OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Tell Me How You Feel: Designing Emotion-Aware Voicebots to Ease Pandemic Anxiety In Aging Citizens
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

The feeling of anxiety and loneliness among aging population has been recently amplified by the COVID-19 related lockdowns. Emotion-aware multimodal bot application combining voice and visual interface was developed to address the problem in the group of older citizens. The application is novel as it combines three main modules: information, emotion selection and psychological intervention, with the aim of improving human well-being. The preliminary study with target group confirmed that multimodality improves usability and that the information module is essential for participating in a psychological intervention. The solution is universal and can also be applied to areas not directly related to COVID-19 pandemic.
Automated Dilated Spatio-Temporal Synchronous Graph Modeling for Traffic Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Accurate traffic prediction is a challenging task in intelligent transportation systems because of the complex spatio-temporal dependencies in transportation networks. Many existing works utilize sophisticated temporal modeling approaches to incorporate with graph convolution networks (GCNs) for capturing short-term and long-term spatio-temporal dependencies. However, these separated modules with complicated designs could restrict effectiveness and efficiency of spatio-temporal representation learning. Furthermore, most previous works adopt the fixed graph construction methods to characterize the global spatio-temporal relations, which limits the learning capability of the model for different time periods and even different data scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose an automated dilated spatio-temporal synchronous graph network, named Auto-DSTSGN for traffic prediction. Specifically, we design an automated dilated spatio-temporal synchronous graph (Auto-DSTSG) module to capture the short-term and long-term spatio-temporal correlations by stacking deeper layers with dilation factors in an increasing order. Further, we propose a graph structure search approach to automatically construct the spatio-temporal synchronous graph that can adapt to different data scenarios. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our model can achieve about 10% improvements compared with the state-of-art methods. Source codes are available at https://github.com/jinguangyin/Auto-DSTSGN.
Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning Leads to Higher Adversarial Susceptibility
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Contrastive self-supervised learning (CSL) has managed to match or surpass the performance of supervised learning in image and video classification. However, it is still largely unknown if the nature of the representations induced by the two learning paradigms is similar. We investigate this under the lens of adversarial robustness. Our analysis of the problem reveals that CSL has intrinsically higher sensitivity to perturbations over supervised learning. We identify the uniform distribution of data representation over a unit hypersphere in the CSL representation space as the key contributor to this phenomenon. We establish that this is a result of the presence of false negative pairs in the training process, which increases model sensitivity to input perturbations. Our finding is supported by extensive experiments for image and video classification using adversarial perturbations and other input corruptions. We devise a strategy to detect and remove false negative pairs that is simple, yet effective in improving model robustness with CSL training. We close up to 68% of the robustness gap between CSL and its supervised counterpart. Finally, we contribute to adversarial learning by incorporating our method in CSL. We demonstrate an average gain of about 5% over two different state-of-the-art methods in this domain.
Ladder Matrix Recovery from Permutations
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We give unique recovery guarantees for matrices of bounded rank that have undergone permutations of their entries. We even do this for a more general matrix structure that we call ladder matrices. We use methods and results of commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, for which we include a preparation as needed for a general audience.
Head-Related Transfer Function Interpolation from Spatially Sparse Measurements Using Autoencoder with Source Position Conditioning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a method of head-related transfer function (HRTF) interpolation from sparsely measured HRTFs using an autoencoder with source position conditioning. The proposed method is drawn from an analogy between an HRTF interpolation method based on regularized linear regression (RLR) and an autoencoder. Through this analogy, we found the key feature of the RLR-based method that HRTFs are decomposed into source-position-dependent and source-position-independent factors. On the basis of this finding, we design the encoder and decoder so that their weights and biases are generated from source positions. Furthermore, we introduce an aggregation module that reduces the dependence of latent variables on source position for obtaining a source-position-independent representation of each subject. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can work well for unseen subjects and achieve an interpolation performance with only one-eighth measurements comparable to that of the RLR-based method.
Opportunistic hip fracture risk prediction in Men from X-ray: Findings from the Osteoporosis in Men (MrOS) Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Osteoporosis is a common disease that increases fracture risk. Hip fractures, especially in elderly people, lead to increased morbidity, decreased quality of life and increased mortality. Being a silent disease before fracture, osteoporosis often remains undiagnosed and untreated. Areal bone mineral density (aBMD) assessed by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) is the gold-standard method for osteoporosis diagnosis and hence also for future fracture prediction (prognostic). However, the required special equipment is not broadly available everywhere, in particular not to patients in developing countries. We propose a deep learning classification model (FORM) that can directly predict hip fracture risk from either plain radiographs (X-ray) or 2D projection images of computed tomography (CT) data. Our method is fully automated and therefore well suited for opportunistic screening settings, identifying high risk patients in a broader population without additional screening. FORM was trained and evaluated on X-rays and CT projections from the Osteoporosis in Men (MrOS) study. 3108 X-rays (89 incident hip fractures) or 2150 CTs (80 incident hip fractures) with a 80/20 split were used. We show that FORM can correctly predict the 10-year hip fracture risk with a validation AUC of 81.44 +- 3.11% / 81.04 +- 5.54% (mean +- STD) including additional information like age, BMI, fall history and health background across a 5-fold cross validation on the X-ray and CT cohort, respectively. Our approach significantly (p < 0.01) outperforms previous methods like Cox Proportional-Hazards Model and \frax with 70.19 +- 6.58 and 74.72 +- 7.21 respectively on the X-ray cohort. Our model outperform on both cohorts hip aBMD based predictions. We are confident that FORM can contribute on improving osteoporosis diagnosis at an early stage.
Taguchi based Design of Sequential Convolution Neural Network for Classification of Defective Fasteners
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Fasteners play a critical role in securing various parts of machinery. Deformations such as dents, cracks, and scratches on the surface of fasteners are caused by material properties and incorrect handling of equipment during production processes. As a result, quality control is required to ensure safe and reliable operations. The existing defect inspection method relies on manual examination, which consumes a significant amount of time, money, and other resources; also, accuracy cannot be guaranteed due to human error. Automatic defect detection systems have proven impactful over the manual inspection technique for defect analysis. However, computational techniques such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and deep learning-based approaches are evolutionary methods. By carefully selecting the design parameter values, the full potential of CNN can be realised. Using Taguchi-based design of experiments and analysis, an attempt has been made to develop a robust automatic system in this study. The dataset used to train the system has been created manually for M14 size nuts having two labeled classes: Defective and Non-defective. There are a total of 264 images in the dataset. The proposed sequential CNN comes up with a 96.3% validation accuracy, 0.277 validation loss at 0.001 learning rate.
Fact sheet: Automatic Self-Reported Personality Recognition Track
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose an informed baseline to help disentangle the various contextual factors of influence in this type of case studies. For this purpose, we analysed the correlation between the given metadata and the self-assigned personality trait scores and developed a model based solely on this information. Further, we compared the performance of this informed baseline with models based on state-of-the-art visual, linguistic and audio features. For the present dataset, a model trained solely on simple metadata features (age, gender and number of sessions) proved to have superior or similar performance when compared with simple audio, linguistic or visual features-based systems.
GesSure- A Robust Face-Authentication enabled Dynamic Gesture Recognition GUI Application
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Using physical interactive devices like mouse and keyboards hinders naturalistic human-machine interaction and increases the probability of surface contact during a pandemic. Existing gesture-recognition systems do not possess user authentication, making them unreliable. Static gestures in current gesture-recognition technology introduce long adaptation periods and reduce user compatibility. Our technology places a strong emphasis on user recognition and safety. We use meaningful and relevant gestures for task operation, resulting in a better user experience. This paper aims to design a robust, face-verification-enabled gesture recognition system that utilizes a graphical user interface and primarily focuses on security through user recognition and authorization. The face model uses MTCNN and FaceNet to verify the user, and our LSTM-CNN architecture for gesture recognition, achieving an accuracy of 95% with five classes of gestures. The prototype developed through our research has successfully executed context-dependent tasks like save, print, control video-player operations and exit, and context-free operating system tasks like sleep, shut-down, and unlock intuitively. Our application and dataset are available as open source.
Efficient Prior Publication Identification for Open Source Code
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) enables large-scale reuse of preexisting software components. The main drawback is increased complexity in software supply chain management. A common approach to tame such complexity is automated open source compliance, which consists in automating the verication of adherence to various open source management best practices about license obligation fulllment, vulnerability tracking, software composition analysis, and nearby concerns.We consider the problem of auditing a source code base to determine which of its parts have been published before, which is an important building block of automated open source compliance toolchains. Indeed, if source code allegedly developed in house is recognized as having been previously published elsewhere, alerts should be raised to investigate where it comes from and whether this entails that additional obligations shall be fullled before product shipment.We propose an ecient approach for prior publication identication that relies on a knowledge base of known source code artifacts linked together in a global Merkle direct acyclic graph and a dedicated discovery protocol. We introduce swh-scanner, a source code scanner that realizes the proposed approach in practice using as knowledge base Software Heritage, the largest public archive of source code artifacts. We validate experimentally the proposed approach, showing its eciency in both abstract (number of queries) and concrete terms (wall-clock time), performing benchmarks on 16 845 real-world public code bases of various sizes, from small to very large.
Layer-refined Graph Convolutional Networks for Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Recommendation models utilizing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance, as they can integrate both the node information and the topological structure of the user-item interaction graph. However, these GCN-based recommendation models not only suffer from over-smoothing when stacking too many layers but also bear performance degeneration resulting from the existence of noise in user-item interactions. In this paper, we first identify a recommendation dilemma of over-smoothing and solution collapsing in current GCN-based models. Specifically, these models usually aggregate all layer embeddings for node updating and achieve their best recommendation performance within a few layers because of over-smoothing. Conversely, if we place learnable weights on layer embeddings for node updating, the weight space will always collapse to a fixed point, at which the weighting of the ego layer almost holds all. We propose a layer-refined GCN model, dubbed LayerGCN, that refines layer representations during information propagation and node updating of GCN. Moreover, previous GCN-based recommendation models aggregate all incoming information from neighbors without distinguishing the noise nodes, which deteriorates the recommendation performance. Our model further prunes the edges of the user-item interaction graph following a degree-sensitive probability instead of the uniform distribution. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models significantly on four public datasets with fast training convergence. The implementation code of the proposed method is available at https://github.com/enoche/ImRec.
Visual Speech-Aware Perceptual 3D Facial Expression Reconstruction from Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The recent state of the art on monocular 3D face reconstruction from image data has made some impressive advancements, thanks to the advent of Deep Learning. However, it has mostly focused on input coming from a single RGB image, overlooking the following important factors: a) Nowadays, the vast majority of facial image data of interest do not originate from single images but rather from videos, which contain rich dynamic information. b) Furthermore, these videos typically capture individuals in some form of verbal communication (public talks, teleconferences, audiovisual human-computer interactions, interviews, monologues/dialogues in movies, etc). When existing 3D face reconstruction methods are applied in such videos, the artifacts in the reconstruction of the shape and motion of the mouth area are often severe, since they do not match well with the speech audio. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we present the first method for visual speech-aware perceptual reconstruction of 3D mouth expressions. We do this by proposing a "lipread" loss, which guides the fitting process so that the elicited perception from the 3D reconstructed talking head resembles that of the original video footage. We demonstrate that, interestingly, the lipread loss is better suited for 3D reconstruction of mouth movements compared to traditional landmark losses, and even direct 3D supervision. Furthermore, the devised method does not rely on any text transcriptions or corresponding audio, rendering it ideal for training in unlabeled datasets. We verify the efficiency of our method through exhaustive objective evaluations on three large-scale datasets, as well as subjective evaluation with two web-based user studies.
Inference skipping for more efficient real-time speech enhancement with parallel RNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural network (DNN) based speech enhancement models have attracted extensive attention due to their promising performance. However, it is difficult to deploy a powerful DNN in real-time applications because of its high computational cost. Typical compression methods such as pruning and quantization do not make good use of the data characteristics. In this paper, we introduce the Skip-RNN strategy into speech enhancement models with parallel RNNs. The states of the RNNs update intermittently without interrupting the update of the output mask, which leads to significant reduction of computational load without evident audio artifacts. To better leverage the difference between the voice and the noise, we further regularize the skipping strategy with voice activity detection (VAD) guidance, saving more computational load. Experiments on a high-performance speech enhancement model, dual-path convolutional recurrent network (DPCRN), show the superiority of our strategy over strategies like network pruning or directly training a smaller model. We also validate the generalization of the proposed strategy on two other competitive speech enhancement models.
Adaptive Graph-Based Feature Normalization for Facial Expression Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) suffers from data uncertainties caused by ambiguous facial images and annotators' subjectiveness, resulting in excursive semantic and feature covariate shifting problem. Existing works usually correct mislabeled data by estimating noise distribution, or guide network training with knowledge learned from clean data, neglecting the associative relations of expressions. In this work, we propose an Adaptive Graph-based Feature Normalization (AGFN) method to protect FER models from data uncertainties by normalizing feature distributions with the association of expressions. Specifically, we propose a Poisson graph generator to adaptively construct topological graphs for samples in each mini-batches via a sampling process, and correspondingly design a coordinate descent strategy to optimize proposed network. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art works with accuracies of 91.84% and 91.11% on the benchmark datasets FERPlus and RAF-DB, respectively, and when the percentage of mislabeled data increases (e.g., to 20%), our network surpasses existing works significantly by 3.38% and 4.52%.
Development of monitoring systems for anomaly detection using ASTD specifications
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

Anomaly-based intrusion detection systems are essential defenses against cybersecurity threats because they can identify anomalies in current activities. However, these systems have difficulties providing entity processing independence through a programming language. In addition, a degradation of the detection process is caused by the complexity of scheduling the training and detection processes, which are required to keep the anomaly detection system continuously updated. This paper shows how to use the algebraic state-transition diagram (ASTD) language to develop flexible anomaly detection systems. This paper provides a model for detecting point anomalies using the unsupervised non-parametric technique Kernel Density Estimation to estimate the probability density of event occurrence. The proposed model caters for both the training and the detection phase continuously. The ASTD language streamlines the modeling of detection systems thanks to its process algebraic operators that provide a solution to overcome these challenges. By delegating the combination of anomaly-based detection processes to the ASTD language, the effort and complexity are reduced during detection models development. Finally, using a qualitative evaluation, this study demonstrates that the algebraic operators in the ASTD specification language overcome these challenges.
Motion Planning and Control for Multi Vehicle Autonomous Racing at High Speeds
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a multi-layer motion planning and control architecture for autonomous racing, capable of avoiding static obstacles, performing active overtakes, and reaching velocities above 75 $m/s$. The used offline global trajectory generation and the online model predictive controller are highly based on optimization and dynamic models of the vehicle, where the tires and camber effects are represented in an extended version of the basic Pacejka Magic Formula. The proposed single-track model is identified and validated using multi-body motorsport libraries which allow simulating the vehicle dynamics properly, especially useful when real experimental data are missing. The fundamental regularization terms and constraints of the controller are tuned to reduce the rate of change of the inputs while assuring an acceptable velocity and path tracking. The motion planning strategy consists of a Frenét-Frame-based planner which considers a forecast of the opponent produced by a Kalman filter. The planner chooses the collision-free path and velocity profile to be tracked on a 3 seconds horizon to realize different goals such as following and overtaking. The proposed solution has been applied on a Dallara AV-21 racecar and tested at oval race tracks achieving lateral accelerations up to 25 $m/s^{2}$.
Adaptive Soft Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Self-supervised learning has recently achieved great success in representation learning without human annotations. The dominant method -- that is contrastive learning, is generally based on instance discrimination tasks, i.e., individual samples are treated as independent categories. However, presuming all the samples are different contradicts the natural grouping of similar samples in common visual datasets, e.g., multiple views of the same dog. To bridge the gap, this paper proposes an adaptive method that introduces soft inter-sample relations, namely Adaptive Soft Contrastive Learning (ASCL). More specifically, ASCL transforms the original instance discrimination task into a multi-instance soft discrimination task, and adaptively introduces inter-sample relations. As an effective and concise plug-in module for existing self-supervised learning frameworks, ASCL achieves the best performance on several benchmarks in terms of both performance and efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/MrChenFeng/ASCL_ICPR2022.
Ten Lessons for Data Sharing With a Data Commons
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

A data commons is a cloud-based data platform with a governance structure that allows a community to manage, analyze and share its data. Data commons provide a research community with the ability to manage and analyze large datasets using the elastic scalability provided by cloud computing and to share data securely and compliantly, and, in this way, accelerate the pace of research. Over the past decade, a number of data commons have been developed and we discuss some of the lessons learned from this effort.