OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Maneuver Identification Challenge
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

AI algorithms that identify maneuvers from trajectory data could play an important role in improving flight safety and pilot training. AI challenges allow diverse teams to work together to solve hard problems and are an effective tool for developing AI solutions. AI challenges are also a key driver of AI computational requirements. The Maneuver Identification Challenge hosted at maneuver-id.mit.edu provides thousands of trajectories collected from pilots practicing in flight simulators, descriptions of maneuvers, and examples of these maneuvers performed by experienced pilots. Each trajectory consists of positions, velocities, and aircraft orientations normalized to a common coordinate system. Construction of the data set required significant data architecture to transform flight simulator logs into AI ready data, which included using a supercomputer for deduplication and data conditioning. There are three proposed challenges. The first challenge is separating physically plausible (good) trajectories from unfeasible (bad) trajectories. Human labeled good and bad trajectories are provided to aid in this task. Subsequent challenges are to label trajectories with their intended maneuvers and to assess the quality of those maneuvers.
Robust High-Resolution Video Matting with Temporal Guidance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce a robust, real-time, high-resolution human video matting method that achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Our method is much lighter than previous approaches and can process 4K at 76 FPS and HD at 104 FPS on an Nvidia GTX 1080Ti GPU. Unlike most existing methods that perform video matting frame-by-frame as independent images, our method uses a recurrent architecture to exploit temporal information in videos and achieves significant improvements in temporal coherence and matting quality. Furthermore, we propose a novel training strategy that enforces our network on both matting and segmentation objectives. This significantly improves our model's robustness. Our method does not require any auxiliary inputs such as a trimap or a pre-captured background image, so it can be widely applied to existing human matting applications.
SOMTimeS: Self Organizing Maps for Time Series Clustering and its Application to Serious Illness Conversations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

There is an increasing demand for scalable algorithms capable of clustering and analyzing large time series datasets. The Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) is a type of unsupervised artificial neural network for visualizing and clustering complex data, reducing the dimensionality of data, and selecting influential features. Like all clustering methods, the SOM requires a measure of similarity between input data (in this work time series). Dynamic time warping (DTW) is one such measure, and a top performer given that it accommodates the distortions when aligning time series. Despite its use in clustering, DTW is limited in practice because it is quadratic in runtime complexity with the length of the time series data. To address this, we present a new DTW-based clustering method, called SOMTimeS (a Self-Organizing Map for TIME Series), that scales better and runs faster than other DTW-based clustering algorithms, and has similar performance accuracy. The computational performance of SOMTimeS stems from its ability to prune unnecessary DTW computations during the SOM's training phase. We also implemented a similar pruning strategy for K-means for comparison with one of the top performing clustering algorithms. We evaluated the pruning effectiveness, accuracy, execution time and scalability on 112 benchmark time series datasets from the University of California, Riverside classification archive. We showed that for similar accuracy, the speed-up achieved for SOMTimeS and K-means was 1.8x on average; however, rates varied between 1x and 18x depending on the dataset. SOMTimeS and K-means pruned 43% and 50% of the total DTW computations, respectively. We applied SOMtimeS to natural language conversation data collected as part of a large healthcare cohort study of patient-clinician serious illness conversations to demonstrate the algorithm's utility with complex, temporally sequenced phenomena.
A New Interpolation Approach and Corresponding Instance-Based Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Starting from finding approximate value of a function, introduces the measure of approximation-degree between two numerical values, proposes the concepts of "strict approximation" and "strict approximation region", then, derives the corresponding one-dimensional interpolation methods and formulas, and then presents a calculation model called "sum-times-difference formula" for high-dimensional interpolation, thus develops a new interpolation approach, that is, ADB interpolation. ADB interpolation is applied to the interpolation of actual functions with satisfactory results. Viewed from principle and effect, the interpolation approach is of novel idea, and has the advantages of simple calculation, stable accuracy, facilitating parallel processing, very suiting for high-dimensional interpolation, and easy to be extended to the interpolation of vector valued functions. Applying the approach to instance-based learning, a new instance-based learning method, learning using ADB interpolation, is obtained. The learning method is of unique technique, which has also the advantages of definite mathematical basis, implicit distance weights, avoiding misclassification, high efficiency, and wide range of applications, as well as being interpretable, etc. In principle, this method is a kind of learning by analogy, which and the deep learning that belongs to inductive learning can complement each other, and for some problems, the two can even have an effect of "different approaches but equal results" in big data and cloud computing environment. Thus, the learning using ADB interpolation can also be regarded as a kind of "wide learning" that is dual to deep learning.
Exact Decoding Probability of Sparse Random Linear Network Coding for Reliable Multicast
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Sparse random linear network coding (SRLNC) used as a class of erasure codes to ensure the reliability of multicast communications has been widely investigated. However, an exact expression for the decoding success probability of SRLNC is still unknown, and existing expressions are either asymptotic or approximate. In this paper, we derive an exact expression for the decoding success probability of SRLNC. The key to achieving this is to propose a criterion that a vector is contained in a subspace. To obtain this criterion, we construct a basis of a subspace, with respect to this basis, the coordinates of a vector are known, based on a maximal linearly independent set of the columns of a matrix. The exactness and the computation of the derived expression are demonstrated by a simple example.
A Program Instrumentation for Prefix-Based Tracing in Message-Passing Concurrency
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2021
Year: 2021

The execution of concurrent programs generally involves some degree of nondeterminism, mostly due to the relative speeds of the concurrent processes. As a consequence, reproducibility is often challenging. This problem has been traditionally tackled by a combination of tracing and replay. In this paper, we introduce a program instrumentation for "prefix-based tracing" that combines both tracing and replay. In the general case, the program is instrumented with a partial trace, so that the execution first follows the partial trace (replay) and, then, proceeds nondeterministically, eventually producing a trace of the complete execution as a side effect. Observe that traditional tracing and replay are particular cases of our approach when an empty trace is provided (pure tracing) and when a full trace is provided (pure replay), respectively.
SLIM: Explicit Slot-Intent Mapping with BERT for Joint Multi-Intent Detection and Slot Filling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Utterance-level intent detection and token-level slot filling are two key tasks for natural language understanding (NLU) in task-oriented systems. Most existing approaches assume that only a single intent exists in an utterance. However, there are often multiple intents within an utterance in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we propose a multi-intent NLU framework, called SLIM, to jointly learn multi-intent detection and slot filling based on BERT. To fully exploit the existing annotation data and capture the interactions between slots and intents, SLIM introduces an explicit slot-intent classifier to learn the many-to-one mapping between slots and intents. Empirical results on three public multi-intent datasets demonstrate (1) the superior performance of SLIM compared to the current state-of-the-art for NLU with multiple intents and (2) the benefits obtained from the slot-intent classifier.
Photos Are All You Need for Reciprocal Recommendation in Online Dating
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Recommender Systems are algorithms that predict a user's preference for an item. Reciprocal Recommenders are a subset of recommender systems, where the items in question are people, and the objective is therefore to predict a bidirectional preference relation. They are used in settings such as online dating services and social networks. In particular, images provided by users are a crucial part of user preference, and one that is not exploited much in the literature. We present a novel method of interpreting user image preference history and using this to make recommendations. We train a recurrent neural network to learn a user's preferences and make predictions of reciprocal preference relations that can be used to make recommendations that satisfy both users. We show that our proposed system achieves an F1 score of 0.87 when using only photographs to produce reciprocal recommendations on a large real world online dating dataset. Our system significantly outperforms on the state of the art in both content-based and collaborative filtering systems.
Training and Profiling a Pediatric Emotion Recognition Classifier on Mobile Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Implementing automated emotion recognition on mobile devices could provide an accessible diagnostic and therapeutic tool for those who struggle to recognize emotion, including children with developmental behavioral conditions such as autism. Although recent advances have been made in building more accurate emotion classifiers, existing models are too computationally expensive to be deployed on mobile devices. In this study, we optimized and profiled various machine learning models designed for inference on edge devices and were able to match previous state of the art results for emotion recognition on children. Our best model, a MobileNet-V2 network pre-trained on ImageNet, achieved 65.11% balanced accuracy and 64.19% F1-score on CAFE, while achieving a 45-millisecond inference latency on a Motorola Moto G6 phone. This balanced accuracy is only 1.79% less than the current state of the art for CAFE, which used a model that contains 26.62x more parameters and was unable to run on the Moto G6, even when fully optimized. This work validates that with specialized design and optimization techniques, machine learning models can become lightweight enough for deployment on mobile devices and still achieve high accuracies on difficult image classification tasks.
Attention-based Neural Load Forecasting: A Dynamic Feature Selection Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Encoder-decoder-based recurrent neural network (RNN) has made significant progress in sequence-to-sequence learning tasks such as machine translation and conversational models. Recent works have shown the advantage of this type of network in dealing with various time series forecasting tasks. The present paper focuses on the problem of multi-horizon short-term load forecasting, which plays a key role in the power system's planning and operation. Leveraging the encoder-decoder RNN, we develop an attention model to select the relevant features and similar temporal information adaptively. First, input features are assigned with different weights by a feature selection attention layer, while the updated historical features are encoded by a bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layer. Then, a decoder with hierarchical temporal attention enables a similar day selection, which re-evaluates the importance of historical information at each time step. Numerical results tested on the dataset of the global energy forecasting competition 2014 show that our proposed model significantly outperforms some existing forecasting schemes.
Quadratic mutual information regularization in real-time deep CNN models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, regularized lightweight deep convolutional neural network models, capable of effectively operating in real-time on devices with restricted computational power for high-resolution video input are proposed. Furthermore, a novel regularization method motivated by the Quadratic Mutual Information, in order to improve the generalization ability of the utilized models is proposed. Extensive experiments on various binary classification problems involved in autonomous systems are performed, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed models as well as of the proposed regularizer.
Magnetic Field Sensing for Pedestrian and Robot Indoor Positioning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper we address the problem of indoor localization using magnetic field data in two setups, when data is collected by (i) human-held mobile phone and (ii) by localization robots that perturb magnetic data with their own electromagnetic field. For the first setup, we revise the state of the art approaches and propose a novel extended pipeline to benefit from the presence of magnetic anomalies in indoor environment created by different ferromagnetic objects. We capture changes of the Earth's magnetic field due to indoor magnetic anomalies and transform them in multi-variate times series. We then convert temporal patterns into visual ones. We use methods of Recurrence Plots, Gramian Angular Fields and Markov Transition Fields to represent magnetic field time series as image sequences. We regress the continuous values of user position in a deep neural network that combines convolutional and recurrent layers. For the second setup, we analyze how magnetic field data get perturbed by robots' electromagnetic field. We add an alignment step to the main pipeline, in order to compensate the mismatch between train and test sets obtained by different robots. We test our methods on two public (MagPie and IPIN'20) and one proprietary (Hyundai department store) datasets. We report evaluation results and show that our methods outperform the state of the art methods by a large margin.
Finite-time System Identification and Adaptive Control in Autoregressive Exogenous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Autoregressive exogenous (ARX) systems are the general class of input-output dynamical systems used for modeling stochastic linear dynamical systems (LDS) including partially observable LDS such as LQG systems. In this work, we study the problem of system identification and adaptive control of unknown ARX systems. We provide finite-time learning guarantees for the ARX systems under both open-loop and closed-loop data collection. Using these guarantees, we design adaptive control algorithms for unknown ARX systems with arbitrary strongly convex or convex quadratic regulating costs. Under strongly convex cost functions, we design an adaptive control algorithm based on online gradient descent to design and update the controllers that are constructed via a convex controller reparametrization. We show that our algorithm has $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret via explore and commit approach and if the model estimates are updated in epochs using closed-loop data collection, it attains the optimal regret of $\text{polylog}(T)$ after $T$ time-steps of interaction. For the case of convex quadratic cost functions, we propose an adaptive control algorithm that deploys the optimism in the face of uncertainty principle to design the controller. In this setting, we show that the explore and commit approach has a regret upper bound of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(T^{2/3})$, and the adaptive control with continuous model estimate updates attains $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{T})$ regret after $T$ time-steps.
A New Sentence Ordering Method Using BERT Pretrained Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Building systems with capability of natural language understanding (NLU) has been one of the oldest areas of AI. An essential component of NLU is to detect logical succession of events contained in a text. The task of sentence ordering is proposed to learn succession of events with applications in AI tasks. The performance of previous works employing statistical methods is poor, while the neural networks-based approaches are in serious need of large corpora for model learning. In this paper, we propose a method for sentence ordering which does not need a training phase and consequently a large corpus for learning. To this end, we generate sentence embedding using BERT pre-trained model and measure sentence similarity using cosine similarity score. We suggest this score as an indicator of sequential events' level of coherence. We finally sort the sentences through brute-force search to maximize overall similarities of the sequenced sentences. Our proposed method outperformed other baselines on ROCStories, a corpus of 5-sentence human-made stories. The method is specifically more efficient than neural network-based methods when no huge corpus is available. Among other advantages of this method are its interpretability and needlessness to linguistic knowledge.
Truly Perfect Samplers for Data Streams and Sliding Windows
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

In the $G$-sampling problem, the goal is to output an index $i$ of a vector $f \in\mathbb{R}^n$, such that for all coordinates $j \in [n]$, \[\textbf{Pr}[i=j] = (1 \pm ε) \frac{G(f_j)}{\sum_{k\in[n]} G(f_k)} + γ,\] where $G:\mathbb{R} \to \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$ is some non-negative function. If $ε= 0$ and $γ= 1/\text{poly}(n)$, the sampler is called perfect. In the data stream model, $f$ is defined implicitly by a sequence of updates to its coordinates, and the goal is to design such a sampler in small space. Jayaram and Woodruff (FOCS 2018) gave the first perfect $L_p$ samplers in turnstile streams, where $G(x)=|x|^p$, using $\text{polylog}(n)$ space for $p\in(0,2]$. However, to date all known sampling algorithms are not truly perfect, since their output distribution is only point-wise $γ= 1/\text{poly}(n)$ close to the true distribution. This small error can be significant when samplers are run many times on successive portions of a stream, and leak potentially sensitive information about the data stream. In this work, we initiate the study of truly perfect samplers, with $ε= γ= 0$, and comprehensively investigate their complexity in the data stream and sliding window models. Abstract truncated due to arXiv limits; please see paper for full abstract.
An Introduction to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Method for Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

The goal of this article is to introduce the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method -- a Hamiltonian dynamics-inspired algorithm for sampling from a Gibbs density $π(x) \propto e^{-f(x)}$. We focus on the "idealized" case, where one can compute continuous trajectories exactly. We show that idealized HMC preserves $π$ and we establish its convergence when $f$ is strongly convex and smooth.
Canoe : A System for Collaborative Learning for Neural Nets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

For highly distributed environments such as edge computing, collaborative learning approaches eschew the dependence on a global, shared model, in favor of models tailored for each location. Creating tailored models for individual learning contexts reduces the amount of data transfer, while collaboration among peers provides acceptable model performance. Collaboration assumes, however, the availability of knowledge transfer mechanisms, which are not trivial for deep learning models where knowledge isn't easily attributed to precise model slices. We present Canoe - a framework that facilitates knowledge transfer for neural networks. Canoe provides new system support for dynamically extracting significant parameters from a helper node's neural network and uses this with a multi-model boosting-based approach to improve the predictive performance of the target node. The evaluation of Canoe with different PyTorch and TensorFlow neural network models demonstrates that the knowledge transfer mechanism improves the model's adaptiveness to changes up to 3.5X compared to learning in isolation, while affording several magnitudes reduction in data movement costs compared to federated learning.
COVID-19 reproduction number estimated from SEIR model: association with people's mobility in 2020
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

This paper is an exploratory study of two epidemiological questions on a worldwide basis. How fast is the disease spreading? Are the restrictions (especially mobility restrictions) for people bring the expected effect? To answer the first question, we propose a tool for estimating the reproduction number of epidemic (the number of secondary infections $R_t$) based on the SEIR model and compare it with an non-model $R_t$ estimation. To measure the $R_t$ of COVID-19 for different countries, real-time data on coronavirus daily cases of infections, recoveries, deaths are retrieved from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University. To assess the effectiveness of mobility restrictions for the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the correlations between the $R_t$ and people's mobility (based on the Apple mobility index) are presented. The correlations were considered for 12 countries and for most of them, the correlations are negative. This shows a delay in the implementation of mobility restrictions - the countries imposed them in response to growth of new COVID-19 cases, rather than preventively.
Injecting Text in Self-Supervised Speech Pretraining
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Self-supervised pretraining for Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) has shown varied degrees of success. In this paper, we propose to jointly learn representations during pretraining from two different modalities: speech and text. The proposed method, tts4pretrain complements the power of contrastive learning in self-supervision with linguistic/lexical representations derived from synthesized speech, effectively learning from untranscribed speech and unspoken text. Lexical learning in the speech encoder is enforced through an additional sequence loss term that is coupled with contrastive loss during pretraining. We demonstrate that this novel pretraining method yields Word Error Rate (WER) reductions of 10% relative on the well-benchmarked, Librispeech task over a state-of-the-art baseline pretrained with wav2vec2.0 only. The proposed method also serves as an effective strategy to compensate for the lack of transcribed speech, effectively matching the performance of 5000 hours of transcribed speech with just 100 hours of transcribed speech on the AMI meeting transcription task. Finally, we demonstrate WER reductions of up to 15% on an in-house Voice Search task over traditional pretraining. Incorporating text into encoder pretraining is complimentary to rescoring with a larger or in-domain language model, resulting in additional 6% relative reduction in WER.