OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reassessing the Limitations of CNN Methods for Camera Pose Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we address the problem of camera pose estimation in outdoor and indoor scenarios. In comparison to the currently top-performing methods that rely on 2D to 3D matching, we propose a model that can directly regress the camera pose from images with significantly higher accuracy than existing methods of the same class. We first analyse why regression methods are still behind the state-of-the-art, and we bridge the performance gap with our new approach. Specifically, we propose a way to overcome the biased training data by a novel training technique, which generates poses guided by a probability distribution from the training set for synthesising new training views. Lastly, we evaluate our approach on two widely used benchmarks and show that it achieves significantly improved performance compared to prior regression-based methods, retrieval techniques as well as 3D pipelines with local feature matching.
First-Order Theory of Probabilistic Independence and Single-Letter Characterizations of Capacity Regions
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the first-order theory of random variables with the probabilistic independence relation, which concerns statements consisting of random variables, the probabilistic independence symbol, logical operators, and existential and universal quantifiers. Although probabilistic independence is the only non-logical relation included, this theory is surprisingly expressive, and is able to interpret the true first-order arithmetic over natural numbers (and hence is undecidable). We also construct a single-letter characterization of the capacity region for a general class of multiuser coding settings (including broadcast channel, interference channel and relay channel), using a first-order formula. We then introduce the linear entropy hierarchy to classify single-letter characterizations according to their complexity.
Generative Relation Linking for Question Answering over Knowledge Bases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Relation linking is essential to enable question answering over knowledge bases. Although there are various efforts to improve relation linking performance, the current state-of-the-art methods do not achieve optimal results, therefore, negatively impacting the overall end-to-end question answering performance. In this work, we propose a novel approach for relation linking framing it as a generative problem facilitating the use of pre-trained sequence-to-sequence models. We extend such sequence-to-sequence models with the idea of infusing structured data from the target knowledge base, primarily to enable these models to handle the nuances of the knowledge base. Moreover, we train the model with the aim to generate a structured output consisting of a list of argument-relation pairs, enabling a knowledge validation step. We compared our method against the existing relation linking systems on four different datasets derived from DBpedia and Wikidata. Our method reports large improvements over the state-of-the-art while using a much simpler model that can be easily adapted to different knowledge bases.
An NLP approach to quantify dynamic salience of predefined topics in a text corpus
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The proliferation of news media available online simultaneously presents a valuable resource and significant challenge to analysts aiming to profile and understand social and cultural trends in a geographic location of interest. While an abundance of news reports documenting significant events, trends, and responses provides a more democratized picture of the social characteristics of a location, making sense of an entire corpus to extract significant trends is a steep challenge for any one analyst or team. Here, we present an approach using natural language processing techniques that seeks to quantify how a set of pre-defined topics of interest change over time across a large corpus of text. We found that, given a predefined topic, we can identify and rank sets of terms, or n-grams, that map to those topics and have usage patterns that deviate from a normal baseline. Emergence, disappearance, or significant variations in n-gram usage present a ground-up picture of a topic's dynamic salience within a corpus of interest.
Diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia Using Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We train a machine learning model on a dataset of 2177 individuals using as features 26 probe sets and their age in order to classify if someone has acute myeloid leukaemia or is healthy. The dataset is multicentric and consists of data from 27 organisations, 25 cities, 15 countries and 4 continents. The accuracy or our model is 99.94\% and its F1-score 0.9996. To the best of our knowledge the performance of our model is the best one in the literature, as regards the prediction of AML using similar or not data. Moreover, there has not been any bibliographic reference associated with acute myeloid leukaemia for the 26 probe sets we used as features in our model.
Network Generalization Prediction for Safety Critical Tasks in Novel Operating Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

It is well known that Neural Network (network) performance often degrades when a network is used in novel operating domains that differ from its training and testing domains. This is a major limitation, as networks are being integrated into safety critical, cyber-physical systems that must work in unconstrained environments, e.g., perception for autonomous vehicles. Training networks that generalize to novel operating domains and that extract robust features is an active area of research, but previous work fails to predict what the network performance will be in novel operating domains. We propose the task Network Generalization Prediction: predicting the expected network performance in novel operating domains. We describe the network performance in terms of an interpretable Context Subspace, and we propose a methodology for selecting the features of the Context Subspace that provide the most information about the network performance. We identify the Context Subspace for a pretrained Faster RCNN network performing pedestrian detection on the Berkeley Deep Drive (BDD) Dataset, and demonstrate Network Generalization Prediction accuracy within 5% or less of observed performance. We also demonstrate that the Context Subspace from the BDD Dataset is informative for completely unseen datasets, JAAD and Cityscapes, where predictions have a bias of 10% or less.
Memory-Efficient Factorization Machines via Binarizing both Data and Model Coefficients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Factorization Machines (FM), a general predictor that can efficiently model feature interactions in linear time, was primarily proposed for collaborative recommendation and have been broadly used for regression, classification and ranking tasks. Subspace Encoding Factorization Machine (SEFM) has been proposed recently to overcome the expressiveness limitation of Factorization Machines (FM) by applying explicit nonlinear feature mapping for both individual features and feature interactions through one-hot encoding to each input feature. Despite the effectiveness of SEFM, it increases the memory cost of FM by $b$ times, where $b$ is the number of bins when applying one-hot encoding on each input feature. To reduce the memory cost of SEFM, we propose a new method called Binarized FM which constraints the model parameters to be binary values (i.e., 1 or $-1$). Then each parameter value can be efficiently stored in one bit. Our proposed method can significantly reduce the memory cost of SEFM model. In addition, we propose a new algorithm to effectively and efficiently learn proposed FM with binary constraints using Straight Through Estimator (STE) with Adaptive Gradient Descent (Adagrad). Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed method on eight different classification datasets. Our experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed method achieves comparable accuracy with SEFM but with much less memory cost.
Self-dual $2$-quasi-abelian Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A kind of self-dual quasi-abelian codes of index $2$ over any finite field $F$ is introduced. By counting the number of such codes and the number of the codes of this kind whose relative minimum weights are small, such codes are proved to be asymptotically good provided $-1$ is a square in $F$. Moreover, a kind of self-orthogonal quasi-abelian codes of index $2$ are defined; and such codes always exist. In a way similar to that for self-dual quasi-abelian codes of index $2$, it is proved that the kind of the self-orthogonal quasi-abelian codes of index $2$ is asymptotically good.
Reconstruction of Worm Propagation Path Using a Trace-back Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Worm origin identification and propagation path reconstruction are essential problems in digital forensics. However, a small number of studies have specifically investigated these problems so far. In this paper, we extend a distributed trace-back algorithm, called Origins, which is only able to identify the origins of fast-spreading worms. We make some modifications to this algorithm so that in addition to identifying the worm origins, it can also reconstruct the propagation path. We also evaluate our extended algorithm. The results show that our algorithm can reconstruct the propagation path of worms with high recall and precision, on average around 0.96. Also, the algorithm identifies the origins correctly in all of our experiments.
Social influence leads to the formation of diverse local trends
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but has only been shown in the context of music listening. To further examine the effect of social influence on media popularity, we extend this research to the context of algorithmically-generated images by re-adapting Salganik et al's Music Lab experiment. On a digital platform where participants discover and curate AI-generated hybrid animals, we randomly assign both the knowledge of other participants' behavior and the visual presentation of the information. We successfully replicate the Music Lab's findings in the context of images, whereby social influence leads to an unpredictable winner-take-all market. However, we also find that social influence can lead to the emergence of local cultural trends that diverge from the status quo and are ultimately more diverse. We discuss the implications of these results for platform designers and animal conservation efforts.
Diffeomorphic Particle Image Velocimetry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The existing particle image velocimetry (PIV) do not consider the curvature effect of the non-straight particle trajectory, because it seems to be impossible to obtain the curvature information from a pair of particle images. As a result, the computed vector underestimates the real velocity due to the straight-line approximation, that further causes a systematic error for the PIV instrument. In this work, the particle curved trajectory between two recordings is firstly explained with the streamline segment of a steady flow (diffeomorphic transformation) instead of a single vector, and this idea is termed as diffeomorphic PIV. Specifically, a deformation field is introduced to describe the particle displacement, i.e., we try to find the optimal velocity field, of which the corresponding deformation vector field agrees with the particle displacement. Because the variation of the deformation function can be approximated with the variation of the velocity function, the diffeomorphic PIV can be implemented as iterative PIV. That says, the diffeomorphic PIV warps the images with deformation vector field instead of the velocity, and keeps the rest as same as iterative PIVs. Two diffeomorphic deformation schemes -- forward diffeomorphic deformation interrogation (FDDI) and central diffeomorphic deformation interrogation (CDDI) -- are proposed. Tested on synthetic images, the FDDI achieves significant accuracy improvement across different one-pass displacement estimators (cross-correlation, optical flow, deep learning flow). Besides, the results on three real PIV image pairs demonstrate the non-negligible curvature effect for CDI-based PIV, and our FDDI provides larger velocity estimation (more accurate) in the fast curvy streamline areas. The accuracy improvement of the combination of FDDI and accurate dense estimator means that our diffeomorphic PIV paves a new way for complex flow measurement.
MOI-Mixer: Improving MLP-Mixer with Multi Order Interactions in Sequential Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Successful sequential recommendation systems rely on accurately capturing the user's short-term and long-term interest. Although Transformer-based models achieved state-of-the-art performance in the sequential recommendation task, they generally require quadratic memory and time complexity to the sequence length, making it difficult to extract the long-term interest of users. On the other hand, Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP)-based models, renowned for their linear memory and time complexity, have recently shown competitive results compared to Transformer in various tasks. Given the availability of a massive amount of the user's behavior history, the linear memory and time complexity of MLP-based models make them a promising alternative to explore in the sequential recommendation task. To this end, we adopted MLP-based models in sequential recommendation but consistently observed that MLP-based methods obtain lower performance than those of Transformer despite their computational benefits. From experiments, we observed that introducing explicit high-order interactions to MLP layers mitigates such performance gap. In response, we propose the Multi-Order Interaction (MOI) layer, which is capable of expressing an arbitrary order of interactions within the inputs while maintaining the memory and time complexity of the MLP layer. By replacing the MLP layer with the MOI layer, our model was able to achieve comparable performance with Transformer-based models while retaining the MLP-based models' computational benefits.
Self-Supervised Pretraining and Controlled Augmentation Improve Rare Wildlife Recognition in UAV Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Automated animal censuses with aerial imagery are a vital ingredient towards wildlife conservation. Recent models are generally based on deep learning and thus require vast amounts of training data. Due to their scarcity and minuscule size, annotating animals in aerial imagery is a highly tedious process. In this project, we present a methodology to reduce the amount of required training data by resorting to self-supervised pretraining. In detail, we examine a combination of recent contrastive learning methodologies like Momentum Contrast (MoCo) and Cross-Level Instance-Group Discrimination (CLD) to condition our model on the aerial images without the requirement for labels. We show that a combination of MoCo, CLD, and geometric augmentations outperforms conventional models pre-trained on ImageNet by a large margin. Crucially, our method still yields favorable results even if we reduce the number of training animals to just 10%, at which point our best model scores double the recall of the baseline at similar precision. This effectively allows reducing the number of required annotations to a fraction while still being able to train high-accuracy models in such highly challenging settings.
Using Guilds to Foster Internal Startups in Large Organizations: A case study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Software product innovation in large organizations is fundamentally chal-lenging because of restrained freedom and flexibility to conduct experi-ments. As a response, large agile companies form internal startups to initiate employ-driven innovation, inspired by Lean startup. This case study investi-gates how communities of practice support five internal startups in develop-ing new software products within a large organization. We observed six communities of practice meetings, two workshops and conducted ten semi-structured interviews over the course of a year. Our findings show that a community of practice, called the Innovation guild, allowed internal startups to help each other by collectively solving problems, creating shared practic-es, and sharing knowledge. This study confirms that benefits documented in earlier research into CoPs also hold true in the context of software product innovation in large organizations. Henceforth, we suggest that similar innova-tion guilds, as described in this paper, can support large companies in the in-novation race for new software products.
An Experimental Urban Case Study with Various Data Sources and a Model for Traffic Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Accurate estimation of the traffic state over a network is essential since it is the starting point for designing and implementing any traffic management strategy. Hence, traffic operators and users of a transportation network can make reliable decisions such as influence/change route or mode choice. However, the problem of traffic state estimation from various sensors within an urban environment is very complex for several different reasons, such as availability of sensors, different noise levels, different output quantities, sensor accuracy, heterogeneous data fusion, and many more. To provide a better understanding of this problem, we organized an experimental campaign with video measurement in an area within the urban network of Zurich, Switzerland. We focus on capturing the traffic state in terms of traffic flow and travel times by ensuring measurements from established thermal cameras by the city's authorities, processed video data, and the Google Distance Matrix. We assess the different data sources, and we propose a simple yet efficient Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) model to estimate travel times with fusion of various data sources. Comparative results with ground-truth data (derived from video measurements) show the efficiency and robustness of the proposed methodology.
Incremental cluster validity index-guided online learning for performance and robustness to presentation order
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In streaming data applications incoming samples are processed and discarded, therefore, intelligent decision-making is crucial for the performance of lifelong learning systems. In addition, the order in which samples arrive may heavily affect the performance of online (and offline) incremental learners. The recently introduced incremental cluster validity indices (iCVIs) provide valuable aid in addressing such class of problems. Their primary use-case has been cluster quality monitoring; nonetheless, they have been very recently integrated in a streaming clustering method to assist the clustering task itself. In this context, the work presented here introduces the first adaptive resonance theory (ART)-based model that uses iCVIs for unsupervised and semi-supervised online learning. Moreover, it shows for the first time how to use iCVIs to regulate ART vigilance via an iCVI-based match tracking mechanism. The model achieves improved accuracy and robustness to ordering effects by integrating an online iCVI framework as module B of a topological adaptive resonance theory predictive mapping (TopoARTMAP) -- thereby being named iCVI-TopoARTMAP -- and by employing iCVI-driven post-processing heuristics at the end of each learning step. The online iCVI framework provides assignments of input samples to clusters at each iteration in accordance to any of several iCVIs. The iCVI-TopoARTMAP maintains useful properties shared by ARTMAP models, such as stability, immunity to catastrophic forgetting, and the many-to-one mapping capability via the map field module. The performance (unsupervised and semi-supervised) and robustness to presentation order (unsupervised) of iCVI-TopoARTMAP were evaluated via experiments with a synthetic data set and deep embeddings of a real-world face image data set.
SPAN: Subgraph Prediction Attention Network for Dynamic Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes a novel model for predicting subgraphs in dynamic graphs, an extension of traditional link prediction. This proposed end-to-end model learns a mapping from the subgraph structures in the current snapshot to the subgraph structures in the next snapshot directly, i.e., edge existence among multiple nodes in the subgraph. A new mechanism named cross-attention with a twin-tower module is designed to integrate node attribute information and topology information collaboratively for learning subgraph evolution. We compare our model with several state-of-the-art methods for subgraph prediction and subgraph pattern prediction in multiple real-world homogeneous and heterogeneous dynamic graphs, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms other models in these two tasks, with a gain increase from 5.02% to 10.88%.
Adapting GPT, GPT-2 and BERT Language Models for Speech Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Language models (LMs) pre-trained on massive amounts of text, in particular bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT), generative pre-training (GPT), and GPT-2, have become a key technology for many natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we present results using fine-tuned GPT, GPT-2, and their combination for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Unlike unidirectional LM GPT and GPT-2, BERT is bidirectional whose direct product of the output probabilities is no longer a valid language prior probability. A conversion method is proposed to compute the correct language prior probability based on bidirectional LM outputs in a mathematically exact way. Experimental results on the widely used AMI and Switchboard ASR tasks showed that the combination of the fine-tuned GPT and GPT-2 outperformed the combination of three neural LMs with different architectures trained from scratch on the in-domain text by up to a 12% relative word error rate reduction (WERR). Furthermore, on the AMI corpus, the proposed conversion for language prior probabilities enables BERT to obtain an extra 3% relative WERR, and the combination of BERT, GPT and GPT-2 results in further improvements.
Compressing gradients by exploiting temporal correlation in momentum-SGD
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

An increasing bottleneck in decentralized optimization is communication. Bigger models and growing datasets mean that decentralization of computation is important and that the amount of information exchanged is quickly growing. While compression techniques have been introduced to cope with the latter, none has considered leveraging the temporal correlations that exist in consecutive vector updates. An important example is distributed momentum-SGD where temporal correlation is enhanced by the low-pass-filtering effect of applying momentum. In this paper we design and analyze compression methods that exploit temporal correlation in systems both with and without error-feedback. Experiments with the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that our proposed methods offer significant reduction in the rate of communication at only a negligible increase in computation complexity. We further analyze the convergence of SGD when compression is applied with error-feedback. In the literature, convergence guarantees are developed only for compressors that provide error-bounds point-wise, i.e., for each input to the compressor. In contrast, many important codes (e.g. rate-distortion codes) provide error-bounds only in expectation and thus provide a more general guarantee. In this paper we prove the convergence of SGD under an expected error assumption by establishing a bound for the minimum gradient norm.