OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards MOOCs for Lipreading: Using Synthetic Talking Heads to Train Humans in Lipreading at Scale
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Many people with some form of hearing loss consider lipreading as their primary mode of day-to-day communication. However, finding resources to learn or improve one's lipreading skills can be challenging. This is further exacerbated in the COVID19 pandemic due to restrictions on direct interactions with peers and speech therapists. Today, online MOOCs platforms like Coursera and Udemy have become the most effective form of training for many types of skill development. However, online lipreading resources are scarce as creating such resources is an extensive process needing months of manual effort to record hired actors. Because of the manual pipeline, such platforms are also limited in vocabulary, supported languages, accents, and speakers and have a high usage cost. In this work, we investigate the possibility of replacing real human talking videos with synthetically generated videos. Synthetic data can easily incorporate larger vocabularies, variations in accent, and even local languages and many speakers. We propose an end-to-end automated pipeline to develop such a platform using state-of-the-art talking head video generator networks, text-to-speech models, and computer vision techniques. We then perform an extensive human evaluation using carefully thought out lipreading exercises to validate the quality of our designed platform against the existing lipreading platforms. Our studies concretely point toward the potential of our approach in developing a large-scale lipreading MOOC platform that can impact millions of people with hearing loss.
Scalable link prediction in Twitter using self-configured framework
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Link prediction analysis becomes vital to acquire a deeper understanding of events underlying social networks interactions and connections especially in current evolving and large-scale social networks. Traditional link prediction approaches underperformed for most large-scale social networks in terms of its scalability and efficiency. Spark is a distributed open-source framework that facilitate scalable link prediction efficiency in large-scale social networks. The framework provides numerous tunable properties for users to manually configure the parameters for the applications. However, manual configurations open to performance issue when the applications start scaling tremendously, which is hard to set up and expose to human errors. This paper introduced a novel Self-Configured Framework (SCF) to provide an autonomous feature in Spark that predicts and sets the best configuration instantly before the application execution using XGBoost classifier. SCF is evaluated on the Twitter social network using three link prediction applications: Graph Clustering (GC), Overlapping Community Detection (OCD), and Redundant Graph Clustering (RGD) to assess the impact of shifting data sizes on different applications in Twitter. The result demonstrates a 40% reduction in prediction time as well as a balanced resource consumption that makes full use of resources, especially for limited number and size of clusters
Turing Machines with Two-level Memory: A Deep Look into the Input/Output Complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

The input/output complexity, which is the complexity of data exchange between the main memory and the external memory, has been elaborately studied by a lot of former researchers. However, the existing works failed to consider the input/output complexity in a computation model point of view. In this paper we remedy this by proposing three variants of Turing machine that include external memory and the mechanism of exchanging data between main memory and external memory. Based on these new models, the input/output complexity is deeply studied. We discussed the relationship between input/output complexity and the other complexity measures such as time complexity and parameterized complexity, which is not considered by former researchers. We also define the external access trace complexity, which reflects the physical behavior of magnetic disks and gives a theoretical evidence of IO-efficient algorithms.
LWA-HAND: Lightweight Attention Hand for Interacting Hand Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have witnessed great success for hand reconstruction in real-time applications such as visual reality and augmented reality while interacting with two-hand reconstruction through efficient transformers is left unexplored. In this paper, we propose a method called lightweight attention hand (LWA-HAND) to reconstruct hands in low flops from a single RGB image. To solve the occlusion and interaction problem in efficient attention architectures, we propose three mobile attention modules in this paper. The first module is a lightweight feature attention module that extracts both local occlusion representation and global image patch representation in a coarse-to-fine manner. The second module is a cross image and graph bridge module which fuses image context and hand vertex. The third module is a lightweight cross-attention mechanism that uses element-wise operation for the cross-attention of two hands in linear complexity. The resulting model achieves comparable performance on the InterHand2.6M benchmark in comparison with the state-of-the-art models. Simultaneously, it reduces the flops to $0.47GFlops$ while the state-of-the-art models have heavy computations between $10GFlops$ and $20GFlops$.
IAAT: A Input-Aware Adaptive Tuning framework for Small GEMM
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

GEMM with the small size of input matrices is becoming widely used in many fields like HPC and machine learning. Although many famous BLAS libraries already supported small GEMM, they cannot achieve near-optimal performance. This is because the costs of pack operations are high and frequent boundary processing cannot be neglected. This paper proposes an input-aware adaptive tuning framework(IAAT) for small GEMM to overcome the performance bottlenecks in state-of-the-art implementations. IAAT consists of two stages, the install-time stage and the run-time stage. In the run-time stage, IAAT tiles matrices into blocks to alleviate boundary processing. This stage utilizes an input-aware adaptive tile algorithm and plays the role of runtime tuning. In the install-time stage, IAAT auto-generates hundreds of kernels of different sizes to remove pack operations. Finally, IAAT finishes the computation of small GEMM by invoking different kernels, which corresponds to the size of blocks. The experimental results show that IAAT gains better performance than other BLAS libraries on ARMv8 platform.
Representation Learning with Graph Neural Networks for Speech Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Learning expressive representation is crucial in deep learning. In speech emotion recognition (SER), vacuum regions or noises in the speech interfere with expressive representation learning. However, traditional RNN-based models are susceptible to such noise. Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN) has demonstrated its effectiveness for representation learning, and we adopt this framework for SER. In particular, we propose a cosine similarity-based graph as an ideal graph structure for representation learning in SER. We present a Cosine similarity-based Graph Convolutional Network (CoGCN) that is robust to perturbation and noise. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods or provides competitive results with a significant model size reduction with only 1/30 parameters.
Provably Tightest Linear Approximation for Robustness Verification of Sigmoid-like Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The robustness of deep neural networks is crucial to modern AI-enabled systems and should be formally verified. Sigmoid-like neural networks have been adopted in a wide range of applications. Due to their non-linearity, Sigmoid-like activation functions are usually over-approximated for efficient verification, which inevitably introduces imprecision. Considerable efforts have been devoted to finding the so-called tighter approximations to obtain more precise verification results. However, existing tightness definitions are heuristic and lack theoretical foundations. We conduct a thorough empirical analysis of existing neuron-wise characterizations of tightness and reveal that they are superior only on specific neural networks. We then introduce the notion of network-wise tightness as a unified tightness definition and show that computing network-wise tightness is a complex non-convex optimization problem. We bypass the complexity from different perspectives via two efficient, provably tightest approximations. The results demonstrate the promising performance achievement of our approaches over state of the art: (i) achieving up to 251.28% improvement to certified lower robustness bounds; and (ii) exhibiting notably more precise verification results on convolutional networks.
A Syntax Aware BERT for Identifying Well-Formed Queries in a Curriculum Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

A well formed query is defined as a query which is formulated in the manner of an inquiry, and with correct interrogatives, spelling and grammar. While identifying well formed queries is an important task, few works have attempted to address it. In this paper we propose transformer based language model - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to this task. We further imbibe BERT with parts-of-speech information inspired from earlier works. Furthermore, we also train the model in multiple curriculum settings for improvement in performance. Curriculum Learning over the task is experimented with Baby Steps and One Pass techniques. Proposed architecture performs exceedingly well on the task. The best approach achieves accuracy of 83.93%, outperforming previous state-of-the-art at 75.0% and reaching close to the approximate human upper bound of 88.4%.
MockingBERT: A Method for Retroactively Adding Resilience to NLP Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Protecting NLP models against misspellings whether accidental or adversarial has been the object of research interest for the past few years. Existing remediations have typically either compromised accuracy or required full model re-training with each new class of attacks. We propose a novel method of retroactively adding resilience to misspellings to transformer-based NLP models. This robustness can be achieved without the need for re-training of the original NLP model and with only a minimal loss of language understanding performance on inputs without misspellings. Additionally we propose a new efficient approximate method of generating adversarial misspellings, which significantly reduces the cost needed to evaluate a model's resilience to adversarial attacks.
A Web Application for Experimenting and Validating Remote Measurement of Vital Signs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

With a surge in online medical advising remote monitoring of patient vitals is required. This can be facilitated with the Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) techniques that compute vital signs from facial videos. It involves processing video frames to obtain skin pixels, extracting the cardiac data from it and applying signal processing filters to extract the Blood Volume Pulse (BVP) signal. Different algorithms are applied to the BVP signal to estimate the various vital signs. We implemented a web application framework to measure a person's Heart Rate (HR), Heart Rate Variability (HRV), Oxygen Saturation (SpO2), Respiration Rate (RR), Blood Pressure (BP), and stress from the face video. The rPPG technique is highly sensitive to illumination and motion variation. The web application guides the users to reduce the noise due to these variations and thereby yield a cleaner BVP signal. The accuracy and robustness of the framework was validated with the help of volunteers.
ProPaLL: Probabilistic Partial Label Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Partial label learning is a type of weakly supervised learning, where each training instance corresponds to a set of candidate labels, among which only one is true. In this paper, we introduce ProPaLL, a novel probabilistic approach to this problem, which has at least three advantages compared to the existing approaches: it simplifies the training process, improves performance, and can be applied to any deep architecture. Experiments conducted on artificial and real-world datasets indicate that ProPaLL outperforms the existing approaches.
Energy-aware Scheduling of Virtualized Base Stations in O-RAN with Online Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The design of Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) compliant systems for configuring the virtualized Base Stations (vBSs) is of paramount importance for network operators. This task is challenging since optimizing the vBS scheduling procedure requires knowledge of parameters, which are erratic and demanding to obtain in advance. In this paper, we propose an online learning algorithm for balancing the performance and energy consumption of a vBS. This algorithm provides performance guarantees under unforeseeable conditions, such as non-stationary traffic and network state, and is oblivious to the vBS operation profile. We study the problem in its most general form and we prove that the proposed technique achieves sub-linear regret (i.e., zero average optimality gap) even in a fast-changing environment. By using real-world data and various trace-driven evaluations, our findings indicate savings of up to 74.3% in the power consumption of a vBS in comparison with state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Revisiting Item Promotion in GNN-based Collaborative Filtering: A Masked Targeted Topological Attack Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Graph neural networks (GNN) based collaborative filtering (CF) have attracted increasing attention in e-commerce and social media platforms. However, there still lack efforts to evaluate the robustness of such CF systems in deployment. Fundamentally different from existing attacks, this work revisits the item promotion task and reformulates it from a targeted topological attack perspective for the first time. Specifically, we first develop a targeted attack formulation to maximally increase a target item's popularity. We then leverage gradient-based optimizations to find a solution. However, we observe the gradient estimates often appear noisy due to the discrete nature of a graph, which leads to a degradation of attack ability. To resolve noisy gradient effects, we then propose a masked attack objective that can remarkably enhance the topological attack ability. Furthermore, we design a computationally efficient approach to the proposed attack, thus making it feasible to evaluate large-large CF systems. Experiments on two real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our attack in analyzing the robustness of GNN-based CF more practically.
PLMCL: Partial-Label Momentum Curriculum Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Multi-label image classification aims to predict all possible labels in an image. It is usually formulated as a partial-label learning problem, given the fact that it could be expensive in practice to annotate all labels in every training image. Existing works on partial-label learning focus on the case where each training image is annotated with only a subset of its labels. A special case is to annotate only one positive label in each training image. To further relieve the annotation burden and enhance the performance of the classifier, this paper proposes a new partial-label setting in which only a subset of the training images are labeled, each with only one positive label, while the rest of the training images remain unlabeled. To handle this new setting, we propose an end-to-end deep network, PLMCL (Partial Label Momentum Curriculum Learning), that can learn to produce confident pseudo labels for both partially-labeled and unlabeled training images. The novel momentum-based law updates soft pseudo labels on each training image with the consideration of the updating velocity of pseudo labels, which help avoid trapping to low-confidence local minimum, especially at the early stage of training in lack of both observed labels and confidence on pseudo labels. In addition, we present a confidence-aware scheduler to adaptively perform easy-to-hard learning for different labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed PLMCL outperforms many state-of-the-art multi-label classification methods under various partial-label settings on three different datasets.
Socially Fair Center-based and Linear Subspace Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Center-based clustering (e.g., $k$-means, $k$-medians) and clustering using linear subspaces are two most popular techniques to partition real-world data into smaller clusters. However, when the data consists of sensitive demographic groups, significantly different clustering cost per point for different sensitive groups can lead to fairness-related harms (e.g., different quality-of-service). The goal of socially fair clustering is to minimize the maximum cost of clustering per point over all groups. In this work, we propose a unified framework to solve socially fair center-based clustering and linear subspace clustering, and give practical, efficient approximation algorithms for these problems. We do extensive experiments to show that on multiple benchmark datasets our algorithms either closely match or outperform state-of-the-art baselines.
Fault-Tolerant Graph Realizations in the Congested Clique
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we study the graph realization problem in the Congested Clique model of distributed computing under crash faults. We consider {\em degree-sequence realization}, in which each node $v$ is associated with a degree value $d(v)$, and the resulting degree sequence is realizable if it is possible to construct an overlay network with the given degrees. Our main result is a $O(f)$-round deterministic algorithm for the degree-sequence realization problem in a $n$-node Congested Clique, of which $f$ nodes could be faulty ($f<n$). The algorithm uses $O(n^2)$ messages. We complement the result with lower bounds to show that the algorithm is tight w.r.t the number of rounds and the messages simultaneously. We also extend our result to the Node Capacitated Clique (NCC) model, where each node is restricted to sending and receiving at-most $O(\log n)$ messages per round. In the NCC model, our algorithm solves degree-sequence realization in $O(nf/\log n)$ rounds and $O(n^2)$ messages. For both settings, our algorithms work without the knowledge of $f$, the number of faults. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results for the graph realization problem in the crash-fault distributed network.
On Information Bottleneck for Gaussian Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

The information bottleneck problem (IB) of jointly stationary Gaussian sources is considered. A water-filling solution for the IB rate is given in terms of its SNR spectrum and whose rate is attained via frequency domain test-channel realization. A time-domain realization of the IB rate, based on linear prediction, is also proposed, which lends itself to an efficient implementation of the corresponding remote source-coding problem. A compound version of the problem is addressed, in which the joint distribution of the source is not precisely specified but rather in terms of a lower bound on the guaranteed mutual information. It is proved that a white SNR spectrum is optimal for this setting.
Õptimal Dual Vertex Failure Connectivity Labels
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we present succinct labeling schemes for supporting connectivity queries under vertex faults. For a given $n$-vertex graph $G$, an $f$-VFT (resp., EFT) connectivity labeling scheme is a distributed data structure that assigns each of the graph edges and vertices a short label, such that given the labels of a vertex pair $u$ and $v$, and the labels of at most $f$ failing vertices (resp., edges) $F$, one can determine if $u$ and $v$ are connected in $G \setminus F$. The primary complexity measure is the length of the individual labels. Since their introduction by [Courcelle, Twigg, STACS '07], FT labeling schemes have been devised only for a limited collection of graph families. A recent work [Dory and Parter, PODC 2021] provided EFT labeling schemes for general graphs under edge failures, leaving the vertex failure case fairly open. We provide the first sublinear $f$-VFT labeling schemes for $f \geq 2$ for any $n$-vertex graph. Our key result is $2$-VFT connectivity labels with $O(\log^3 n)$ bits. Our constructions are based on analyzing the structure of dual failure replacement paths on top of the well-known heavy-light tree decomposition technique of [Sleator and Tarjan, STOC 1981]. We also provide $f$-VFT labels with sub-linear length (in $|V|$) for any $f=o(\log\log n)$, that are based on a reduction to the existing EFT labels.
Physical LiDAR Simulation in Real-Time Engine
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Designing and validating sensor applications and algorithms in simulation is an important step in the modern development process. Furthermore, modern open-source multi-sensor simulation frameworks are moving towards the usage of video-game engines such as the Unreal Engine. Simulation of a sensor such as a LiDAR can prove to be difficult in such real-time software. In this paper we present a GPU-accelerated simulation of LiDAR based on its physical properties and interaction with the environment. We provide a generation of the depth and intensity data based on the properties of the sensor as well as the surface material and incidence angle at which the light beams hit the surface. It is validated against a real LiDAR sensor and shown to be accurate and precise although highly depended on the spectral data used for the material properties.
Passive and Active Acoustic Sensing for Soft Pneumatic Actuators
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a sensorization method for soft pneumatic actuators that uses an embedded microphone and speaker to measure different actuator properties. The physical state of the actuator determines the specific modulation of sound as it travels through the structure. Using simple machine learning, we create a computational sensor that infers the corresponding state from sound recordings. We demonstrate the acoustic sensor on a soft pneumatic continuum actuator and use it to measure contact locations, contact forces, object materials, actuator inflation, and actuator temperature. We show that the sensor is reliable (average classification rate for six contact locations of 93%), precise (mean spatial accuracy of 3.7 mm), and robust against common disturbances like background noise. Finally, we compare different sounds and learning methods and achieve best results with 20 ms of white noise and a support vector classifier as the sensor model.