OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning-based Measurement Scheduling for Loosely-Coupled Cooperative Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In cooperative localization, communicating mobile agents use inter-agent relative measurements to improve their dead-reckoning-based global localization. Measurement scheduling enables an agent to decide which subset of available inter-agent relative measurements it should process when its computational resources are limited. Optimal measurement scheduling is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. The so-called sequential greedy (SG) algorithm is a popular suboptimal polynomial-time solution for this problem. However, the merit function evaluation for the SG algorithms requires access to the state estimate vector and error covariance matrix of all the landmark agents (teammates that an agent can take measurements from). This paper proposes a measurement scheduling for CL that follows the SG approach but reduces the communication and computation cost by using a neural network-based surrogate model as a proxy for the SG algorithm's merit function. The significance of this model is that it is driven by local information and only a scalar metadata from the landmark agents. This solution addresses the time and memory complexity issues of running the SG algorithm in three ways: (a) reducing the inter-agent communication message size, (b) decreasing the complexity of function evaluations by using a simpler surrogate (proxy) function, (c) reducing the required memory size.Simulations demonstrate our results.
A Tale of Color Variants: Representation and Self-Supervised Learning in Fashion E-Commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we address a crucial problem in fashion e-commerce (with respect to customer experience, as well as revenue): color variants identification, i.e., identifying fashion products that match exactly in their design (or style), but only to differ in their color. We propose a generic framework, that leverages deep visual Representation Learning at its heart, to address this problem for our fashion e-commerce platform. Our framework could be trained with supervisory signals in the form of triplets, that are obtained manually. However, it is infeasible to obtain manual annotations for the entire huge collection of data usually present in fashion e-commerce platforms, such as ours, while capturing all the difficult corner cases. But, to our rescue, interestingly we observed that this crucial problem in fashion e-commerce could also be solved by simple color jitter based image augmentation, that recently became widely popular in the contrastive Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) literature, that seeks to learn visual representations without using manual labels. This naturally led to a question in our mind: Could we leverage SSL in our use-case, and still obtain comparable performance to our supervised framework? The answer is, Yes! because, color variant fashion objects are nothing but manifestations of a style, in different colors, and a model trained to be invariant to the color (with, or without supervision), should be able to recognize this! This is what the paper further demonstrates, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, while evaluating a couple of state-of-the-art SSL techniques, and also proposing a novel method.
Curriculum Meta-Learning for Few-shot Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We propose an adaptation of the curriculum training framework, applicable to state-of-the-art meta learning techniques for few-shot classification. Curriculum-based training popularly attempts to mimic human learning by progressively increasing the training complexity to enable incremental concept learning. As the meta-learner's goal is learning how to learn from as few samples as possible, the exact number of those samples (i.e. the size of the support set) arises as a natural proxy of a given task's difficulty. We define a simple yet novel curriculum schedule that begins with a larger support size and progressively reduces it throughout training to eventually match the desired shot-size of the test setup. This proposed method boosts the learning efficiency as well as the generalization capability. Our experiments with the MAML algorithm on two few-shot image classification tasks show significant gains with the curriculum training framework. Ablation studies corroborate the independence of our proposed method from the model architecture as well as the meta-learning hyperparameters
Does constituency analysis enhance domain-specific pre-trained BERT models for relation extraction?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recently many studies have been conducted on the topic of relation extraction. The DrugProt track at BioCreative VII provides a manually-annotated corpus for the purpose of the development and evaluation of relation extraction systems, in which interactions between chemicals and genes are studied. We describe the ensemble system that we used for our submission, which combines predictions of fine-tuned bioBERT, sciBERT and const-bioBERT models by majority voting. We specifically tested the contribution of syntactic information to relation extraction with BERT. We observed that adding constituentbased syntactic information to BERT improved precision, but decreased recall, since relations rarely seen in the train set were less likely to be predicted by BERT models in which the syntactic information is infused. Our code is available online [https://github.com/Maple177/drugprot-relation-extraction].
Automap: Towards Ergonomic Automated Parallelism for ML Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The rapid rise in demand for training large neural network architectures has brought into focus the need for partitioning strategies, for example by using data, model, or pipeline parallelism. Implementing these methods is increasingly supported through program primitives, but identifying efficient partitioning strategies requires expensive experimentation and expertise. We present the prototype of an automated partitioner that seamlessly integrates into existing compilers and existing user workflows. Our partitioner enables SPMD-style parallelism that encompasses data parallelism and parameter/activation sharding. Through a combination of inductive tactics and search in a platform-independent partitioning IR, automap can recover expert partitioning strategies such as Megatron sharding for transformer layers.
Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Modeling and Control for Effective Robotic Manipulator Motion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Robotic manipulators are widely used in applications that require fast and precise motion. Such devices, however, are prompt to nonlinear control issues due to the flexibility in joints and the friction in the motors within the dynamics of their rigid part. To address these issues, the Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) and Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) approaches are implemented in the Takagy-Sugeno Fuzzy Model (T-SFM). We propose the following methodology; initially, the state space equations of the nonlinear manipulator model are derived. Next, a Takagy-Sugeno Fuzzy Model (T-SFM) technique is used for linearizing the state space equations of the nonlinear manipulator. The T-SFM controller is developed using the Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) method. The prime concept of the designed controller is to compensate for all the fuzzy rules. Furthermore, the Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) are applied to generate adequate cases to ensure stability and control. Convex programming methods are applied to solve the developed LMIs problems. Simulations developed for the proposed model show that the proposed controller stabilized the system with zero tracking error in less than 1.5 s.
Fusion Detection via Distance-Decay IoU and weighted Dempster-Shafer Evidence Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, increasing attentions are paid on object detection in remote sensing imagery. However, traditional optical detection is highly susceptible to illumination and weather anomaly. It is a challenge to effectively utilize the cross-modality information from multi-source remote sensing images, especially from optical and synthetic aperture radar images, to achieve all-day and all-weather detection with high accuracy and speed. Towards this end, a fast multi-source fusion detection framework is proposed in current paper. A novel distance-decay intersection over union is employed to encode the shape properties of the targets with scale invariance. Therefore, the same target in multi-source images can be paired accurately. Furthermore, the weighted Dempster-Shafer evidence theory is utilized to combine the optical and synthetic aperture radar detection, which overcomes the drawback in feature-level fusion that requires a large amount of paired data. In addition, the paired optical and synthetic aperture radar images for container ship Ever Given which ran aground in the Suez Canal are taken to demonstrate our fusion algorithm. To test the effectiveness of the proposed method, on self-built data set, the average precision of the proposed fusion detection framework outperform the optical detection by 20.13%.
A Novel Prediction Setup for Online Speed-Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Given the rapid rise in energy demand by data centers and computing systems in general, it is fundamental to incorporate energy considerations when designing (scheduling) algorithms. Machine learning can be a useful approach in practice by predicting the future load of the system based on, for example, historical data. However, the effectiveness of such an approach highly depends on the quality of the predictions and can be quite far from optimal when predictions are sub-par. On the other hand, while providing a worst-case guarantee, classical online algorithms can be pessimistic for large classes of inputs arising in practice. This paper, in the spirit of the new area of machine learning augmented algorithms, attempts to obtain the best of both worlds for the classical, deadline based, online speed-scaling problem: Based on the introduction of a novel prediction setup, we develop algorithms that (i) obtain provably low energy-consumption in the presence of adequate predictions, and (ii) are robust against inadequate predictions, and (iii) are smooth, i.e., their performance gradually degrades as the prediction error increases.
Transfer learning to improve streamflow forecasts in data sparse regions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Effective water resource management requires information on water availability, both in terms of quality and quantity, spatially and temporally. In this paper, we study the methodology behind Transfer Learning (TL) through fine-tuning and parameter transferring for better generalization performance of streamflow prediction in data-sparse regions. We propose a standard recurrent neural network in the form of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to fit on a sufficiently large source domain dataset and repurpose the learned weights to a significantly smaller, yet similar target domain datasets. We present a methodology to implement transfer learning approaches for spatiotemporal applications by separating the spatial and temporal components of the model and training the model to generalize based on categorical datasets representing spatial variability. The framework is developed on a rich benchmark dataset from the US and evaluated on a smaller dataset collected by The Nature Conservancy in Kenya. The LSTM model exhibits generalization performance through our TL technique. Results from this current experiment demonstrate the effective predictive skill of forecasting streamflow responses when knowledge transferring and static descriptors are used to improve hydrologic model generalization in data-sparse regions.
Extracting Domain-specific Concepts from Large-scale Linked Open Data
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a methodology for extracting concepts for a target domain from large-scale linked open data (LOD) to support the construction of domain ontologies providing field-specific knowledge and definitions. The proposed method defines search entities by linking the LOD vocabulary with technical terms related to the target domain. The search entities are then used as a starting point for obtaining upper-level concepts in the LOD, and the occurrences of common upper-level entities and the chain-of-path relationships are examined to determine the range of conceptual connections in the target domain. A technical dictionary index and natural language processing are used to evaluate whether the extracted concepts cover the domain. As an example of extracting a class hierarchy from LOD, we used Wikidata to construct a domain ontology for polymer materials and physical properties. The proposed method can be applied to general datasets with class hierarchies, and it allows ontology developers to create an initial model of the domain ontology for their own purposes.
FastWARC: Optimizing Large-Scale Web Archive Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Web search and other large-scale web data analytics rely on processing archives of web pages stored in a standardized and efficient format. Since its introduction in 2008, the IIPC's Web ARCive (WARC) format has become the standard format for this purpose. As a list of individually compressed records of HTTP requests and responses, it allows for constant-time random access to all kinds of web data via off-the-shelf open source parsers in many programming languages, such as WARCIO, the de-facto standard for Python. When processing web archives at the terabyte or petabyte scale, however, even small inefficiencies in these tools add up quickly, resulting in hours, days, or even weeks of wasted compute time. Reviewing the basic components of WARCIO and analyzing its bottlenecks, we proceed to build FastWARC, a new high-performance WARC processing library for Python, written in C++/Cython, which yields performance improvements by factors of 1.6-8x.
Properties of Minimizing Entropy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Compact data representations are one approach for improving generalization of learned functions. We explicitly illustrate the relationship between entropy and cardinality, both measures of compactness, including how gradient descent on the former reduces the latter. Whereas entropy is distribution sensitive, cardinality is not. We propose a third compactness measure that is a compromise between the two: expected cardinality, or the expected number of unique states in any finite number of draws, which is more meaningful than standard cardinality as it discounts states with negligible probability mass. We show that minimizing entropy also minimizes expected cardinality.
VAE based Text Style Transfer with Pivot Words Enhancement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Text Style Transfer (TST) aims to alter the underlying style of the source text to another specific style while keeping the same content. Due to the scarcity of high-quality parallel training data, unsupervised learning has become a trending direction for TST tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel VAE based Text Style Transfer with pivOt Words Enhancement leaRning (VT-STOWER) method which utilizes Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and external style embeddings to learn semantics and style distribution jointly. Additionally, we introduce pivot words learning, which is applied to learn decisive words for a specific style and thereby further improve the overall performance of the style transfer. The proposed VT-STOWER can be scaled to different TST scenarios given very limited and non-parallel training data with a novel and flexible style strength control mechanism. Experiments demonstrate that the VT-STOWER outperforms the state-of-the-art on sentiment, formality, and code-switching TST tasks.
Feature Disentanglement of Robot Trajectories
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Modeling trajectories generated by robot joints is complex and required for high level activities like trajectory generation, clustering, and classification. Disentagled representation learning promises advances in unsupervised learning, but they have not been evaluated in robot-generated trajectories. In this paper we evaluate three disentangling VAEs ($β$-VAE, Decorr VAE, and a new $β$-Decorr VAE) on a dataset of 1M robot trajectories generated from a 3 DoF robot arm. We find that the decorrelation-based formulations perform the best in terms of disentangling metrics, trajectory quality, and correlation with ground truth latent features. We expect that these results increase the use of unsupervised learning in robot control.
Intelligent Acoustic Module for Autonomous Vehicles using Fast Gated Recurrent approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

This paper elucidates a model for acoustic single and multi-tone classification in resource constrained edge devices. The proposed model is of State-of-the-art Fast Accurate Stable Tiny Gated Recurrent Neural Network. This model has resulted in improved performance metrics and lower size compared to previous hypothesized methods by using lesser parameters with higher efficiency and employment of a noise reduction algorithm. The model is implemented as an acoustic AI module, focused for the application of sound identification, localization, and deployment on AI systems like that of an autonomous car. Further, the inclusion of localization techniques carries the potential of adding a new dimension to the multi-tone classifiers present in autonomous vehicles, as its demand increases in urban cities and developing countries in the future.
Distributed Interactive Proofs for the Recognition of Some Geometric Intersection Graph Classes
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

A graph $G=(V,E)$ is a geometric intersection graph if every node $v \in V$ is identified with a geometric object of some particular type, and two nodes are adjacent if the corresponding objects intersect. Geometric intersection graph classes have been studied from both the theoretical and practical point of view. On the one hand, many hard problems can be efficiently solved or approximated when the input graph is restricted to a geometric intersection class of graphs. On the other hand, these graphs appear naturally in many applications such as sensor networks, scheduling problems, and others. Recently, in the context of distributed certification and distributed interactive proofs, the recognition of graph classes has started to be intensively studied. Different results related to the recognition of trees, bipartite graphs, bounded diameter graphs, triangle-free graphs, planar graphs, bounded genus graphs, $H$-minor free graphs, etc., have been obtained. The goal of the present work is to design efficient distributed protocols for the recognition of relevant geometric intersection graph classes, namely permutation graphs, trapezoid graphs, circle graphs, and polygon-circle graphs. More precisely, for the two first classes, we give proof labeling schemes recognizing them with logarithmic-sized certificates. For the other two classes, we give three-round distributed interactive protocols that use messages and certificates of size $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$. Finally, we provide logarithmic lower-bounds on the size of the certificates on the proof labeling schemes for the recognition of any of the aforementioned geometric intersection graph classes.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Image Segmentation: a Comprehensive Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semantic segmentation plays a fundamental role in a broad variety of computer vision applications, providing key information for the global understanding of an image. Yet, the state-of-the-art models rely on large amount of annotated samples, which are more expensive to obtain than in tasks such as image classification. Since unlabelled data is instead significantly cheaper to obtain, it is not surprising that Unsupervised Domain Adaptation reached a broad success within the semantic segmentation community. This survey is an effort to summarize five years of this incredibly rapidly growing field, which embraces the importance of semantic segmentation itself and a critical need of adapting segmentation models to new environments. We present the most important semantic segmentation methods; we provide a comprehensive survey on domain adaptation techniques for semantic segmentation; we unveil newer trends such as multi-domain learning, domain generalization, test-time adaptation or source-free domain adaptation; we conclude this survey by describing datasets and benchmarks most widely used in semantic segmentation research. We hope that this survey will provide researchers across academia and industry with a comprehensive reference guide and will help them in fostering new research directions in the field.
Labeling Out-of-View Objects in Immersive Analytics to Support Situated Visual Searching
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Augmented Reality (AR) embeds digital information into objects of the physical world. Data can be shown in-situ, thereby enabling real-time visual comparisons and object search in real-life user tasks, such as comparing products and looking up scores in a sports game. While there have been studies on designing AR interfaces for situated information retrieval, there has only been limited research on AR object labeling for visual search tasks in the spatial environment. In this paper, we identify and categorize different design aspects in AR label design and report on a formal user study on labels for out-of-view objects to support visual search tasks in AR. We design three visualization techniques for out-of-view object labeling in AR, which respectively encode the relative physical position (height-encoded), the rotational direction (angle-encoded), and the label values (value-encoded) of the objects. We further implement two traditional in-view object labeling techniques, where labels are placed either next to the respective objects (situated) or at the edge of the AR FoV (boundary). We evaluate these five different label conditions in three visual search tasks for static objects. Our study shows that out-of-view object labels are beneficial when searching for objects outside the FoV, spatial orientation, and when comparing multiple spatially sparse objects. Angle-encoded labels with directional cues of the surrounding objects have the overall best performance with the highest user satisfaction. We discuss the implications of our findings for future immersive AR interface design.