OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fun Selfie Filters in Face Recognition: Impact Assessment and Removal
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This work investigates the impact of fun selfie filters, which are frequently used to modify selfies, on face recognition systems. Based on a qualitative assessment and classification of freely available mobile applications, ten relevant fun selfie filters are selected to create a database. To this end, the selected filters are automatically applied to face images of public face image databases. Different state-of-the-art methods are used to evaluate the influence of fun selfie filters on the performance of face detection using dlib, RetinaFace, and a COTS method, sample quality estimated by FaceQNet and MagFace, and recognition accuracy employing ArcFace and a COTS algorithm. The obtained results indicate that selfie filters negatively affect face recognition modules, especially if fun selfie filters cover a large region of the face, where the mouth, nose, and eyes are covered. To mitigate such unwanted effects, a GAN-based selfie filter removal algorithm is proposed which consists of a segmentation module, a perceptual network, and a generation module. In a cross-database experiment the application of the presented selfie filter removal technique has shown to significantly improve the biometric performance of the underlying face recognition systems.
Data Analysis of Bulacan State University Faculty Scientific Publication Based on Google Scholar using Web Data Scraping Technique
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

The paper aims to analyze and monitor the research publication productivity of the faculty members of Bulacan State University. This paper compiles all the scientific publications from Bulacan State University (BulSU) and its external campuses as an index in Google Scholar. This study was intended to track and monitor the scientific productivity of the faculty members of Bulacan State University and each college and campus.
Indication as Prior Knowledge for Multimodal Disease Classification in Chest Radiographs with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

When a clinician refers a patient for an imaging exam, they include the reason (e.g. relevant patient history, suspected disease) in the scan request; this appears as the indication field in the radiology report. The interpretation and reporting of the image are substantially influenced by this request text, steering the radiologist to focus on particular aspects of the image. We use the indication field to drive better image classification, by taking a transformer network which is unimodally pre-trained on text (BERT) and fine-tuning it for multimodal classification of a dual image-text input. We evaluate the method on the MIMIC-CXR dataset, and present ablation studies to investigate the effect of the indication field on the classification performance. The experimental results show our approach achieves 87.8 average micro AUROC, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods for unimodal (84.4) and multimodal (86.0) classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/jacenkow/mmbt.
A Data-driven Multi-fidelity Physics-informed Learning Framework for Smart Manufacturing: A Composites Processing Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

Despite the successful implementations of physics-informed neural networks in different scientific domains, it has been shown that for complex nonlinear systems, achieving an accurate model requires extensive hyperparameter tuning, network architecture design, and costly and exhaustive training processes. To avoid such obstacles and make the training of physics-informed models less precarious, in this paper, a data-driven multi-fidelity physics-informed framework is proposed based on transfer learning principles. The framework incorporates the knowledge from low-fidelity auxiliary systems and limited labeled data from target actual system to significantly improve the performance of conventional physics-informed models. While minimizing the efforts of designing a complex task-specific network for the problem at hand, the proposed settings guide the physics-informed model towards a fast and efficient convergence to a global optimum. An adaptive weighting method is utilized to further enhance the optimization of the model composite loss function during the training process. A data-driven strategy is also introduced for maintaining high performance in subdomains with significant divergence between low- and high-fidelity behaviours. The heat transfer of composite materials undergoing a cure cycle is investigated as a case study to demonstrate the proposed framework's performance compared to conventional physics-informed models.
Automatic Issue Classifier: A Transfer Learning Framework for Classifying Issue Reports
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Issue tracking systems are used in the software industry for the facilitation of maintenance activities that keep the software robust and up to date with ever-changing industry requirements. Usually, users report issues that can be categorized into different labels such as bug reports, enhancement requests, and questions related to the software. Most of the issue tracking systems make the labelling of these issue reports optional for the issue submitter, which leads to a large number of unlabeled issue reports. In this paper, we present a state-of-the-art method to classify the issue reports into their respective categories i.e. bug, enhancement, and question. This is a challenging task because of the common use of informal language in the issue reports. Existing studies use traditional natural language processing approaches adopting key-word based features, which fail to incorporate the contextual relationship between words and therefore result in a high rate of false positives and false negatives. Moreover, previous works utilize a uni-label approach to classify the issue reports however, in reality, an issue-submitter can tag one issue report with more than one label at a time. This paper presents our approach to classify the issue reports in a multi-label setting. We use an off-the-shelf neural network called RoBERTa and fine-tune it to classify the issue reports. We validate our approach on issue reports belonging to numerous industrial projects from GitHub. We were able to achieve promising F-1 scores of 81%, 74%, and 80% for bug reports, enhancements, and questions, respectively. We also develop an industry tool called Automatic Issue Classifier (AIC), which automatically assigns labels to newly reported issues on GitHub repositories with high accuracy.
Adaptive Bandit Convex Optimization with Heterogeneous Curvature
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the problem of adversarial bandit convex optimization, that is, online learning over a sequence of arbitrary convex loss functions with only one function evaluation for each of them. While all previous works assume known and homogeneous curvature on these loss functions, we study a heterogeneous setting where each function has its own curvature that is only revealed after the learner makes a decision. We develop an efficient algorithm that is able to adapt to the curvature on the fly. Specifically, our algorithm not only recovers or \emph{even improves} existing results for several homogeneous settings, but also leads to surprising results for some heterogeneous settings -- for example, while Hazan and Levy (2014) showed that $\widetilde{O}(d^{3/2}\sqrt{T})$ regret is achievable for a sequence of $T$ smooth and strongly convex $d$-dimensional functions, our algorithm reveals that the same is achievable even if $T^{3/4}$ of them are not strongly convex, and sometimes even if a constant fraction of them are not strongly convex. Our approach is inspired by the framework of Bartlett et al. (2007) who studied a similar heterogeneous setting but with stronger gradient feedback. Extending their framework to the bandit feedback setting requires novel ideas such as lifting the feasible domain and using a logarithmically homogeneous self-concordant barrier regularizer.
Corralling a Larger Band of Bandits: A Case Study on Switching Regret for Linear Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the problem of combining and learning over a set of adversarial bandit algorithms with the goal of adaptively tracking the best one on the fly. The CORRAL algorithm of Agarwal et al. (2017) and its variants (Foster et al., 2020a) achieve this goal with a regret overhead of order $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{MT})$ where $M$ is the number of base algorithms and $T$ is the time horizon. The polynomial dependence on $M$, however, prevents one from applying these algorithms to many applications where $M$ is poly$(T)$ or even larger. Motivated by this issue, we propose a new recipe to corral a larger band of bandit algorithms whose regret overhead has only \emph{logarithmic} dependence on $M$ as long as some conditions are satisfied. As the main example, we apply our recipe to the problem of adversarial linear bandits over a $d$-dimensional $\ell_p$ unit-ball for $p \in (1,2]$. By corralling a large set of $T$ base algorithms, each starting at a different time step, our final algorithm achieves the first optimal switching regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{d S T})$ when competing against a sequence of comparators with $S$ switches (for some known $S$). We further extend our results to linear bandits over a smooth and strongly convex domain as well as unconstrained linear bandits.
Ultra-fine Entity Typing with Indirect Supervision from Natural Language Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The task of ultra-fine entity typing (UFET) seeks to predict diverse and free-form words or phrases that describe the appropriate types of entities mentioned in sentences. A key challenge for this task lies in the large amount of types and the scarcity of annotated data per type. Existing systems formulate the task as a multi-way classification problem and train directly or distantly supervised classifiers. This causes two issues: (i) the classifiers do not capture the type semantics since types are often converted into indices; (ii) systems developed in this way are limited to predicting within a pre-defined type set, and often fall short of generalizing to types that are rarely seen or unseen in training. This work presents LITE, a new approach that formulates entity typing as a natural language inference (NLI) problem, making use of (i) the indirect supervision from NLI to infer type information meaningfully represented as textual hypotheses and alleviate the data scarcity issue, as well as (ii) a learning-to-rank objective to avoid the pre-defining of a type set. Experiments show that, with limited training data, LITE obtains state-of-the-art performance on the UFET task. In addition, LITE demonstrates its strong generalizability, by not only yielding best results on other fine-grained entity typing benchmarks, more importantly, a pre-trained LITE system works well on new data containing unseen types.
Learning long-term music representations via hierarchical contextual constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Learning symbolic music representations, especially disentangled representations with probabilistic interpretations, has been shown to benefit both music understanding and generation. However, most models are only applicable to short-term music, while learning long-term music representations remains a challenging task. We have seen several studies attempting to learn hierarchical representations directly in an end-to-end manner, but these models have not been able to achieve the desired results and the training process is not stable. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn long-term symbolic music representations through contextual constraints. First, we use contrastive learning to pre-train a long-term representation by constraining its difference from the short-term representation (extracted by an off-the-shelf model). Then, we fine-tune the long-term representation by a hierarchical prediction model such that a good long-term representation (e.g., an 8-bar representation) can reconstruct the corresponding short-term ones (e.g., the 2-bar representations within the 8-bar range). Experiments show that our method stabilizes the training and the fine-tuning steps. In addition, the designed contextual constraints benefit both reconstruction and disentanglement, significantly outperforming the baselines.
Fairness-aware Configuration of Machine Learning Libraries
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

This paper investigates the parameter space of machine learning (ML) algorithms in aggravating or mitigating fairness bugs. Data-driven software is increasingly applied in social-critical applications where ensuring fairness is of paramount importance. The existing approaches focus on addressing fairness bugs by either modifying the input dataset or modifying the learning algorithms. On the other hand, the selection of hyperparameters, which provide finer controls of ML algorithms, may enable a less intrusive approach to influence the fairness. Can hyperparameters amplify or suppress discrimination present in the input dataset? How can we help programmers in detecting, understanding, and exploiting the role of hyperparameters to improve the fairness? We design three search-based software testing algorithms to uncover the precision-fairness frontier of the hyperparameter space. We complement these algorithms with statistical debugging to explain the role of these parameters in improving fairness. We implement the proposed approaches in the tool Parfait-ML (PARameter FAIrness Testing for ML Libraries) and show its effectiveness and utility over five mature ML algorithms as used in six social-critical applications. In these applications, our approach successfully identified hyperparameters that significantly improve (vis-a-vis the state-of-the-art techniques) the fairness without sacrificing precision. Surprisingly, for some algorithms (e.g., random forest), our approach showed that certain configuration of hyperparameters (e.g., restricting the search space of attributes) can amplify biases across applications. Upon further investigation, we found intuitive explanations of these phenomena, and the results corroborate similar observations from the literature.
Web-Based File Clustering and Indexing for Mindoro State University
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

The Web Based File Clustering and Indexing for Mindoro State University aim to organize data circulated over the Web into groups or collections to facilitate data availability and access and at the same time meet user preferences. The main benefits include increasing Web information accessibility, understanding users navigation behavior, improving information retrieval and content delivery on the Web. Web based file clustering could help in reaching the required documents that the user is searching for. In this paper a novel approach has been introduced for search results clustering that is based on the semantics of the retrieved documents rather than the syntax of the terms in those documents. Data clustering was used to improve the information retrieval from the collection of documents. Data were processed and analyzed using SPSS where the instrument was evaluated to test the reliability and validity of the measures used. Evaluation was based on a Likert scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor as described for the selected quality characteristics.
Performance of Downlink and Uplink Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

This letter analyzes the fundamental performance of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems. For downlink and uplink ISAC, the diversity orders are analyzed to evaluate the communication rate (CR) and the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) slopes are unveiled for the CR as well as the sensing rate (SR). Furthermore, the achievable downlink and uplink CR-SR regions are characterized. It is shown that ISAC can provide more degrees of freedom for both the CR and the SR than conventional frequency-division sensing and communications systems where isolated frequency bands are used for sensing and communications, respectively.
Tac3D: A Novel Vision-based Tactile Sensor for Measuring Forces Distribution and Estimating Friction Coefficient Distribution
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The importance of force perception in interacting with the environment was proven years ago. However, it is still a challenge to measure the contact force distribution accurately in real-time. In order to break through this predicament, we propose a new vision-based tactile sensor, the Tac3D sensor, for measuring the three-dimensional contact surface shape and contact force distribution. In this work, virtual binocular vision is first applied to the tactile sensor, which allows the Tac3D sensor to measure the three-dimensional tactile information in a simple and efficient way and has the advantages of simple structure, low computational costs, and inexpensive. Then, we used contact surface shape and force distribution to estimate the friction coefficient distribution in contact region. Further, combined with the global position of the tactile sensor, the 3D model of the object with friction coefficient distribution is reconstructed. These reconstruction experiments not only demonstrate the excellent performance of the Tac3D sensor but also imply the possibility to optimize the action planning in grasping based on the friction coefficient distribution of the object.
Application of Color Block Code in Image Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

Aiming at the high cost of embedding annotation watermark in a narrow small area and the information distortion caused by the change of annotation watermark image resolution, this paper proposes a color block code technology, which uses location information and color code to form recognizable graphics, which can not only simplify the annotation graphics, but also ensure the recognition efficiency. First, the constituent elements of color block code are designed, and then the coding and decoding method of color block code is proposed. Experiments show that color block code has high anti-scaling and anti-interference, and can be widely used in the labeling of small object surface and low resolution image.
RandomSEMO: Normality Learning Of Moving Objects For Video Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recent anomaly detection algorithms have shown powerful performance by adopting frame predicting autoencoders. However, these methods face two challenging circumstances. First, they are likely to be trained to be excessively powerful, generating even abnormal frames well, which leads to failure in detecting anomalies. Second, they are distracted by the large number of objects captured in both foreground and background. To solve these problems, we propose a novel superpixel-based video data transformation technique named Random Superpixel Erasing on Moving Objects (RandomSEMO) and Moving Object Loss (MOLoss), built on top of a simple lightweight autoencoder. RandomSEMO is applied to the moving object regions by randomly erasing their superpixels. It enforces the network to pay attention to the foreground objects and learn the normal features more effectively, rather than simply predicting the future frame. Moreover, MOLoss urges the model to focus on learning normal objects captured within RandomSEMO by amplifying the loss on the pixels near the moving objects. The experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-arts on three benchmarks.
New Approximation Algorithms for Fair $k$-median Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

The fair $k$-median problem is one of the important clustering problems. The current best approximation ratio is 4.675 for this problem with 1-fair violation, which was proposed by Bercea et al. [APPROX-RANDOM'2019]. As far as we know, there is no available approximation algorithm for the problem without any fair violation. In this paper, we consider the fair $k$-median problem in bounded doubling metrics and general metrics. We provide the first QPTAS for fair $k$-median problem in doubling metrics. Based on the split-tree decomposition of doubling metrics, we present a dynamic programming process to find the candidate centers, and apply min-cost max-flow method to deal with the assignment of clients. Especially, for overcoming the difficulties caused by the fair constraints, we construct an auxiliary graph and use minimum weighted perfect matching to get part of the cost. For the fair $k$-median problem in general metrics, we present an approximation algorithm with ratio $O(\log k)$, which is based on the embedding of given space into tree metrics, and the dynamic programming method. Our two approximation algorithms for the fair $k$-median problem are the first results for the corresponding problems without any fair violation, respectively.
LighTN: Light-weight Transformer Network for Performance-overhead Tradeoff in Point Cloud Downsampling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Compared with traditional task-irrelevant downsampling methods, task-oriented neural networks have shown improved performance in point cloud downsampling range. Recently, Transformer family of networks has shown a more powerful learning capacity in visual tasks. However, Transformer-based architectures potentially consume too many resources which are usually worthless for low overhead task networks in downsampling range. This paper proposes a novel light-weight Transformer network (LighTN) for task-oriented point cloud downsampling, as an end-to-end and plug-and-play solution. In LighTN, a single-head self-correlation module is presented to extract refined global contextual features, where three projection matrices are simultaneously eliminated to save resource overhead, and the output of symmetric matrix satisfies the permutation invariant. Then, we design a novel downsampling loss function to guide LighTN focuses on critical point cloud regions with more uniform distribution and prominent points coverage. Furthermore, We introduce a feed-forward network scaling mechanism to enhance the learnable capacity of LighTN according to the expand-reduce strategy. The result of extensive experiments on classification and registration tasks demonstrates LighTN can achieve state-of-the-art performance with limited resource overhead.
Model-based Testing of Scratch Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Learners are often introduced to programming via dedicated languages such as Scratch, where block-based commands are assembled visually in order to control the interactions of graphical sprites. Automated testing of such programs is an important prerequisite for supporting debugging, providing hints, or assessing learning outcomes. However, writing tests for Scratch programs can be challenging: The game-like and randomised nature of typical Scratch programs makes it difficult to identify specific timed input sequences used to control the programs. Furthermore, precise test assertions to check the resulting program states are incompatible with the fundamental principle of creative freedom in programming in Scratch, where correct program behaviour may be implemented with deviations in the graphical appearance or timing of the program. The event-driven and actor-oriented nature of Scratch programs, however, makes them a natural fit for describing program behaviour using finite state machines. In this paper, we introduce a model-based testing approach by extending Whisker, an automated testing framework for Scratch programs. The model-based extension describes expected program behaviour in terms of state machines, which makes it feasible to check the abstract behaviour of a program independent of exact timing and pixel-precise graphical details, and to automatically derive test inputs testing even challenging programs. A video demonstrating model-based testing with Whisker is available at the following URL: https://youtu.be/edgCNbGSGEY