OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Closer Look at Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Continual learning is a setting where machine learning models learn novel concepts from continuously shifting training data, while simultaneously avoiding degradation of knowledge on previously seen classes which may disappear from the training data for extended periods of time (a phenomenon known as the catastrophic forgetting problem). Current approaches for continual learning of a single expanding task (aka class-incremental continual learning) require extensive rehearsal of previously seen data to avoid this degradation of knowledge. Unfortunately, rehearsal comes at a cost to memory, and it may also violate data-privacy. Instead, we explore combining knowledge distillation and parameter regularization in new ways to achieve strong continual learning performance without rehearsal. Specifically, we take a deep dive into common continual learning techniques: prediction distillation, feature distillation, L2 parameter regularization, and EWC parameter regularization. We first disprove the common assumption that parameter regularization techniques fail for rehearsal-free continual learning of a single, expanding task. Next, we explore how to leverage knowledge from a pre-trained model in rehearsal-free continual learning and find that vanilla L2 parameter regularization outperforms EWC parameter regularization and feature distillation. Finally, we explore the recently popular ImageNet-R benchmark, and show that L2 parameter regularization implemented in self-attention blocks of a ViT transformer outperforms recent popular prompting for continual learning methods.
LASER: LAtent SpacE Rendering for 2D Visual Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present LASER, an image-based Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) framework for 2D floor maps. LASER introduces the concept of latent space rendering, where 2D pose hypotheses on the floor map are directly rendered into a geometrically-structured latent space by aggregating viewing ray features. Through a tightly coupled rendering codebook scheme, the viewing ray features are dynamically determined at rendering-time based on their geometries (i.e. length, incident-angle), endowing our representation with view-dependent fine-grain variability. Our codebook scheme effectively disentangles feature encoding from rendering, allowing the latent space rendering to run at speeds above 10KHz. Moreover, through metric learning, our geometrically-structured latent space is common to both pose hypotheses and query images with arbitrary field of views. As a result, LASER achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-scale indoor localization datasets (i.e. ZInD and Structured3D) for both panorama and perspective image queries, while significantly outperforming existing learning-based methods in speed.
Alternate Intermediate Conditioning with Syllable-level and Character-level Targets for Japanese ASR
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

End-to-end automatic speech recognition directly maps input speech to characters. However, the mapping can be problematic when several different pronunciations should be mapped into one character or when one pronunciation is shared among many different characters. Japanese ASR suffers the most from such many-to-one and one-to-many mapping problems due to Japanese kanji characters. To alleviate the problems, we introduce explicit interaction between characters and syllables using Self-conditioned connectionist temporal classification (CTC), in which the upper layers are ``self-conditioned'' on the intermediate predictions from the lower layers. The proposed method utilizes character-level and syllable-level intermediate predictions as conditioning features to deal with mutual dependency between characters and syllables. Experimental results on Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese show that the proposed method outperformed the conventional multi-task and Self-conditioned CTC methods.
Model-Parallel Fourier Neural Operators as Learned Surrogates for Large-Scale Parametric PDEs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Fourier neural operators (FNOs) are a recently introduced neural network architecture for learning solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs), which have been shown to perform significantly better than comparable deep learning approaches. Once trained, FNOs can achieve speed-ups of multiple orders of magnitude over conventional numerical PDE solvers. However, due to the high dimensionality of their input data and network weights, FNOs have so far only been applied to two-dimensional or small three-dimensional problems. To remove this limited problem-size barrier, we propose a model-parallel version of FNOs based on domain-decomposition of both the input data and network weights. We demonstrate that our model-parallel FNO is able to predict time-varying PDE solutions of over 2.6 billion variables on Perlmutter using up to 512 A100 GPUs and show an example of training a distributed FNO on the Azure cloud for simulating multiphase CO$_2$ dynamics in the Earth's subsurface.
On the Global Convergence of Stochastic Fictitious Play in Stochastic Games with Turn-based Controllers
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a learning dynamic with almost sure convergence guarantee for any stochastic game with turn-based controllers (on state transitions) as long as stage-payoffs induce a zero-sum or identical-interest game. Stage-payoffs for different states can even have different structures, e.g., by summing to zero in some states and being identical in others. The dynamics presented combines the classical stochastic fictitious play with value iteration for stochastic games. There are two key properties: (i) players play finite horizon stochastic games with increasing lengths within the underlying infinite-horizon stochastic game, and (ii) the turn-based controllers ensure that the auxiliary stage-games (induced from the continuation payoff estimated) are strategically equivalent to zero-sum or identical-interest games.
Disentangling Abstraction from Statistical Pattern Matching in Human and Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The ability to acquire abstract knowledge is a hallmark of human intelligence and is believed by many to be one of the core differences between humans and neural network models. Agents can be endowed with an inductive bias towards abstraction through meta-learning, where they are trained on a distribution of tasks that share some abstract structure that can be learned and applied. However, because neural networks are hard to interpret, it can be difficult to tell whether agents have learned the underlying abstraction, or alternatively statistical patterns that are characteristic of that abstraction. In this work, we compare the performance of humans and agents in a meta-reinforcement learning paradigm in which tasks are generated from abstract rules. We define a novel methodology for building "task metamers" that closely match the statistics of the abstract tasks but use a different underlying generative process, and evaluate performance on both abstract and metamer tasks. We find that humans perform better at abstract tasks than metamer tasks whereas common neural network architectures typically perform worse on the abstract tasks than the matched metamers. This work provides a foundation for characterizing differences between humans and machine learning that can be used in future work towards developing machines with more human-like behavior.
Neural Estimation of the Rate-Distortion Function With Applications to Operational Source Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

A fundamental question in designing lossy data compression schemes is how well one can do in comparison with the rate-distortion function, which describes the known theoretical limits of lossy compression. Motivated by the empirical success of deep neural network (DNN) compressors on large, real-world data, we investigate methods to estimate the rate-distortion function on such data, which would allow comparison of DNN compressors with optimality. While one could use the empirical distribution of the data and apply the Blahut-Arimoto algorithm, this approach presents several computational challenges and inaccuracies when the datasets are large and high-dimensional, such as the case of modern image datasets. Instead, we re-formulate the rate-distortion objective, and solve the resulting functional optimization problem using neural networks. We apply the resulting rate-distortion estimator, called NERD, on popular image datasets, and provide evidence that NERD can accurately estimate the rate-distortion function. Using our estimate, we show that the rate-distortion achievable by DNN compressors are within several bits of the rate-distortion function for real-world datasets. Additionally, NERD provides access to the rate-distortion achieving channel, as well as samples from its output marginal. Therefore, using recent results in reverse channel coding, we describe how NERD can be used to construct an operational one-shot lossy compression scheme with guarantees on the achievable rate and distortion. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance with DNN compressors.
Semi-Nonparametric Estimation of Distribution Divergence in Non-Euclidean Spaces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper explores methods for estimating or approximating the total variation distance and the chi-squared divergence of probability measures within topological sample spaces, using independent and identically distributed samples. Our focus is on the practical scenario where the sample space is homeomorphic to subsets of Euclidean space, with the specific homeomorphism remaining unknown. Our proposed methods rely on the integral probability metric with witness functions in universal reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). The estimators we develop consist of learnable parametric functions mapping the sample space to Euclidean space, paired with universal kernels defined in Euclidean space. This approach effectively overcomes the challenge of constructing universal kernels directly on non-Euclidean spaces. Furthermore, the estimators we devise demonstrate asymptotic consistency, and we provide a detailed statistical analysis, shedding light on their practical implementation.
Learning to Reduce Information Bottleneck for Object Detection in Aerial Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Object detection in aerial images is a fundamental research topic in the geoscience and remote sensing domain. However, the advanced approaches on this topic mainly focus on designing the elaborate backbones or head networks but ignore neck networks. In this letter, we first underline the importance of the neck network in object detection from the perspective of information bottleneck. Then, to alleviate the information deficiency problem in the current approaches, we propose a global semantic network (GSNet), which acts as a bridge from the backbone network to the head network in a bidirectional global pattern. Compared to the existing approaches, our model can capture the rich and enhanced image features with less computational costs. Besides, we further propose a feature fusion refinement module (FRM) for different levels of features, which are suffering from the problem of semantic gap in feature fusion. To demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach, experiments are carried out on two challenging and representative aerial image datasets (i.e., DOTA and HRSC2016). Experimental results in terms of accuracy and complexity validate the superiority of our method. The code has been open-sourced at GSNet.
Towards Robust and Accurate Myoelectric Controller Design based on Multi-objective Optimization using Evolutionary Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Myoelectric pattern recognition is one of the important aspects in the design of the control strategy for various applications including upper-limb prostheses and bio-robotic hand movement systems. The current work has proposed an approach to design an energy-efficient EMG-based controller by considering a kernelized SVM classifier for decoding the information of surface electromyography (sEMG) signals to infer the underlying muscle movements. In order to achieve the optimized performance of the EMG-based controller, our main strategy of classifier design is to reduce the false movements of the overall system (when the EMG-based controller is at the `Rest' position). To this end, we have formulated the training algorithm of the proposed supervised learning system as a general constrained multi-objective optimization problem. An elitist multi-objective evolutionary algorithm $-$ the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) has been used to tune the hyperparameters of SVM. We have presented the experimental results by performing the experiments on a dataset consisting of the sEMG signals collected from eleven subjects at five different upper limb positions. Furthermore, the performance of the trained models based on the two-objective metrics, namely classification accuracy, and false-negative have been evaluated on two different test sets to examine the generalization capability of the proposed training approach while implementing limb-position invariant EMG classification. It is evident from the presented result that the proposed approach provides much more flexibility to the designer in selecting the parameters of the classifier to optimize the energy efficiency of the EMG-based controller.
Nearly Tight Spectral Sparsification of Directed Hypergraphs by a Simple Iterative Sampling Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Spectral hypergraph sparsification, an attempt to extend well-known spectral graph sparsification to hypergraphs, has been extensively studied over the past few years. For undirected hypergraphs, Kapralov, Krauthgamer, Tardos, and Yoshida~(2022) have proved an $\varepsilon$-spectral sparsifier of the optimal $O^*(n)$ size, where $n$ is the number of vertices and $O^*$ suppresses the $\varepsilon^{-1}$ and $\log n$ factors. For directed hypergraphs, however, the optimal sparsifier size has not been known. Our main contribution is the first algorithm that constructs an $O^*(n^2)$-size $\varepsilon$-spectral sparsifier for a weighted directed hypergraph. Our result is optimal up to the $\varepsilon^{-1}$ and $\log n$ factors since there is a lower bound of $Ω(n^2)$ even for directed graphs. We also show the first non-trivial lower bound of $Ω(n^2/\varepsilon)$ for general directed hypergraphs. The basic idea of our algorithm is borrowed from the spanner-based sparsification for ordinary graphs by Koutis and Xu~(2016). Their iterative sampling approach is indeed useful for designing sparsification algorithms in various circumstances. To demonstrate this, we also present a similar iterative sampling algorithm for undirected hypergraphs that attains one of the best size bounds, enjoys parallel implementation, and can be transformed to be fault-tolerant.
An Automated Conversion Between Selected Robot Kinematic Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a methodology that forms an automated tool for robot kinematic representation conversion, called the RobKin Interpreter. It is a set of analytical algorithms that apply basic linear algebra tools that can analyze an input serial robot representation, express the joints globally in matrix form, and map to other representations such as standard Denavit-Hartenberg parameters, Roll-Pitch-Yaw angles with translational displacement, and Product of Exponentials with a possibility to generate a URDF (Universal Robot Description Format) file from any of them. It works for revolute and prismatic joints and can interpret even arbitrary kinematic structures that do not have orthogonally placed joints and often appear in flexible robotic systems. The aim of the proposed methods is to facilitate the necessary switches between representations due to software compatibility, calculation simplification, or cooperation.
Graph Neural Networks Designed for Different Graph Types: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graphs are ubiquitous in nature and can therefore serve as models for many practical but also theoretical problems. For this purpose, they can be defined as many different types which suitably reflect the individual contexts of the represented problem. To address cutting-edge problems based on graph data, the research field of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has emerged. Despite the field's youth and the speed at which new models are developed, many recent surveys have been published to keep track of them. Nevertheless, it has not yet been gathered which GNN can process what kind of graph types. In this survey, we give a detailed overview of already existing GNNs and, unlike previous surveys, categorize them according to their ability to handle different graph types and properties. We consider GNNs operating on static and dynamic graphs of different structural constitutions, with or without node or edge attributes. Moreover, we distinguish between GNN models for discrete-time or continuous-time dynamic graphs and group the models according to their architecture. We find that there are still graph types that are not or only rarely covered by existing GNN models. We point out where models are missing and give potential reasons for their absence.
A novel semantic-functional approach for multiuser event-trigger communication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

This work introduces a new perspective for physical media sharing in multiuser communication by jointly considering (i) the meaning of the transmitted message and (ii) its function at the end user. Specifically, we have defined a scenario where multiple users (sensors) are continuously transmitting their own states concerning a predetermined event. On the receiver side there is an alarm monitoring system, whose function is to decide whether such a predetermined event has happened in a certain time period and, if yes, in which user. The media access control protocol proposed constitutes an alternative approach to the conventional physical layer methods, because the receiver does not decode the received waveform directly; rather, the relative position of the absence or presence of energy within a multidimensional resource space carries the (semantic) information. The protocol introduced here provides high efficiency in multiuser networks that operate with event-triggered sampling by enabling a constructive reconstruction of transmission collisions. We have demonstrated that the proposed method leads to a better event transmission efficiency than conventional methods like TDMA and slotted ALOHA. Remarkably, the proposed method achieves 100\% efficiency and 0\% error probability in almost all the studied cases, while consistently outperforming TDMA and slotted ALOHA.
Offline Reinforcement Learning for Safer Blood Glucose Control in People with Type 1 Diabetes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The widespread adoption of effective hybrid closed loop systems would represent an important milestone of care for people living with type 1 diabetes (T1D). These devices typically utilise simple control algorithms to select the optimal insulin dose for maintaining blood glucose levels within a healthy range. Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been utilised as a method for further enhancing glucose control in these devices. Previous approaches have been shown to reduce patient risk and improve time spent in the target range when compared to classical control algorithms, but are prone to instability in the learning process, often resulting in the selection of unsafe actions. This work presents an evaluation of offline RL for developing effective dosing policies without the need for potentially dangerous patient interaction during training. This paper examines the utility of BCQ, CQL and TD3-BC in managing the blood glucose of the 30 virtual patients available within the FDA-approved UVA/Padova glucose dynamics simulator. When trained on less than a tenth of the total training samples required by online RL to achieve stable performance, this work shows that offline RL can significantly increase time in the healthy blood glucose range from 61.6 +\- 0.3% to 65.3 +/- 0.5% when compared to the strongest state-of-art baseline (p < 0.001). This is achieved without any associated increase in low blood glucose events. Offline RL is also shown to be able to correct for common and challenging control scenarios such as incorrect bolus dosing, irregular meal timings and compression errors.
Defending Active Directory by Combining Neural Network based Dynamic Program and Evolutionary Diversity Optimisation
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Active Directory (AD) is the default security management system for Windows domain networks. We study a Stackelberg game model between one attacker and one defender on an AD attack graph. The attacker initially has access to a set of entry nodes. The attacker can expand this set by strategically exploring edges. Every edge has a detection rate and a failure rate. The attacker aims to maximize their chance of successfully reaching the destination before getting detected. The defender's task is to block a constant number of edges to decrease the attacker's chance of success. We show that the problem is #P-hard and, therefore, intractable to solve exactly. We convert the attacker's problem to an exponential sized Dynamic Program that is approximated by a Neural Network (NN). Once trained, the NN provides an efficient fitness function for the defender's Evolutionary Diversity Optimisation (EDO). The diversity emphasis on the defender's solution provides a diverse set of training samples, which improves the training accuracy of our NN for modelling the attacker. We go back and forth between NN training and EDO. Experimental results show that for R500 graph, our proposed EDO based defense is less than 1% away from the optimal defense.
DynLight: Realize dynamic phase duration with multi-level traffic signal control
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

We would like to withdraw this article for the following reasons: 1 this article is not satisfactory for limited language and theoretical description; 2 we have enriched and revised this article with the help of other authors; 3 we must update the author contribution information.
LaF: Labeling-Free Model Selection for Automated Deep Neural Network Reusing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Applying deep learning to science is a new trend in recent years which leads DL engineering to become an important problem. Although training data preparation, model architecture design, and model training are the normal processes to build DL models, all of them are complex and costly. Therefore, reusing the open-sourced pre-trained model is a practical way to bypass this hurdle for developers. Given a specific task, developers can collect massive pre-trained deep neural networks from public sources for re-using. However, testing the performance (e.g., accuracy and robustness) of multiple DNNs and recommending which model should be used is challenging regarding the scarcity of labeled data and the demand for domain expertise. In this paper, we propose a labeling-free (LaF) model selection approach to overcome the limitations of labeling efforts for automated model reusing. The main idea is to statistically learn a Bayesian model to infer the models' specialty only based on predicted labels. We evaluate LaF using 9 benchmark datasets including image, text, and source code, and 165 DNNs, considering both the accuracy and robustness of models. The experimental results demonstrate that LaF outperforms the baseline methods by up to 0.74 and 0.53 on Spearman's correlation and Kendall's $τ$, respectively.