OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Improved Approximation Schemes for (Un-)Bounded Subset-Sum and Partition
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

We consider the SUBSET SUM problem and its important variants in this paper. In the SUBSET SUM problem, a (multi-)set $X$ of $n$ positive numbers and a target number $t$ are given, and the task is to find a subset of $X$ with the maximal sum that does not exceed $t$. It is well known that this problem is NP-hard and admits fully polynomial-time approximation schemes (FPTASs). In recent years, it has been shown that there does not exist an FPTAS of running time $\tilde\OO( 1/ε^{2-δ})$ for arbitrary small $δ>0$ assuming ($\min$,+)-convolution conjecture~\cite{bringmann2021fine}. However, the lower bound can be bypassed if we relax the constraint such that the task is to find a subset of $X$ that can slightly exceed the threshold $t$ by $ε$ times, and the sum of numbers within the subset is at least $1-\tilde\OO(ε)$ times the optimal objective value that respects the constraint. Approximation schemes that may violate the constraint are also known as weak approximation schemes. For the SUBSET SUM problem, there is a randomized weak approximation scheme running in time $\tilde\OO(n+ 1/ε^{5/3})$ [Mucha et al.'19]. For the special case where the target $t$ is half of the summation of all input numbers, weak approximation schemes are equivalent to approximation schemes that do not violate the constraint, and the best-known algorithm runs in $\tilde\OO(n+1/ε^{{3}/{2}})$ time [Bringmann and Nakos'21].
Modern French Poetry Generation with RoBERTa and GPT-2
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We present a novel neural model for modern poetry generation in French. The model consists of two pretrained neural models that are fine-tuned for the poem generation task. The encoder of the model is a RoBERTa based one while the decoder is based on GPT-2. This way the model can benefit from the superior natural language understanding performance of RoBERTa and the good natural language generation performance of GPT-2. Our evaluation shows that the model can create French poetry successfully. On a 5 point scale, the lowest score of 3.57 was given by human judges to typicality and emotionality of the output poetry while the best score of 3.79 was given to understandability.
A Strongly Polynomial Algorithm for Approximate Forster Transforms and its Application to Halfspace Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

The Forster transform is a method of regularizing a dataset by placing it in {\em radial isotropic position} while maintaining some of its essential properties. Forster transforms have played a key role in a diverse range of settings spanning computer science and functional analysis. Prior work had given {\em weakly} polynomial time algorithms for computing Forster transforms, when they exist. Our main result is the first {\em strongly polynomial time} algorithm to compute an approximate Forster transform of a given dataset or certify that no such transformation exists. By leveraging our strongly polynomial Forster algorithm, we obtain the first strongly polynomial time algorithm for {\em distribution-free} PAC learning of halfspaces. This learning result is surprising because {\em proper} PAC learning of halfspaces is {\em equivalent} to linear programming. Our learning approach extends to give a strongly polynomial halfspace learner in the presence of random classification noise and, more generally, Massart noise.
Land Use Prediction using Electro-Optical to SAR Few-Shot Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Satellite image analysis has important implications for land use, urbanization, and ecosystem monitoring. Deep learning methods can facilitate the analysis of different satellite modalities, such as electro-optical (EO) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, by supporting knowledge transfer between the modalities to compensate for individual shortcomings. Recent progress has shown how distributional alignment of neural network embeddings can produce powerful transfer learning models by employing a sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) loss. We analyze how this method can be applied to Sentinel-1 and -2 satellite imagery and develop several extensions toward making it effective in practice. In an application to few-shot Local Climate Zone (LCZ) prediction, we show that these networks outperform multiple common baselines on datasets with a large number of classes. Further, we provide evidence that instance normalization can significantly stabilize the training process and that explicitly shaping the embedding space using supervised contrastive learning can lead to improved performance.
A comparative study of emotion recognition methods using facial expressions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Understanding the facial expressions of our interlocutor is important to enrich the communication and to give it a depth that goes beyond the explicitly expressed. In fact, studying one's facial expression gives insight into their hidden emotion state. However, even as humans, and despite our empathy and familiarity with the human emotional experience, we are only able to guess what the other might be feeling. In the fields of artificial intelligence and computer vision, Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) is a topic that is still in full growth mostly with the advancement of deep learning approaches and the improvement of data collection. The main purpose of this paper is to compare the performance of three state-of-the-art networks, each having their own approach to improve on FER tasks, on three FER datasets. The first and second sections respectively describe the three datasets and the three studied network architectures designed for an FER task. The experimental protocol, the results and their interpretation are outlined in the remaining sections.
Fast Online Hashing with Multi-Label Projection
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Hashing has been widely researched to solve the large-scale approximate nearest neighbor search problem owing to its time and storage superiority. In recent years, a number of online hashing methods have emerged, which can update the hash functions to adapt to the new stream data and realize dynamic retrieval. However, existing online hashing methods are required to update the whole database with the latest hash functions when a query arrives, which leads to low retrieval efficiency with the continuous increase of the stream data. On the other hand, these methods ignore the supervision relationship among the examples, especially in the multi-label case. In this paper, we propose a novel Fast Online Hashing (FOH) method which only updates the binary codes of a small part of the database. To be specific, we first build a query pool in which the nearest neighbors of each central point are recorded. When a new query arrives, only the binary codes of the corresponding potential neighbors are updated. In addition, we create a similarity matrix which takes the multi-label supervision information into account and bring in the multi-label projection loss to further preserve the similarity among the multi-label data. The experimental results on two common benchmarks show that the proposed FOH can achieve dramatic superiority on query time up to 6.28 seconds less than state-of-the-art baselines with competitive retrieval accuracy.
Estimating Meetings' Air Flight $CO_2$ Equivalent Emissions An Illustrative Example with IETF meetings
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

These notes describe CO2eq a tool that estimates $CO_2$ equivalent emissions associated with air traffic and applies it to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international standard developing organization that meets 3 times a year. CO2eq estimates that the participation to IETF meetings (by a single participant) generates as much $CO_2$ equivalent as the $CO_2$ emissions per capita of European countries generating their energy using coal -- like Germany or Poland for example. This suggests some radical changes should be considered by the IETF. According to the conclusion of the $26^{th}$ Conference of the Parties (COP26) from the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres; in 2021, the number of meetings should be limited to a maximum of one meeting per year. In addition, the incorporation of sustainability principles into the IETF's strategy, should include, for example, increasing the effort to enhance the experience of 'remote' participation as well as adhering to programs (such as for example the United Nations Global Compact and the caring for climate initiative) to align its strategy and report progress toward sustainability.
Neural Cell Video Synthesis via Optical-Flow Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The biomedical imaging world is notorious for working with small amounts of data, frustrating state-of-the-art efforts in the computer vision and deep learning worlds. With large datasets, it is easier to make progress we have seen from the natural image distribution. It is the same with microscopy videos of neuron cells moving in a culture. This problem presents several challenges as it can be difficult to grow and maintain the culture for days, and it is expensive to acquire the materials and equipment. In this work, we explore how to alleviate this data scarcity problem by synthesizing the videos. We, therefore, take the recent work of the video diffusion model to synthesize videos of cells from our training dataset. We then analyze the model's strengths and consistent shortcomings to guide us on improving video generation to be as high-quality as possible. To improve on such a task, we propose modifying the denoising function and adding motion information (dense optical flow) so that the model has more context regarding how video frames transition over time and how each pixel changes over time.
NeRDi: Single-View NeRF Synthesis with Language-Guided Diffusion as General Image Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

2D-to-3D reconstruction is an ill-posed problem, yet humans are good at solving this problem due to their prior knowledge of the 3D world developed over years. Driven by this observation, we propose NeRDi, a single-view NeRF synthesis framework with general image priors from 2D diffusion models. Formulating single-view reconstruction as an image-conditioned 3D generation problem, we optimize the NeRF representations by minimizing a diffusion loss on its arbitrary view renderings with a pretrained image diffusion model under the input-view constraint. We leverage off-the-shelf vision-language models and introduce a two-section language guidance as conditioning inputs to the diffusion model. This is essentially helpful for improving multiview content coherence as it narrows down the general image prior conditioned on the semantic and visual features of the single-view input image. Additionally, we introduce a geometric loss based on estimated depth maps to regularize the underlying 3D geometry of the NeRF. Experimental results on the DTU MVS dataset show that our method can synthesize novel views with higher quality even compared to existing methods trained on this dataset. We also demonstrate our generalizability in zero-shot NeRF synthesis for in-the-wild images.
Giga-SSL: Self-Supervised Learning for Gigapixel Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Whole slide images (WSI) are microscopy images of stained tissue slides routinely prepared for diagnosis and treatment selection in medical practice. WSI are very large (gigapixel size) and complex (made of up to millions of cells). The current state-of-the-art (SoTA) approach to classify WSI subdivides them into tiles, encodes them by pre-trained networks and applies Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) to train for specific downstream tasks. However, annotated datasets are often small, typically a few hundred to a few thousand WSI, which may cause overfitting and underperforming models. Conversely, the number of unannotated WSI is ever increasing, with datasets of tens of thousands (soon to be millions) of images available. While it has been previously proposed to use these unannotated data to identify suitable tile representations by self-supervised learning (SSL), downstream classification tasks still require full supervision because parts of the MIL architecture is not trained during tile level SSL pre-training. Here, we propose a strategy of slide level SSL to leverage the large number of WSI without annotations to infer powerful slide representations. Applying our method to The Cancer-Genome Atlas, one of the most widely used data resources in cancer research (16 TB image data), we are able to downsize the dataset to 23 MB without any loss in predictive power: we show that a linear classifier trained on top of these embeddings maintains or improves previous SoTA performances on various benchmark WSI classification tasks. Finally, we observe that training a classifier on these representations with tiny datasets (e.g. 50 slides) improved performances over SoTA by an average of +6.3 AUC points over all downstream tasks.
Status Quo Bias in Users Information Systems (IS) Adoption and Continuance Intentions: A Literature Review and Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Information systems (IS) adoption and continuance intentions of users have a dominant effect on digital transformation in organisations. However, organisations undergoing digital transformation face substantial barriers due to user resistance to IS implementations. Status quo bias (SQB) plays a vital role in users decision-making regarding adopting new IS or continuing to use existing IS. Despite recent research to validate the effects of SQB on user resistance to IS implementations, how SQB affects the IS adoption and continuance intentions of users remains poorly understood, making it harder to develop ways of successfully dealing with it. To address the gap, we performed a systematic literature review on SQB in IS research. Our proposed framework incorporates the psychological phenomena promoting the status quo, SQB theory constructs, levels of SQB influence, and factors reducing the user resistance to IS implementations to enhance the understanding of IS adoption and continuance intentions.
Fine-Grained Emotional Paraphrasing along Emotion Gradients
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Paraphrase generation, a.k.a. paraphrasing, is a common and important task in natural language processing. Emotional paraphrasing, which changes the emotion embodied in a piece of text while preserving its meaning, has many potential applications, e.g., moderating online dialogues and preventing cyberbullying. We introduce a new task of fine-grained emotional paraphrasing along emotion gradients, that is, altering the emotional intensities of the paraphrases in fine grain following smooth variations in affective dimensions while preserving the meanings of the originals. We propose a framework for addressing this task by fine-tuning text-to-text Transformers through multi-task training. We enhance several widely used paraphrasing corpus by annotating the input and target texts with their fine-grained emotion labels. With these labels, fine-tuning text-to-text Transformers on these corpus entails multi-task training. Evaluations of the fine-tuned Transformers on separate test sets show that including fine-grained emotion labels in the paraphrase task significantly improve the chance of obtaining high-quality paraphrases of the desired emotions, i.e., more than doubling the number of exact matches of desired emotions while achieving consistently better scores in paraphrase metrics such as BLEU, ROGUE, and METEOR.
Achieving Transparency in Distributed Machine Learning with Explainable Data Collaboration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Transparency of Machine Learning models used for decision support in various industries becomes essential for ensuring their ethical use. To that end, feature attribution methods such as SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) are widely used to explain the predictions of black-box machine learning models to customers and developers. However, a parallel trend has been to train machine learning models in collaboration with other data holders without accessing their data. Such models, trained over horizontally or vertically partitioned data, present a challenge for explainable AI because the explaining party may have a biased view of background data or a partial view of the feature space. As a result, explanations obtained from different participants of distributed machine learning might not be consistent with one another, undermining trust in the product. This paper presents an Explainable Data Collaboration Framework based on a model-agnostic additive feature attribution algorithm (KernelSHAP) and Data Collaboration method of privacy-preserving distributed machine learning. In particular, we present three algorithms for different scenarios of explainability in Data Collaboration and verify their consistency with experiments on open-access datasets. Our results demonstrated a significant (by at least a factor of 1.75) decrease in feature attribution discrepancies among the users of distributed machine learning.
Improving Deep Localized Level Analysis: How Game Logs Can Help
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Player modelling is the field of study associated with understanding players. One pursuit in this field is affect prediction: the ability to predict how a game will make a player feel. We present novel improvements to affect prediction by using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict player experience trained on game event logs in tandem with localized level structure information. We test our approach on levels based on Super Mario Bros. (Infinite Mario Bros.) and Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (Gwario), as well as original Super Mario Bros. levels. We outperform prior work, and demonstrate the utility of training on player logs, even when lacking them at test time for cross-domain player modelling.
SSDNeRF: Semantic Soft Decomposition of Neural Radiance Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) encode the radiance in a scene parameterized by the scene's plenoptic function. This is achieved by using an MLP together with a mapping to a higher-dimensional space, and has been proven to capture scenes with a great level of detail. Naturally, the same parameterization can be used to encode additional properties of the scene, beyond just its radiance. A particularly interesting property in this regard is the semantic decomposition of the scene. We introduce a novel technique for semantic soft decomposition of neural radiance fields (named SSDNeRF) which jointly encodes semantic signals in combination with radiance signals of a scene. Our approach provides a soft decomposition of the scene into semantic parts, enabling us to correctly encode multiple semantic classes blending along the same direction -- an impossible feat for existing methods. Not only does this lead to a detailed, 3D semantic representation of the scene, but we also show that the regularizing effects of the MLP used for encoding help to improve the semantic representation. We show state-of-the-art segmentation and reconstruction results on a dataset of common objects and demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied for high quality temporally consistent video editing and re-compositing on a dataset of casually captured selfie videos.
Slimmable Pruned Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Slimmable Neural Networks (S-Net) is a novel network which enabled to select one of the predefined proportions of channels (sub-network) dynamically depending on the current computational resource availability. The accuracy of each sub-network on S-Net, however, is inferior to that of individually trained networks of the same size due to its difficulty of simultaneous optimization on different sub-networks. In this paper, we propose Slimmable Pruned Neural Networks (SP-Net), which has sub-network structures learned by pruning instead of adopting structures with the same proportion of channels in each layer (width multiplier) like S-Net, and we also propose new pruning procedures: multi-base pruning instead of one-shot or iterative pruning to realize high accuracy and huge training time saving. We also introduced slimmable channel sorting (scs) to achieve calculation as fast as S-Net and zero padding match (zpm) pruning to prune residual structure in more efficient way. SP-Net can be combined with any kind of channel pruning methods and does not require any complicated processing or time-consuming architecture search like NAS models. Compared with each sub-network of the same FLOPs on S-Net, SP-Net improves accuracy by 1.2-1.5% for ResNet-50, 0.9-4.4% for VGGNet, 1.3-2.7% for MobileNetV1, 1.4-3.1% for MobileNetV2 on ImageNet. Furthermore, our methods outperform other SOTA pruning methods and are on par with various NAS models according to our experimental results on ImageNet. The code is available at https://github.com/hideakikuratsu/SP-Net.
PADDLES: Phase-Amplitude Spectrum Disentangled Early Stopping for Learning with Noisy Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated superiority in learning patterns, but are sensitive to label noises and may overfit noisy labels during training. The early stopping strategy averts updating CNNs during the early training phase and is widely employed in the presence of noisy labels. Motivated by biological findings that the amplitude spectrum (AS) and phase spectrum (PS) in the frequency domain play different roles in the animal's vision system, we observe that PS, which captures more semantic information, can increase the robustness of DNNs to label noise, more so than AS can. We thus propose early stops at different times for AS and PS by disentangling the features of some layer(s) into AS and PS using Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) during training. Our proposed Phase-AmplituDe DisentangLed Early Stopping (PADDLES) method is shown to be effective on both synthetic and real-world label-noise datasets. PADDLES outperforms other early stopping methods and obtains state-of-the-art performance.
An automated approach to extracting positive and negative clinical research results
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Failure is common in clinical trials since the successful failures presented in negative results always indicate the ways that should not be taken. In this paper, we proposed an automated approach to extracting positive and negative clinical research results by introducing a PICOE (Population, Intervention, Comparation, Outcome, and Effect) framework to represent randomized controlled trials (RCT) reports, where E indicates the effect between a specific I and O. We developed a pipeline to extract and assign the corresponding statistical effect to a specific I-O pair from natural language RCT reports. The extraction models achieved a high degree of accuracy for ICO and E descriptive words extraction through two rounds of training. By defining a threshold of p-value, we find in all Covid-19 related intervention-outcomes pairs with statistical tests, negative results account for nearly 40%. We believe that this observation is noteworthy since they are extracted from the published literature, in which there is an inherent risk of reporting bias, preferring to report positive results rather than negative results. We provided a tool to systematically understand the current level of clinical evidence by distinguishing negative results from the positive results.