OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multitask Neuroevolution for Reinforcement Learning with Long and Short Episodes
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Studies have shown evolution strategies (ES) to be a promising approach for reinforcement learning (RL) with deep neural networks. However, the issue of high sample complexity persists in applications of ES to deep RL over long horizons. This paper is the first to address the shortcoming of today's methods via a novel neuroevolutionary multitasking (NuEMT) algorithm, designed to transfer information from a set of auxiliary tasks (of short episode length) to the target (full length) RL task at hand. The auxiliary tasks, extracted from the target, allow an agent to update and quickly evaluate policies on shorter time horizons. The evolved skills are then transferred to guide the longer and harder task towards an optimal policy. We demonstrate that the NuEMT algorithm achieves data-efficient evolutionary RL, reducing expensive agent-environment interaction data requirements. Our key algorithmic contribution in this setting is to introduce, for the first time, a multitask skills transfer mechanism based on the statistical importance sampling technique. In addition, an adaptive resource allocation strategy is utilized to assign computational resources to auxiliary tasks based on their gleaned usefulness. Experiments on a range of continuous control tasks from the OpenAI Gym confirm that our proposed algorithm is efficient compared to recent ES baselines.
Efficient Remote Photoplethysmography with Temporal Derivative Modules and Time-Shift Invariant Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present a lightweight neural model for remote heart rate estimation focused on the efficient spatio-temporal learning of facial photoplethysmography (PPG) based on i) modelling of PPG dynamics by combinations of multiple convolutional derivatives, and ii) increased flexibility of the model to learn possible offsets between the facial video PPG and the ground truth. PPG dynamics are modelled by a Temporal Derivative Module (TDM) constructed by the incremental aggregation of multiple convolutional derivatives, emulating a Taylor series expansion up to the desired order. Robustness to ground truth offsets is handled by the introduction of TALOS (Temporal Adaptive LOcation Shift), a new temporal loss to train learning-based models. We verify the effectiveness of our model by reporting accuracy and efficiency metrics on the public PURE and UBFC-rPPG datasets. Compared to existing models, our approach shows competitive heart rate estimation accuracy with a much lower number of parameters and lower computational cost.
Formal Modeling and Initial Analysis of the 4SECURail Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

We present the case study developed in the context of the 4SECURail project and the approach used for its formal modeling and analysis. Starting from a simple SysML/UML behavioral model of the system requirements, three formal models have been developed using three different frameworks, namely UMC, ProB, and CADP/LNT. The paper shows how the different ways to represent and analyze the system from the three different points of view allow us to take advantage of the resulting diversity.
DBSOP: An Efficient Heuristic for Speedy MCMC Sampling on Polytopes
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2022
Year: 2022

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques have long been studied in computational geometry subjects whereabouts the problems to be studied are complex geometric objects which by their nature require optimized techniques to be deployed or to gain useful insights by them. MCMC approaches are directly answering to geometric problems we are attempting to answer, and how these problems could be deployed from theory to practice. Polytope which is a limited volume in n-dimensional space specified by a collection of linear inequality constraints require specific approximation. Therefore, sampling across density based polytopes can not be performed without the use of such methods in which the amount of repetition required is defined as a property of error margin. In this work we propose a simple accurate sampling approach based on the triangulation (tessellation) of a polytope. Moreover, we propose an efficient algorithm named Density Based Sampling on Polytopes (DBSOP) for speedy MCMC sampling where the time required to perform sampling is significantly lower compared to existing approaches in low dimensions with complexity $\mathcal{O}^{*}\left(n^{3}\right)$. Ultimately, we highlight possible future aspects and how the proposed scheme can be further improved with the integration of reservoir-sampling based methods resulting in more speedy and efficient solution.
Geolocation estimation of target vehicles using image processing and geometric computation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Estimating vehicles' locations is one of the key components in intelligent traffic management systems (ITMSs) for increasing traffic scene awareness. Traditionally, stationary sensors have been employed in this regard. The development of advanced sensing and communication technologies on modern vehicles (MVs) makes it feasible to use such vehicles as mobile sensors to estimate the traffic data of observed vehicles. This study aims to explore the capabilities of a monocular camera mounted on an MV in order to estimate the geolocation of the observed vehicle in a global positioning system (GPS) coordinate system. We proposed a new methodology by integrating deep learning, image processing, and geometric computation to address the observed-vehicle localization problem. To evaluate our proposed methodology, we developed new algorithms and tested them using real-world traffic data. The results indicated that our proposed methodology and algorithms could effectively estimate the observed vehicle's latitude and longitude dynamically.
AraBART: a Pretrained Arabic Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Abstractive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Like most natural language understanding and generation tasks, state-of-the-art models for summarization are transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architectures that are pretrained on large corpora. While most existing models focused on English, Arabic remained understudied. In this paper we propose AraBART, the first Arabic model in which the encoder and the decoder are pretrained end-to-end, based on BART. We show that AraBART achieves the best performance on multiple abstractive summarization datasets, outperforming strong baselines including a pretrained Arabic BERT-based model and multilingual mBART and mT5 models.
Bike Sharing Demand Prediction based on Knowledge Sharing across Modes: A Graph-based Deep Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Bike sharing is an increasingly popular part of urban transportation systems. Accurate demand prediction is the key to support timely re-balancing and ensure service efficiency. Most existing models of bike-sharing demand prediction are solely based on its own historical demand variation, essentially regarding bike sharing as a closed system and neglecting the interaction between different transport modes. This is particularly important because bike sharing is often used to complement travel through other modes (e.g., public transit). Despite some recent efforts, there is no existing method capable of leveraging spatiotemporal information from multiple modes with heterogeneous spatial units. To address this research gap, this study proposes a graph-based deep learning approach for bike sharing demand prediction (B-MRGNN) with multimodal historical data as input. The spatial dependencies across modes are encoded with multiple intra- and inter-modal graphs. A multi-relational graph neural network (MRGNN) is introduced to capture correlations between spatial units across modes, such as bike sharing stations, subway stations, or ride-hailing zones. Extensive experiments are conducted using real-world bike sharing, subway and ride-hailing data from New York City, and the results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed approach compared to existing methods.
BNS-GCN: Efficient Full-Graph Training of Graph Convolutional Networks with Partition-Parallelism and Random Boundary Node Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have emerged as the state-of-the-art method for graph-based learning tasks. However, training GCNs at scale is still challenging, hindering both the exploration of more sophisticated GCN architectures and their applications to real-world large graphs. While it might be natural to consider graph partition and distributed training for tackling this challenge, this direction has only been slightly scratched the surface in the previous works due to the limitations of existing designs. In this work, we first analyze why distributed GCN training is ineffective and identify the underlying cause to be the excessive number of boundary nodes of each partitioned subgraph, which easily explodes the memory and communication costs for GCN training. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective method dubbed BNS-GCN that adopts random Boundary-Node-Sampling to enable efficient and scalable distributed GCN training. Experiments and ablation studies consistently validate the effectiveness of BNS-GCN, e.g., boosting the throughput by up to 16.2x and reducing the memory usage by up to 58%, while maintaining a full-graph accuracy. Furthermore, both theoretical and empirical analysis show that BNS-GCN enjoys a better convergence than existing sampling-based methods. We believe that our BNS-GCN has opened up a new paradigm for enabling GCN training at scale. The code is available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/BNS-GCN.
Underwater Light Field Retention : Neural Rendering for Underwater Imaging
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Underwater Image Rendering aims to generate a true-tolife underwater image from a given clean one, which could be applied to various practical applications such as underwater image enhancement, camera filter, and virtual gaming. We explore two less-touched but challenging problems in underwater image rendering, namely, i) how to render diverse underwater scenes by a single neural network? ii) how to adaptively learn the underwater light fields from natural exemplars, i,e., realistic underwater images? To this end, we propose a neural rendering method for underwater imaging, dubbed UWNR (Underwater Neural Rendering). Specifically, UWNR is a data-driven neural network that implicitly learns the natural degenerated model from authentic underwater images, avoiding introducing erroneous biases by hand-craft imaging models. Compared with existing underwater image generation methods, UWNR utilizes the natural light field to simulate the main characteristics ofthe underwater scene. Thus, it is able to synthesize a wide variety ofunderwater images from one clean image with various realistic underwater images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves better visual effects and quantitative metrics over previous methods. Moreover, we adopt UWNR to build an open Large Neural Rendering Underwater Dataset containing various types of water quality, dubbed LNRUD. The source code and LNRUD are available at https: //github.com/Ephemeral182/UWNR.
Transformer-based HTR for Historical Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We apply the TrOCR framework to real-world, historical manuscripts and show that TrOCR per se is a strong model, ideal for transfer learning. TrOCR has been trained on English only, but it can adapt to other languages that use the Latin alphabet fairly easily and with little training material. We compare TrOCR against a SOTA HTR framework (Transkribus) and show that it can beat such systems. This finding is essential since Transkribus performs best when it has access to baseline information, which is not needed at all to fine-tune TrOCR.
Continuous Flow Model of a Historical Battle: A Fresh Look at Pickett's charge
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

A continuous flow model of infantry behavior, based on conservation of individuals and tracking of subunit identity, has been developed in sufficient detail that it can now be applied to a realistic simulation of a historical battle. Pickett's charge during the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in the U.S. Civil War was chosen as an initial application of the model. This scenario is a good test of the current mathematical model because many modern military tactics were employed, in a context where the action took place on foot or horseback, and the historical map and troop numbers are available. Compared to a discrete agent model, the flow model was found to better capture the interaction of the forces with the terrain and each other. A brigade-level simulation, faithful to the details of the historical events, was performed. The main source of asymmetry in the numbers of casualties was found to be the inability of the Confederate forces to use effective ranged fire while they were moving. Comparison of simulations with and without terrain effects showed that they slow the pace of battle and favor the defenders, exposing the attackers to heavy ranged fire for an extended period. A statistical analysis of possible outcomes for an ensemble of 1000 randomized perturbations of the baseline brigade-level scenario was carried out. Consistent with historical events, it was found that only 6 percent of the scenarios resulted in an outcome that could be considered a Confederate victory.
Targeted Extraction of Temporal Facts from Textual Resources for Improved Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Bases
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) systems have the goal of answering complex natural language questions by reasoning over relevant facts retrieved from Knowledge Bases (KB). One of the major challenges faced by these systems is their inability to retrieve all relevant facts due to factors such as incomplete KB and entity/relation linking errors. In this paper, we address this particular challenge for systems handling a specific category of questions called temporal questions, where answer derivation involve reasoning over facts asserting point/intervals of time for various events. We propose a novel approach where a targeted temporal fact extraction technique is used to assist KBQA whenever it fails to retrieve temporal facts from the KB. We use $λ$-expressions of the questions to logically represent the component facts and the reasoning steps needed to derive the answer. This allows us to spot those facts that failed to get retrieved from the KB and generate textual queries to extract them from the textual resources in an open-domain question answering fashion. We evaluated our approach on a benchmark temporal question answering dataset considering Wikidata and Wikipedia respectively as the KB and textual resource. Experimental results show a significant $\sim$30\% relative improvement in answer accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Non-Functional Requirements for Machine Learning: An Exploration of System Scope and Interest
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Systems that rely on Machine Learning (ML systems) have differing demands on system quality compared to traditional systems. Such quality demands, known as non-functional requirements (NFRs), may differ in their definition, scope, and importance from NFRs for traditional systems. Despite the importance of NFRs for ML systems, our understanding of their definitions and scope -- and of the extent of existing research in each NFR -- is lacking compared to our understanding in traditional domains. Building on an investigation into importance and treatment of ML system NFRs in industry, we make three contributions towards narrowing this gap: (1) we present clusters of ML system NFRs based on shared characteristics, (2) we use Scopus search results -- as well as inter-coder reliability on a sample of NFRs -- to estimate the number of relevant studies on a subset of the NFRs, and (3), we use our initial reading of titles and abstracts in each sample to define the scope of NFRs over parts of the system (e.g., training data, ML model, or other system elements). These initial findings form the groundwork for future research in this emerging domain.
Oracle with $\mathrm{P=NP\cap coNP}$, but no Many-One Completeness in UP, DisjNP, and DisjCoNP
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

We construct an oracle relative to which $\mathrm{P} = \mathrm{NP} \cap \mathrm{coNP}$, but there are no many-one complete sets in $\mathrm{UP}$, no many-one complete disjoint $\mathrm{NP}$-pairs, and no many-one complete disjoint $\mathrm{coNP}$-pairs. This contributes to a research program initiated by Pudlák [Pud17], which studies incompleteness in the finite domain and which mentions the construction of such oracles as open problem. The oracle shows that $\mathsf{NP}\cap\mathsf{coNP}$ is indispensable in the list of hypotheses studied by Pudlák. Hence one should consider stronger hypotheses, in order to find a universal one.
Migrating CUDA to oneAPI: A Smith-Waterman Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

To face the programming challenges related to heterogeneous computing, Intel recently introduced oneAPI, a new programming environment that allows code developed in Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) language to be run on different devices such as CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, among others. To tackle CUDA-based legacy codes, oneAPI provides a compatibility tool (dpct) that facilitates the migration to DPC++. Due to the large amount of existing CUDA-based software in the bioinformatics context, this paper presents our experiences porting SW#db, a well-known sequence alignment tool, to DPC++ using dpct. From the experimental work, it was possible to prove the usefulness of dpct for SW#db code migration and the cross-GPU vendor, cross-architecture portability of the migrated DPC++ code. In addition, the performance results showed that the migrated DPC++ code reports similar efficiency rates to its CUDA-native counterpart or even better in some tests (approximately +5%).
Diverse Counterfactual Explanations for Anomaly Detection in Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Data-driven methods that detect anomalies in times series data are ubiquitous in practice, but they are in general unable to provide helpful explanations for the predictions they make. In this work we propose a model-agnostic algorithm that generates counterfactual ensemble explanations for time series anomaly detection models. Our method generates a set of diverse counterfactual examples, i.e, multiple perturbed versions of the original time series that are not considered anomalous by the detection model. Since the magnitude of the perturbations is limited, these counterfactuals represent an ensemble of inputs similar to the original time series that the model would deem normal. Our algorithm is applicable to any differentiable anomaly detection model. We investigate the value of our method on univariate and multivariate real-world datasets and two deep-learning-based anomaly detection models, under several explainability criteria previously proposed in other data domains such as Validity, Plausibility, Closeness and Diversity. We show that our algorithm can produce ensembles of counterfactual examples that satisfy these criteria and thanks to a novel type of visualisation, can convey a richer interpretation of a model's internal mechanism than existing methods. Moreover, we design a sparse variant of our method to improve the interpretability of counterfactual explanations for high-dimensional time series anomalies. In this setting, our explanation is localised on only a few dimensions and can therefore be communicated more efficiently to the model's user.
Towards Explainable Evaluation Metrics for Natural Language Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Unlike classical lexical overlap metrics such as BLEU, most current evaluation metrics (such as BERTScore or MoverScore) are based on black-box language models such as BERT or XLM-R. They often achieve strong correlations with human judgments, but recent research indicates that the lower-quality classical metrics remain dominant, one of the potential reasons being that their decision processes are transparent. To foster more widespread acceptance of the novel high-quality metrics, explainability thus becomes crucial. In this concept paper, we identify key properties and propose key goals of explainable machine translation evaluation metrics. We also provide a synthesizing overview over recent approaches for explainable machine translation metrics and discuss how they relate to those goals and properties. Further, we conduct own novel experiments, which (among others) find that current adversarial NLP techniques are unsuitable for automatically identifying limitations of high-quality black-box evaluation metrics, as they are not meaning-preserving. Finally, we provide a vision of future approaches to explainable evaluation metrics and their evaluation. We hope that our work can help catalyze and guide future research on explainable evaluation metrics and, mediately, also contribute to better and more transparent text generation systems.
Evaluating Token-Level and Passage-Level Dense Retrieval Models for Math Information Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

With the recent success of dense retrieval methods based on bi-encoders, studies have applied this approach to various interesting downstream retrieval tasks with good efficiency and in-domain effectiveness. Recently, we have also seen the presence of dense retrieval models in Math Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks, but the most effective systems remain classic retrieval methods that consider hand-crafted structure features. In this work, we try to combine the best of both worlds:\ a well-defined structure search method for effective formula search and efficient bi-encoder dense retrieval models to capture contextual similarities. Specifically, we have evaluated two representative bi-encoder models for token-level and passage-level dense retrieval on recent MIR tasks. Our results show that bi-encoder models are highly complementary to existing structure search methods, and we are able to advance the state-of-the-art on MIR datasets.
Physics-driven Synthetic Data Learning for Biomedical Magnetic Resonance
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning has innovated the field of computational imaging. One of its bottlenecks is unavailable or insufficient training data. This article reviews an emerging paradigm, imaging physics-based data synthesis (IPADS), that can provide huge training data in biomedical magnetic resonance without or with few real data. Following the physical law of magnetic resonance, IPADS generates signals from differential equations or analytical solution models, making the learning more scalable, explainable, and better protecting privacy. Key components of IPADS learning, including signal generation models, basic deep learning network structures, enhanced data generation, and learning methods are discussed. Great potentials of IPADS have been demonstrated by representative applications in fast imaging, ultrafast signal reconstruction and accurate parameter quantification. Finally, open questions and future work have been discussed.
Curry and Howard Meet Borel
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2022
Year: 2022

We show that an intuitionistic version of counting propositional logic corresponds, in the sense of Curry and Howard, to an expressive type system for the probabilistic event lambda-calculus, a vehicle calculus in which both call-by-name and call-by-value evaluation of discrete randomized functional programs can be simulated. Remarkably, proofs (respectively, types) do not only guarantee that validity (respectively, termination) holds, but also reveal the underlying probability. We finally show that by endowing the type system with an intersection operator, one obtains a system precisely capturing the probabilistic behavior of lambda-terms.