OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fast Simulation of Particulate Suspensions Enabled by Graph Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Predicting the dynamic behaviors of particles in suspension subject to hydrodynamic interaction (HI) and external drive can be critical for many applications. By harvesting advanced deep learning techniques, the present work introduces a new framework, hydrodynamic interaction graph neural network (HIGNN), for inferring and predicting the particles' dynamics in Stokes suspensions. It overcomes the limitations of traditional approaches in computational efficiency, accuracy, and/or transferability. In particular, by uniting the data structure represented by a graph and the neural networks with learnable parameters, the HIGNN constructs surrogate modeling for the mobility tensor of particles which is the key to predicting the dynamics of particles subject to HI and external forces. To account for the many-body nature of HI, we generalize the state-of-the-art GNN by introducing higher-order connectivity into the graph and the corresponding convolutional operation. For training the HIGNN, we only need the data for a small number of particles in the domain of interest, and hence the training cost can be maintained low. Once constructed, the HIGNN permits fast predictions of the particles' velocities and is transferable to suspensions of different numbers/concentrations of particles in the same domain and to any external forcing. It has the ability to accurately capture both the long-range HI and short-range lubrication effects. We demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and transferability of the proposed HIGNN framework in a variety of systems. The requirement on computing resource is minimum: most simulations only require a desktop with one GPU; the simulations for a large suspension of 100,000 particles call for up to 6 GPUs.
Comparing and extending the use of defeasible argumentation with quantitative data in real-world contexts
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Dealing with uncertain, contradicting, and ambiguous information is still a central issue in Artificial Intelligence (AI). As a result, many formalisms have been proposed or adapted so as to consider non-monotonicity, with only a limited number of works and researchers performing any sort of comparison among them. A non-monotonic formalism is one that allows the retraction of previous conclusions or claims, from premises, in light of new evidence, offering some desirable flexibility when dealing with uncertainty. This research article focuses on evaluating the inferential capacity of defeasible argumentation, a formalism particularly envisioned for modelling non-monotonic reasoning. In addition to this, fuzzy reasoning and expert systems, extended for handling non-monotonicity of reasoning, are selected and employed as baselines, due to their vast and accepted use within the AI community. Computational trust was selected as the domain of application of such models. Trust is an ill-defined construct, hence, reasoning applied to the inference of trust can be seen as non-monotonic. Inference models were designed to assign trust scalars to editors of the Wikipedia project. In particular, argument-based models demonstrated more robustness than those built upon the baselines despite the knowledge bases or datasets employed. This study contributes to the body of knowledge through the exploitation of defeasible argumentation and its comparison to similar approaches. The practical use of such approaches coupled with a modular design that facilitates similar experiments was exemplified and their respective implementations made publicly available on GitHub [120, 121]. This work adds to previous works, empirically enhancing the generalisability of defeasible argumentation as a compelling approach to reason with quantitative data and uncertain knowledge.
MACSA: A Multimodal Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis Dataset with Multimodal Fine-grained Aligned Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Multimodal fine-grained sentiment analysis has recently attracted increasing attention due to its broad applications. However, the existing multimodal fine-grained sentiment datasets most focus on annotating the fine-grained elements in text but ignore those in images, which leads to the fine-grained elements in visual content not receiving the full attention they deserve. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, the Multimodal Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (MACSA) dataset, which contains more than 21K text-image pairs. The dataset provides fine-grained annotations for both textual and visual content and firstly uses the aspect category as the pivot to align the fine-grained elements between the two modalities. Based on our dataset, we propose the Multimodal ACSA task and a multimodal graph-based aligned model (MGAM), which adopts a fine-grained cross-modal fusion method. Experimental results show that our method can facilitate the baseline comparison for future research on this corpus. We will make the dataset and code publicly available.
New MDS Entanglement-Assisted Quantum Codes from MDS Hermitian Self-Orthogonal Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

The intersection ${\bf C}\bigcap {\bf C}^{\perp_H}$ of a linear code ${\bf C} \subset {\bf F}_{q^2}$ and its Hermitian dual ${\bf C}^{\perp_H}$ is called the Hermitian hull of this code. A linear code ${\bf C} \subset {\bf F}_{q^2}$ satisfying ${\bf C} \subset {\bf C}^{\perp_H}$ is called Hermitian self-orthogonal. Many Hermitian self-orthogonal codes were given for the construction of MDS quantum error correction codes (QECCs). In this paper we prove that for a nonnegative integer $h$ satisfying $0 \leq h \leq k$, a linear Hermitian self-orthogonal $[n, k]_{q^2}$ code is equivalent to a linear $h$-dimension Hermitian hull code. Therefore a lot of new MDS entanglement-assisted quantum error correction (EAQEC) codes can be constructed from previous known Hermitian self-orthogonal codes. Actually our method shows that previous constructed quantum MDS codes from Hermitian self-orthogonal codes can be transformed to MDS entanglement-assisted quantum codes with nonzero consumption parameter $c$ directly. We prove that MDS EAQEC $[[n, k, d, c]]_q$ codes with nonzero $c$ parameters and $d\leq \frac{n+2}{2}$ exist for arbitrary length $n \leq q^2+1$. Moreover any QECC constructed from $k$-dimensional Hermitian self-orthogonal codes can be transformed to $k$ different EAQEC codes.
Detecting tiny objects in aerial images: A normalized Wasserstein distance and a new benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Tiny object detection (TOD) in aerial images is challenging since a tiny object only contains a few pixels. State-of-the-art object detectors do not provide satisfactory results on tiny objects due to the lack of supervision from discriminative features. Our key observation is that the Intersection over Union (IoU) metric and its extensions are very sensitive to the location deviation of the tiny objects, which drastically deteriorates the quality of label assignment when used in anchor-based detectors. To tackle this problem, we propose a new evaluation metric dubbed Normalized Wasserstein Distance (NWD) and a new RanKing-based Assigning (RKA) strategy for tiny object detection. The proposed NWD-RKA strategy can be easily embedded into all kinds of anchor-based detectors to replace the standard IoU threshold-based one, significantly improving label assignment and providing sufficient supervision information for network training. Tested on four datasets, NWD-RKA can consistently improve tiny object detection performance by a large margin. Besides, observing prominent noisy labels in the Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images (AI-TOD) dataset, we are motivated to meticulously relabel it and release AI-TOD-v2 and its corresponding benchmark. In AI-TOD-v2, the missing annotation and location error problems are considerably mitigated, facilitating more reliable training and validation processes. Embedding NWD-RKA into DetectoRS, the detection performance achieves 4.3 AP points improvement over state-of-the-art competitors on AI-TOD-v2. Datasets, codes, and more visualizations are available at: https://chasel-tsui.github.io/AI-TOD-v2/
DSME-LoRa: Seamless Long Range Communication Between Arbitrary Nodes in the Constrained IoT
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Long range radio communication is preferred in many IoT deployments as it avoids the complexity of multi-hop wireless networks. LoRa is a popular, energy-efficient wireless modulation but its networking substrate LoRaWAN introduces severe limitations to its users. In this paper, we present and thoroughly analyze DSME-LoRa, a system design of LoRa with IEEE 802.15.4 DSME as a MAC layer. DSME-LoRa offers the advantage of seamless client-to-client communication beyond the pure gateway-centric transmission of LoRaWAN. We evaluate its feasibility via a full-stack implementation on the popular RIOT operating system, assess its steady-state packet flows in an analytical stochastic Markov model, and quantify its scalability in massive communication scenarios using large scale network simulations. Our findings indicate that DSME-LoRa is indeed a powerful approach that opens LoRa to standard network layers and outperforms LoRaWAN in many dimensions.
Continual Learning with Transformers for Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models become available over time. However, neural network models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is known as catastrophic forgetting and it is often difficult to prevent due to practical constraints, such as the amount of data that can be stored or the limited computation sources that can be used. Moreover, training large neural networks, such as Transformers, from scratch is very costly and requires a vast amount of training data, which might not be available in the application domain of interest. A recent trend indicates that dynamic architectures based on an expansion of the parameters can reduce catastrophic forgetting efficiently in continual learning, but this needs complex tuning to balance the growing number of parameters and barely share any information across tasks. As a result, they struggle to scale to a large number of tasks without significant overhead. In this paper, we validate in the computer vision domain a recent solution called Adaptive Distillation of Adapters (ADA), which is developed to perform continual learning using pre-trained Transformers and Adapters on text classification tasks. We empirically demonstrate on different classification tasks that this method maintains a good predictive performance without retraining the model or increasing the number of model parameters over the time. Besides it is significantly faster at inference time compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
Workflows to driving high-performance interactive supercomputing for urgent decision making
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Interactive urgent computing is a small but growing user of supercomputing resources. However there are numerous technical challenges that must be overcome to make supercomputers fully suited to the wide range of urgent workloads which could benefit from the computational power delivered by such instruments. An important question is how to connect the different components of an urgent workload; namely the users, the simulation codes, and external data sources, together in a structured and accessible manner. In this paper we explore the role of workflows from both the perspective of marshalling and control of urgent workloads, and at the individual HPC machine level. Ultimately requiring two workflow systems, by using a space weather prediction urgent use-cases, we explore the benefit that these two workflow systems provide especially when one exploits the flexibility enabled by them interoperating.
Visualizing and Alleviating the Effect of Radial Distortion on Camera Calibration Using Principal Lines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Preparing appropriate images for camera calibration is crucial to obtain accurate results. In this paper, new suggestions for preparing such data to alleviate the adverse effect of radial distortion for a calibration procedure using principal lines are developed through the investigations of: (i) identifying directions of checkerboard movements in an image which will result in maximum (and minimum) influence on the calibration results, and (ii) inspecting symmetry and monotonicity of such effect in (i) using the above principal lines. Accordingly, it is suggested that the estimation of principal point should based on linearly independent pairs of nearly parallel principal lines, with a member in each pair corresponds to a near 180-degree rotation (in the image plane) of the other. Experimental results show that more robust and consistent calibration results for the foregoing estimation can actually be obtained, compared with the renowned algebraic methods which estimate distortion parameters explicitly.
Risk Perspective Exploration in Distributional Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Distributional reinforcement learning demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in continuous and discrete control settings with the features of variance and risk, which can be used to explore. However, the exploration method employing the risk property is hard to find, although numerous exploration methods in Distributional RL employ the variance of return distribution per action. In this paper, we present risk scheduling approaches that explore risk levels and optimistic behaviors from a risk perspective. We demonstrate the performance enhancement of the DMIX algorithm using risk scheduling in a multi-agent setting with comprehensive experiments.
NumS: Scalable Array Programming for the Cloud
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Scientists increasingly rely on Python tools to perform scalable distributed memory array operations using rich, NumPy-like expressions. However, many of these tools rely on dynamic schedulers optimized for abstract task graphs, which often encounter memory and network bandwidth-related bottlenecks due to sub-optimal data and operator placement decisions. Tools built on the message passing interface (MPI), such as ScaLAPACK and SLATE, have better scaling properties, but these solutions require specialized knowledge to use. In this work, we present NumS, an array programming library which optimizes NumPy-like expressions on task-based distributed systems. This is achieved through a novel scheduler called Load Simulated Hierarchical Scheduling (LSHS). LSHS is a local search method which optimizes operator placement by minimizing maximum memory and network load on any given node within a distributed system. Coupled with a heuristic for load balanced data layouts, our approach is capable of attaining communication lower bounds on some common numerical operations, and our empirical study shows that LSHS enhances performance on Ray by decreasing network load by a factor of 2x, requiring 4x less memory, and reducing execution time by 10x on the logistic regression problem. On terabyte-scale data, NumS achieves competitive performance to SLATE on DGEMM, up to 20x speedup over Dask on a key operation for tensor factorization, and a 2x speedup on logistic regression compared to Dask ML and Spark's MLlib.
Reinforcement Learning in Medical Image Analysis: Concepts, Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Motivation: Medical image analysis involves tasks to assist physicians in qualitative and quantitative analysis of lesions or anatomical structures, significantly improving the accuracy and reliability of diagnosis and prognosis. Traditionally, these tasks are finished by physicians or medical physicists and lead to two major problems: (i) low efficiency; (ii) biased by personal experience. In the past decade, many machine learning methods have been applied to accelerate and automate the image analysis process. Compared to the enormous deployments of supervised and unsupervised learning models, attempts to use reinforcement learning in medical image analysis are scarce. This review article could serve as the stepping-stone for related research. Significance: From our observation, though reinforcement learning has gradually gained momentum in recent years, many researchers in the medical analysis field find it hard to understand and deploy in clinics. One cause is lacking well-organized review articles targeting readers lacking professional computer science backgrounds. Rather than providing a comprehensive list of all reinforcement learning models in medical image analysis, this paper may help the readers to learn how to formulate and solve their medical image analysis research as reinforcement learning problems. Approach & Results: We selected published articles from Google Scholar and PubMed. Considering the scarcity of related articles, we also included some outstanding newest preprints. The papers are carefully reviewed and categorized according to the type of image analysis task. We first review the basic concepts and popular models of reinforcement learning. Then we explore the applications of reinforcement learning models in landmark detection. Finally, we conclude the article by discussing the reviewed reinforcement learning approaches' limitations and possible improvements.
Active Exploration via Experiment Design in Markov Chains
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

A key challenge in science and engineering is to design experiments to learn about some unknown quantity of interest. Classical experimental design optimally allocates the experimental budget to maximize a notion of utility (e.g., reduction in uncertainty about the unknown quantity). We consider a rich setting, where the experiments are associated with states in a {\em Markov chain}, and we can only choose them by selecting a {\em policy} controlling the state transitions. This problem captures important applications, from exploration in reinforcement learning to spatial monitoring tasks. We propose an algorithm -- \textsc{markov-design} -- that efficiently selects policies whose measurement allocation \emph{provably converges to the optimal one}. The algorithm is sequential in nature, adapting its choice of policies (experiments) informed by past measurements. In addition to our theoretical analysis, we showcase our framework on applications in ecological surveillance and pharmacology.
Integrating IoT-Sensing and Crowdsensing with Privacy: Privacy-Preserving Hybrid Sensing for Smart Cities
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

Data sensing and gathering is an essential task for various information-driven services in smart cities. On the one hand, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors can be deployed at certain fixed locations to capture data reliably but suffer from limited sensing coverage. On the other hand, data can also be gathered dynamically through crowdsensing contributed by voluntary users but suffer from its unreliability and the lack of incentives for users' contributions. In this paper, we explore an integrated paradigm called "hybrid sensing" that harnesses both IoT-sensing and crowdsensing in a complementary manner. In hybrid sensing, users are incentivized to provide sensing data not covered by IoT sensors and provide crowdsourced feedback to assist in calibrating IoT-sensing. Their contributions will be rewarded with credits that can be redeemed to retrieve synthesized information from the hybrid system. In this paper, we develop a hybrid sensing system that supports explicit user privacy -- IoT sensors are obscured physically to prevent capturing private user data, and users interact with a crowdsensing server via a privacy-preserving protocol to preserve their anonymity. A key application of our system is smart parking, by which users can inquire and find the available parking spaces in outdoor parking lots. We implemented our hybrid sensing system for smart parking and conducted extensive empirical evaluations. Finally, our hybrid sensing system can be potentially applied to other information-driven services in smart cities.
Auto-Encoder-Extreme Learning Machine Model for Boiler NOx Emission Concentration Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

An automatic encoder (AE) extreme learning machine (ELM)-AE-ELM model is proposed to predict the NOx emission concentration based on the combination of mutual information algorithm (MI), AE, and ELM. First, the importance of practical variables is computed by the MI algorithm, and the mechanism is analyzed to determine the variables related to the NOx emission concentration. Then, the time delay correlations between the selected variables and NOx emission concentration are further analyzed to reconstruct the modeling data. Subsequently, the AE is applied to extract hidden features within the input variables. Finally, an ELM algorithm establishes the relationship between the NOx emission concentration and deep features. The experimental results on practical data indicate that the proposed model shows promising performance compared to state-of-art models.
vMFNet: Compositionality Meets Domain-generalised Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Training medical image segmentation models usually requires a large amount of labeled data. By contrast, humans can quickly learn to accurately recognise anatomy of interest from medical (e.g. MRI and CT) images with some limited guidance. Such recognition ability can easily generalise to new images from different clinical centres. This rapid and generalisable learning ability is mostly due to the compositional structure of image patterns in the human brain, which is less incorporated in medical image segmentation. In this paper, we model the compositional components (i.e. patterns) of human anatomy as learnable von-Mises-Fisher (vMF) kernels, which are robust to images collected from different domains (e.g. clinical centres). The image features can be decomposed to (or composed by) the components with the composing operations, i.e. the vMF likelihoods. The vMF likelihoods tell how likely each anatomical part is at each position of the image. Hence, the segmentation mask can be predicted based on the vMF likelihoods. Moreover, with a reconstruction module, unlabeled data can also be used to learn the vMF kernels and likelihoods by recombining them to reconstruct the input image. Extensive experiments show that the proposed vMFNet achieves improved generalisation performance on two benchmarks, especially when annotations are limited. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/vios-s/vMFNet.
Why patient data cannot be easily forgotten?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Rights provisioned within data protection regulations, permit patients to request that knowledge about their information be eliminated by data holders. With the advent of AI learned on data, one can imagine that such rights can extent to requests for forgetting knowledge of patient's data within AI models. However, forgetting patients' imaging data from AI models, is still an under-explored problem. In this paper, we study the influence of patient data on model performance and formulate two hypotheses for a patient's data: either they are common and similar to other patients or form edge cases, i.e. unique and rare cases. We show that it is not possible to easily forget patient data. We propose a targeted forgetting approach to perform patient-wise forgetting. Extensive experiments on the benchmark Automated Cardiac Diagnosis Challenge dataset showcase the improved performance of the proposed targeted forgetting approach as opposed to a state-of-the-art method.