OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Tensor Network Representation for High-Order Tensor Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This work studies the problem of high-dimensional data (referred to as tensors) completion from partially observed samplings. We consider that a tensor is a superposition of multiple low-rank components. In particular, each component can be represented as multilinear connections over several latent factors and naturally mapped to a specific tensor network (TN) topology. In this paper, we propose a fundamental tensor decomposition (TD) framework: Multi-Tensor Network Representation (MTNR), which can be regarded as a linear combination of a range of TD models, e.g., CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition, Tensor Train (TT), and Tensor Ring (TR). Specifically, MTNR represents a high-order tensor as the addition of multiple TN models, and the topology of each TN is automatically generated instead of manually pre-designed. For the optimization phase, an adaptive topology learning (ATL) algorithm is presented to obtain latent factors of each TN based on a rank incremental strategy and a projection error measurement strategy. In addition, we theoretically establish the fundamental multilinear operations for the tensors with TN representation, and reveal the structural transformation of MTNR to a single TN. Finally, MTNR is applied to a typical task, tensor completion, and two effective algorithms are proposed for the exact recovery of incomplete data based on the Alternating Least Squares (ALS) scheme and Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier (ADMM) framework. Extensive numerical experiments on synthetic data and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MTNR compared with the start-of-the-art methods.
ARMAN: Pre-training with Semantically Selecting and Reordering of Sentences for Persian Abstractive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Abstractive text summarization is one of the areas influenced by the emergence of pre-trained language models. Current pre-training works in abstractive summarization give more points to the summaries with more words in common with the main text and pay less attention to the semantic similarity between generated sentences and the original document. We propose ARMAN, a Transformer-based encoder-decoder model pre-trained with three novel objectives to address this issue. In ARMAN, salient sentences from a document are selected according to a modified semantic score to be masked and form a pseudo summary. To summarize more accurately and similar to human writing patterns, we applied modified sentence reordering. We evaluated our proposed models on six downstream Persian summarization tasks. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on all six summarization tasks measured by ROUGE and BERTScore. Our models also outperform prior works in textual entailment, question paraphrasing, and multiple choice question answering. Finally, we established a human evaluation and show that using the semantic score significantly improves summarization results.
HSMD: An object motion detection algorithm using a Hybrid Spiking Neural Network Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The detection of moving objects is a trivial task performed by vertebrate retinas, yet a complex computer vision task. Object-motion-sensitive ganglion cells (OMS-GC) are specialised cells in the retina that sense moving objects. OMS-GC take as input continuous signals and produce spike patterns as output, that are transmitted to the Visual Cortex via the optic nerve. The Hybrid Sensitive Motion Detector (HSMD) algorithm proposed in this work enhances the GSOC dynamic background subtraction (DBS) algorithm with a customised 3-layer spiking neural network (SNN) that outputs spiking responses akin to the OMS-GC. The algorithm was compared against existing background subtraction (BS) approaches, available on the OpenCV library, specifically on the 2012 change detection (CDnet2012) and the 2014 change detection (CDnet2014) benchmark datasets. The results show that the HSMD was ranked overall first among the competing approaches and has performed better than all the other algorithms on four of the categories across all the eight test metrics. Furthermore, the HSMD proposed in this paper is the first to use an SNN to enhance an existing state of the art DBS (GSOC) algorithm and the results demonstrate that the SNN provides near real-time performance in realistic applications.
Survey about cyberattack protection motivation in higher education: Academics at Slovenian universities, 2017
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

This paper reports on a study aiming to explore factors associated with motivation of individuals in organizations to protect against cyberattacks. The objectives of this study were to determine how fear of cyberattacks, perceived severity, perceived vulnerability, perceived threats, measure efficacy, self-efficacy, measure costs, mandatoriness and psychological reactance are associated with protection motivation of individuals in organizations. The study employed a cross-sectional research design. A survey was conducted among academics at six Slovenian universities between June and September 2017. A total of 324 respondents completed the survey (7.6 percent response rate) providing for N=255 useful responses after excluding poorly completed responses. The survey questionnaire was developed in English. A Slovenian translation of the survey questionnaire is available.
Multilingual Audio-Visual Smartphone Dataset And Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Smartphones have been employed with biometric-based verification systems to provide security in highly sensitive applications. Audio-visual biometrics are getting popular due to their usability, and also it will be challenging to spoof because of their multimodal nature. In this work, we present an audio-visual smartphone dataset captured in five different recent smartphones. This new dataset contains 103 subjects captured in three different sessions considering the different real-world scenarios. Three different languages are acquired in this dataset to include the problem of language dependency of the speaker recognition systems. These unique characteristics of this dataset will pave the way to implement novel state-of-the-art unimodal or audio-visual speaker recognition systems. We also report the performance of the bench-marked biometric verification systems on our dataset. The robustness of biometric algorithms is evaluated towards multiple dependencies like signal noise, device, language and presentation attacks like replay and synthesized signals with extensive experiments. The obtained results raised many concerns about the generalization properties of state-of-the-art biometrics methods in smartphones.
Robot Localization and Navigation through Predictive Processing using LiDAR
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Knowing the position of the robot in the world is crucial for navigation. Nowadays, Bayesian filters, such as Kalman and particle-based, are standard approaches in mobile robotics. Recently, end-to-end learning has allowed for scaling-up to high-dimensional inputs and improved generalization. However, there are still limitations to providing reliable laser navigation. Here we show a proof-of-concept of the predictive processing-inspired approach to perception applied for localization and navigation using laser sensors, without the need for odometry. We learn the generative model of the laser through self-supervised learning and perform both online state-estimation and navigation through stochastic gradient descent on the variational free-energy bound. We evaluated the algorithm on a mobile robot (TIAGo Base) with a laser sensor (SICK) in Gazebo. Results showed improved state-estimation performance when comparing to a state-of-the-art particle filter in the absence of odometry. Furthermore, conversely to standard Bayesian estimation approaches our method also enables the robot to navigate when providing the desired goal by inferring the actions that minimize the prediction error.
Failure Analysis of Hadoop Schedulers using an Integration of Model Checking and Simulation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The Hadoop scheduler is a centerpiece of Hadoop, the leading processing framework for data-intensive applications in the cloud. Given the impact of failures on the performance of applications running on Hadoop, testing and verifying the performance of the Hadoop scheduler is critical. Existing approaches such as performance simulation and analytical modeling are inadequate because they are not able to ascertain a complete verification of a Hadoop scheduler. This is due to the wide range of constraints and aspects involved in Hadoop. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology that integrates and combines simulation and model checking techniques to perform a formal verification of Hadoop schedulers, focusing on the following properties: schedulability, fairness and resources-deadlock freeness. We use the CSP language to formally describe a Hadoop scheduler, and the PAT model checker to verify its properties. Next, we use the proposed formal model to analyze the scheduler of OpenCloud, a Hadoop-based cluster that simulates the Hadoop load, in order to illustrate the usability and benefits of our work. Results show that our proposed methodology can help identify several tasks failures (up to 78%) early on, i.e., before the tasks are executed on the cluster.
A distillation-based approach integrating continual learning and federated learning for pervasive services
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Federated Learning, a new machine learning paradigm enhancing the use of edge devices, is receiving a lot of attention in the pervasive community to support the development of smart services. Nevertheless, this approach still needs to be adapted to the specificity of the pervasive domain. In particular, issues related to continual learning need to be addressed. In this paper, we present a distillation-based approach dealing with catastrophic forgetting in federated learning scenario. Specifically, Human Activity Recognition tasks are used as a demonstration domain.
Surrogate Parameters Optimization for Data and Model Fusion of COVID-19 Time-series Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Our research focuses on developing a computational framework to simulate the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 pandemic. We examine the development of a system named ADRIANA for the simulation using South Africa as a case study. The design of the ADRIANA system interconnects three sub-models to establish a computational technique to advise policy regarding lockdown measures to reduce the transmission pattern of COVID-19 in South Africa. Additionally, the output of the ADRIANA can be used by healthcare administration to predict peak demand time for resources needed to treat infected individuals. ABM is suited for our research experiment, but to prevent the computational constraints of using ABM-based framework for this research, we develop an SEIR compartmental model, a discrete event simulator, and an optimized surrogate model to form a system named ADRIANA. We also ensure that the surrogate's findings are accurate enough to provide optimal solutions. We use the Genetic Algorithm (GA) for the optimization by estimating the optimal hyperparameter configuration for the surrogate. We concluded this study by discussing the solutions presented by the ADRIANA system, which aligns with the primary goal of our study to present an optimal guide to lockdown policy by the government and resource management by the hospital administrators.
VAINE: Visualization and AI for Natural Experiments
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Natural experiments are observational studies where the assignment of treatment conditions to different populations occurs by chance "in the wild". Researchers from fields such as economics, healthcare, and the social sciences leverage natural experiments to conduct hypothesis testing and causal effect estimation for treatment and outcome variables that would otherwise be costly, infeasible, or unethical. In this paper, we introduce VAINE (Visualization and AI for Natural Experiments), a visual analytics tool for identifying and understanding natural experiments from observational data. We then demonstrate how VAINE can be used to validate causal relationships, estimate average treatment effects, and identify statistical phenomena such as Simpson's paradox through two usage scenarios.
AStitchInLanguageModels: Dataset and Methods for the Exploration of Idiomaticity in Pre-Trained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Despite their success in a variety of NLP tasks, pre-trained language models, due to their heavy reliance on compositionality, fail in effectively capturing the meanings of multiword expressions (MWEs), especially idioms. Therefore, datasets and methods to improve the representation of MWEs are urgently needed. Existing datasets are limited to providing the degree of idiomaticity of expressions along with the literal and, where applicable, (a single) non-literal interpretation of MWEs. This work presents a novel dataset of naturally occurring sentences containing MWEs manually classified into a fine-grained set of meanings, spanning both English and Portuguese. We use this dataset in two tasks designed to test i) a language model's ability to detect idiom usage, and ii) the effectiveness of a language model in generating representations of sentences containing idioms. Our experiments demonstrate that, on the task of detecting idiomatic usage, these models perform reasonably well in the one-shot and few-shot scenarios, but that there is significant scope for improvement in the zero-shot scenario. On the task of representing idiomaticity, we find that pre-training is not always effective, while fine-tuning could provide a sample efficient method of learning representations of sentences containing MWEs.
TxT: Crossmodal End-to-End Learning with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Reasoning over multiple modalities, e.g. in Visual Question Answering (VQA), requires an alignment of semantic concepts across domains. Despite the widespread success of end-to-end learning, today's multimodal pipelines by and large leverage pre-extracted, fixed features from object detectors, typically Faster R-CNN, as representations of the visual world. The obvious downside is that the visual representation is not specifically tuned to the multimodal task at hand. At the same time, while transformer-based object detectors have gained popularity, they have not been employed in today's multimodal pipelines. We address both shortcomings with TxT, a transformer-based crossmodal pipeline that enables fine-tuning both language and visual components on the downstream task in a fully end-to-end manner. We overcome existing limitations of transformer-based detectors for multimodal reasoning regarding the integration of global context and their scalability. Our transformer-based multimodal model achieves considerable gains from end-to-end learning for multimodal question answering.
Detecting and Mitigating Test-time Failure Risks via Model-agnostic Uncertainty Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Reliably predicting potential failure risks of machine learning (ML) systems when deployed with production data is a crucial aspect of trustworthy AI. This paper introduces Risk Advisor, a novel post-hoc meta-learner for estimating failure risks and predictive uncertainties of any already-trained black-box classification model. In addition to providing a risk score, the Risk Advisor decomposes the uncertainty estimates into aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty components, thus giving informative insights into the sources of uncertainty inducing the failures. Consequently, Risk Advisor can distinguish between failures caused by data variability, data shifts and model limitations and advise on mitigation actions (e.g., collecting more data to counter data shift). Extensive experiments on various families of black-box classification models and on real-world and synthetic datasets covering common ML failure scenarios show that the Risk Advisor reliably predicts deployment-time failure risks in all the scenarios, and outperforms strong baselines.
'1e0a': A Computational Approach to Rhythm Training
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2021
Year: 2021

We present a computational assessment system that promotes the learning of basic rhythmic patterns. The system is capable of generating multiple rhythmic patterns with increasing complexity within various cycle lengths. For a generated rhythm pattern the performance assessment of the learner is carried out through the statistical deviations calculated from the onset detection and temporal assessment of a learner's performance. This is compared with the generated pattern, and their performance accuracy forms the feedback to the learner. The system proceeds to generate a new pattern of increased complexity when performance assessment results are within certain error bounds. The system thus mimics a learner-teacher relationship as the learner progresses in their feedback-based learning. The choice of progression within a cycle for each pattern is determined by a predefined complexity metric. This metric is based on a coded element model for the perceptual processing of sequential stimuli. The model earlier proposed for a sequence of tones and non-tones, is now used for onsets and silences. This system is developed into a web-based application and provides accessibility for learning purposes. Analysis of the performance assessments shows that the complexity metric is indicative of the perceptual processing of rhythm patterns and can be used for rhythm learning.
Scrutinizing uncitedness of selective Indian physics and astronomy journals through the prism of some h-type indicators
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

There exist huge chunk of academic items receiving no citation years after years and remaining beyond the veil of ignorance of the academic audience. These are known as uncited items. Now, the question is, why a paper fails to get citation? The attribute of incapability of receiving citation may be termed as Uncitedness. This paper traces brief history of the concept of uncitedness sprouted first in 1964 in an article entitled Cybernetics, homeostasis and a model of disease by Gerson Jacobs. The concept of uncitedness was scientometrically first explained by Garfield in 1970. The uncitedness of twelve esteemed Indian physics and astronomy journals over a twelve years' (2009-2020) time span is analysed here. Besides Uncitedness Factor (UF), three other indicators are introduced here, viz. Citation per paper per Year (CY), h-core Density (HD) and Time-normalised h-index (TH). The journal-wise variational patterns of these four indicators, i.e. UF, CY, HD and TH and the relationships of UF with other three indicators are analysed. The calculated numerical values of these indicators are observed to formulate seven hypotheses, which are tested by F-Test method. The average annual rate of change of uncited paper is found 67% of total number of papers. The indicator CY is found temporally constant. The indicator HD is found nearly constant journal-wise over the entire time span, while the indicator TH is found nearly constant for all journals. The UF inversely varies with CY and TH for the journals and directly varies with TH over the years. Except few highly reputed Indian journals in physics and astronomy, majority other journals face the situation of uncitedness. The uncitedness of Indian journals in this field outshines the same for global journals by 12%, which indicates lack of circulation and timely reach of research communication to the relevant audience.
Filling the Gaps in Ancient Akkadian Texts: A Masked Language Modelling Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present models which complete missing text given transliterations of ancient Mesopotamian documents, originally written on cuneiform clay tablets (2500 BCE - 100 CE). Due to the tablets' deterioration, scholars often rely on contextual cues to manually fill in missing parts in the text in a subjective and time-consuming process. We identify that this challenge can be formulated as a masked language modelling task, used mostly as a pretraining objective for contextualized language models. Following, we develop several architectures focusing on the Akkadian language, the lingua franca of the time. We find that despite data scarcity (1M tokens) we can achieve state of the art performance on missing tokens prediction (89% hit@5) using a greedy decoding scheme and pretraining on data from other languages and different time periods. Finally, we conduct human evaluations showing the applicability of our models in assisting experts to transcribe texts in extinct languages.
Sharper bounds on the Fourier concentration of DNFs
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2021
Year: 2021

In 1992 Mansour proved that every size-$s$ DNF formula is Fourier-concentrated on $s^{O(\log\log s)}$ coefficients. We improve this to $s^{O(\log\log k)}$ where $k$ is the read number of the DNF. Since $k$ is always at most $s$, our bound matches Mansour's for all DNFs and strengthens it for small-read ones. The previous best bound for read-$k$ DNFs was $s^{O(k^{3/2})}$. For $k$ up to $\tildeΘ(\log\log s)$, we further improve our bound to the optimal $\mathrm{poly}(s)$; previously no such bound was known for any $k = ω_s(1)$. Our techniques involve new connections between the term structure of a DNF, viewed as a set system, and its Fourier spectrum.
A Large-Scale Study of Machine Translation in the Turkic Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recent advances in neural machine translation (NMT) have pushed the quality of machine translation systems to the point where they are becoming widely adopted to build competitive systems. However, there is still a large number of languages that are yet to reap the benefits of NMT. In this paper, we provide the first large-scale case study of the practical application of MT in the Turkic language family in order to realize the gains of NMT for Turkic languages under high-resource to extremely low-resource scenarios. In addition to presenting an extensive analysis that identifies the bottlenecks towards building competitive systems to ameliorate data scarcity, our study has several key contributions, including, i) a large parallel corpus covering 22 Turkic languages consisting of common public datasets in combination with new datasets of approximately 2 million parallel sentences, ii) bilingual baselines for 26 language pairs, iii) novel high-quality test sets in three different translation domains and iv) human evaluation scores. All models, scripts, and data will be released to the public.