OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Neural Policy Gradient Methods: Global Optimality and Rates of Convergence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Policy gradient methods with actor-critic schemes demonstrate tremendous empirical successes, especially when the actors and critics are parameterized by neural networks. However, it remains less clear whether such "neural" policy gradient methods converge to globally optimal policies and whether they even converge at all. We answer both the questions affirmatively in the overparameterized regime. In detail, we prove that neural natural policy gradient converges to a globally optimal policy at a sublinear rate. Also, we show that neural vanilla policy gradient converges sublinearly to a stationary point. Meanwhile, by relating the suboptimality of the stationary points to the representation power of neural actor and critic classes, we prove the global optimality of all stationary points under mild regularity conditions. Particularly, we show that a key to the global optimality and convergence is the "compatibility" between the actor and critic, which is ensured by sharing neural architectures and random initializations across the actor and critic. To the best of our knowledge, our analysis establishes the first global optimality and convergence guarantees for neural policy gradient methods.
Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Perspectives on using Automatic Speech Recognition in Conversation
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Many personal devices have transitioned from visual-controlled interfaces to speech-controlled interfaces to reduce costs and interactive friction, supported by the rapid growth in capabilities of speech-controlled interfaces, e.g., Amazon Echo or Apple's Siri. A consequence is that people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) may be unable to use these speech-controlled devices. We show that deaf speech has a high error rate compared to hearing speech, in commercial speech-controlled interfaces. Deaf speech had approximately a 78% word error rate (WER) compared to a hearing speech 18% WER. Our findings show that current speech-controlled interfaces are not usable by DHH people. Based on our findings, significant advances in speech recognition software or alternative approaches will be needed for deaf use of speech-controlled interfaces. We show that current speech-controlled interfaces are not usable by DHH people.
Starting CLuP with polytope relaxation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The Controlled Loosening-up (CLuP) mechanism that we recently introduced in \cite{Stojnicclupint19} is a generic concept that can be utilized to solve a large class of problems in polynomial time. Since it relies in its core on an iterative procedure, the key to its excellent performance lies in a typically very small number of iterations needed to execute the entire algorithm. In a separate paper \cite{Stojnicclupcmpl19}, we presented a detailed complexity analysis that indeed confirms the relatively small number of iterations. Since both papers, \cite{Stojnicclupint19} and \cite{Stojnicclupcmpl19} are the introductory papers on the topic we made sure to limit the initial discussion just to the core of the algorithm and consequently focused only on the algorithm's most basic version. On numerous occasions though, we emphasized that various improvements and further upgrades are possible. In this paper we present a first step in this direction and discuss a very simple upgrade that can be introduced on top of the basic CLuP mechanism. It relates to the starting of the CLuP and suggests the well-known so-called polytope-relaxation heuristic (see, e.g. \cite{StojnicBBSD05,StojnicBBSD08}) as the starting point. We refer to this variant of CLuP as the CLuP-plt and proceed with the presentation of its complexity analysis. As in \cite{Stojnicclupcmpl19}, a particular \textbf{\emph{complexity analysis per iteration level}} type of complexity analysis is chosen and presented through the algorithm's application on the well-known MIMO ML detection problem. As expected, the analysis confirms that CLuP-plt performs even better than the original CLuP. In some of the most interesting regimes it often achieves within the \textbf{\emph{first three iterations}} an excellent performance. We also complement the theoretical findings with a solid set of numerical experiments.
Efficient Real-Time Camera Based Estimation of Heart Rate and Its Variability
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Remote photo-plethysmography (rPPG) uses a remotely placed camera to estimating a person's heart rate (HR). Similar to how heart rate can provide useful information about a person's vital signs, insights about the underlying physio/psychological conditions can be obtained from heart rate variability (HRV). HRV is a measure of the fine fluctuations in the intervals between heart beats. However, this measure requires temporally locating heart beats with a high degree of precision. We introduce a refined and efficient real-time rPPG pipeline with novel filtering and motion suppression that not only estimates heart rate more accurately, but also extracts the pulse waveform to time heart beats and measure heart rate variability. This method requires no rPPG specific training and is able to operate in real-time. We validate our method on a self-recorded dataset under an idealized lab setting, and show state-of-the-art results on two public dataset with realistic conditions (VicarPPG and PURE).
Translating Visual Art into Music
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

The Synesthetic Variational Autoencoder (SynVAE) introduced in this research is able to learn a consistent mapping between visual and auditive sensory modalities in the absence of paired datasets. A quantitative evaluation on MNIST as well as the Behance Artistic Media dataset (BAM) shows that SynVAE is capable of retaining sufficient information content during the translation while maintaining cross-modal latent space consistency. In a qualitative evaluation trial, human evaluators were furthermore able to match musical samples with the images which generated them with accuracies of up to 73%.
Online Pedestrian Group Walking Event Detection Using Spectral Analysis of Motion Similarity Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

A method for online identification of group of moving objects in the video is proposed in this paper. This method at each frame identifies group of tracked objects with similar local instantaneous motion pattern using spectral clustering on motion similarity graph. Then, the output of the algorithm is used to detect the event of more than two object moving together as required by PETS2015 challenge. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on the PETS2015 dataset.
Gaze-Driven Adaptive Interventions for Magazine-Style Narrative Visualizations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper we investigate the value of gaze-driven adaptive interventions to support processing of textual documents with embedded visualizations, i.e., Magazine Style Narrative Visualizations (MSNVs). These interventions are provided dynamically by highlighting relevant data points in the visualization when the user reads related sentences in the MNSV text, as detected by an eye-tracker. We conducted a user study during which participants read a set of MSNVs with our interventions, and compared their performance and experience with participants who received no interventions. Our work extends previous findings by showing that dynamic, gaze-driven interventions can be delivered based on reading behaviors in MSNVs, a widespread form of documents that have never been considered for gaze-driven adaptation so far. Next, we found that the interventions significantly improved the performance of users with low levels of visualization literacy, i.e., those users who need help the most due to their lower ability to process and understand data visualizations. However, high literacy users were not impacted by the interventions, providing initial evidence that gaze-driven interventions can be further improved by personalizing them to the levels of visualization literacy of their users.
What can the brain teach us about building artificial intelligence?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

This paper is the preprint of an invited commentary on Lake et al's Behavioral and Brain Sciences article titled "Building machines that learn and think like people". Lake et al's paper offers a timely critique on the recent accomplishments in artificial intelligence from the vantage point of human intelligence, and provides insightful suggestions about research directions for building more human-like intelligence. Since we agree with most of the points raised in that paper, we will offer a few points that are complementary.
AMR Normalization for Fairer Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Meaning Representation (AMR; Banarescu et al., 2013) encodes the meaning of sentences as a directed graph and Smatch (Cai and Knight, 2013) is the primary metric for evaluating AMR graphs. Smatch, however, is unaware of some meaning-equivalent variations in graph structure allowed by the AMR Specification and gives different scores for AMRs exhibiting these variations. In this paper I propose four normalization methods for helping to ensure that conceptually equivalent AMRs are evaluated as equivalent. Equivalent AMRs with and without normalization can look quite different---comparing a gold corpus to itself with relation reification alone yields a difference of 25 Smatch points, suggesting that the outputs of two systems may not be directly comparable without normalization. The algorithms described in this paper are implemented on top of an existing open-source Python toolkit for AMR and will be released under the same license.
Learning sparse representations in reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading account of the midbrain dopamine system and the basal ganglia in reinforcement learning. These algorithms typically learn a mapping from the agent's current sensed state to a selected action (known as a policy function) via learning a value function (expected future rewards). TD Learning methods have been very successful on a broad range of control tasks, but learning can become intractably slow as the state space of the environment grows. This has motivated methods that learn internal representations of the agent's state, effectively reducing the size of the state space and restructuring state representations in order to support generalization. However, TD Learning coupled with an artificial neural network, as a function approximator, has been shown to fail to learn some fairly simple control tasks, challenging this explanation of reward-based learning. We hypothesize that such failures do not arise in the brain because of the ubiquitous presence of lateral inhibition in the cortex, producing sparse distributed internal representations that support the learning of expected future reward. The sparse conjunctive representations can avoid catastrophic interference while still supporting generalization. We provide support for this conjecture through computational simulations, demonstrating the benefits of learned sparse representations for three problematic classic control tasks: Puddle-world, Mountain-car, and Acrobot.
Topological Coding and Topological Matrices Toward Network Overall Security
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

A mathematical topology with matrix is a natural representation of a coding relational structure that is found in many fields of the world. Matrices are very important in computation of real applications, s ce matrices are easy saved in computer and run quickly, as well as matrices are convenient to deal with communities of current networks, such as Laplacian matrices, adjacent matrices in graph theory. Motivated from convenient, useful and powerful matrices used in computation and investigation of today's networks, we have introduced Topcode-matrices, which are matrices of order $3\times q$ and differ from popular matrices applied in linear algebra and computer science. Topcode-matrices can use numbers, letters, Chinese characters, sets, graphs, algebraic groups \emph{etc.} as their elements. One important thing is that Topcode-matrices of numbers can derive easily number strings, since number strings are text-based passwords used in information security. Topcode-matrices can be used to describe topological graphic passwords (Topsnut-gpws) used in information security and graph connected properties for solving some problems coming in the investigation of Graph Networks and Graph Neural Networks proposed by GoogleBrain and DeepMind. Our topics, in this article, are: Topsnut-matrices, Topcode-matrices, Hanzi-matrices, adjacency ve-value matrices and pan-Topcode-matrices, and some connections between these Topcode-matrices will be proven. We will discuss algebraic groups obtained from the above matrices, graph groups, graph networking groups and number string groups for encrypting different communities of dynamic networks. The operations and results on our matrices help us to set up our overall security mechanism to protect networks.
A Compositional Model of Multi-faceted Trust for Personalized Item Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Trust-based recommender systems improve rating prediction with respect to Collaborative Filtering by leveraging the additional information provided by a trust network among users to deal with the cold start problem. However, they are challenged by recent studies according to which people generally perceive the usage of data about social relations as a violation of their own privacy. In order to address this issue, we extend trust-based recommender systems with additional evidence about trust, based on public anonymous information, and we make them configurable with respect to the data that can be used in the given application domain: 1 - We propose the Multi-faceted Trust Model (MTM) to define trust among users in a compositional way, possibly including or excluding the types of information it contains. MTM flexibly integrates social links with public anonymous feedback received by user profiles and user contributions in social networks. 2 - We propose LOCABAL+, based on MTM, which extends the LOCABAL trust-based recommender system with multi-faceted trust and trust-based social regularization. Experiments carried out on two public datasets of item reviews show that, with a minor loss of user coverage, LOCABAL+ outperforms state-of-the art trust-based recommender systems and Collaborative Filtering in accuracy, ranking of items and error minimization both when it uses complete information about trust and when it ignores social relations. The combination of MTM with LOCABAL+ thus represents a promising alternative to state-of-the-art trust-based recommender systems.
SQuAP-Ont: an Ontology of Software Quality Relational Factors from Financial Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Quality, architecture, and process are considered the keystones of software engineering. ISO defines them in three separate standards. However, their interaction has been scarcely studied, so far. The SQuAP model (Software Quality, Architecture, Process) describes twenty-eight main factors that impact on software quality in banking systems, and each factor is described as a relation among some characteristics from the three ISO standards. Hence, SQuAP makes such relations emerge rigorously, although informally. In this paper, we present SQuAP-Ont, an OWL ontology designed by following a well-established methodology based on the re-use of Ontology Design Patterns (i.e. ODPs). SQuAP-Ont formalises the relations emerging from SQuAP to represent and reason via Linked Data about software engineering in a three-dimensional model consisting of quality, architecture, and process ISO characteristics.
Simulation and computational analysis of multiscale graph agent-based tumor model
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2019
Year: 2019

This paper deals with the cellular biological network analysis of the tumor-growth model, consisting of multiple spaces and time scales. In this paper, we present a model in graph simulation using ABM for tumor growth. In particular, we propose a graph agent-based modeling and simulation system in the format of tumor growth scenario for evolving analysis. To manage cellular biological network analysis, we developed a workflow that allows us to estimate the tumor model and the complexity of the evolving behavior in a principled manner. By developing the model using Python, which has enabled us to run the model multiple times (more than what is possible by conventional means) to generate a large amount of data, we have succeeded in getting deep in to the micro-environment of the tumor, employing network analysis. Combining agent-based modeling with graph-based modeling to simulate the structure, dynamics, and functions of complex networks is exclusively important for biological systems with a large number of open parameters, e.g., epidemic models of disease spreading or cancer. Extracting data from evolutionary directed graphs and a set of centrality algorithms helps us to tackle the problems of pathway analysis and to develop the ability to predict, control, and design the function of metabolisms. Reproducing and performing complex parametric simulations a known phenomenon at a sufficient level of detail for computational biology could be an impressive achievement for fast analysis purposes in clinics, both on the predictive diagnostic and therapeutic side.
Heterogeneous Collaborative Filtering
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2019
Year: 2019

Recommendation system is important to a content sharing/creating social network. Collaborative filtering is a widely-adopted technology in conventional recommenders, which is based on similarity between positively engaged content items involving the same users. Conventional collaborative filtering (CCF) suffers from cold start problem and narrow content diversity. We propose a new recommendation approach, heterogeneous collaborative filtering (HCF) to tackle these challenges at the root, while keeping the strength of collaborative filtering. We present two implementation algorithms of HCF for content recommendation and content dissemination. Experiment results demonstrate that our approach improve the recommendation quality in a real world social network for content creating and sharing.
Verifying the DPLL Algorithm in Dafny
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2019
Year: 2019

Modern high-performance SAT solvers quickly solve large satisfiability instances that occur in practice. If the instance is satisfiable, then the SAT solver can provide a witness which can be checked independently in the form of a satisfying truth assignment. However, if the instance is unsatisfiable, the certificates could be exponentially large or the SAT solver might not be able to output certificates. The implementation of the SAT solver should then be trusted not to contain bugs. However, the data structures and algorithms implemented by a typical high-performance SAT solver are complex enough to allow for subtle programming errors. To counter this issue, we build a verified SAT solver using the Dafny system. We discuss its implementation in the present article.
Video Affective Effects Prediction with Multi-modal Fusion and Shot-Long Temporal Context
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Predicting the emotional impact of videos using machine learning is a challenging task considering the varieties of modalities, the complicated temporal contex of the video as well as the time dependency of the emotional states. Feature extraction, multi-modal fusion and temporal context fusion are crucial stages for predicting valence and arousal values in the emotional impact, but have not been successfully exploited. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework with novel designs of modal structure and multi-modal fusion strategy. We select the most suitable modalities for valence and arousal tasks respectively and each modal feature is extracted using the modality-specific pre-trained deep model on large generic dataset. Two-time-scale structures, one for the intra-clip and the other for the inter-clip, are proposed to capture the temporal dependency of video content and emotion states. To combine the complementary information from multiple modalities, an effective and efficient residual-based progressive training strategy is proposed. Each modality is step-wisely combined into the multi-modal model, responsible for completing the missing parts of features. With all those improvements above, our proposed prediction framework achieves better performance on the LIRIS-ACCEDE dataset with a large margin compared to the state-of-the-art.
Technical Report -- Comparison of Direct Finite Element Simulation with Actuator Line Models and Vortex Models for Simulation of Turbulent Flow Past a Vertical Axis wind Turbine
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2019
Year: 2019

We compare three different methodologies for simulation of turbulent flow past a vertical axis wind turbine: (i) full resolution of the turbine blades in a Direct Finite Element Simulation (DFS), (ii) implicit representation of the turbine blades in a 3D Actuator Line Method (ALM), and (iii) implicit representation of the turbine blades as sources in a Vortex Model (VM). The integrated normal force on one blade is computed for a range of azimuthal angles, and is compared to experimental data for the different tip speed ratios, 2.55, 3.44 and 4.09.
Extracting Aspects Hierarchies using Rhetorical Structure Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a novel approach to generate aspect hierarchies that proved to be consistently correct compared with human-generated hierarchies. We present an unsupervised technique using Rhetorical Structure Theory and graph analysis. We evaluated our approach based on 100,000 reviews from Amazon and achieved an astonishing 80% coverage compared with human-generated hierarchies coded in ConceptNet. The method could be easily extended with a sentiment analysis model and used to describe sentiment on different levels of aspect granularity. Hence, besides the flat aspect structure, we can differentiate between aspects and describe if the charging aspect is related to battery or price.