed performance for drone receivers in a multicast with heavier traffic loads.
WSRNet: Joint Spotting and Recognition of Handwritten Words
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we present a unified model that can handle both Keyword Spotting and Word Recognition with the same network architecture. The proposed network is comprised of a non-recurrent CTC branch and a Seq2Seq branch that is further augmented with an Autoencoding module. The related joint loss leads to a boost in recognition performance, while the Seq2Seq branch is used to create efficient word representations. We show how to further process these representations with binarization and a retraining scheme to provide compact and highly efficient descriptors, suitable for keyword spotting. Numerical results validate the usefulness of the proposed architecture, as our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in keyword spotting, and provides results in the ballpark of the leading methods for word recognition.
Probabilistic Skyline Query Processing over Uncertain Data Streams in Edge Computing Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

With the advancement of technology, the data generated in our lives is getting faster and faster, and the amount of data that various applications need to process becomes extremely huge. Therefore, we need to put more effort into analyzing data and extracting valuable information. Cloud computing used to be a good technology to solve a large number of data analysis problems. However, in the era of the popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT), transmitting sensing data back to the cloud for centralized data analysis will consume a lot of wireless communication and network transmission costs. To solve the above problems, edge computing has become a promising solution. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for processing probabilistic skyline queries over uncertain data streams in an edge computing environment. We use the concept of a second skyline set to filter data that is unlikely to be the result of the skyline. Besides, the edge server only sends the information needed to update the global analysis results on the cloud server, which will greatly reduce the amount of data transmitted over the network. The results show that our proposed method not only reduces the response time by more than 50% compared with the brute force method on two-dimensional data but also maintains the leading processing speed on high-dimensional data.
DeepGIN: Deep Generative Inpainting Network for Extreme Image Inpainting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The degree of difficulty in image inpainting depends on the types and sizes of the missing parts. Existing image inpainting approaches usually encounter difficulties in completing the missing parts in the wild with pleasing visual and contextual results as they are trained for either dealing with one specific type of missing patterns (mask) or unilaterally assuming the shapes and/or sizes of the masked areas. We propose a deep generative inpainting network, named DeepGIN, to handle various types of masked images. We design a Spatial Pyramid Dilation (SPD) ResNet block to enable the use of distant features for reconstruction. We also employ Multi-Scale Self-Attention (MSSA) mechanism and Back Projection (BP) technique to enhance our inpainting results. Our DeepGIN outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches generally, including two publicly available datasets (FFHQ and Oxford Buildings), both quantitatively and qualitatively. We also demonstrate that our model is capable of completing masked images in the wild.
Algorithm for SIS and MultiSIS problems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

SIS problem has numerous applications in cryptography. Known algorithms for solving that problem are exponential in complexity. A new algorithm is suggested in this note, its complexity is sub-exponential for a range of parameters.