OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automated Distance Estimation for Wildlife Camera Trapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The ongoing biodiversity crisis calls for accurate estimation of animal density and abundance to identify sources of biodiversity decline and effectiveness of conservation interventions. Camera traps together with abundance estimation methods are often employed for this purpose. The necessary distances between camera and observed animals are traditionally derived in a laborious, fully manual or semi-automatic process. Both approaches require reference image material, which is both difficult to acquire and not available for existing datasets. We propose a fully automatic approach we call AUtomated DIstance esTimation (AUDIT) to estimate camera-to-animal distances. We leverage existing state-of-the-art relative monocular depth estimation and combine it with a novel alignment procedure to estimate metric distances. AUDIT is fully automated and requires neither the comparison of observations in camera trap imagery with reference images nor capturing of reference image material at all. AUDIT therefore relieves biologists and ecologists from a significant workload. We evaluate AUDIT on a zoo scenario dataset unseen during training where we achieve a mean absolute distance estimation error over all animal instances of only 0.9864 meters and mean relative error (REL) of 0.113. The code and usage instructions are available at https://github.com/PJ-cs/DistanceEstimationTracking
TamilEmo: Finegrained Emotion Detection Dataset for Tamil
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Emotional Analysis from textual input has been considered both a challenging and interesting task in Natural Language Processing. However, due to the lack of datasets in low-resource languages (i.e. Tamil), it is difficult to conduct research of high standard in this area. Therefore we introduce this labelled dataset (a largest manually annotated dataset of more than 42k Tamil YouTube comments, labelled for 31 emotions including neutral) for emotion recognition. The goal of this dataset is to improve emotion detection in multiple downstream tasks in Tamil. We have also created three different groupings of our emotions (3-class, 7-class and 31-class) and evaluated the model's performance on each category of the grouping. Our MURIL-base model has achieved a 0.60 macro average F1-score across our 3-class group dataset. With 7-class and 31-class groups, the Random Forest model performed well with a macro average F1-scores of 0.42 and 0.29 respectively.
Online Learning to Transport via the Minimal Selection Principle
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Motivated by robust dynamic resource allocation in operations research, we study the \textit{Online Learning to Transport} (OLT) problem where the decision variable is a probability measure, an infinite-dimensional object. We draw connections between online learning, optimal transport, and partial differential equations through an insight called the minimal selection principle, originally studied in the Wasserstein gradient flow setting by \citet{Ambrosio_2005}. This allows us to extend the standard online learning framework to the infinite-dimensional setting seamlessly. Based on our framework, we derive a novel method called the \textit{minimal selection or exploration (MSoE) algorithm} to solve OLT problems using mean-field approximation and discretization techniques. In the displacement convex setting, the main theoretical message underpinning our approach is that minimizing transport cost over time (via the minimal selection principle) ensures optimal cumulative regret upper bounds. On the algorithmic side, our MSoE algorithm applies beyond the displacement convex setting, making the mathematical theory of optimal transport practically relevant to non-convex settings common in dynamic resource allocation.
"This is Fake! Shared it by Mistake": Assessing the Intent of Fake News Spreaders
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Individuals can be misled by fake news and spread it unintentionally without knowing it is false. This phenomenon has been frequently observed but has not been investigated. Our aim in this work is to assess the intent of fake news spreaders. To distinguish between intentional versus unintentional spreading, we study the psychological explanations of unintentional spreading. With this foundation, we then propose an influence graph, using which we assess the intent of fake news spreaders. Our extensive experiments show that the assessed intent can help significantly differentiate between intentional and unintentional fake news spreaders. Furthermore, the estimated intent can significantly improve the current techniques that detect fake news. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to model individuals' intent in fake news spreading.
A Novel Encoder-Decoder Network with Guided Transmission Map for Single Image Dehazing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

A novel Encoder-Decoder Network with Guided Transmission Map (EDN-GTM) for single image dehazing scheme is proposed in this paper. The proposed EDN-GTM takes conventional RGB hazy image in conjunction with its transmission map estimated by adopting dark channel prior as the inputs of the network. The proposed EDN-GTM utilizes U-Net for image segmentation as the core network and utilizes various modifications including spatial pyramid pooling module and Swish activation to achieve state-of-the-art dehazing performance. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed EDN-GTM outperforms most of traditional and deep learning-based image dehazing schemes in terms of PSNR and SSIM metrics. The proposed EDN-GTM furthermore proves its applicability to object detection problems. Specifically, when applied to an image preprocessing tool for driving object detection, the proposed EDN-GTM can efficiently remove haze and significantly improve detection accuracy by 4.73% in terms of mAP measure. The code is available at: https://github.com/tranleanh/edn-gtm.
Spectral Propagation Graph Network for Few-shot Time Series Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Few-shot Time Series Classification (few-shot TSC) is a challenging problem in time series analysis. It is more difficult to classify when time series of the same class are not completely consistent in spectral domain or time series of different classes are partly consistent in spectral domain. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named Spectral Propagation Graph Network (SPGN) to explicitly model and propagate the spectrum-wise relations between different time series with graph network. To the best of our knowledge, SPGN is the first to utilize spectral comparisons in different intervals and involve spectral propagation across all time series with graph networks for few-shot TSC. SPGN first uses bandpass filter to expand time series in spectral domain for calculating spectrum-wise relations between time series. Equipped with graph networks, SPGN then integrates spectral relations with label information to make spectral propagation. The further study conveys the bi-directional effect between spectral relations acquisition and spectral propagation. We conduct extensive experiments on few-shot TSC benchmarks. SPGN outperforms state-of-the-art results by a large margin in $4\% \sim 13\%$. Moreover, SPGN surpasses them by around $12\%$ and $9\%$ under cross-domain and cross-way settings respectively.
GrASP: Gradient-Based Affordance Selection for Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Planning with a learned model is arguably a key component of intelligence. There are several challenges in realizing such a component in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) problems. One such challenge is dealing effectively with continuous action spaces when using tree-search planning (e.g., it is not feasible to consider every action even at just the root node of the tree). In this paper we present a method for selecting affordances useful for planning -- for learning which small number of actions/options from a continuous space of actions/options to consider in the tree-expansion process during planning. We consider affordances that are goal-and-state-conditional mappings to actions/options as well as unconditional affordances that simply select actions/options available in all states. Our selection method is gradient based: we compute gradients through the planning procedure to update the parameters of the function that represents affordances. Our empirical work shows that it is feasible to learn to select both primitive-action and option affordances, and that simultaneously learning to select affordances and planning with a learned value-equivalent model can outperform model-free RL.
No-Regret Learning in Dynamic Stackelberg Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

In a Stackelberg game, a leader commits to a randomized strategy, and a follower chooses their best strategy in response. We consider an extension of a standard Stackelberg game, called a discrete-time dynamic Stackelberg game, that has an underlying state space that affects the leader's rewards and available strategies and evolves in a Markovian manner depending on both the leader and follower's selected strategies. Although standard Stackelberg games have been utilized to improve scheduling in security domains, their deployment is often limited by requiring complete information of the follower's utility function. In contrast, we consider scenarios where the follower's utility function is unknown to the leader; however, it can be linearly parameterized. Our objective then is to provide an algorithm that prescribes a randomized strategy to the leader at each step of the game based on observations of how the follower responded in previous steps. We design a no-regret learning algorithm that, with high probability, achieves a regret bound (when compared to the best policy in hindsight) which is sublinear in the number of time steps; the degree of sublinearity depends on the number of features representing the follower's utility function. The regret of the proposed learning algorithm is independent of the size of the state space and polynomial in the rest of the parameters of the game. We show that the proposed learning algorithm outperforms existing model-free reinforcement learning approaches.
Impact of Device Thermal Performance on 5G mmWave Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

5G millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular networks have been reported to deliver 1-2 Gbps downlink throughput, via speed-tests. However, these speed-tests capture only a few seconds of throughput and are not representative of sustained throughput over several minutes. We report the first measurements of sustained throughput in three cities, Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco, where we observe throughput throttling due to rising skin temperature of the phone when it is connected to a deployed 5G mmWave base-station (BS). Radio Resource Control (RRC) messaging between the phone and the BS indicates the reduction in the number of aggregated mmWave channels from 4 to 1 followed by a switch to 4G. We corroborate these measurements with infra-red images as the phone heats up. Thus, mmWave throughput will be limited not by network characteristics but by device thermal management.
Geometric Digital Twinning of Industrial Facilities: Retrieval of Industrial Shapes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper devises, implements and benchmarks a novel shape retrieval method that can accurately match individual labelled point clusters (instances) of existing industrial facilities with their respective CAD models. It employs a combination of image and point cloud deep learning networks to classify and match instances to their geometrically similar CAD model. It extends our previous research on geometric digital twin generation from point cloud data, which currently is a tedious, manual process. Experiments with our joint network reveal that it can reliably retrieve CAD models at 85.2\% accuracy. The proposed research is a fundamental framework to enable the geometric Digital Twin (gDT) pipeline and incorporate the real geometric configuration into the Digital Twin.
Networks and Identity Drive Geographic Properties of the Diffusion of Linguistic Innovation
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Adoption of cultural innovation (e.g., music, beliefs, language) is often geographically correlated, with adopters largely residing within the boundaries of relatively few well-studied, socially significant areas. These cultural regions are often hypothesized to be the result of either (i) identity performance driving the adoption of cultural innovation, or (ii) homophily in the networks underlying diffusion. In this study, we show that demographic identity and network topology are both required to model the diffusion of innovation, as they play complementary roles in producing its spatial properties. We develop an agent-based model of cultural adoption, and validate geographic patterns of transmission in our model against a novel dataset of innovative words that we identify from a 10% sample of Twitter. Using our model, we are able to directly compare a combined network + identity model of diffusion to simulated network-only and identity-only counterfactuals -- allowing us to test the separate and combined roles of network and identity. While social scientists often treat either network or identity as the core social structure in modeling culture change, we show that key geographic properties of diffusion actually depend on both factors as each one influences different mechanisms of diffusion. Specifically, the network principally drives spread among urban counties via weak-tie diffusion, while identity plays a disproportionate role in transmission among rural counties via strong-tie diffusion. Diffusion between urban and rural areas, a key component in innovation diffusing nationally, requires both network and identity. Our work suggests that models must integrate both factors in order to understand and reproduce the adoption of innovation.
Space-Time Adaptive Processing Using Random Matrix Theory Under Limited Training Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Space-time adaptive processing (STAP) is one of the most effective approaches to suppressing ground clutters in airborne radar systems. It basically takes two forms, i.e., full-dimension STAP (FD-STAP) and reduced-dimension STAP (RD-STAP). When the numbers of clutter training samples are less than two times their respective system degrees-of-freedom (DOF), the performances of both FD-STAP and RD-STAP degrade severely due to inaccurate clutter estimation. To enhance STAP performance under the limited training samples, this paper develops a STAP theory with random matrix theory (RMT). By minimizing the output clutter-plus-noise power, the estimate of the inversion of clutter plus noise covariance matrix (CNCM) can be obtained through optimally manipulating its eigenvalues, and thus producing the optimal STAP weight vector. Two STAP algorithms, FD-STAP using RMT (RMT-FD-STAP) and RD-STAP using RMT (RMT-RD-STAP), are proposed. It is found that both RMT-FD-STAP and RMT-RD-STAP greatly outperform other-related STAP algorithms when the numbers of training samples are larger than their respective clutter DOFs, which are much less than the corresponding system DOFs. Theoretical analyses and simulation demonstrate the effectiveness and the performance advantages of the proposed STAP algorithms.
Instance-wise algorithm configuration with graph neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We present our submission for the configuration task of the Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) NeurIPS 2021 competition. The configuration task is to predict a good configuration of the open-source solver SCIP to solve a mixed integer linear program (MILP) efficiently. We pose this task as a supervised learning problem: First, we compile a large dataset of the solver performance for various configurations and all provided MILP instances. Second, we use this data to train a graph neural network that learns to predict a good configuration for a specific instance. The submission was tested on the three problem benchmarks of the competition and improved solver performance over the default by 12% and 35% and 8% across the hidden test instances. We ranked 3rd out of 15 on the global leaderboard and won the student leaderboard. We make our code publicly available at \url{https://github.com/RomeoV/ml4co-competition} .
Spherical Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Using convolutional neural networks for 360images can induce sub-optimal performance due to distortions entailed by a planar projection. The distortion gets deteriorated when a rotation is applied to the 360image. Thus, many researches based on convolutions attempt to reduce the distortions to learn accurate representation. In contrast, we leverage the transformer architecture to solve image classification problems for 360images. Using the proposed transformer for 360images has two advantages. First, our method does not require the erroneous planar projection process by sampling pixels from the sphere surface. Second, our sampling method based on regular polyhedrons makes low rotation equivariance errors, because specific rotations can be reduced to permutations of faces. In experiments, we validate our network on two aspects, as follows. First, we show that using a transformer with highly uniform sampling methods can help reduce the distortion. Second, we demonstrate that the transformer architecture can achieve rotation equivariance on specific rotations. We compare our method to other state-of-the-art algorithms using the SPH-MNIST, SPH-CIFAR, and SUN360 datasets and show that our method is competitive with other methods.
Loss-guided Stability Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In modern data analysis, sparse model selection becomes inevitable once the number of predictors variables is very high. It is well-known that model selection procedures like the Lasso or Boosting tend to overfit on real data. The celebrated Stability Selection overcomes these weaknesses by aggregating models, based on subsamples of the training data, followed by choosing a stable predictor set which is usually much sparser than the predictor sets from the raw models. The standard Stability Selection is based on a global criterion, namely the per-family error rate, while additionally requiring expert knowledge to suitably configure the hyperparameters. Since model selection depends on the loss function, i.e., predictor sets selected w.r.t. some particular loss function differ from those selected w.r.t. some other loss function, we propose a Stability Selection variant which respects the chosen loss function via an additional validation step based on out-of-sample validation data, optionally enhanced with an exhaustive search strategy. Our Stability Selection variants are widely applicable and user-friendly. Moreover, our Stability Selection variants can avoid the issue of severe underfitting which affects the original Stability Selection for noisy high-dimensional data, so our priority is not to avoid false positives at all costs but to result in a sparse stable model with which one can make predictions. Experiments where we consider both regression and binary classification and where we use Boosting as model selection algorithm reveal a significant precision improvement compared to raw Boosting models while not suffering from any of the mentioned issues of the original Stability Selection.
Needs-aware Artificial Intelligence: AI that 'serves [human] needs'
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

By defining the current limits (and thereby the frontiers), many boundaries are shaping, and will continue to shape, the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We push on these boundaries in order to make further progress into what were yesterday's frontiers. They are both pliable and resilient - always creating new boundaries of what AI can (or should) achieve. Among these are technical boundaries (such as processing capacity), psychological boundaries (such as human trust in AI systems), ethical boundaries (such as with AI weapons), and conceptual boundaries (such as the AI people can imagine). It is within this final category while it can play a fundamental role in all other boundaries} that we find the construct of needs and the limitations that our current concept of need places on the future AI.
EvoJAX: Hardware-Accelerated Neuroevolution
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Evolutionary computation has been shown to be a highly effective method for training neural networks, particularly when employed at scale on CPU clusters. Recent work have also showcased their effectiveness on hardware accelerators, such as GPUs, but so far such demonstrations are tailored for very specific tasks, limiting applicability to other domains. We present EvoJAX, a scalable, general purpose, hardware-accelerated neuroevolution toolkit. Building on top of the JAX library, our toolkit enables neuroevolution algorithms to work with neural networks running in parallel across multiple TPU/GPUs. EvoJAX achieves very high performance by implementing the evolution algorithm, neural network and task all in NumPy, which is compiled just-in-time to run on accelerators. We provide extensible examples of EvoJAX for a wide range of tasks, including supervised learning, reinforcement learning and generative art. Since EvoJAX can find solutions to most of these tasks within minutes on a single accelerator, compared to hours or days when using CPUs, our toolkit can significantly shorten the iteration cycle of evolutionary computation experiments. EvoJAX is available at https://github.com/google/evojax
Intelligent Resource Allocations for IRS-Assisted OFDM Communications: A Hybrid MDQN-DDPG Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted OFDM system. The system sum rate maximization framework is formulated by jointly optimizing subcarrier allocation, base station transmit beamforming and IRS phase shift. Considering the continuous and discrete hybrid action space characteristics of the optimization variables, we propose an efficient resource allocation algorithm combining multiple deep Q networks (MDQN) and deep deterministic policy-gradient (DDPG) to deal with this issue. In our algorithm, MDQN are employed to solve the problem of large discrete action space, while DDPG is introduced to tackle the continuous action allocation. Compared with the traditional approaches, our proposed MDQN-DDPG based algorithm has the advantage of continuous behavior improvement through learning from the environment. Simulation results demonstrate superior performance of our design in terms of system sum rate compared with the benchmark schemes.
Hardware calibrated learning to compensate heterogeneity in analog RRAM-based Spiking Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) can unleash the full power of analog Resistive Random Access Memories (RRAMs) based circuits for low power signal processing. Their inherent computational sparsity naturally results in energy efficiency benefits. The main challenge implementing robust SNNs is the intrinsic variability (heterogeneity) of both analog CMOS circuits and RRAM technology. In this work, we assessed the performance and variability of RRAM-based neuromorphic circuits that were designed and fabricated using a 130\,nm technology node. Based on these results, we propose a Neuromorphic Hardware Calibrated (NHC) SNN, where the learning circuits are calibrated on the measured data. We show that by taking into account the measured heterogeneity characteristics in the off-chip learning phase, the NHC SNN self-corrects its hardware non-idealities and learns to solve benchmark tasks with high accuracy. This work demonstrates how to cope with the heterogeneity of neurons and synapses for increasing classification accuracy in temporal tasks.