OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
EnsembleMOT: A Step towards Ensemble Learning of Multiple Object Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) has rapidly progressed in recent years. Existing works tend to design a single tracking algorithm to perform both detection and association. Though ensemble learning has been exploited in many tasks, i.e, classification and object detection, it hasn't been studied in the MOT task, which is mainly caused by its complexity and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective ensemble method for MOT, called EnsembleMOT, which merges multiple tracking results from various trackers with spatio-temporal constraints. Meanwhile, several post-processing procedures are applied to filter out abnormal results. Our method is model-independent and doesn't need the learning procedure. What's more, it can easily work in conjunction with other algorithms, e.g., tracklets interpolation. Experiments on the MOT17 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Codes are available at https://github.com/dyhBUPT/EnsembleMOT.
Intrinsic Dimension for Large-Scale Geometric Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The concept of dimension is essential to grasp the complexity of data. A naive approach to determine the dimension of a dataset is based on the number of attributes. More sophisticated methods derive a notion of intrinsic dimension (ID) that employs more complex feature functions, e.g., distances between data points. Yet, many of these approaches are based on empirical observations, cannot cope with the geometric character of contemporary datasets, and do lack an axiomatic foundation. A different approach was proposed by V. Pestov, who links the intrinsic dimension axiomatically to the mathematical concentration of measure phenomenon. First methods to compute this and related notions for ID were computationally intractable for large-scale real-world datasets. In the present work, we derive a computationally feasible method for determining said axiomatic ID functions. Moreover, we demonstrate how the geometric properties of complex data are accounted for in our modeling. In particular, we propose a principle way to incorporate neighborhood information, as in graph data, into the ID. This allows for new insights into common graph learning procedures, which we illustrate by experiments on the Open Graph Benchmark.
Learning Provably Stabilizing Neural Controllers for Discrete-Time Stochastic Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of learning control policies in discrete-time stochastic systems which guarantee that the system stabilizes within some specified stabilization region with probability~$1$. Our approach is based on the novel notion of stabilizing ranking supermartingales (sRSMs) that we introduce in this work. Our sRSMs overcome the limitation of methods proposed in previous works whose applicability is restricted to systems in which the stabilizing region cannot be left once entered under any control policy. We present a learning procedure that learns a control policy together with an sRSM that formally certifies probability~$1$ stability, both learned as neural networks. We show that this procedure can also be adapted to formally verifying that, under a given Lipschitz continuous control policy, the stochastic system stabilizes within some stabilizing region with probability~$1$. Our experimental evaluation shows that our learning procedure can successfully learn provably stabilizing policies in practice.
Routing Schemes for Hybrid Communication Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of computing routing schemes in the $\mathsf{HYBRID}$ model of distributed computing where nodes have access to two fundamentally different communication modes. In this problem nodes have to compute small labels and routing tables that allow for efficient routing of messages in the local network, which typically offers the majority of the throughput. Recent work has shown that using the $\mathsf{HYBRID}$ model admits a significant speed-up compared to what would be possible if either communication mode were used in isolation. Nonetheless, if general graphs are used as the input graph the computation of routing schemes still takes polynomial rounds in the $\mathsf{HYBRID}$ model. We bypass this lower bound by restricting the local graph to unit-disc-graphs and solve the problem deterministically with running time $O(|\mathcal H|^2 \!+\! \log n)$, label size $O(\log n)$, and size of routing tables $O(|\mathcal H|^2 \!\cdot\! \log n)$ where $|\mathcal H|$ is the number of ``radio holes'' in the network. Our work builds on recent work by Coy et al., who obtain this result in the much simpler setting where the input graph has no radio holes. We develop new techniques to achieve this, including a decomposition of the local graph into path-convex regions, where each region contains a shortest path for any pair of nodes in it.
Continual Learning by Modeling Intra-Class Variation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

It has been observed that neural networks perform poorly when the data or tasks are presented sequentially. Unlike humans, neural networks suffer greatly from catastrophic forgetting, making it impossible to perform life-long learning. To address this issue, memory-based continual learning has been actively studied and stands out as one of the best-performing methods. We examine memory-based continual learning and identify that large variation in the representation space is crucial for avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Motivated by this, we propose to diversify representations by using two types of perturbations: model-agnostic variation (i.e., the variation is generated without the knowledge of the learned neural network) and model-based variation (i.e., the variation is conditioned on the learned neural network). We demonstrate that enlarging representational variation serves as a general principle to improve continual learning. Finally, we perform empirical studies which demonstrate that our method, as a simple plug-and-play component, can consistently improve a number of memory-based continual learning methods by a large margin.
On Monotonicities of Interval Valued Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we develop the notions of weak/directional monotonicity (developed by Sesma-Sara et al. in terms of the \emph{Kulisch-Miranker order}) and the notion of $ G $-monotonicity (introduced by Santiago et al. for $ [0,\!1]$) for intervals endowed with admissible orders.
Multilingual BERT has an accent: Evaluating English influences on fluency in multilingual models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

While multilingual language models can improve NLP performance on low-resource languages by leveraging higher-resource languages, they also reduce average performance on all languages (the 'curse of multilinguality'). Here we show another problem with multilingual models: grammatical structures in higher-resource languages bleed into lower-resource languages, a phenomenon we call grammatical structure bias. We show this bias via a novel method for comparing the fluency of multilingual models to the fluency of monolingual Spanish and Greek models: testing their preference for two carefully-chosen variable grammatical structures (optional pronoun-drop in Spanish and optional Subject-Verb ordering in Greek). We find that multilingual BERT is biased toward the English-like setting (explicit pronouns and Subject-Verb-Object ordering) as compared to our monolingual control language model. With our case studies, we hope to bring to light the fine-grained ways in which multilingual models can be biased,and encourage more linguistically-aware fluency evaluation.
The IID Prophet Inequality with Limited Flexibility
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

In online sales, sellers usually offer each potential buyer a posted price in a take-it-or-leave fashion. Buyers can sometimes see posted prices faced by other buyers, and changing the price frequently could be considered unfair. The literature on posted price mechanisms and prophet inequality problems has studied the two extremes of pricing policies, the fixed price policy and fully dynamic pricing. The former is suboptimal in revenue but is perceived as fairer than the latter. This work examines the middle situation, where there are at most $k$ distinct prices over the selling horizon. Using the framework of prophet inequalities with independent and identically distributed random variables, we propose a new prophet inequality for strategies that use at most $k$ thresholds. We present asymptotic results in $k$ and results for small values of $k$. For $k=2$ prices, we show an improvement of at least $11\%$ over the best fixed-price solution. Moreover, $k=5$ prices suffice to guarantee almost $99\%$ of the approximation factor obtained by a fully dynamic policy that uses an arbitrary number of prices. From a technical standpoint, we use an infinite-dimensional linear program in our analysis; this formulation could be of independent interest to other online selection problems.
Embeddings as Epistemic States: Limitations on the Use of Pooling Operators for Accumulating Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Various neural network architectures rely on pooling operators to aggregate information coming from different sources. It is often implicitly assumed in such contexts that vectors encode epistemic states, i.e. that vectors capture the evidence that has been obtained about some properties of interest, and that pooling these vectors yields a vector that combines this evidence. We study, for a number of standard pooling operators, under what conditions they are compatible with this idea, which we call the epistemic pooling principle. While we find that all the considered pooling operators can satisfy the epistemic pooling principle, this only holds when embeddings are sufficiently high-dimensional and, for most pooling operators, when the embeddings satisfy particular constraints (e.g. having non-negative coordinates). We furthermore show that these constraints have important implications on how the embeddings can be used in practice. In particular, we find that when the epistemic pooling principle is satisfied, in most cases it is impossible to verify the satisfaction of propositional formulas using linear scoring functions, with two exceptions: (i) max-pooling with embeddings that are upper-bounded and (ii) Hadamard pooling with non-negative embeddings. This finding helps to clarify, among others, why Graph Neural Networks sometimes under-perform in reasoning tasks. Finally, we also study an extension of the epistemic pooling principle to weighted epistemic states, which are important in the context of non-monotonic reasoning, where max-pooling emerges as the most suitable operator.
Cross-client Label Propagation for Transductive and Semi-Supervised Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present Cross-Client Label Propagation(XCLP), a new method for transductive federated learning. XCLP estimates a data graph jointly from the data of multiple clients and computes labels for the unlabeled data by propagating label information across the graph. To avoid clients having to share their data with anyone, XCLP employs two cryptographically secure protocols: secure Hamming distance computation and secure summation. We demonstrate two distinct applications of XCLP within federated learning. In the first, we use it in a one-shot way to predict labels for unseen test points. In the second, we use it to repeatedly pseudo-label unlabeled training data in a federated semi-supervised setting. Experiments on both real federated and standard benchmark datasets show that in both applications XCLP achieves higher classification accuracy than alternative approaches.
Iterative Document-level Information Extraction via Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We present a novel iterative extraction model, IterX, for extracting complex relations, or templates (i.e., N-tuples representing a mapping from named slots to spans of text) within a document. Documents may feature zero or more instances of a template of any given type, and the task of template extraction entails identifying the templates in a document and extracting each template's slot values. Our imitation learning approach casts the problem as a Markov decision process (MDP), and relieves the need to use predefined template orders to train an extractor. It leads to state-of-the-art results on two established benchmarks -- 4-ary relation extraction on SciREX and template extraction on MUC-4 -- as well as a strong baseline on the new BETTER Granular task.
Interpreting Neural Policies with Disentangled Tree Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The advancement of robots, particularly those functioning in complex human-centric environments, relies on control solutions that are driven by machine learning. Understanding how learning-based controllers make decisions is crucial since robots are often safety-critical systems. This urges a formal and quantitative understanding of the explanatory factors in the interpretability of robot learning. In this paper, we aim to study interpretability of compact neural policies through the lens of disentangled representation. We leverage decision trees to obtain factors of variation [1] for disentanglement in robot learning; these encapsulate skills, behaviors, or strategies toward solving tasks. To assess how well networks uncover the underlying task dynamics, we introduce interpretability metrics that measure disentanglement of learned neural dynamics from a concentration of decisions, mutual information and modularity perspective. We showcase the effectiveness of the connection between interpretability and disentanglement consistently across extensive experimental analysis.
The Inventory is Dark and Full of Misinformation: Understanding the Abuse of Ad Inventory Pooling in the Ad-Tech Supply Chain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Ad-tech enables publishers to programmatically sell their ad inventory to millions of demand partners through a complex supply chain. Bogus or low quality publishers can exploit the opaque nature of the ad-tech to deceptively monetize their ad inventory. In this paper, we investigate for the first time how misinformation sites subvert the ad-tech transparency standards and pool their ad inventory with unrelated sites to circumvent brand safety protections. We find that a few major ad exchanges are disproportionately responsible for the dark pools that are exploited by misinformation websites. We further find evidence that dark pooling allows misinformation sites to deceptively sell their ad inventory to reputable brands. We conclude with a discussion of potential countermeasures such as better vetting of ad exchange partners, adoption of new ad-tech transparency standards that enable end-to-end validation of the ad-tech supply chain, as well as widespread deployment of independent audits like ours.
A Survey on UAV-enabled Edge Computing: Resource Management Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Edge computing facilitates low-latency services at the network's edge by distributing computation, communication, and storage resources within the geographic proximity of mobile and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The recent advancement in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technologies has opened new opportunities for edge computing in military operations, disaster response, or remote areas where traditional terrestrial networks are limited or unavailable. In such environments, UAVs can be deployed as aerial edge servers or relays to facilitate edge computing services. This form of computing is also known as UAV-enabled Edge Computing (UEC), which offers several unique benefits such as mobility, line-of-sight, flexibility, computational capability, and cost-efficiency. However, the resources on UAVs, edge servers, and IoT devices are typically very limited in the context of UEC. Efficient resource management is, therefore, a critical research challenge in UEC. In this article, we present a survey on the existing research in UEC from the resource management perspective. We identify a conceptual architecture, different types of collaborations, wireless communication models, research directions, key techniques and performance indicators for resource management in UEC. We also present a taxonomy of resource management in UEC. Finally, we identify and discuss some open research challenges that can stimulate future research directions for resource management in UEC.
Multi-recipient and threshold encryption based on hidden multipliers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Let $S$ be a pool of $s$ parties and Alice be the dealer. In this paper, we propose a scheme that allows the dealer to encrypt messages in such a way that only one authorized coalition of parties (which the dealer chooses depending on the message) can decrypt. At the setup stage, each of the parties involved in the process receives an individual key from the dealer. To decrypt information, an authorized coalition of parties must work together to use their keys. Based on this scheme, we propose a threshold encryption scheme. For a given message $f$ the dealer can choose any threshold $m = m(f).$ More precisely, any set of parties of size at least $m$ can evaluate $f$; any set of size less than $m$ cannot do this. Similarly, the distribution of keys among the included parties can be done in such a way that authorized coalitions of parties will be given the opportunity to put a collective digital signature on any documents. This primitive can be generalized to the dynamic setting, where any user can dynamically join the pool $S$. In this case the new user receives a key from the dealer. Also any user can leave the pool $S$. In both cases, already distributed keys of other users do not change. The main feature of the proposed schemes is that for a given $s$ the keys are distributed once and can be used multiple times. The proposed scheme is based on the idea of hidden multipliers in encryption. As a platform, one can use both multiplicative groups of finite fields and groups of invertible elements of commutative rings, in particular, multiplicative groups of residue rings. We propose two versions of this scheme.
Over-the-Air Computation Based on Balanced Number Systems for Federated Edge Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this study, we propose a digital over-the-air computation (OAC) scheme for achieving continuous-valued (analog) aggregation for federated edge learning (FEEL). We show that the average of a set of real-valued parameters can be calculated approximately by using the average of the corresponding numerals, where the numerals are obtained based on a balanced number system. By exploiting this key property, the proposed scheme encodes the local stochastic gradients into a set of numerals. Next, it determines the positions of the activated orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) subcarriers by using the values of the numerals. To eliminate the need for precise sample-level time synchronization, channel estimation overhead, and channel inversion, the proposed scheme also uses a non-coherent receiver at the edge server (ES) and does not utilize a pre-equalization at the edge devices (EDs). We theoretically analyze the MSE performance of the proposed scheme and the convergence rate for a non-convex loss function. To improve the test accuracy of FEEL with the proposed scheme, we introduce the concept of adaptive absolute maximum (AAM). Our numerical results show that when the proposed scheme is used with AAM for FEEL, the test accuracy can reach up to 98% for heterogeneous data distribution.
ComSearch: Equation Searching with Combinatorial Strategy for Solving Math Word Problems with Weak Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Previous studies have introduced a weakly-supervised paradigm for solving math word problems requiring only the answer value annotation. While these methods search for correct value equation candidates as pseudo labels, they search among a narrow sub-space of the enormous equation space. To address this problem, we propose a novel search algorithm with combinatorial strategy \textbf{ComSearch}, which can compress the search space by excluding mathematically equivalent equations. The compression allows the searching algorithm to enumerate all possible equations and obtain high-quality data. We investigate the noise in the pseudo labels that hold wrong mathematical logic, which we refer to as the \textit{false-matching} problem, and propose a ranking model to denoise the pseudo labels. Our approach holds a flexible framework to utilize two existing supervised math word problem solvers to train pseudo labels, and both achieve state-of-the-art performance in the weak supervision task.
Sapling Similarity: a performing and interpretable memory-based tool for recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Many bipartite networks describe systems where an edge represents a relation between a user and an item. Measuring the similarity between either users or items is the basis of memory-based collaborative filtering, a widely used method to build a recommender system with the purpose of proposing items to users. When the edges of the network are unweighted, the popular common neighbors-based approaches, allowing only positive similarity values, neglect the possibility and the effect of two users (or two items) being very dissimilar. Moreover, they underperform with respect to model-based (machine learning) approaches, although providing higher interpretability. Inspired by the functioning of Decision Trees, we propose a method to compute similarity that allows also negative values, the Sapling Similarity. The key idea is to look at how the information that a user is connected to an item influences our prior estimation of the probability that another user is connected to the same item: if it is reduced, then the similarity between the two users will be negative, otherwise, it will be positive. We show that, when used to build memory-based collaborative filtering, Sapling Similarity provides better recommendations than existing similarity metrics. Then we compare the Sapling Similarity Collaborative Filtering (SSCF, a hybrid of the item-based and the user-based) with state-of-the-art models using standard datasets. Even if SSCF depends on only one straightforward hyperparameter, it has comparable or higher recommending accuracy, and outperforms all other models on the Amazon-Book dataset, while retaining the high explainability of memory-based approaches.
Scalable Multi-robot Motion Planning for Congested Environments With Topological Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-robot motion planning (MRMP) is the problem of finding collision-free paths for a set of robots in a continuous state space. The difficulty of MRMP increases with the number of robots and is exacerbated in environments with narrow passages that robots must pass through, like warehouse aisles where coordination between robots is required. In single-robot settings, topology-guided motion planning methods have shown improved performance in these constricted environments. In this work, we extend an existing topology-guided single-robot motion planning method to the multi-robot domain to leverage the improved efficiency provided by topological guidance. We demonstrate our method's ability to efficiently plan paths in complex environments with many narrow passages, scaling to robot teams of size up to 25 times larger than existing methods in this class of problems. By leveraging knowledge of the topology of the environment, we also find higher-quality solutions than other methods.