OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automatic Game Design via Mechanic Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Game designs often center on the game mechanics---rules governing the logical evolution of the game. We seek to develop an intelligent system that generates computer games. As first steps towards this goal we present a composable and cross-domain representation for game mechanics that draws from AI planning action representations. We use a constraint solver to generate mechanics subject to design requirements on the form of those mechanics---what they do in the game. A planner takes a set of generated mechanics and tests whether those mechanics meet playability requirements---controlling how mechanics function in a game to affect player behavior. We demonstrate our system by modeling and generating mechanics in a role-playing game, platformer game, and combined role-playing-platformer game.
Image to Video Domain Adaptation Using Web Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Training deep neural networks typically requires large amounts of labeled data which may be scarce or expensive to obtain for a particular target domain. As an alternative, we can leverage webly-supervised data (i.e. results from a public search engine) which are relatively plentiful but may contain noisy results. In this work, we propose a novel two-stage approach to learn a video classifier using webly-supervised data. We argue that learning appearance features and then temporal features sequentially, rather than simultaneously, is an easier optimization for this task. We show this by first learning an image model from web images, which is used to initialize and train a video model. Our model applies domain adaptation to account for potential domain shift present between the source domain (webly-supervised data) and target domain and also accounts for noise by adding a novel attention component. We report results competitive with state-of-the-art for webly-supervised approaches on UCF-101 (while simplifying the training process) and also evaluate on Kinetics for comparison.
A Deep Learning Approach for Tweet Classification and Rescue Scheduling for Effective Disaster Management
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2019
Year: 2019

It is a challenging and complex task to acquire information from different regions of a disaster-affected area in a timely fashion. The extensive spread and reach of social media and networks allow people to share information in real-time. However, the processing of social media data and gathering of valuable information require a series of operations such as (1) processing each specific tweet for a text classification, (2) possible location determination of people needing help based on tweets, and (3) priority calculations of rescue tasks based on the classification of tweets. These are three primary challenges in developing an effective rescue scheduling operation using social media data. In this paper, first, we propose a deep learning model combining attention based Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify the tweets under different categories. We use pre-trained crisis word vectors and global vectors for word representation (GLoVe) for capturing semantic meaning from tweets. Next, we perform feature engineering to create an auxiliary feature map which dramatically increases the model accuracy. In our experiments using real data sets from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, it is observed that our proposed approach performs better compared to other classification methods based on Precision, Recall, F1-score, and Accuracy, and is highly effective to determine the correct priority of a tweet. Furthermore, to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed classification model a merged dataset comprises of 4 different datasets from CrisisNLP and another 15 different disasters data from CrisisLex are used. Finally, we develop an adaptive multitask hybrid scheduling algorithm considering resource constraints to perform an effective rescue scheduling operation considering different rescue priorities.
Learning to Generalize to Unseen Tasks with Bilevel Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Recent metric-based meta-learning approaches, which learn a metric space that generalizes well over combinatorial number of different classification tasks sampled from a task distribution, have been shown to be effective for few-shot classification tasks of unseen classes. They are often trained with episodic training where they iteratively train a common metric space that reduces distance between the class representatives and instances belonging to each class, over large number of episodes with random classes. However, this training is limited in that while the main target is the generalization to the classification of unseen classes during training, there is no explicit consideration of generalization during meta-training phase. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple yet effective meta-learning framework for metricbased approaches, which we refer to as learning to generalize (L2G), that explicitly constrains the learning on a sampled classification task to reduce the classification error on a randomly sampled unseen classification task with a bilevel optimization scheme. This explicit learning aimed toward generalization allows the model to obtain a metric that separates well between unseen classes. We validate our L2G framework on mini-ImageNet and tiered-ImageNet datasets with two base meta-learning few-shot classification models, Prototypical Networks and Relation Networks. The results show that L2G significantly improves the performance of the two methods over episodic training. Further visualization shows that L2G obtains a metric space that clusters and separates unseen classes well.
Fuzzy informer homed routing protocol for wireless sensor network
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2019
Year: 2019

A wireless sensor network consists of several sensor nodes. Sensor nodes collaborate to collect meaningful environmental information and send them to the base station. During these processes, nodes are prone to failure, due to the energy depletion, hardware or software failure, etc. Therefore, fault tolerance and energy efficiency are two important objectives for reliable packet delivery. To address these objectives a novel method called fuzzy informer homed routing protocol is introduced. The proposed method tries to distribute the workload between every sensor node. A fuzzy logic approach is used to handle uncertainties in cluster head communication range estimation. The simulation results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce energy consumption as compared with IHR and DHR protocols. Furthermore, results revealed that it performs better than IHR and DHR protocols in terms of first node dead and half of the nodes alive, throughput and total remaining energy. It is concluded that the proposed protocol is a stable and energy efficient fault tolerance algorithm for wireless sensor networks.
On the Relationship Between Coupling and Refactoring: An Empirical Viewpoint
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2019
Year: 2019

[Background] Refactoring has matured over the past twenty years to become part of a developer's toolkit. However, many fundamental research questions still remain largely unexplored. [Aim] The goal of this paper is to investigate the highest and lowest quartile of refactoring-based data using two coupling metrics - the Coupling between Objects metric and the more recent Conceptual Coupling between Classes metric to answer this question. Can refactoring trends and patterns be identified based on the level of class coupling? [Method] In this paper, we analyze over six thousand refactoring operations drawn from releases of three open-source systems to address one such question. [Results] Results showed no meaningful difference in the types of refactoring applied across either lower or upper quartile of coupling for both metrics; refactorings usually associated with coupling removal were actually more numerous in the lower quartile in some cases. A lack of inheritance-related refactorings across all systems was also noted. [Conclusions] The emerging message (and a perplexing one) is that developers seem to be largely indifferent to classes with high coupling when it comes to refactoring types - they treat classes with relatively low coupling in almost the same way.
EdgeMORE: Improving Resource Allocation with Multiple Options from Tenants
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2019
Year: 2019

Under the paradigm of Edge Computing (EC), a Network Operator (NO) deploys computational resources at the network edge and let third-party Service Providers (SPs) run on top of them, as tenants. Besides the clear advantages for SPs and final users thanks to the vicinity of computation nodes, a NO aims to allocate edge resources in order to increase its own utility, including bandwidth saving, operational cost reduction, QoE for its users, etc. However, while the number of third-party services competing for edge resources is expected to dramatically grow, the resources deployed cannot increase accordingly, due to physical limitations. Therefore, smart strategies are needed to fully exploit the potential of EC, despite its constrains. To this aim, we propose to leverage service adaptability, a dimension that has mainly been neglected so far: each service can adapt to the amount of resources that the NO has allocated to it, balancing the fraction of service computation performed at the edge and relying on remote servers, e.g., in the Cloud, for the rest. We propose EdgeMORE, a resource allocation strategy in which SPs express their capabilities to adapt to different resource constraints, by declaring the different configurations under which they are able to run, specifying the resources needed and the utility provided to the NO. The NO then chooses the most convenient option per each SP, in order to maximize the total utility. We formalize EdgeMORE as a Integer Linear Program. We show via simulation that EdgeMORE greatly improves EC utility with respect to the standard where no multiple options for running services are allowed.
The HSIC Bottleneck: Deep Learning without Back-Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce the HSIC (Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion) bottleneck for training deep neural networks. The HSIC bottleneck is an alternative to the conventional cross-entropy loss and backpropagation that has a number of distinct advantages. It mitigates exploding and vanishing gradients, resulting in the ability to learn very deep networks without skip connections. There is no requirement for symmetric feedback or update locking. We find that the HSIC bottleneck provides performance on MNIST/FashionMNIST/CIFAR10 classification comparable to backpropagation with a cross-entropy target, even when the system is not encouraged to make the output resemble the classification labels. Appending a single layer trained with SGD (without backpropagation) to reformat the information further improves performance.
Remote Mobile Manipulation with the Centauro Robot: Full-body Telepresence and Autonomous Operator Assistance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Solving mobile manipulation tasks in inaccessible and dangerous environments is an important application of robots to support humans. Example domains are construction and maintenance of manned and unmanned stations on the moon and other planets. Suitable platforms require flexible and robust hardware, a locomotion approach that allows for navigating a wide variety of terrains, dexterous manipulation capabilities, and respective user interfaces. We present the CENTAURO system which has been designed for these requirements and consists of the Centauro robot and a set of advanced operator interfaces with complementary strength enabling the system to solve a wide range of realistic mobile manipulation tasks. The robot possesses a centaur-like body plan and is driven by torque-controlled compliant actuators. Four articulated legs ending in steerable wheels allow for omnidirectional driving as well as for making steps. An anthropomorphic upper body with two arms ending in five-finger hands enables human-like manipulation. The robot perceives its environment through a suite of multimodal sensors. The resulting platform complexity goes beyond the complexity of most known systems which puts the focus on a suitable operator interface. An operator can control the robot through a telepresence suit, which allows for flexibly solving a large variety of mobile manipulation tasks. Locomotion and manipulation functionalities on different levels of autonomy support the operation. The proposed user interfaces enable solving a wide variety of tasks without previous task-specific training. The integrated system is evaluated in numerous teleoperated experiments that are described along with lessons learned.
An adaptive architecture for portability of greenhouse models
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2019
Year: 2019

This work deals with the portability of greenhouse models, as we believe that this is a challenge to their practical usage in control strategies under production conditions. We address this task by means of adaptive neural networks, which re-adjust their weights when transferred to new conditions. Such an adaptive account for computational models is typical of the field of developmental robotics, which investigates learning of motor control in artificial systems inspired on infants development. Similarly to robots, greenhouses are complex systems comprising technical and biological elements, whose state can be measured and modified through control actions. We present an adaptive model architecture to perform online learning on greenhouse models. This learning process makes use of an episodic memory and of online re-training. This allows for adaptation without the need for a complete new training, which might be prohibitive if the data under the new conditions is scarce. Current experiments focus on how a model of tomato photosynthesis, developed in a research facility, can adapt itself to a new environment in a production greenhouse. Further research will focus on model plasticity by means of adaptive learning rates and management of the episodic memory described in this paper. The models presented as a proof-of-concept estimate the transpiration and photosynthesis of a hydroponic tomato crop by using measurements of the climate as inputs. The models are trained and tested using data from a greenhouse in Berlin, Germany. Thereafter, the adaptive architecture is fed with data from a production greenhouse in southern Germany, where other tomato varieties were grown under different irrigation and climate strategies. The proposed adaptive architecture represents a promising tool for spreading the use of models produced by high-tech research centers to the greenhouse production sector.
Why Authors Don't Visualize Uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2019
Year: 2019

Clear presentation of uncertainty is an exception rather than rule in media articles, data-driven reports, and consumer applications, despite proposed techniques for communicating sources of uncertainty in data. This work considers, Why do so many visualization authors choose not to visualize uncertainty? I contribute a detailed characterization of practices, associations, and attitudes related to uncertainty communication among visualization authors, derived from the results of surveying 90 authors who regularly create visualizations for others as part of their work, and interviewing thirteen influential visualization designers. My results highlight challenges that authors face and expose assumptions and inconsistencies in beliefs about the role of uncertainty in visualization. In particular, a clear contradiction arises between authors' acknowledgment of the value of depicting uncertainty and the norm of omitting direct depiction of uncertainty. To help explain this contradiction, I present a rhetorical model of uncertainty omission in visualization-based communication. I also adapt a formal statistical model of how viewers judge the strength of a signal in a visualization to visualization-based communication, to argue that uncertainty communication necessarily reduces degrees of freedom in viewers' statistical inferences. I conclude with recommendations for how visualization research on uncertainty communication could better serve practitioners' current needs and values while deepening understanding of assumptions that reinforce uncertainty omission.
SqueezeNAS: Fast neural architecture search for faster semantic segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

For real time applications utilizing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), it is critical that the models achieve high-accuracy on the target task and low-latency inference on the target computing platform. While Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been effectively used to develop low-latency networks for image classification, there has been relatively little effort to use NAS to optimize DNN architectures for other vision tasks. In this work, we present what we believe to be the first proxyless hardware-aware search targeted for dense semantic segmentation. With this approach, we advance the state-of-the-art accuracy for latency-optimized networks on the Cityscapes semantic segmentation dataset. Our latency-optimized small SqueezeNAS network achieves 68.02% validation class mIOU with less than 35 ms inference times on the NVIDIA AGX Xavier. Our latency-optimized large SqueezeNAS network achieves 73.62% class mIOU with less than 100 ms inference times. We demonstrate that significant performance gains are possible by utilizing NAS to find networks optimized for both the specific task and inference hardware. We also present detailed analysis comparing our networks to recent state-of-the-art architectures.
Attribute-Guided Coupled GAN for Cross-Resolution Face Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this paper, we propose a novel attribute-guided cross-resolution (low-resolution to high-resolution) face recognition framework that leverages a coupled generative adversarial network (GAN) structure with adversarial training to find the hidden relationship between the low-resolution and high-resolution images in a latent common embedding subspace. The coupled GAN framework consists of two sub-networks, one dedicated to the low-resolution domain and the other dedicated to the high-resolution domain. Each sub-network aims to find a projection that maximizes the pair-wise correlation between the two feature domains in a common embedding subspace. In addition to projecting the images into a common subspace, the coupled network also predicts facial attributes to improve the cross-resolution face recognition. Specifically, our proposed coupled framework exploits facial attributes to further maximize the pair-wise correlation by implicitly matching facial attributes of the low and high-resolution images during the training, which leads to a more discriminative embedding subspace resulting in performance enhancement for cross-resolution face recognition. The efficacy of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art is demonstrated using the LFWA, Celeb-A, SCFace and UCCS datasets.
Sparsity Emerges Naturally in Neural Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

Concerns about interpretability, computational resources, and principled inductive priors have motivated efforts to engineer sparse neural models for NLP tasks. If sparsity is important for NLP, might well-trained neural models naturally become roughly sparse? Using the Taxi-Euclidean norm to measure sparsity, we find that frequent input words are associated with concentrated or sparse activations, while frequent target words are associated with dispersed activations but concentrated gradients. We find that gradients associated with function words are more concentrated than the gradients of content words, even controlling for word frequency.
Jenny 5 -- the robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Jenny 5 is a fully open-source robot intended to be used mainly for research but can also act as a human assistant. It has a mobile platform with rubber tracks, a flexible leg, two arms with 7 degrees of freedom each and head with 2 degrees of freedom. The robot is actuated by 20 motors (DC, steppers and servos) and its state is read with the help of many sensors. The robot also has 3 webcams for computer vision tasks. In this paper the current state of the robot is described.
Word Sense Disambiguation using Diffusion Kernel PCA
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

One of the major problems in natural language processing (NLP) is the word sense disambiguation (WSD) problem. It is the task of computationally identifying the right sense of a polysemous word based on its context. Resolving the WSD problem boosts the accuracy of many NLP focused algorithms such as text classification and machine translation. In this paper, we introduce a new supervised algorithm for WSD, that is based on Kernel PCA and Semantic Diffusion Kernel, which is called Diffusion Kernel PCA (DKPCA). DKPCA grasps the semantic similarities within terms, and it is based on PCA. These properties enable us to perform feature extraction and dimension reduction guided by semantic similarities and within the algorithm. Our empirical results on SensEval data demonstrate that DKPCA achieves higher or very close accuracy results compared to SVM and KPCA with various well-known kernels when the labeled data ratio is meager. Considering the scarcity of labeled data, whereas large quantities of unlabeled textual data are easily accessible, these are highly encouraging first results to develop DKPCA further.
How Does Learning Rate Decay Help Modern Neural Networks?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Learning rate decay (lrDecay) is a \emph{de facto} technique for training modern neural networks. It starts with a large learning rate and then decays it multiple times. It is empirically observed to help both optimization and generalization. Common beliefs in how lrDecay works come from the optimization analysis of (Stochastic) Gradient Descent: 1) an initially large learning rate accelerates training or helps the network escape spurious local minima; 2) decaying the learning rate helps the network converge to a local minimum and avoid oscillation. Despite the popularity of these common beliefs, experiments suggest that they are insufficient in explaining the general effectiveness of lrDecay in training modern neural networks that are deep, wide, and nonconvex. We provide another novel explanation: an initially large learning rate suppresses the network from memorizing noisy data while decaying the learning rate improves the learning of complex patterns. The proposed explanation is validated on a carefully-constructed dataset with tractable pattern complexity. And its implication, that additional patterns learned in later stages of lrDecay are more complex and thus less transferable, is justified in real-world datasets. We believe that this alternative explanation will shed light into the design of better training strategies for modern neural networks.