OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
LRTuner: A Learning Rate Tuner for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

One very important hyperparameter for training deep neural networks is the learning rate schedule of the optimizer. The choice of learning rate schedule determines the computational cost of getting close to a minima, how close you actually get to the minima, and most importantly the kind of local minima (wide/narrow) attained. The kind of minima attained has a significant impact on the generalization accuracy of the network. Current systems employ hand tuned learning rate schedules, which are painstakingly tuned for each network and dataset. Given that the state space of schedules is huge, finding a satisfactory learning rate schedule can be very time consuming. In this paper, we present LRTuner, a method for tuning the learning rate as training proceeds. Our method works with any optimizer, and we demonstrate results on SGD with Momentum, and Adam optimizers. We extensively evaluate LRTuner on multiple datasets, models, and across optimizers. We compare favorably against standard learning rate schedules for the given dataset and models, including ImageNet on Resnet-50, Cifar-10 on Resnet-18, and SQuAD fine-tuning on BERT. For example on ImageNet with Resnet-50, LRTuner shows up to 0.2% absolute gains in test accuracy compared to the hand-tuned baseline schedule. Moreover, LRTuner can achieve the same accuracy as the baseline schedule in 29% less optimization steps.
Longer Version for "Deep Context-Encoding Network for Retinal Image Captioning"
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Automatically generating medical reports for retinal images is one of the promising ways to help ophthalmologists reduce their workload and improve work efficiency. In this work, we propose a new context-driven encoding network to automatically generate medical reports for retinal images. The proposed model is mainly composed of a multi-modal input encoder and a fused-feature decoder. Our experimental results show that our proposed method is capable of effectively leveraging the interactive information between the input image and context, i.e., keywords in our case. The proposed method creates more accurate and meaningful reports for retinal images than baseline models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. This performance is shown in several commonly used metrics for the medical report generation task: BLEU-avg (+16%), CIDEr (+10.2%), and ROUGE (+8.6%).
A Joint Power Splitting, Active and Passive Beamforming Optimization Framework for IRS Assisted MIMO SWIPT System
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

This paper considers an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multi-input multi-output (MIMO) power splitting (PS) based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system with multiple PS receivers (PSRs). The objective is to maximize the achievable data rate of the system by jointly optimizing the PS ratios at the PSRs, the active transmit beamforming (ATB) at the access point (AP), and the passive reflective beamforming (PRB) at the IRS, while the constraints on maximum transmission power at the AP, the reflective phase shift of each element at the IRS, the individual minimum harvested energy requirement of each PSR, and the domain of PS ratio of each PSR are all satisfied. For this unsolved problem, however, since the optimization variables are intricately coupled and the constraints are conflicting, the formulated problem is non-convex, and cannot be addressed by employing exist approaches directly. To this end, we propose a joint optimization framework to solve this problem. Particularly, we reformulate it as an equivalent form by employing the Lagrangian dual transform and the fractional programming transform, and decompose the transformed problem into several sub-problems. Then, we propose an alternate optimization algorithm by capitalizing on the dual sub-gradient method, the successive convex approximation method, and the penalty-based majorization-minimization approach, to solve the sub-problems iteratively, and obtain the optimal solutions in nearly closed-forms. Numerical simulation results verify the effectiveness of the IRS in SWIPT system and indicate that the proposed algorithm offers a substantial performance gain.
Defending Pre-trained Language Models from Adversarial Word Substitutions Without Performance Sacrifice
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Pre-trained contextualized language models (PrLMs) have led to strong performance gains in downstream natural language understanding tasks. However, PrLMs can still be easily fooled by adversarial word substitution, which is one of the most challenging textual adversarial attack methods. Existing defence approaches suffer from notable performance loss and complexities. Thus, this paper presents a compact and performance-preserved framework, Anomaly Detection with Frequency-Aware Randomization (ADFAR). In detail, we design an auxiliary anomaly detection classifier and adopt a multi-task learning procedure, by which PrLMs are able to distinguish adversarial input samples. Then, in order to defend adversarial word substitution, a frequency-aware randomization process is applied to those recognized adversarial input samples. Empirical results show that ADFAR significantly outperforms those newly proposed defense methods over various tasks with much higher inference speed. Remarkably, ADFAR does not impair the overall performance of PrLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/LilyNLP/ADFAR
How effective are Graph Neural Networks in Fraud Detection for Network Data?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Graph-based Neural Networks (GNNs) are recent models created for learning representations of nodes (and graphs), which have achieved promising results when detecting patterns that occur in large-scale data relating different entities. Among these patterns, financial fraud stands out for its socioeconomic relevance and for presenting particular challenges, such as the extreme imbalance between the positive (fraud) and negative (legitimate transactions) classes, and the concept drift (i.e., statistical properties of the data change over time). Since GNNs are based on message propagation, the representation of a node is strongly impacted by its neighbors and by the network's hubs, amplifying the imbalance effects. Recent works attempt to adapt undersampling and oversampling strategies for GNNs in order to mitigate this effect without, however, accounting for concept drift. In this work, we conduct experiments to evaluate existing techniques for detecting network fraud, considering the two previous challenges. For this, we use real data sets, complemented by synthetic data created from a new methodology introduced here. Based on this analysis, we propose a series of improvement points that should be investigated in future research.
Multiscale IoU: A Metric for Evaluation of Salient Object Detection with Fine Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

General-purpose object-detection algorithms often dismiss the fine structure of detected objects. This can be traced back to how their proposed regions are evaluated. Our goal is to renegotiate the trade-off between the generality of these algorithms and their coarse detections. In this work, we present a new metric that is a marriage of a popular evaluation metric, namely Intersection over Union (IoU), and a geometrical concept, called fractal dimension. We propose Multiscale IoU (MIoU) which allows comparison between the detected and ground-truth regions at multiple resolution levels. Through several reproducible examples, we show that MIoU is indeed sensitive to the fine boundary structures which are completely overlooked by IoU and f1-score. We further examine the overall reliability of MIoU by comparing its distribution with that of IoU on synthetic and real-world datasets of objects. We intend this work to re-initiate exploration of new evaluation methods for object-detection algorithms.
Memory-Efficient Differentiable Transformer Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) is successfully applied in many vision tasks. However, directly using DARTS for Transformers is memory-intensive, which renders the search process infeasible. To this end, we propose a multi-split reversible network and combine it with DARTS. Specifically, we devise a backpropagation-with-reconstruction algorithm so that we only need to store the last layer's outputs. By relieving the memory burden for DARTS, it allows us to search with larger hidden size and more candidate operations. We evaluate the searched architecture on three sequence-to-sequence datasets, i.e., WMT'14 English-German, WMT'14 English-French, and WMT'14 English-Czech. Experimental results show that our network consistently outperforms standard Transformers across the tasks. Moreover, our method compares favorably with big-size Evolved Transformers, reducing search computation by an order of magnitude.
Noise Classification Aided Attention-Based Neural Network for Monaural Speech Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes an noise type classification aided attention-based neural network approach for monaural speech enhancement. The network is constructed based on a previous work by introducing a noise classification subnetwork into the structure and taking the classification embedding into the attention mechanism for guiding the network to make better feature extraction. Specifically, to make the network an end-to-end way, an audio encoder and decoder constructed by temporal convolution is used to make transformation between waveform and spectrogram. Additionally, our model is composed of two long short term memory (LSTM) based encoders, two attention mechanism, a noise classifier and a speech mask generator. Experiments show that, compared with OM-LSA and the previous work, the proposed noise classification aided attention-based approach can achieve better performance in terms of speech quality (PESQ). More promisingly, our approach has better generalization ability to unseen noise conditions.
Deep Reinforcement Based Optimization of Function Splitting in Virtualized Radio Access Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Virtualized Radio Access Network (vRAN) is one of the key enablers of future wireless networks as it brings the agility to the radio access network (RAN) architecture and offers degrees of design freedom. Yet, it also creates a challenging problem on how to design the functional split configuration. In this paper, a deep reinforcement learning approach is proposed to optimize function splitting in vRAN. A learning paradigm is developed that optimizes the location of functions in the RAN. These functions can be placed either at a central/cloud unit (CU) or a distributed unit (DU). This problem is formulated as constrained neural combinatorial reinforcement learning to minimize the total network cost. In this solution, a policy gradient method with Lagrangian relaxation is applied that uses a stacked long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network architecture to approximate the policy. Then, a sampling technique with a temperature hyperparameter is applied for the inference process. The results show that our proposed solution can learn the optimal function split decision and solve the problem with a $0.4\%$ optimality gap. Moreover, our method can reduce the cost by up to $320\%$ compared to a distributed-RAN (D-RAN). We also conclude that altering the traffic load and routing cost does not significantly degrade the optimality performance.
Semi-orthogonal Embedding for Efficient Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present the efficiency of semi-orthogonal embedding for unsupervised anomaly segmentation. The multi-scale features from pre-trained CNNs are recently used for the localized Mahalanobis distances with significant performance. However, the increased feature size is problematic to scale up to the bigger CNNs, since it requires the batch-inverse of multi-dimensional covariance tensor. Here, we generalize an ad-hoc method, random feature selection, into semi-orthogonal embedding for robust approximation, cubically reducing the computational cost for the inverse of multi-dimensional covariance tensor. With the scrutiny of ablation studies, the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art with significant margins for the MVTec AD, KolektorSDD, KolektorSDD2, and mSTC datasets. The theoretical and empirical analyses offer insights and verification of our straightforward yet cost-effective approach.
Bio-inspired visual attention for silicon retinas based on spiking neural networks applied to pattern classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Visual attention can be defined as the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively focusing on a discrete aspect of sensory cues while disregarding other perceivable information. This biological mechanism, more specifically saliency detection, has long been used in multimedia indexing to drive the analysis only on relevant parts of images or videos for further processing. The recent advent of silicon retinas (or event cameras -- sensors that measure pixel-wise changes in brightness and output asynchronous events accordingly) raises the question of how to adapt attention and saliency to the unconventional type of such sensors' output. Silicon retina aims to reproduce the biological retina behaviour. In that respect, they produce punctual events in time that can be construed as neural spikes and interpreted as such by a neural network. In particular, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) represent an asynchronous type of artificial neural network closer to biology than traditional artificial networks, mainly because they seek to mimic the dynamics of neural membrane and action potentials over time. SNNs receive and process information in the form of spike trains. Therefore, they make for a suitable candidate for the efficient processing and classification of incoming event patterns measured by silicon retinas. In this paper, we review the biological background behind the attentional mechanism, and introduce a case study of event videos classification with SNNs, using a biology-grounded low-level computational attention mechanism, with interesting preliminary results.
A Protection Method of Trained CNN Model with Secret Key from Unauthorized Access
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a novel method for protecting convolutional neural network (CNN) models with a secret key set so that unauthorized users without the correct key set cannot access trained models. The method enables us to protect not only from copyright infringement but also the functionality of a model from unauthorized access without any noticeable overhead. We introduce three block-wise transformations with a secret key set to generate learnable transformed images: pixel shuffling, negative/positive transformation, and FFX encryption. Protected models are trained by using transformed images. The results of experiments with the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets show that the performance of a protected model was close to that of non-protected models when the key set was correct, while the accuracy severely dropped when an incorrect key set was given. The protected model was also demonstrated to be robust against various attacks. Compared with the state-of-the-art model protection with passports, the proposed method does not have any additional layers in the network, and therefore, there is no overhead during training and inference processes.
Exploration and Exploitation: Two Ways to Improve Chinese Spelling Correction Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

A sequence-to-sequence learning with neural networks has empirically proven to be an effective framework for Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC), which takes a sentence with some spelling errors as input and outputs the corrected one. However, CSC models may fail to correct spelling errors covered by the confusion sets, and also will encounter unseen ones. We propose a method, which continually identifies the weak spots of a model to generate more valuable training instances, and apply a task-specific pre-training strategy to enhance the model. The generated adversarial examples are gradually added to the training set. Experimental results show that such an adversarial training method combined with the pretraining strategy can improve both the generalization and robustness of multiple CSC models across three different datasets, achieving stateof-the-art performance for CSC task.
Bounded logit attention: Learning to explain image classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Explainable artificial intelligence is the attempt to elucidate the workings of systems too complex to be directly accessible to human cognition through suitable side-information referred to as "explanations". We present a trainable explanation module for convolutional image classifiers we call bounded logit attention (BLA). The BLA module learns to select a subset of the convolutional feature map for each input instance, which then serves as an explanation for the classifier's prediction. BLA overcomes several limitations of the instancewise feature selection method "learning to explain" (L2X) introduced by Chen et al. (2018): 1) BLA scales to real-world sized image classification problems, and 2) BLA offers a canonical way to learn explanations of variable size. Due to its modularity BLA lends itself to transfer learning setups and can also be employed as a post-hoc add-on to trained classifiers. Beyond explainability, BLA may serve as a general purpose method for differentiable approximation of subset selection. In a user study we find that BLA explanations are preferred over explanations generated by the popular (Grad-)CAM method.
Insights into the performance of loosely-coupled FSI schemes based on Robin boundary conditions
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

Robin boundary conditions are a natural consequence of employing Nitsche's method for imposing the kinematic velocity constraint at the fluid-solid interface. Loosely-coupled FSI schemes based on Dirichlet-Robin or Robin-Robin coupling have been demonstrated to improve the stability of such schemes with respect to added-mass. This paper aims to offer some numerical insights into the performance characteristics of such loosely-coupled FSI schemes based on Robin boundary conditions. Using numerical examples, we demonstrate that the improved stability due to the added damping term is actually at the expense of important dynamic characteristics of the structural sub-problem.
Learning Free-Form Deformation for 3D Face Reconstruction from In-The-Wild Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The 3D Morphable Model (3DMM), which is a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based statistical model that represents a 3D face using linear basis functions, has shown promising results for reconstructing 3D faces from single-view in-the-wild images. However, 3DMM has restricted representation power due to the limited number of 3D scans and the global linear basis. To address the limitations of 3DMM, we propose a straightforward learning-based method that reconstructs a 3D face mesh through Free-Form Deformation (FFD) for the first time. FFD is a geometric modeling method that embeds a reference mesh within a parallelepiped grid and deforms the mesh by moving the sparse control points of the grid. As FFD is based on mathematically defined basis functions, it has no limitation in representation power. Thus, we can recover accurate 3D face meshes by estimating appropriate deviation of control points as deformation parameters. Although both 3DMM and FFD are parametric models, it is difficult to predict the effect of the 3DMM parameters on the face shape, while the deformation parameters of FFD are interpretable in terms of their effect on the final shape of the mesh. This practical advantage of FFD allows the resulting mesh and control points to serve as a good starting point for 3D face modeling, in that ordinary users can fine-tune the mesh by using widely available 3D software tools. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate how our method successfully estimates the 3D face geometry and facial expressions from 2D face images, achieving comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods.
Collective Information Security in Large-Scale Urban Protests: the Case of Hong Kong
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill protests in Hong Kong present a rich context for exploring information security practices among protesters due to their large-scale urban setting and highly digitalised nature. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 11 participants of these protests. Research findings reveal how protesters favoured Telegram and relied on its security for internal communication and organisation of on-the-ground collective action; were organised in small private groups and large public groups to enable collective action; adopted tactics and technologies that enable pseudonymity; and developed a variety of strategies to detect compromises and to achieve forms of forward secrecy and post-compromise security when group members were (presumed) arrested. We further show how group administrators had assumed the roles of leaders in these 'leaderless' protests and were critical to collective protest efforts.
SemEval-2021 Task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper introduces the SemEval-2021 shared task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning (ReCAM). This shared task is designed to help evaluate the ability of machines in representing and understanding abstract concepts. Given a passage and the corresponding question, a participating system is expected to choose the correct answer from five candidates of abstract concepts in a cloze-style machine reading comprehension setup. Based on two typical definitions of abstractness, i.e., the imperceptibility and nonspecificity, our task provides three subtasks to evaluate the participating models. Specifically, Subtask 1 aims to evaluate how well a system can model concepts that cannot be directly perceived in the physical world. Subtask 2 focuses on models' ability in comprehending nonspecific concepts located high in a hypernym hierarchy given the context of a passage. Subtask 3 aims to provide some insights into models' generalizability over the two types of abstractness. During the SemEval-2021 official evaluation period, we received 23 submissions to Subtask 1 and 28 to Subtask 2. The participating teams additionally made 29 submissions to Subtask 3. The leaderboard and competition website can be found at https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/26153. The data and baseline code are available at https://github.com/boyuanzheng010/SemEval2021-Reading-Comprehension-of-Abstract-Meaning.