OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Truthful Meta-Explanations for Local Interpretability of Machine Learning Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Automated Machine Learning-based systems' integration into a wide range of tasks has expanded as a result of their performance and speed. Although there are numerous advantages to employing ML-based systems, if they are not interpretable, they should not be used in critical, high-risk applications where human lives are at risk. To address this issue, researchers and businesses have been focusing on finding ways to improve the interpretability of complex ML systems, and several such methods have been developed. Indeed, there are so many developed techniques that it is difficult for practitioners to choose the best among them for their applications, even when using evaluation metrics. As a result, the demand for a selection tool, a meta-explanation technique based on a high-quality evaluation metric, is apparent. In this paper, we present a local meta-explanation technique which builds on top of the truthfulness metric, which is a faithfulness-based metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of both the technique and the metric by concretely defining all the concepts and through experimentation.
AsyInst: Asymmetric Affinity with DepthGrad and Color for Box-Supervised Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The weakly supervised instance segmentation is a challenging task. The existing methods typically use bounding boxes as supervision and optimize the network with a regularization loss term such as pairwise color affinity loss for instance segmentation. Through systematic analysis, we found that the commonly used pairwise affinity loss has two limitations: (1) it works with color affinity but leads to inferior performance with other modalities such as depth gradient, (2)the original affinity loss does not prevent trivial predictions as intended but actually accelerates this process due to the affinity loss term being symmetric. To overcome these two limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric affinity loss which provides the penalty against the trivial prediction and generalizes well with affinity loss from different modalities. With the proposed asymmetric affinity loss, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the Cityscapes dataset and outperforms our baseline method by 3.5% in mask AP.
Recognizing when a preference system is close to admitting a master list
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

A preference system $\mathcal{I}$ is an undirected graph where vertices have preferences over their neighbors, and $\mathcal{I}$ admits a master list if all preferences can be derived from a single ordering over all vertices. We study the problem of deciding whether a given preference system $\mathcal{I}$ is close to admitting a master list based on three different distance measures. We determine the computational complexity of the following questions: can $\mathcal{I}$ be modified by (i) $k$ swaps in the preferences, (ii) $k$ edge deletions, or (iii) $k$ vertex deletions so that the resulting instance admits a master list? We investigate these problems in detail from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity and of approximation. We also present two applications related to stable and popular matchings.
Efficient Stein Variational Inference for Reliable Distribution-lossless Network Pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Network pruning is a promising way to generate light but accurate models and enable their deployment on resource-limited edge devices. However, the current state-of-the-art assumes that the effective sub-network and the other superfluous parameters in the given network share the same distribution, where pruning inevitably involves a distribution truncation operation. They usually eliminate values near zero. While simple, it may not be the most appropriate method, as effective models may naturally have many small values associated with them. Removing near-zero values already embedded in model space may significantly reduce model accuracy. Another line of work has proposed to assign discrete prior over all possible sub-structures that still rely on human-crafted prior hypotheses. Worse still, existing methods use regularized point estimates, namely Hard Pruning, that can not provide error estimations and fail reliability justification for the pruned networks. In this paper, we propose a novel distribution-lossless pruning method, named DLLP, to theoretically find the pruned lottery within Bayesian treatment. Specifically, DLLP remodels the vanilla networks as discrete priors for the latent pruned model and the other redundancy. More importantly, DLLP uses Stein Variational Inference to approach the latent prior and effectively bypasses calculating KL divergence with unknown distribution. Extensive experiments based on small Cifar-10 and large-scaled ImageNet demonstrate that our method can obtain sparser networks with great generalization performance while providing quantified reliability for the pruned model.
Multiple Object Tracking Challenge Technical Report for Team MT_IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This is a brief technical report of our proposed method for Multiple-Object Tracking (MOT) Challenge in Complex Environments. In this paper, we treat the MOT task as a two-stage task including human detection and trajectory matching. Specifically, we designed an improved human detector and associated most of detection to guarantee the integrity of the motion trajectory. We also propose a location-wise matching matrix to obtain more accurate trace matching. Without any model merging, our method achieves 66.672 HOTA and 93.971 MOTA on the DanceTrack challenge dataset.
RFEPS: Reconstructing Feature-line Equipped Polygonal Surface
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

Feature lines are important geometric cues in characterizing the structure of a CAD model. Despite great progress in both explicit reconstruction and implicit reconstruction, it remains a challenging task to reconstruct a polygonal surface equipped with feature lines, especially when the input point cloud is noisy and lacks faithful normal vectors. In this paper, we develop a multistage algorithm, named RFEPS, to address this challenge. The key steps include (1)denoising the point cloud based on the assumption of local planarity, (2)identifying the feature-line zone by optimization of discrete optimal transport, (3)augmenting the point set so that sufficiently many additional points are generated on potential geometry edges, and (4) generating a polygonal surface that interpolates the augmented point set based on restricted power diagram. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that RFEPS, benefiting from the edge-point augmentation and the feature-preserving explicit reconstruction, outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of the reconstruction quality, especially in terms of the ability to reconstruct missing feature lines.
Design and Control of the "TransBoat": A Transformable Unmanned Surface Vehicle for Overwater Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the TransBoat, a novel omnidirectional unmanned surface vehicle (USV) with a magnetbased docking system for overwater construction with wave disturbances. This is the first such USV that can build overwater structures by transporting modules. The TransBoat incorporates two features designed to reject wave disturbances. First, the TransBoat's expandable body structure can actively transform from a mono-hull into a multi-hull for stabilization in turbulent environments by extending its four outrigger hulls. Second, a real-time nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) scheme is proposed for all shapes of the TransBoat to enhance its maneuverability and resist disturbance to its movement, based on a nonlinear dynamic model. An experimental approach is proposed to identify the parameters of the dynamic model, and a subsequent trajectory tracking test validates the dynamics, NMPC controller and system mobility. Further, docking experiments identify improved performance in the expanded form of the TransBoat compared with the contracted form, including an increased success rate (of ~ 10%) and reduced docking time (of ~ 40 s on average). Finally, a bridge construction test verifies our system design and the NMPC control method.
THREAT/crawl: a Trainable, Highly-Reusable, and Extensible Automated Method and Tool to Crawl Criminal Underground Forums
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Collecting data on underground criminal communities is highly valuable both for security research and security operations. Unfortunately these communities live within a constellation of diverse online forums that are difficult to infiltrate, may adopt crawling monitoring countermeasures, and require the development of ad-hoc scrapers for each different community, making the endeavour increasingly technically challenging, and potentially expensive. To address this problem we propose THREAT/crawl, a method and prototype tool for a highly reusable crawler that can learn a wide range of (arbitrary) forum structures, can remain under-the-radar during the crawling activity and can be extended and configured at the user will. We showcase THREAT/crawl capabilities and provide prime evaluation of our prototype against a range of active, live, underground communities.
Face Forgery Detection Based on Facial Region Displacement Trajectory Series
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deep-learning-based technologies such as deepfakes ones have been attracting widespread attention in both society and academia, particularly ones used to synthesize forged face images. These automatic and professional-skill-free face manipulation technologies can be used to replace the face in an original image or video with any target object while maintaining the expression and demeanor. Since human faces are closely related to identity characteristics, maliciously disseminated identity manipulated videos could trigger a crisis of public trust in the media and could even have serious political, social, and legal implications. To effectively detect manipulated videos, we focus on the position offset in the face blending process, resulting from the forced affine transformation of the normalized forged face. We introduce a method for detecting manipulated videos that is based on the trajectory of the facial region displacement. Specifically, we develop a virtual-anchor-based method for extracting the facial trajectory, which can robustly represent displacement information. This information was used to construct a network for exposing multidimensional artifacts in the trajectory sequences of manipulated videos that is based on dual-stream spatial-temporal graph attention and a gated recurrent unit backbone. Testing of our method on various manipulation datasets demonstrated that its accuracy and generalization ability is competitive with that of the leading detection methods.
Gaussian Radar Transformer for Semantic Segmentation in Noisy Radar Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Scene understanding is crucial for autonomous robots in dynamic environments for making future state predictions, avoiding collisions, and path planning. Camera and LiDAR perception made tremendous progress in recent years, but face limitations under adverse weather conditions. To leverage the full potential of multi-modal sensor suites, radar sensors are essential for safety critical tasks and are already installed in most new vehicles today. In this paper, we address the problem of semantic segmentation of moving objects in radar point clouds to enhance the perception of the environment with another sensor modality. Instead of aggregating multiple scans to densify the point clouds, we propose a novel approach based on the self-attention mechanism to accurately perform sparse, single-scan segmentation. Our approach, called Gaussian Radar Transformer, includes the newly introduced Gaussian transformer layer, which replaces the softmax normalization by a Gaussian function to decouple the contribution of individual points. To tackle the challenge of the transformer to capture long-range dependencies, we propose our attentive up- and downsampling modules to enlarge the receptive field and capture strong spatial relations. We compare our approach to other state-of-the-art methods on the RadarScenes data set and show superior segmentation quality in diverse environments, even without exploiting temporal information.
Transformer-Based Named Entity Recognition for French Using Adversarial Adaptation to Similar Domain Corpora
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Named Entity Recognition (NER) involves the identification and classification of named entities in unstructured text into predefined classes. NER in languages with limited resources, like French, is still an open problem due to the lack of large, robust, labelled datasets. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based NER approach for French using adversarial adaptation to similar domain or general corpora for improved feature extraction and better generalization. We evaluate our approach on three labelled datasets and show that our adaptation framework outperforms the corresponding non-adaptive models for various combinations of transformer models, source datasets and target corpora.
Intervening With Confidence: Conformal Prescriptive Monitoring of Business Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to improve the performance of a process by selectively triggering interventions at runtime (e.g., offering a discount to a customer) to increase the probability of a desired case outcome (e.g., a customer making a purchase). The backbone of a prescriptive process monitoring method is an intervention policy, which determines for which cases and when an intervention should be executed. Existing methods in this field rely on predictive models to define intervention policies; specifically, they consider policies that trigger an intervention when the estimated probability of a negative outcome exceeds a threshold. However, the probabilities computed by a predictive model may come with a high level of uncertainty (low confidence), leading to unnecessary interventions and, thus, wasted effort. This waste is particularly problematic when the resources available to execute interventions are limited. To tackle this shortcoming, this paper proposes an approach to extend existing prescriptive process monitoring methods with so-called conformal predictions, i.e., predictions with confidence guarantees. An empirical evaluation using real-life public datasets shows that conformal predictions enhance the net gain of prescriptive process monitoring methods under limited resources.
Designing Feature Vector Representations: A case study from Chemistry
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

We present a case study investigating feature descriptors in the context of the analysis of chemical multivariate ensemble data. The data of each ensemble member consists of three parts: the design parameters for each ensemble member, field data resulting from the numerical simulations, and physical properties of the molecules. Since feature-based methods have the potential to reduce the data complexity and facilitate comparison and clustering, we are focusing on such methods. However, there are many options to design the feature vector representation and there is no obvious preference. To get a better understanding of the different representations, we analyze their similarities and differences. Thereby, we focus on three characteristics derived from the representations: the distribution of pairwise distances, the clustering tendency, and the rank-order of the pairwise distances. The results of our investigations partially confirmed expected behavior, but also provided some surprising observations that can be used for the future development of feature representations in the chemical domain.
Why the equivalence problem for unambiguous grammars has not been solved back in 1966?
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

In 1966, Semenov, by using a technique based on power series, suggested an algorithm that tells apart the languages described by an unambiguous grammar and a DFA. At the first glance, it may appear that the algorithm can be easily modified to yield a full solution of the equivalence problem for unambiguous grammars. This article shows why this hunch is, in fact, incorrect.
On Families of Full Trios Containing Counter Machine Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

We look at nondeterministic finite automata augmented with multiple reversal-bounded counters where, during an accepting computation, the behavior of the counters is specified by some fixed pattern. These patterns can serve as a useful "bridge" to other important automata and grammar models in the theoretical computer science literature, thereby helping in their study. Various pattern behaviors are considered, together with characterizations and comparisons. For example, one such pattern defines exactly the smallest full trio containing all the bounded semilinear languages. Another pattern defines the smallest full trio containing all the bounded context-free languages. The "bridging" to other families is then applied, e.g. to certain Turing machine restrictions, as well as other families. Certain general decidability properties are also studied using this framework.
Reconciling a Centroid-Hypothesis Conflict in Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a source domain to an unlabeled target domain, where the source data is unavailable during adaptation. Existing approaches for SFDA focus on self-training usually including well-established entropy minimization techniques. One of the main challenges in SFDA is to reduce accumulation of errors caused by domain misalignment. A recent strategy successfully managed to reduce error accumulation by pseudo-labeling the target samples based on class-wise prototypes (centroids) generated by their clustering in the representation space. However, this strategy also creates cases for which the cross-entropy of a pseudo-label and the minimum entropy have a conflict in their objectives. We call this conflict the centroid-hypothesis conflict. We propose to reconcile this conflict by aligning the entropy minimization objective with that of the pseudo labels' cross entropy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of aligning the two loss objectives on three domain adaptation datasets. In addition, we provide state-of-the-art results using up-to-date architectures also showing the consistency of our method across these architectures.
Towards Explainable Motion Prediction using Heterogeneous Graph Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Motion prediction systems aim to capture the future behavior of traffic scenarios enabling autonomous vehicles to perform safe and efficient planning. The evolution of these scenarios is highly uncertain and depends on the interactions of agents with static and dynamic objects in the scene. GNN-based approaches have recently gained attention as they are well suited to naturally model these interactions. However, one of the main challenges that remains unexplored is how to address the complexity and opacity of these models in order to deal with the transparency requirements for autonomous driving systems, which includes aspects such as interpretability and explainability. In this work, we aim to improve the explainability of motion prediction systems by using different approaches. First, we propose a new Explainable Heterogeneous Graph-based Policy (XHGP) model based on an heterograph representation of the traffic scene and lane-graph traversals, which learns interaction behaviors using object-level and type-level attention. This learned attention provides information about the most important agents and interactions in the scene. Second, we explore this same idea with the explanations provided by GNNExplainer. Third, we apply counterfactual reasoning to provide explanations of selected individual scenarios by exploring the sensitivity of the trained model to changes made to the input data, i.e., masking some elements of the scene, modifying trajectories, and adding or removing dynamic agents. The explainability analysis provided in this paper is a first step towards more transparent and reliable motion prediction systems, important from the perspective of the user, developers and regulatory agencies. The code to reproduce this work is publicly available at https://github.com/sancarlim/Explainable-MP/tree/v1.1.
Can Offline Reinforcement Learning Help Natural Language Understanding?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Pre-training has been a useful method for learning implicit transferable knowledge and it shows the benefit of offering complementary features across different modalities. Recent work mainly focuses on the modalities such as image and text, for example, studies show that visual features learned from images can help visual-grounded language understanding. In this paper, we consider investigating the potential connection between offline reinforcement learning (RL) and language modeling (LM). Intuitively, RL and LM are similar in predicting the next states based on the current and previous states, which rely on both local and long-range dependency across states. To validate such an assumption, we pre-trained different offline RL tasks using Transformer and then evaluate these models on various language-related tasks. Experimental results show that our RL pre-trained models can give close performance compared with the models using the LM training objective, showing that there exist common useful features across these two modalities. To further explore the potential relationship, we investigate some factors such as Markov property and the sequential nature of RL trajectory.
Tight Performance Guarantees of Imitator Policies with Continuous Actions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Behavioral Cloning (BC) aims at learning a policy that mimics the behavior demonstrated by an expert. The current theoretical understanding of BC is limited to the case of finite actions. In this paper, we study BC with the goal of providing theoretical guarantees on the performance of the imitator policy in the case of continuous actions. We start by deriving a novel bound on the performance gap based on Wasserstein distance, applicable for continuous-action experts, holding under the assumption that the value function is Lipschitz continuous. Since this latter condition is hardy fulfilled in practice, even for Lipschitz Markov Decision Processes and policies, we propose a relaxed setting, proving that value function is always Holder continuous. This result is of independent interest and allows obtaining in BC a general bound for the performance of the imitator policy. Finally, we analyze noise injection, a common practice in which the expert action is executed in the environment after the application of a noise kernel. We show that this practice allows deriving stronger performance guarantees, at the price of a bias due to the noise addition.