OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-granularity for knowledge distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Considering the fact that students have different abilities to understand the knowledge imparted by teachers, a multi-granularity distillation mechanism is proposed for transferring more understandable knowledge for student networks. A multi-granularity self-analyzing module of the teacher network is designed, which enables the student network to learn knowledge from different teaching patterns. Furthermore, a stable excitation scheme is proposed for robust supervision for the student training. The proposed distillation mechanism can be embedded into different distillation frameworks, which are taken as baselines. Experiments show the mechanism improves the accuracy by 0.58% on average and by 1.08% in the best over the baselines, which makes its performance superior to the state-of-the-arts. It is also exploited that the student's ability of fine-tuning and robustness to noisy inputs can be improved via the proposed mechanism. The code is available at https://github.com/shaoeric/multi-granularity-distillation.
Automated Enterprise Architecture Model Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Metadata are like the steam engine of the 21st century, driving businesses and offer multiple enhancements. Nevertheless, many companies are unaware that these data can be used efficiently to improve their own operation. This is where the Enterprise Architecture Framework comes in. It empowers an organisation to get a clear view of their business, application, technical and physical layer. This modelling approach is an established method for organizations to take a deeper look into their structure and processes. The development of such models requires a great deal of effort, is carried out manually by interviewing stakeholders and requires continuous maintenance. Our new approach enables the automated mining of Enterprise Architecture models. The system uses common technologies to collect the metadata based on network traffic, log files and other information in an organisation. Based on this, the new approach generates EA models with the desired views points. Furthermore, a rule and knowledge-based reasoning is used to obtain a holistic overview. This offers a strategic decision support from business structure over process design up to planning the appropriate support technology. Therefore, it forms the base for organisations to act in an agile way. The modelling can be performed in different modelling languages, including ArchiMate and the Nato Architecture Framework (NAF). The designed approach is already evaluated on a small company with multiple services and an infrastructure with several nodes.
Online Continual Learning For Visual Food Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Food image classification is challenging for real-world applications since existing methods require static datasets for training and are not capable of learning from sequentially available new food images. Online continual learning aims to learn new classes from data stream by using each new data only once without forgetting the previously learned knowledge. However, none of the existing works target food image analysis, which is more difficult to learn incrementally due to its high intra-class variation with the unbalanced and unpredictable characteristics of future food class distribution. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing (1) a novel clustering based exemplar selection algorithm to store the most representative data belonging to each learned food for knowledge replay, and (2) an effective online learning regime using balanced training batch along with the knowledge distillation on augmented exemplars to maintain the model performance on all learned classes. Our method is evaluated on a challenging large scale food image database, Food-1K, by varying the number of newly added food classes. Our results show significant improvements compared with existing state-of-the-art online continual learning methods, showing great potential to achieve lifelong learning for food image classification in real world.
SCIDA: Self-Correction Integrated Domain Adaptation from Single- to Multi-label Aerial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Most publicly available datasets for image classification are with single labels, while images are inherently multi-labeled in our daily life. Such an annotation gap makes many pre-trained single-label classification models fail in practical scenarios. This annotation issue is more concerned for aerial images: Aerial data collected from sensors naturally cover a relatively large land area with multiple labels, while annotated aerial datasets, which are publicly available (e.g., UCM, AID), are single-labeled. As manually annotating multi-label aerial images would be time/labor-consuming, we propose a novel self-correction integrated domain adaptation (SCIDA) method for automatic multi-label learning. SCIDA is weakly supervised, i.e., automatically learning the multi-label image classification model from using massive, publicly available single-label images. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel Label-Wise self-Correction (LWC) module to better explore underlying label correlations. This module also makes the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) from single- to multi-label data possible. For model training, the proposed model only uses single-label information yet requires no prior knowledge of multi-labeled data; and it predicts labels for multi-label aerial images. In our experiments, trained with single-labeled MAI-AID-s and MAI-UCM-s datasets, the proposed model is tested directly on our collected Multi-scene Aerial Image (MAI) dataset.
Maps Search Misspelling Detection Leveraging Domain-Augmented Contextual Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Building an independent misspelling detector and serve it before correction can bring multiple benefits to speller and other search components, which is particularly true for the most commonly deployed noisy-channel based speller systems. With rapid development of deep learning and substantial advancement in contextual representation learning such as BERTology, building a decent misspelling detector without having to rely on hand-crafted features associated with noisy-channel architecture becomes more-than-ever accessible. However BERTolgy models are trained with natural language corpus but Maps Search is highly domain specific, would BERTology continue its success. In this paper we design 4 stages of models for misspeling detection ranging from the most basic LSTM to single-domain augmented fine-tuned BERT. We found for Maps Search in our case, other advanced BERTology family model such as RoBERTa does not necessarily outperform BERT, and a classic cross-domain fine-tuned full BERT even underperforms a smaller single-domain fine-tuned BERT. We share more findings through comprehensive modeling experiments and analysis, we also briefly cover the data generation algorithm breakthrough.
Challenges for cognitive decoding using deep learning methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In cognitive decoding, researchers aim to characterize a brain region's representations by identifying the cognitive states (e.g., accepting/rejecting a gamble) that can be identified from the region's activity. Deep learning (DL) methods are highly promising for cognitive decoding, with their unmatched ability to learn versatile representations of complex data. Yet, their widespread application in cognitive decoding is hindered by their general lack of interpretability as well as difficulties in applying them to small datasets and in ensuring their reproducibility and robustness. We propose to approach these challenges by leveraging recent advances in explainable artificial intelligence and transfer learning, while also providing specific recommendations on how to improve the reproducibility and robustness of DL modeling results.
End-to-End Adaptive Monte Carlo Denoising and Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The classic Monte Carlo path tracing can achieve high quality rendering at the cost of heavy computation. Recent works make use of deep neural networks to accelerate this process, by improving either low-resolution or fewer-sample rendering with super-resolution or denoising neural networks in post-processing. However, denoising and super-resolution have only been considered separately in previous work. We show in this work that Monte Carlo path tracing can be further accelerated by joint super-resolution and denoising (SRD) in post-processing. This new type of joint filtering allows only a low-resolution and fewer-sample (thus noisy) image to be rendered by path tracing, which is then fed into a deep neural network to produce a high-resolution and clean image. The main contribution of this work is a new end-to-end network architecture, specifically designed for the SRD task. It contains two cascaded stages with shared components. We discover that denoising and super-resolution require very different receptive fields, a key insight that leads to the introduction of deformable convolution into the network design. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms previous methods and their variants adopted for the SRD task.
Legal perspective on possible fairness measures - A legal discussion using the example of hiring decisions (preprint)
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

With the increasing use of AI in algorithmic decision making (e.g. based on neural networks), the question arises how bias can be excluded or mitigated. There are some promising approaches, but many of them are based on a "fair" ground truth, others are based on a subjective goal to be reached, which leads to the usual problem of how to define and compute "fairness". The different functioning of algorithmic decision making in contrast to human decision making leads to a shift from a process-oriented to a result-oriented discrimination assessment. We argue that with such a shift society needs to determine which kind of fairness is the right one to choose for which certain scenario. To understand the implications of such a determination we explain the different kinds of fairness concepts that might be applicable for the specific application of hiring decisions, analyze their pros and cons with regard to the respective fairness interpretation and evaluate them from a legal perspective (based on EU law).
TL-SDD: A Transfer Learning-Based Method for Surface Defect Detection with Few Samples
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Surface defect detection plays an increasingly important role in manufacturing industry to guarantee the product quality. Many deep learning methods have been widely used in surface defect detection tasks, and have been proven to perform well in defects classification and location. However, deep learning-based detection methods often require plenty of data for training, which fail to apply to the real industrial scenarios since the distribution of defect categories is often imbalanced. In other words, common defect classes have many samples but rare defect classes have extremely few samples, and it is difficult for these methods to well detect rare defect classes. To solve the imbalanced distribution problem, in this paper we propose TL-SDD: a novel Transfer Learning-based method for Surface Defect Detection. First, we adopt a two-phase training scheme to transfer the knowledge from common defect classes to rare defect classes. Second, we propose a novel Metric-based Surface Defect Detection (M-SDD) model. We design three modules for this model: (1) feature extraction module: containing feature fusion which combines high-level semantic information with low-level structural information. (2) feature reweighting module: transforming examples to a reweighting vector that indicates the importance of features. (3) distance metric module: learning a metric space in which defects are classified by computing distances to representations of each category. Finally, we validate the performance of our proposed method on a real dataset including surface defects of aluminum profiles. Compared to the baseline methods, the performance of our proposed method has improved by up to 11.98% for rare defect classes.
Multiparty secret sharing based on hidden multipliers
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Secret sharing schemes based on the idea of hidden multipliers in encryption are proposed. As a platform, one can use both multiplicative groups of finite fields and groups of invertible elements of commutative rings, in particular, multiplicative groups of residue rings. We propose two versions of the secret sharing scheme and a version of ($k,n$)-thrested scheme. For a given $n$, the dealer can choose any $k.$ The main feature of the proposed schemes is that the shares of secrets are distributed once and can be used multiple times. This property distinguishes the proposed schemes from the secret sharing schemes known in the literature. The proposed schemes are semantically secure. The same message can be transmitted in different forms. From the transferred secret $c$ it is impossible to determine which of the two given secrets $m_1$ or $m_2$ was transferred. For concreteness, we give some numerical examples.
Distance-aware Quantization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We address the problem of network quantization, that is, reducing bit-widths of weights and/or activations to lighten network architectures. Quantization methods use a rounding function to map full-precision values to the nearest quantized ones, but this operation is not differentiable. There are mainly two approaches to training quantized networks with gradient-based optimizers. First, a straight-through estimator (STE) replaces the zero derivative of the rounding with that of an identity function, which causes a gradient mismatch problem. Second, soft quantizers approximate the rounding with continuous functions at training time, and exploit the rounding for quantization at test time. This alleviates the gradient mismatch, but causes a quantizer gap problem. We alleviate both problems in a unified framework. To this end, we introduce a novel quantizer, dubbed a distance-aware quantizer (DAQ), that mainly consists of a distance-aware soft rounding (DASR) and a temperature controller. To alleviate the gradient mismatch problem, DASR approximates the discrete rounding with the kernel soft argmax, which is based on our insight that the quantization can be formulated as a distance-based assignment problem between full-precision values and quantized ones. The controller adjusts the temperature parameter in DASR adaptively according to the input, addressing the quantizer gap problem. Experimental results on standard benchmarks show that DAQ outperforms the state of the art significantly for various bit-widths without bells and whistles.
Structure-Aware Feature Generation for Zero-Shot Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) targets at recognizing unseen categories by leveraging auxiliary information, such as attribute embedding. Despite the encouraging results achieved, prior ZSL approaches focus on improving the discriminant power of seen-class features, yet have largely overlooked the geometric structure of the samples and the prototypes. The subsequent attribute-based generative adversarial network (GAN), as a result, also neglects the topological information in sample generation and further yields inferior performances in classifying the visual features of unseen classes. In this paper, we introduce a novel structure-aware feature generation scheme, termed as SA-GAN, to explicitly account for the topological structure in learning both the latent space and the generative networks. Specifically, we introduce a constraint loss to preserve the initial geometric structure when learning a discriminative latent space, and carry out our GAN training with additional supervising signals from a structure-aware discriminator and a reconstruction module. The former supervision distinguishes fake and real samples based on their affinity to class prototypes, while the latter aims to reconstruct the original feature space from the generated latent space. This topology-preserving mechanism enables our method to significantly enhance the generalization capability on unseen-classes and consequently improve the classification performance. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms the state of the art. Our code can be found in the supplementary material and will also be made publicly available.
Data-driven Analysis of Gender Differences and Similarities in Scratch Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are an essential entry point to computer science. In order to create an effective learning environment that has the potential to address the gender imbalance in computer science, it is essential to better understand gender-specific differences in how children use such programming environments. In this paper, we explore gender differences and similarities in Scratch programs along two dimensions: In order to understand what motivates girls and boys to use Scratch, we apply a topic analysis using unsupervised machine learning for the first time on Scratch programs, using a dataset of 317 programs created by girls and boys in the range of 8-10 years. In order to understand how they program for these topics, we apply automated program analysis on the code implemented in these projects. We find that, in-line with common stereotypes, girls prefer topics that revolve around unicorns, celebrating, dancing and music, while boys tend to prefer gloomy topics with bats and ghouls, or competitive ones such as soccer or basketball. Girls prefer animations and stories, resulting in simpler control structures, while boys create games with more loops and conditional statements, resulting in more complex programs. Considering these differences can help to improve the learning outcomes and the resulting computing-related self-concepts, which are prerequisites for developing a longer-term interest in computer science.
Creating and Querying Personalized Versions of Wikidata on a Laptop
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Application developers today have three choices for exploiting the knowledge present in Wikidata: they can download the Wikidata dumps in JSON or RDF format, they can use the Wikidata API to get data about individual entities, or they can use the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint. None of these methods can support complex, yet common, query use cases, such as retrieval of large amounts of data or aggregations over large fractions of Wikidata. This paper introduces KGTK Kypher, a query language and processor that allows users to create personalized variants of Wikidata on a laptop. We present several use cases that illustrate the types of analyses that Kypher enables users to run on the full Wikidata KG on a laptop, combining data from external resources such as DBpedia. The Kypher queries for these use cases run much faster on a laptop than the equivalent SPARQL queries on a Wikidata clone running on a powerful server with 24h time-out limits.
A Longitudinal Analysis on Instagram Characteristics of Olympic Champions
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

This study examines Olympic champions characteristics on Instagram to first understand how age and gender affect the characteristics and their interrelations and second to see if the future changes in those characteristics are predictable. We crawled Instagram data of individual gold medalists in Rio2016 Olympic for a period of 4 months and utilized a content analytic method to analyze their photograph posts. The cross-sectional analysis shows as the champions get older, the rate of follower engagement decreases in both genders, but men increase their pure self-presentation posts while women extend their circle of followings. In its approval, the longitudinal analysis shows when the higher rate of engagement is achieved, then men and women champions lose their tendency in increasing self-presenting posts and number of followings respectively. These findings in the light of relative theories and the previous literature contribute to a better understanding of athletes cyber behavior in social media. Moreover, the findings serve as a guide for sport researchers seeking to grasp the ways that aid athletes to better interact with their followers and build the personal brand, which involves sponsorship and other promotional opportunities.
On the Importance of Encrypting Deep Features
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this study, we analyze model inversion attacks with only two assumptions: feature vectors of user data are known, and a black-box API for inference is provided. On the one hand, limitations of existing studies are addressed by opting for a more practical setting. Experiments have been conducted on state-of-the-art models in person re-identification, and two attack scenarios (i.e., recognizing auxiliary attributes and reconstructing user data) are investigated. Results show that an adversary could successfully infer sensitive information even under severe constraints. On the other hand, it is advisable to encrypt feature vectors, especially for a machine learning model in production. As an alternative to traditional encryption methods such as AES, a simple yet effective method termed ShuffleBits is presented. More specifically, the binary sequence of each floating-point number gets shuffled. Deployed using the one-time pad scheme, it serves as a plug-and-play module that is applicable to any neural network, and the resulting model directly outputs deep features in encrypted form. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/nixingyang/ShuffleBits.
Improving Self-supervised Learning with Hardness-aware Dynamic Curriculum Learning: An Application to Digital Pathology
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently shown tremendous potential to learn generic visual representations useful for many image analysis tasks. Despite their notable success, the existing SSL methods fail to generalize to downstream tasks when the number of labeled training instances is small or if the domain shift between the transfer domains is significant. In this paper, we attempt to improve self-supervised pretrained representations through the lens of curriculum learning by proposing a hardness-aware dynamic curriculum learning (HaDCL) approach. To improve the robustness and generalizability of SSL, we dynamically leverage progressive harder examples via easy-to-hard and hard-to-very-hard samples during mini-batch downstream fine-tuning. We discover that by progressive stage-wise curriculum learning, the pretrained representations are significantly enhanced and adaptable to both in-domain and out-of-domain distribution data. We performed extensive validation on three histology benchmark datasets on both patch-wise and slide-level classification problems. Our curriculum based fine-tuning yields a significant improvement over standard fine-tuning, with a minimum improvement in area-under-the-curve (AUC) score of 1.7% and 2.2% on in-domain and out-of-domain distribution data, respectively. Further, we empirically show that our approach is more generic and adaptable to any SSL methods and does not impose any additional overhead complexity. Besides, we also outline the role of patch-based versus slide-based curriculum learning in histopathology to provide practical insights into the success of curriculum based fine-tuning of SSL methods. Code is released at https://github.com/srinidhiPY/ICCV-CDPATH2021-ID-8