OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hierarchical Human-Motion Prediction and Logic-Geometric Programming for Minimal Interference Human-Robot Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we tackle the problem of human-robot coordination in sequences of manipulation tasks. Our approach integrates hierarchical human motion prediction with Task and Motion Planning (TAMP). We first devise a hierarchical motion prediction approach by combining Inverse Reinforcement Learning and short-term motion prediction using a Recurrent Neural Network. In a second step, we propose a dynamic version of the TAMP algorithm Logic-Geometric Programming (LGP). Our version of Dynamic LGP, replans periodically to handle the mismatch between the human motion prediction and the actual human behavior. We assess the efficacy of the approach by training the prediction algorithms and testing the framework on the publicly available MoGaze dataset.
Capturing patterns of variation unique to a specific dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Capturing patterns of variation present in a dataset is important in exploratory data analysis and unsupervised learning. Contrastive dimension reduction methods, such as contrastive principal component analysis (cPCA), find patterns unique to a target dataset of interest by contrasting with a carefully chosen background dataset representing unwanted or uninteresting variation. However, such methods typically require a tuning parameter that governs the level of contrast, and it is unclear how to choose this parameter objectively. Furthermore, it is frequently of interest to contrast against multiple backgrounds, which is difficult to accomplish with existing methods. We propose unique component analysis (UCA), a tuning-free method that identifies low-dimensional representations of a target dataset relative to one or more comparison datasets. It is computationally efficient even with large numbers of features. We show in several experiments that UCA with a single background dataset achieves similar results compared to cPCA with various tuning parameters, and that UCA with multiple individual background datasets is superior to both cPCA with any single background data and cPCA with a pooled background dataset.
Improving Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Different from traditional knowledge graphs (KGs) where facts are represented as entity-relation-entity triplets, hyper-relational KGs (HKGs) allow triplets to be associated with additional relation-entity pairs (a.k.a qualifiers) to convey more complex information. How to effectively and efficiently model the triplet-qualifier relationship for prediction tasks such as HKG completion is an open challenge for research. This paper proposes to improve the best-performing method in HKG completion, namely STARE, by introducing two novel revisions: (1) Replacing the computation-heavy graph neural network module with light-weight entity/relation embedding processing techniques for efficiency improvement without sacrificing effectiveness; (2) Adding a qualifier-oriented auxiliary training task for boosting the prediction power of our approach on HKG completion. The proposed approach consistently outperforms STARE in our experiments on three benchmark datasets, with significantly improved computational efficiency.
Open data for Moroccan license plates for OCR applications : data collection, labeling, and model construction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Significant number of researches have been developed recently around intelligent system for traffic management, especially, OCR based license plate recognition, as it is considered as a main step for any automatic traffic management system. Good quality data sets are increasingly needed and produced by the research community to improve the performance of those algorithms. Furthermore, a special need of data is noted for countries having special characters on their licence plates, like Morocco, where Arabic Alphabet is used. In this work, we present a labeled open data set of circulation plates taken in Morocco, for different type of vehicles, namely cars, trucks and motorcycles. This data was collected manually and consists of 705 unique and different images. Furthermore this data was labeled for plate segmentation and for matriculation number OCR. Also, As we show in this paper, the data can be enriched using data augmentation techniques to create training sets with few thousands of images for different machine leaning and AI applications. We present and compare a set of models built on this data. Also, we publish this data as an open access data to encourage innovation and applications in the field of OCR and image processing for traffic control and other applications for transportation and heterogeneous vehicle management.
proScript: Partially Ordered Scripts Generation via Pre-trained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Scripts - standardized event sequences describing typical everyday activities - have been shown to help understand narratives by providing expectations, resolving ambiguity, and filling in unstated information. However, to date they have proved hard to author or extract from text. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time that pre-trained neural language models (LMs) can be be finetuned to generate high-quality scripts, at varying levels of granularity, for a wide range of everyday scenarios (e.g., bake a cake). To do this, we collected a large (6.4k), crowdsourced partially ordered scripts (named proScript), which is substantially larger than prior datasets, and developed models that generate scripts with combining language generation and structure prediction. We define two complementary tasks: (i) edge prediction: given a scenario and unordered events, organize the events into a valid (possibly partial-order) script, and (ii) script generation: given only a scenario, generate events and organize them into a (possibly partial-order) script. Our experiments show that our models perform well (e.g., F1=75.7 in task (i)), illustrating a new approach to overcoming previous barriers to script collection. We also show that there is still significant room for improvement toward human level performance. Together, our tasks, dataset, and models offer a new research direction for learning script knowledge.
Multitask Learning for VVC Quality Enhancement and Super-Resolution
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The latest video coding standard, called versatile video coding (VVC), includes several novel and refined coding tools at different levels of the coding chain. These tools bring significant coding gains with respect to the previous standard, high efficiency video coding (HEVC). However, the encoder may still introduce visible coding artifacts, mainly caused by coding decisions applied to adjust the bitrate to the available bandwidth. Hence, pre and post-processing techniques are generally added to the coding pipeline to improve the quality of the decoded video. These methods have recently shown outstanding results compared to traditional approaches, thanks to the recent advances in deep learning. Generally, multiple neural networks are trained independently to perform different tasks, thus omitting to benefit from the redundancy that exists between the models. In this paper, we investigate a learning-based solution as a post-processing step to enhance the decoded VVC video quality. Our method relies on multitask learning to perform both quality enhancement and super-resolution using a single shared network optimized for multiple degradation levels. The proposed solution enables a good performance in both mitigating coding artifacts and super-resolution with fewer network parameters compared to traditional specialized architectures.
CTU Depth Decision Algorithms for HEVC: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2021
Year: 2021

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) surpasses its predecessors in encoding efficiency by introducing new coding tools at the cost of an increased encoding time-complexity. The Coding Tree Unit (CTU) is the main building block used in HEVC. In the HEVC standard, frames are divided into CTUs with the predetermined size of up to 64x64 pixels. Each CTU is then divided recursively into a number of equally sized square areas, known as Coding Units (CUs). Although this diversity of frame partitioning increases encoding efficiency, it also causes an increase in the time complexity due to the increased number of ways to find the optimal partitioning. To address this complexity, numerous algorithms have been proposed to eliminate unnecessary searches during partitioning CTUs by exploiting the correlation in the video. In this paper, existing CTU depth decision algorithms for HEVC are surveyed. These algorithms are categorized into two groups, namely statistics and machine learning approaches. Statistics approaches are further subdivided into neighboring and inherent approaches. Neighboring approaches exploit the similarity between adjacent CTUs to limit the depth range of the current CTU, while inherent approaches use only the available information within the current CTU. Machine learning approaches try to extract and exploit similarities implicitly. Traditional methods like support vector machines or random forests use manually selected features, while recently proposed deep learning methods extract features during training. Finally, this paper discusses extending these methods to more recent video coding formats such as Versatile Video Coding (VVC) and AOMedia Video 1(AV1).
Experimental review of distance sensors for indoor mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, some of the distance sensor, including Kinect, Hokuyo UTM-30LX, and RPLidar were observed experimentally. Strengths and weaknesses of each sensor were reviewed so that it can be used as a reference for selecting a suitable sensor for any particular application. A software application has been developed in C programming language as a platform for gathering information for all tested sensors. According to the experiment results, it showed that Hokuyo UTM-30LX results in random normally distributed error on measuring distance with average error 21.94 mm and variance 32.11. On the other hand, error measurement resulted by Kinect and RPLidar strongly depended on measured distance of the object from the sensors, while measurement error resulted by Kinect had a negative correlation with the measured distance and the error resulted by RPLidar sensor had a positive correlation with the measured distance. The performance of these three sensors for detecting a transparent object shows that the Kinect sensors can detect the transparent object on its effective range measurement, Hokuyo UTM-30LX can detect the transparent object in the distance more than equal to 200 mm, and the RPLidar sensor cannot detect the transparent object at all tested distance. Lastly, the experiment shows that the Hokuyo UTM-30LX has the fastest processing time significantly, and the RPLidar has the slowest processing time significantly, while the processing time of Kinect sensor was in between. These processing times were not significantly affected by various tested distance measurement.
Enriching a Model's Notion of Belief using a Persistent Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Although pretrained language models (PTLMs) have been shown to contain significant amounts of world knowledge, they can still produce inconsistent answers to questions when probed, even after using specialized training techniques to reduce inconsistency. As a result, it can be hard to identify what the model actually "believes" about the world. Our goal is to reduce this problem, so systems are more globally consistent and accurate in their answers. Our approach is to add a memory component -- a BeliefBank -- that records a model's answers, and two mechanisms that use it to improve consistency among beliefs. First, a reasoning component -- a weighted SAT solver -- improves consistency by flipping answers that significantly clash with others. Second, a feedback component re-queries the model but using known beliefs as context. We show that, in a controlled experimental setting, these two mechanisms improve both accuracy and consistency. This is significant as it is a first step towards endowing models with an evolving memory, allowing them to construct a more coherent picture of the world.
3rd Workshop on Hybrid Development Approaches in Software System Development
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Evidence shows that software development methods, frameworks, and even practices are seldom applied in companies by following the book. Combinations of different methodologies into home-grown processes are being constantly uncovered. Nonetheless, an academic understanding and investigation of this phenomenon is very limited. In 2016, the HELENA initiative was launched to research hybrid development approaches in software system development. This paper introduces the 3rd HELENA workshop and provides a detailed description of the instrument used and the available data sets.
ALGAMES: A Fast Augmented Lagrangian Solver for Constrained Dynamic Games
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Dynamic games are an effective paradigm for dealing with the control of multiple interacting actors. This paper introduces ALGAMES (Augmented Lagrangian GAME-theoretic Solver), a solver that handles trajectory-optimization problems with multiple actors and general nonlinear state and input constraints. Its novelty resides in satisfying the first-order optimality conditions with a quasi-Newton root-finding algorithm and rigorously enforcing constraints using an augmented Lagrangian method. We evaluate our solver in the context of autonomous driving on scenarios with a strong level of interactions between the vehicles. We assess the robustness of the solver using Monte Carlo simulations. It is able to reliably solve complex problems like ramp merging with three vehicles three times faster than a state-of-the-art DDP-based approach. A model-predictive control (MPC) implementation of the algorithm, running at more than 60 Hz, demonstrates ALGAMES' ability to mitigate the "frozen robot" problem on complex autonomous driving scenarios like merging onto a crowded highway.
A Surface Geometry Model for LiDAR Depth Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

LiDAR depth completion is a task that predicts depth values for every pixel on the corresponding camera frame, although only sparse LiDAR points are available. Most of the existing state-of-the-art solutions are based on deep neural networks, which need a large amount of data and heavy computations for training the models. In this letter, a novel non-learning depth completion method is proposed by exploiting the local surface geometry that is enhanced by an outlier removal algorithm. The proposed surface geometry model is inspired by the observation that most pixels with unknown depth have a nearby LiDAR point. Therefore, it is assumed those pixels share the same surface with the nearest LiDAR point, and their respective depth can be estimated as the nearest LiDAR depth value plus a residual error. The residual error is calculated by using a derived equation with several physical parameters as input, including the known camera intrinsic parameters, estimated normal vector, and offset distance on the image plane. The proposed method is further enhanced by an outlier removal algorithm that is designed to remove incorrectly mapped LiDAR points from occluded regions. On KITTI dataset, the proposed solution achieves the best error performance among all existing non-learning methods and is comparable to the best self-supervised learning method and some supervised learning methods. Moreover, since outlier points from occluded regions is a commonly existing problem, the proposed outlier removal algorithm is a general preprocessing step that is applicable to many robotic systems with both camera and LiDAR sensors.
Convolutional Normalizing Flows for Deep Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep Gaussian processes (DGPs), a hierarchical composition of GP models, have successfully boosted the expressive power of their single-layer counterpart. However, it is impossible to perform exact inference in DGPs, which has motivated the recent development of variational inference-based methods. Unfortunately, either these methods yield a biased posterior belief or it is difficult to evaluate their convergence. This paper introduces a new approach for specifying flexible, arbitrarily complex, and scalable approximate posterior distributions. The posterior distribution is constructed through a normalizing flow (NF) which transforms a simple initial probability into a more complex one through a sequence of invertible transformations. Moreover, a novel convolutional normalizing flow (CNF) is developed to improve the time efficiency and capture dependency between layers. Empirical evaluation shows that CNF DGP outperforms the state-of-the-art approximation methods for DGPs.
A Self-Supervised Auxiliary Loss for Deep RL in Partially Observable Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

In this work we explore an auxiliary loss useful for reinforcement learning in environments where strong performing agents are required to be able to navigate a spatial environment. The auxiliary loss proposed is to minimize the classification error of a neural network classifier that predicts whether or not a pair of states sampled from the agents current episode trajectory are in order. The classifier takes as input a pair of states as well as the agent's memory. The motivation for this auxiliary loss is that there is a strong correlation with which of a pair of states is more recent in the agents episode trajectory and which of the two states is spatially closer to the agent. Our hypothesis is that learning features to answer this question encourages the agent to learn and internalize in memory representations of states that facilitate spatial reasoning. We tested this auxiliary loss on a navigation task in a gridworld and achieved 9.6% increase in accumulative episode reward compared to a strong baseline approach.
Approximate Triangle Counting via Sampling and Fast Matrix Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

There is a trivial $O(\frac{n^3}{T})$ time algorithm for approximate triangle counting where $T$ is the number of triangles in the graph and $n$ the number of vertices. At the same time, one may count triangles exactly using fast matrix multiplication in time $\tilde{O}(n^ω)$. Is it possible to get a negative dependency on the number of triangles $T$ while retaining the $n^ω$ dependency on $n$? We answer this question positively by providing an algorithm which runs in time $O\big(\frac{n^ω}{T^{ω- 2}}\big) \cdot \text{poly}(n^{o(1)}/ε)$. This is optimal in the sense that as long as the exponent of $T$ is independent of $n, T$, it cannot be improved while retaining the dependency on $n$; this as follows from the lower bound of Eden and Rosenbaum [APPROX/RANDOM 2018]. Our algorithm improves upon the state of the art when $T = ω(1)$ and $T = o(n)$. We also consider the problem of approximate triangle counting in sparse graphs, parameterizing by the number of edges $m$. The best known algorithm runs in time $\tilde{O}\big(\frac{m^{3/2}}{T}\big)$ [Eden et al., SIAM Journal on Computing, 2017]. There is also a well known algorithm for exact triangle counting that runs in time $\tilde{O}(m^{2ω/(ω+ 1)})$. We again get an algorithm that retains the exponent of $m$ while running faster on graphs with larger number of triangles. Specifically, our algorithm runs in time $O\Big(\frac{m^{2ω/(ω+1)}}{ T^{2(ω-1)/(ω+1)}}\Big) \cdot \text{poly}(n^{o(1)}/ε)$. This is again optimal in the sense that if the exponent of $T$ is to be constant, it cannot be improved without worsening the dependency on $m$. This algorithm improves upon the state of the art when $T = ω(1)$ and $T = o(\sqrt{m})$.
Objective-Dependent Uncertainty Driven Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

From diagnosing neovascular diseases to detecting white matter lesions, accurate tiny vessel segmentation in fundus images is critical. Promising results for accurate vessel segmentation have been known. However, their effectiveness in segmenting tiny vessels is still limited. In this paper, we study retinal vessel segmentation by incorporating tiny vessel segmentation into our framework for the overall accurate vessel segmentation. To achieve this, we propose a new deep convolutional neural network (CNN) which divides vessel segmentation into two separate objectives. Specifically, we consider the overall accurate vessel segmentation and tiny vessel segmentation as two individual objectives. Then, by exploiting the objective-dependent (homoscedastic) uncertainty, we enable the network to learn both objectives simultaneously. Further, to improve the individual objectives, we propose: (a) a vessel weight map based auxiliary loss for enhancing tiny vessel connectivity (i.e., improving tiny vessel segmentation), and (b) an enhanced encoder-decoder architecture for improved localization (i.e., for accurate vessel segmentation). Using 3 public retinal vessel segmentation datasets (CHASE_DB1, DRIVE, and STARE), we verify the superiority of our proposed framework in segmenting tiny vessels (8.3% average improvement in sensitivity) while achieving better area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) compared to state-of-the-art methods.
A Novel Non-population-based Meta-heuristic Optimizer Inspired by the Philosophy of Yi Jing
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Yi Jing, Yin-Yang pair optimization (YYPO) has been shown to achieve competitive performance in single objective optimizations. Besides, it has the advantage of low time complexity when comparing to other population-based optimization. As a conceptual extension of YYPO, we proposed the novel Yi optimization (YI) algorithm as one of the best non-population-based optimizer. Incorporating both the harmony and reversal concept of Yi Jing, we replace the Yin-Yang pair with a Yi-point, in which we utilize the Levy flight to update the solution and balance both the effort of the exploration and the exploitation in the optimization process. As a conceptual prototype, we examine YI with IEEE CEC 2017 benchmark and compare its performance with a Levy flight-based optimizer CV1.0, the state-of-the-art dynamical Yin-Yang pair optimization in YYPO family and a few classical optimizers. According to the experimental results, YI shows highly competitive performance while keeping the low time complexity. Hence, the results of this work have implications for enhancing meta-heuristic optimizer using the philosophy of Yi Jing, which deserves research attention.