OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Text Summarization of Czech News Articles Using Named Entities
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The foundation for the research of summarization in the Czech language was laid by the work of Straka et al. (2018). They published the SumeCzech, a large Czech news-based summarization dataset, and proposed several baseline approaches. However, it is clear from the achieved results that there is a large space for improvement. In our work, we focus on the impact of named entities on the summarization of Czech news articles. First, we annotate SumeCzech with named entities. We propose a new metric ROUGE_NE that measures the overlap of named entities between the true and generated summaries, and we show that it is still challenging for summarization systems to reach a high score in it. We propose an extractive summarization approach Named Entity Density that selects a sentence with the highest ratio between a number of entities and the length of the sentence as the summary of the article. The experiments show that the proposed approach reached results close to the solid baseline in the domain of news articles selecting the first sentence. Moreover, we demonstrate that the selected sentence reflects the style of reports concisely identifying to whom, when, where, and what happened. We propose that such a summary is beneficial in combination with the first sentence of an article in voice applications presenting news articles. We propose two abstractive summarization approaches based on Seq2Seq architecture. The first approach uses the tokens of the article. The second approach has access to the named entity annotations. The experiments show that both approaches exceed state-of-the-art results previously reported by Straka et al. (2018), with the latter achieving slightly better results on SumeCzech's out-of-domain testing set.
Jacobian Regularization for Mitigating Universal Adversarial Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Universal Adversarial Perturbations (UAPs) are input perturbations that can fool a neural network on large sets of data. They are a class of attacks that represents a significant threat as they facilitate realistic, practical, and low-cost attacks on neural networks. In this work, we derive upper bounds for the effectiveness of UAPs based on norms of data-dependent Jacobians. We empirically verify that Jacobian regularization greatly increases model robustness to UAPs by up to four times whilst maintaining clean performance. Our theoretical analysis also allows us to formulate a metric for the strength of shared adversarial perturbations between pairs of inputs. We apply this metric to benchmark datasets and show that it is highly correlated with the actual observed robustness. This suggests that realistic and practical universal attacks can be reliably mitigated without sacrificing clean accuracy, which shows promise for the robustness of machine learning systems.
Improving the Accuracy of Early Exits in Multi-Exit Architectures via Curriculum Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deploying deep learning services for time-sensitive and resource-constrained settings such as IoT using edge computing systems is a challenging task that requires dynamic adjustment of inference time. Multi-exit architectures allow deep neural networks to terminate their execution early in order to adhere to tight deadlines at the cost of accuracy. To mitigate this cost, in this paper we introduce a novel method called Multi-Exit Curriculum Learning that utilizes curriculum learning, a training strategy for neural networks that imitates human learning by sorting the training samples based on their difficulty and gradually introducing them to the network. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets and various configurations of multi-exit architectures show that our method consistently improves the accuracy of early exits compared to the standard training approach.
End-to-end Biomedical Entity Linking with Span-based Dictionary Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Disease name recognition and normalization, which is generally called biomedical entity linking, is a fundamental process in biomedical text mining. Recently, neural joint learning of both tasks has been proposed to utilize the mutual benefits. While this approach achieves high performance, disease concepts that do not appear in the training dataset cannot be accurately predicted. This study introduces a novel end-to-end approach that combines span representations with dictionary-matching features to address this problem. Our model handles unseen concepts by referring to a dictionary while maintaining the performance of neural network-based models, in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments using two major datasets demonstrate that our model achieved competitive results with strong baselines, especially for unseen concepts during training.
Comparing merging behaviors observed in naturalistic data with behaviors generated by a machine learned model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

There is quickly growing literature on machine-learned models that predict human driving trajectories in road traffic. These models focus their learning on low-dimensional error metrics, for example average distance between model-generated and observed trajectories. Such metrics permit relative comparison of models, but do not provide clearly interpretable information on how close to human behavior the models actually come, for example in terms of higher-level behavior phenomena that are known to be present in human driving. We study highway driving as an example scenario, and introduce metrics to quantitatively demonstrate the presence, in a naturalistic dataset, of two familiar behavioral phenomena: (1) The kinematics-dependent contest, between on-highway and on-ramp vehicles, of who passes the merging point first. (2) Courtesy lane changes away from the outermost lane, to leave space for a merging vehicle. Applying the exact same metrics to the output of a state-of-the-art machine-learned model, we show that the model is capable of reproducing the former phenomenon, but not the latter. We argue that this type of behavioral analysis provides information that is not available from conventional model-fitting metrics, and that it may be useful to analyze (and possibly fit) models also based on these types of behavioral criteria.
How Will Your Tweet Be Received? Predicting the Sentiment Polarity of Tweet Replies
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Twitter sentiment analysis, which often focuses on predicting the polarity of tweets, has attracted increasing attention over the last years, in particular with the rise of deep learning (DL). In this paper, we propose a new task: predicting the predominant sentiment among (first-order) replies to a given tweet. Therefore, we created RETWEET, a large dataset of tweets and replies manually annotated with sentiment labels. As a strong baseline, we propose a two-stage DL-based method: first, we create automatically labeled training data by applying a standard sentiment classifier to tweet replies and aggregating its predictions for each original tweet; our rationale is that individual errors made by the classifier are likely to cancel out in the aggregation step. Second, we use the automatically labeled data for supervised training of a neural network to predict reply sentiment from the original tweets. The resulting classifier is evaluated on the new RETWEET dataset, showing promising results, especially considering that it has been trained without any manually labeled data. Both the dataset and the baseline implementation are publicly available.
Real-time dense 3D Reconstruction from monocular video data captured by low-cost UAVs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Real-time 3D reconstruction enables fast dense mapping of the environment which benefits numerous applications, such as navigation or live evaluation of an emergency. In contrast to most real-time capable approaches, our approach does not need an explicit depth sensor. Instead, we only rely on a video stream from a camera and its intrinsic calibration. By exploiting the self-motion of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flying with oblique view around buildings, we estimate both camera trajectory and depth for selected images with enough novel content. To create a 3D model of the scene, we rely on a three-stage processing chain. First, we estimate the rough camera trajectory using a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithm. Once a suitable constellation is found, we estimate depth for local bundles of images using a Multi-View Stereo (MVS) approach and then fuse this depth into a global surfel-based model. For our evaluation, we use 55 video sequences with diverse settings, consisting of both synthetic and real scenes. We evaluate not only the generated reconstruction but also the intermediate products and achieve competitive results both qualitatively and quantitatively. At the same time, our method can keep up with a 30 fps video for a resolution of 768x448 pixels.
Bearings Fault Detection Using Hidden Markov Models and Principal Component Analysis Enhanced Features
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Asset health monitoring continues to be of increasing importance on productivity, reliability, and cost reduction. Early Fault detection is a keystone of health management as part of the emerging Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) philosophy. This paper proposes a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to assess the machine health degradation. using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to enhance features extracted from vibration signals is considered. The enhanced features capture the second order structure of the data. The experimental results based on a bearing test bed show the plausibility of the proposed method.
Which Event Happened First? Deferred Choice on Blockchain Using Oracles
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

First come, first served: Critical choices between alternative actions are often made based on events external to an organization, and reacting promptly to their occurrence can be a major advantage over the competition. In Business Process Management (BPM), such deferred choices can be expressed in process models, and they are an important aspect of process engines. Blockchain-based process execution approaches are no exception to this, but are severely limited by the inherent properties of the platform: The closed-world environment prevents direct access to external entities and data, and the passive runtime based entirely on atomic transactions impedes continual monitoring and detection of events. In this paper we provide an in-depth examination of the semantics of deferred choice, and transfer them to environments such as the blockchain. We introduce and compare several oracle architectures able to satisfy certain requirements, and show that they can be implemented using state-of-the-art blockchain technology.
Stateless Neural Meta-Learning using Second-Order Gradients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep learning typically requires large data sets and much compute power for each new problem that is learned. Meta-learning can be used to learn a good prior that facilitates quick learning, thereby relaxing these requirements so that new tasks can be learned quicker; two popular approaches are MAML and the meta-learner LSTM. In this work, we compare the two and formally show that the meta-learner LSTM subsumes MAML. Combining this insight with recent empirical findings, we construct a new algorithm (dubbed TURTLE) which is simpler than the meta-learner LSTM yet more expressive than MAML. TURTLE outperforms both techniques at few-shot sine wave regression and image classification on miniImageNet and CUB without any additional hyperparameter tuning, at a computational cost that is comparable with second-order MAML. The key to TURTLE's success lies in the use of second-order gradients, which also significantly increases the performance of the meta-learner LSTM by 1-6% accuracy.
On the Path to 6G: Embracing the Next Wave of Low Earth Orbit Satellite Access
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Offering space-based Internet services with mega-constellations of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is a promising solution to connecting the unconnected. It can complement the coverage of terrestrial networks to help bridge the digital divide. However, there are challenges from operational obstacles to technical hurdles facing the development of LEO satellite access. This article provides an overview of state of the art in LEO satellite access, including the evolution of LEO satellite constellations and capabilities, critical technical challenges and solutions, standardization aspects from 5G evolution to 6G, and business considerations. We also identify several areas for future exploration to realize a tight integration of LEO satellite access with terrestrial networks in 6G.
Exploiting Learned Policies in Focal Search
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Recent machine-learning approaches to deterministic search and domain-independent planning employ policy learning to speed up search. Unfortunately, when attempting to solve a search problem by successively applying a policy, no guarantees can be given on solution quality. The problem of how to effectively use a learned policy within a bounded-suboptimal search algorithm remains largely as an open question. In this paper, we propose various ways in which such policies can be integrated into Focal Search, assuming that the policy is a neural network classifier. Furthermore, we provide mathematical foundations for some of the resulting algorithms. To evaluate the resulting algorithms over a number of policies with varying accuracy, we use synthetic policies which can be generated for a target accuracy for problems where the search space can be held in memory. We evaluate our focal search variants over three benchmark domains using our synthetic approach, and on the 15-puzzle using a neural network learned using 1.5 million examples. We observe that Discrepancy Focal Search, which we show expands the node which maximizes an approximation of the probability that its corresponding path is a prefix of an optimal path, obtains, in general, the best results in terms of runtime and solution quality.
Guided Table Structure Recognition through Anchor Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents the novel approach towards table structure recognition by leveraging the guided anchors. The concept differs from current state-of-the-art approaches for table structure recognition that naively apply object detection methods. In contrast to prior techniques, first, we estimate the viable anchors for table structure recognition. Subsequently, these anchors are exploited to locate the rows and columns in tabular images. Furthermore, the paper introduces a simple and effective method that improves the results by using tabular layouts in realistic scenarios. The proposed method is exhaustively evaluated on the two publicly available datasets of table structure recognition i.e ICDAR-2013 and TabStructDB. We accomplished state-of-the-art results on the ICDAR-2013 dataset with an average F-Measure of 95.05$\%$ (94.6$\%$ for rows and 96.32$\%$ for columns) and surpassed the baseline results on the TabStructDB dataset with an average F-Measure of 94.17$\%$ (94.08$\%$ for rows and 95.06$\%$ for columns).
SOGAN: 3D-Aware Shadow and Occlusion Robust GAN for Makeup Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, virtual makeup applications have become more and more popular. However, it is still challenging to propose a robust makeup transfer method in the real-world environment. Current makeup transfer methods mostly work well on good-conditioned clean makeup images, but transferring makeup that exhibits shadow and occlusion is not satisfying. To alleviate it, we propose a novel makeup transfer method, called 3D-Aware Shadow and Occlusion Robust GAN (SOGAN). Given the source and the reference faces, we first fit a 3D face model and then disentangle the faces into shape and texture. In the texture branch, we map the texture to the UV space and design a UV texture generator to transfer the makeup. Since human faces are symmetrical in the UV space, we can conveniently remove the undesired shadow and occlusion from the reference image by carefully designing a Flip Attention Module (FAM). After obtaining cleaner makeup features from the reference image, a Makeup Transfer Module (MTM) is introduced to perform accurate makeup transfer. The qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our SOGAN not only achieves superior results in shadow and occlusion situations but also performs well in large pose and expression variations.
Robust Biped Locomotion Using Deep Reinforcement Learning on Top of an Analytical Control Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

This paper proposes a modular framework to generate robust biped locomotion using a tight coupling between an analytical walking approach and deep reinforcement learning. This framework is composed of six main modules which are hierarchically connected to reduce the overall complexity and increase its flexibility. The core of this framework is a specific dynamics model which abstracts a humanoid's dynamics model into two masses for modeling upper and lower body. This dynamics model is used to design an adaptive reference trajectories planner and an optimal controller which are fully parametric. Furthermore, a learning framework is developed based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to find the optimum parameters and to learn how to improve the stability of the robot by moving the arms and changing its center of mass (COM) height. A set of simulations are performed to validate the performance of the framework using the official RoboCup 3D League simulation environment. The results validate the performance of the framework, not only in creating a fast and stable gait but also in learning to improve the upper body efficiency.
Measuring what Really Matters: Optimizing Neural Networks for TinyML
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With the surge of inexpensive computational and memory resources, neural networks (NNs) have experienced an unprecedented growth in architectural and computational complexity. Introducing NNs to resource-constrained devices enables cost-efficient deployments, widespread availability, and the preservation of sensitive data. This work addresses the challenges of bringing Machine Learning to MCUs, where we focus on the ubiquitous ARM Cortex-M architecture. The detailed effects and trade-offs that optimization methods, software frameworks, and MCU hardware architecture have on key performance metrics such as inference latency and energy consumption have not been previously studied in depth for state-of-the-art frameworks such as TensorFlow Lite Micro. We find that empirical investigations which measure the perceptible metrics - performance as experienced by the user - are indispensable, as the impact of specialized instructions and layer types can be subtle. To this end, we propose an implementation-aware design as a cost-effective method for verification and benchmarking. Employing our developed toolchain, we demonstrate how existing NN deployments on resource-constrained devices can be improved by systematically optimizing NNs to their targeted application scenario.
Using GPT-2 to Create Synthetic Data to Improve the Prediction Performance of NLP Machine Learning Classification Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Classification Models use input data to predict the likelihood that the subsequent input data will fall into predetermined categories. To perform effective classifications, these models require large datasets for training. It is becoming common practice to utilize synthetic data to boost the performance of Machine Learning Models. It is reported that Shell is using synthetic data to build models to detect problems that rarely occur; for example Shell created synthetic data to help models to identify deteriorating oil lines. It is common practice for Machine Learning Practitioners to generate synthetic data by rotating, flipping, and cropping images to increase the volume of image data to train Convolutional Neural Networks. The purpose of this paper is to explore creating and utilizing synthetic NLP data to improve the performance of Natural Language Processing Machine Learning Classification Models. In this paper I used a Yelp pizza restaurant reviews dataset and transfer learning to fine-tune a pre-trained GPT-2 Transformer Model to generate synthetic pizza reviews data. I then combined this synthetic data with the original genuine data to create a new joint dataset. The new combined model significantly outperformed the original model in accuracy and precision.
Towards Automated Psychotherapy via Language Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In this experiment, a model was devised, trained, and evaluated to automate psychotherapist/client text conversations through the use of state-of-the-art, Seq2Seq Transformer-based Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. Through training the model upon a mix of the Cornell Movie Dialogue Corpus for language understanding and an open-source, anonymized, and public licensed psychotherapeutic dataset, the model achieved statistically significant performance in published, standardized qualitative benchmarks against human-written validation data - meeting or exceeding human-written responses' performance in 59.7% and 67.1% of the test set for two independent test methods respectively. Although the model cannot replace the work of psychotherapists entirely, its ability to synthesize human-appearing utterances for the majority of the test set serves as a promising step towards communizing and easing stigma at the psychotherapeutic point-of-care.
Dynamic Toll Prediction Using Historical Data on Toll Roads: Case Study of the I-66 Inner Beltway
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Providing the users of a dynamic tolling system with predictions of tolling prices and the travel time difference between the toll road and the alternative routes enables them to make their travel decisions before starting their trip. This study aims to provide accurate predictions of tolling price through training and testing random forest, multilayer perceptron, and long short-term memory models and compare them with the current situation that the best prediction is extending the current toll to the next timesteps. The prediction time horizon includes five 6-minute time intervals ahead of the present time. The prediction performance of models over the testing set reveals that while all the models were significantly better than the base model, the random forest outperforms all models. For instance, while in the trained models, the mean absolute error range is from $1.5 to $2.5 for the next six minutes to the next 30 minutes, respectively, the same measure in the base model is in the range of $2.5 to $6. The prediction of travel time difference along the toll road and its alternative route with the shortest travel time revealed that the multilayer perceptron performs marginally better than the base model. However, due to a relatively stable travel time difference, the current travel time difference is an acceptable prediction for the next 30 minutes prediction horizon.