OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Recent Advances in Deep Learning Techniques for Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, researchers have proposed many deep learning (DL) methods for various tasks, and particularly face recognition (FR) made an enormous leap using these techniques. Deep FR systems benefit from the hierarchical architecture of the DL methods to learn discriminative face representation. Therefore, DL techniques significantly improve state-of-the-art performance on FR systems and encourage diverse and efficient real-world applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of various FR systems that leverage the different types of DL techniques, and for the study, we summarize 168 recent contributions from this area. We discuss the papers related to different algorithms, architectures, loss functions, activation functions, datasets, challenges, improvement ideas, current and future trends of DL-based FR systems. We provide a detailed discussion of various DL methods to understand the current state-of-the-art, and then we discuss various activation and loss functions for the methods. Additionally, we summarize different datasets used widely for FR tasks and discuss challenges related to illumination, expression, pose variations, and occlusion. Finally, we discuss improvement ideas, current and future trends of FR tasks.
Naive Automated Machine Learning -- A Late Baseline for AutoML
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is the problem of automatically finding the pipeline with the best generalization performance on some given dataset. AutoML has received enormous attention in the last decade and has been addressed with sophisticated black-box optimization techniques such as Bayesian Optimization, Grammar-Based Genetic Algorithms, and tree search algorithms. In contrast to those approaches, we present Naive AutoML, a very simple solution to AutoML that exploits important meta-knowledge about machine learning problems and makes simplifying, yet, effective assumptions to quickly come to high-quality solutions. While Naive AutoML can be considered a baseline for the highly sophisticated black-box solvers, we empirically show that those solvers are not able to outperform Naive AutoML; sometimes the contrary is true. On the other hand, Naive AutoML comes with strong advantages such as interpretability and flexibility and poses a strong challenge to current tools.
Characterizing the Communication Requirements of GNN Accelerators: A Model-Based Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

Relational data present in real world graph representations demands for tools capable to study it accurately. In this regard Graph Neural Network (GNN) is a powerful tool, wherein various models for it have also been developed over the past decade. Recently, there has been a significant push towards creating accelerators that speed up the inference and training process of GNNs. These accelerators, however, do not delve into the impact of their dataflows on the overall data movement and, hence, on the communication requirements. In this paper, we formulate analytical models that capture the amount of data movement in the most recent GNN accelerator frameworks. Specifically, the proposed models capture the dataflows and hardware setup of these accelerator designs and expose their scalability characteristics for a set of hardware, GNN model and input graph parameters. Additionally, the proposed approach provides means for the comparative analysis of the vastly different GNN accelerators.
Pretraining the Noisy Channel Model for Task-Oriented Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Direct decoding for task-oriented dialogue is known to suffer from the explaining-away effect, manifested in models that prefer short and generic responses. Here we argue for the use of Bayes' theorem to factorize the dialogue task into two models, the distribution of the context given the response, and the prior for the response itself. This approach, an instantiation of the noisy channel model, both mitigates the explaining-away effect and allows the principled incorporation of large pretrained models for the response prior. We present extensive experiments showing that a noisy channel model decodes better responses compared to direct decoding and that a two stage pretraining strategy, employing both open-domain and task-oriented dialogue data, improves over randomly initialized models.
S3M: Siamese Stack (Trace) Similarity Measure
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Automatic crash reporting systems have become a de-facto standard in software development. These systems monitor target software, and if a crash occurs they send details to a backend application. Later on, these reports are aggregated and used in the development process to 1) understand whether it is a new or an existing issue, 2) assign these bugs to appropriate developers, and 3) gain a general overview of the application's bug landscape. The efficiency of report aggregation and subsequent operations heavily depends on the quality of the report similarity metric. However, a distinctive feature of this kind of report is that no textual input from the user (i.e., bug description) is available: it contains only stack trace information. In this paper, we present S3M ("extreme") -- the first approach to computing stack trace similarity based on deep learning. It is based on a siamese architecture that uses a biLSTM encoder and a fully-connected classifier to compute similarity. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art on both open-sourced data and a private JetBrains dataset. Additionally, we review the impact of stack trace trimming on the quality of the results.
Gender and Racial Fairness in Depression Research using Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Multiple studies have demonstrated that behavior on internet-based social media platforms can be indicative of an individual's mental health status. The widespread availability of such data has spurred interest in mental health research from a computational lens. While previous research has raised concerns about possible biases in models produced from this data, no study has quantified how these biases actually manifest themselves with respect to different demographic groups, such as gender and racial/ethnic groups. Here, we analyze the fairness of depression classifiers trained on Twitter data with respect to gender and racial demographic groups. We find that model performance systematically differs for underrepresented groups and that these discrepancies cannot be fully explained by trivial data representation issues. Our study concludes with recommendations on how to avoid these biases in future research.
The Impacts of Sentiments and Tones in Community-Generated Issue Discussions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

The diverse community members who contribute to the discussions on issue tracking systems of open-source software projects often exhibit complex affective states such as sentiments and tones. These affective states can significantly influence the effectiveness of the issue discussions in elaborating the initial ideas into actionable tasks that the development teams need to address. In this paper, we present an extended empirical study to investigate the impacts of sentiments and tones in community-generated issue discussions. We created and validated a large dataset of sentiments and tones in the issues posts and comments created by diverse community members in three popular open source projects. Our analysis results drew a complex picture of the relationships between, on the one hand, the sentiments and tones in the issue discussions, and on the other hand, various discussion and development-related measures such as the discussion length and the issue resolution time. We also found that when factors such as the issue poster roles and the issue types were controlled, sentiments and tones had varied associations with the measures. Insights gained from these findings can support open source community members in making and moderating effective issue discussions and guide the design of tools to better support community engagement.
EXSCLAIM! -- An automated pipeline for the construction of labeled materials imaging datasets from literature
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Due to recent improvements in image resolution and acquisition speed, materials microscopy is experiencing an explosion of published imaging data. The standard publication format, while sufficient for traditional data ingestion scenarios where a select number of images can be critically examined and curated manually, is not conducive to large-scale data aggregation or analysis, hindering data sharing and reuse. Most images in publications are presented as components of a larger figure with their explicit context buried in the main body or caption text, so even if aggregated, collections of images with weak or no digitized contextual labels have limited value. To solve the problem of curating labeled microscopy data from literature, this work introduces the EXSCLAIM! Python toolkit for the automatic EXtraction, Separation, and Caption-based natural Language Annotation of IMages from scientific literature. We highlight the methodology behind the construction of EXSCLAIM! and demonstrate its ability to extract and label open-source scientific images at high volume.
PPT-SASMM: Scalable Analytical Shared Memory Model: Predicting the Performance of Multicore Caches from a Single-Threaded Execution Trace
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Performance modeling of parallel applications on multicore processors remains a challenge in computational co-design due to multicore processors' complex design. Multicores include complex private and shared memory hierarchies. We present a Scalable Analytical Shared Memory Model (SASMM). SASMM can predict the performance of parallel applications running on a multicore. SASMM uses a probabilistic and computationally-efficient method to predict the reuse distance profiles of caches in multicores. SASMM relies on a stochastic, static basic block-level analysis of reuse profiles. The profiles are calculated from the memory traces of applications that run sequentially rather than using multi-threaded traces. The experiments show that our model can predict private L1 cache hit rates with 2.12% and shared L2 cache hit rates with about 1.50% error rate.
Characterization of the Gittins index for sequential multistage jobs
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2021
Year: 2021

The optimal scheduling problem in single-server queueing systems is a classic problem in queueing theory. The Gittins index policy is known to be the optimal preemptive nonanticipating policy (both for the open version of the problem with Poisson arrivals and the closed version without arrivals) minimizing the expected holding costs. While the Gittins index is thoroughly characterized for ordinary jobs whose state is described by the attained service, it is not at all the case with jobs that have more complex structure. Recently, a class of such jobs, the multistage jobs, were introduced, and it was shown that the computation of Gittins index of a multistage job reduces into separable computations for the individual stages. The characterization is, however, indirect in the sense that it relies on the recursion for an auxiliary function (so called SJP function) and not for the Gittins index itself. In this paper, we answer the natural question: Is it possible to compute the Gittins index for a multistage job more directly by recursively combining the Gittins indexes of its individual stages? According to our results, it seems to be possible, at least, for sequential multistage jobs that have a fixed (deterministic) sequence of stages. We prove this for sequential two-stage jobs that have monotonous hazard rates in both stages, but our numerical experiments give an indication that the result could possibly be generalized to any sequential multistage jobs. Our approach, in this paper, is based on the Whittle index originally developed in the context of restless bandits.
Adoption and Suitability of Software Development Methods and Practices
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

In seeking to complement consultants' and tool vendors' reports, there has been an increasing academic focus on understanding the adoption and use of software development methods and practices. We surveyed practitioners working in Brazil, Finland, and New Zealand in a transnational study to contribute to these efforts. Among our findings we observed that most of the 184 practitioners in our sample focused on a small portfolio of projects that were of short duration. In addition, Scrum and Kanban were used most; however, some practitioners also used conventional methods. Coding Standards, Simple Design and Refactoring were used most by practitioners, and these practices were held to be largely suitable for project and process management. Our evidence points to the need to properly understand and support a wide range of software methods.
Locating Faulty Methods with a Mixed RNN and Attention Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

IR-based fault localization approaches achieves promising results when locating faulty files by comparing a bug report with source code. Unfortunately, they become less effective to locate faulty methods. We conduct a preliminary study to explore its challenges, and identify three problems: the semantic gap problem, the representation sparseness problem, and the single revision problem. To tackle these problems, we propose MRAM, a mixed RNN and attention model, which combines bug-fixing features and method structured features to explore both implicit and explicit relevance between methods and bug reports for method level fault localization task. The core ideas of our model are: (1) constructing code revision graphs from code, commits and past bug reports, which reveal the latent relations among methods to augment short methods and as well provide all revisions of code and past fixes to train more accurate models; (2) embedding three method structured features (token sequences, API invocation sequences, and comments) jointly with RNN and soft attention to represent source methods and obtain their implicit relevance with bug reports; and (3) integrating multirevision bug-fixing features, which provide the explicit relevance between bug reports and methods, to improve the performance. We have implemented MRAM and conducted a controlled experiment on five open-source projects. Comparing with stateof-the-art approaches, our MRAM improves MRR values by 3.8- 5.1% (3.7-5.4%) when the dataset contains (does not contain) localized bug reports. Our statistics test shows that our improvements are significant
6-DOF Feature based LIDAR SLAM using ORB Features from Rasterized Images of 3D LIDAR Point Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

An accurate and computationally efficient SLAM algorithm is vital for modern autonomous vehicles. To make a lightweight the algorithm, most SLAM systems rely on feature detection from images for vision SLAM or point cloud for laser-based methods. Feature detection through a 3D point cloud becomes a computationally challenging task. In this paper, we propose a feature detection method by projecting a 3D point cloud to form an image and apply the vision-based feature detection technique. The proposed method gives repeatable and stable features in a variety of environments. Based on such features, we build a 6-DOF SLAM system consisting of tracking, mapping, and loop closure threads. For loop detection, we employ a 2-step approach i.e. nearest key-frames detection and loop candidate verification by matching features extracted from rasterized LIDAR images. Furthermore, we utilize a key-frame structure to achieve a lightweight SLAM system. The proposed system is evaluated with implementation on the KITTI dataset and the University of Michigan Ford Campus dataset. Through experimental results, we show that the algorithm presented in this paper can substantially reduce the computational cost of feature detection from the point cloud and the whole SLAM system while giving accurate results.
A Self-adaptive SAC-PID Control Approach based on Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control is the most widely used in industrial control, robot control and other fields. However, traditional PID control is not competent when the system cannot be accurately modeled and the operating environment is variable in real time. To tackle these problems, we propose a self-adaptive model-free SAC-PID control approach based on reinforcement learning for automatic control of mobile robots. A new hierarchical structure is developed, which includes the upper controller based on soft actor-critic (SAC), one of the most competitive continuous control algorithms, and the lower controller based on incremental PID controller. Soft actor-critic receives the dynamic information of the mobile robot as input, and simultaneously outputs the optimal parameters of incremental PID controllers to compensate for the error between the path and the mobile robot in real time. In addition, the combination of 24-neighborhood method and polynomial fitting is developed to improve the adaptability of SAC-PID control method to complex environments. The effectiveness of the SAC-PID control method is verified with several different difficulty paths both on Gazebo and real mecanum mobile robot. Futhermore, compared with fuzzy PID control, the SAC-PID method has merits of strong robustness, generalization and real-time performance.
Semantic Contextual Reasoning to Provide Human Behavior
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, the world has witnessed various primitives pertaining to the complexity of human behavior. Identifying an event in the presence of insufficient, incomplete, or tentative premises along with the constraints on resources such as time, data and memory is a vital aspect of an intelligent system. Data explosion presents one of the most challenging research issues for intelligent systems; to optimally represent and store this heterogeneous and voluminous data semantically to provide human behavior. There is a requirement of intelligent but personalized human behavior subject to constraints on resources and priority of the user. Knowledge, when represented in the form of an ontology, procures an intelligent response to a query posed by users; but it does not offer content in accordance with the user context. To this aim, we propose a model to quantify the user context and provide semantic contextual reasoning. A diagnostic belief algorithm (DBA) is also presented that identifies a given event and also computes the confidence of the decision as a function of available resources, premises, exceptions, and desired specificity. We conduct an empirical study in the domain of day-to-day routine queries and the experimental results show that the answer to queries and also its confidence varies with user context.
MDMMT: Multidomain Multimodal Transformer for Video Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present a new state-of-the-art on the text to video retrieval task on MSRVTT and LSMDC benchmarks where our model outperforms all previous solutions by a large margin. Moreover, state-of-the-art results are achieved with a single model on two datasets without finetuning. This multidomain generalisation is achieved by a proper combination of different video caption datasets. We show that training on different datasets can improve test results of each other. Additionally we check intersection between many popular datasets and found that MSRVTT has a significant overlap between the test and the train parts, and the same situation is observed for ActivityNet.
Lessons Learned from Educating AI Engineers
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Over the past three years we have built a practice-oriented, bachelor level, educational programme for software engineers to specialize as AI engineers. The experience with this programme and the practical assignments our students execute in industry has given us valuable insights on the profession of AI engineer. In this paper we discuss our programme and the lessons learned for industry and research.
Acoustic word embeddings for zero-resource languages using self-supervised contrastive learning and multilingual adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) are fixed-dimensional representations of variable-length speech segments. For zero-resource languages where labelled data is not available, one AWE approach is to use unsupervised autoencoder-based recurrent models. Another recent approach is to use multilingual transfer: a supervised AWE model is trained on several well-resourced languages and then applied to an unseen zero-resource language. We consider how a recent contrastive learning loss can be used in both the purely unsupervised and multilingual transfer settings. Firstly, we show that terms from an unsupervised term discovery system can be used for contrastive self-supervision, resulting in improvements over previous unsupervised monolingual AWE models. Secondly, we consider how multilingual AWE models can be adapted to a specific zero-resource language using discovered terms. We find that self-supervised contrastive adaptation outperforms adapted multilingual correspondence autoencoder and Siamese AWE models, giving the best overall results in a word discrimination task on six zero-resource languages.
PAMELI: A Meta-Algorithm for Computationally Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

We present an algorithm for multi-objective optimization of computationally expensive problems. The proposed algorithm is based on solving a set of surrogate problems defined by models of the real one, so that only solutions estimated to be approximately Pareto-optimal are evaluated using the real expensive functions. Aside of the search for solutions, our algorithm also performs a meta-search for optimal surrogate models and navigation strategies for the optimization landscape, therefore adapting the search strategy for solutions to the problem as new information about it is obtained. The competitiveness of our approach is demonstrated by an experimental comparison with one state-of-the-art surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithm on a set of benchmark problems.
Carton dataset synthesis method for domain shift based on foreground texture decoupling and replacement
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

One major impediment in rapidly deploying object detection models for industrial applications is the lack of large annotated datasets. We currently have presented the Sacked Carton Dataset(SCD) that contains carton images from three scenarios, such as comprehensive pharmaceutical logistics company(CPLC), e-commerce logistics company(ECLC), fruit market(FM). However, due to domain shift, the model trained with one of the three scenarios in SCD has poor generalization ability when applied to the rest scenarios. To solve this problem, a novel image synthesis method is proposed to replace the foreground texture of the source datasets with the texture of the target datasets. Our method can keep the context relationship of foreground objects and backgrounds unchanged and greatly augment the target datasets. We firstly propose a surface segmentation algorithm to achieve texture decoupling of each instance. Secondly, a contour reconstruction algorithm is proposed to keep the occlusion and truncation relationship of the instance unchanged. Finally, the Gaussian fusion algorithm is used to replace the foreground texture from the source datasets with the texture from the target datasets. The novel image synthesis method can largely boost AP by at least 4.3%~6.5% on RetinaNet and 3.4%~6.8% on Faster R-CNN for the target domain. Code is available at https://github.com/hustgetlijun/RCAN.