OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Ethical Decision Making During Automated Vehicle Crashes
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Automated vehicles have received much attention recently, particularly the DARPA Urban Challenge vehicles, Google's self-driving cars, and various others from auto manufacturers. These vehicles have the potential to significantly reduce crashes and improve roadway efficiency by automating the responsibilities of the driver. Still, automated vehicles are expected to crash occasionally, even when all sensors, vehicle control components, and algorithms function perfectly. If a human driver is unable to take control in time, a computer will be responsible for pre-crash behavior. Unlike other automated vehicles--such as aircraft, where every collision is catastrophic, and guided track systems, which can only avoid collisions in one dimension--automated roadway vehicles can predict various crash trajectory alternatives and select a path with the lowest damage or likelihood of collision. In some situations, the preferred path may be ambiguous. This study investigates automated vehicle crashing and concludes the following: (1) automated vehicles will almost certainly crash, (2) an automated vehicle's decisions preceding certain crashes will have a moral component, and (3) there is no obvious way to effectively encode complex human morals in software. A three-phase approach to developing ethical crashing algorithms is presented, consisting of a rational approach, an artificial intelligence approach, and a natural language requirement. The phases are theoretical and should be implemented as the technology becomes available.
Sentiment Analysis for Roman Urdu Text over Social Media, a Comparative Study
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In present century, data volume is increasing enormously. The data could be in form for image, text, voice, and video. One factor in this huge growth of data is usage of social media where everyone is posting data on daily basis during chatting, exchanging information, and uploading their personal and official credential. Research of sentiments seeks to uncover abstract knowledge in Published texts in which users communicate their emotions and thoughts about shared content, including blogs, news and social networks. Roman Urdu is the one of most dominant language on social networks in Pakistan and India. Roman Urdu is among the varieties of the world's third largest Urdu language but yet not sufficient work has been done in this language. In this article we addressed the prior concepts and strategies used to examine the sentiment of the roman Urdu text and reported their results as well.
Inherent Trade-offs in the Fair Allocation of Treatments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Explicit and implicit bias clouds human judgement, leading to discriminatory treatment of minority groups. A fundamental goal of algorithmic fairness is to avoid the pitfalls in human judgement by learning policies that improve the overall outcomes while providing fair treatment to protected classes. In this paper, we propose a causal framework that learns optimal intervention policies from data subject to fairness constraints. We define two measures of treatment bias and infer best treatment assignment that minimizes the bias while optimizing overall outcome. We demonstrate that there is a dilemma of balancing fairness and overall benefit; however, allowing preferential treatment to protected classes in certain circumstances (affirmative action) can dramatically improve the overall benefit while also preserving fairness. We apply our framework to data containing student outcomes on standardized tests and show how it can be used to design real-world policies that fairly improve student test scores. Our framework provides a principled way to learn fair treatment policies in real-world settings.
Streaming Simultaneous Speech Translation with Augmented Memory Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on speech translation tasks. However, the model architecture is not efficient enough for streaming scenarios since self-attention is computed over an entire input sequence and the computational cost grows quadratically with the length of the input sequence. Nevertheless, most of the previous work on simultaneous speech translation, the task of generating translations from partial audio input, ignores the time spent in generating the translation when analyzing the latency. With this assumption, a system may have good latency quality trade-offs but be inapplicable in real-time scenarios. In this paper, we focus on the task of streaming simultaneous speech translation, where the systems are not only capable of translating with partial input but are also able to handle very long or continuous input. We propose an end-to-end transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model, equipped with an augmented memory transformer encoder, which has shown great success on the streaming automatic speech recognition task with hybrid or transducer-based models. We conduct an empirical evaluation of the proposed model on segment, context and memory sizes and we compare our approach to a transformer with a unidirectional mask.
Waymo Public Road Safety Performance Data
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Waymo's mission to reduce traffic injuries and fatalities and improve mobility for all has led us to expand deployment of automated vehicles on public roads without a human driver behind the wheel. As part of this process, Waymo is committed to providing the public with informative and relevant data regarding the demonstrated safety of Waymo's automated driving system, which we call the Waymo Driver. The data presented in this paper represents more than 6.1 million miles of automated driving in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area, including operations with a trained operator behind the steering wheel from calendar year 2019 and 65,000 miles of driverless operation without a human behind the steering wheel from 2019 and the first nine months of 2020. The paper includes every collision and minor contact experienced during these operations as well as every predicted contact identified using Waymo's counterfactual, what if, simulation of events had the vehicle's trained operator not disengaged automated driving. There were 47 contact events that occurred over this time period, consisting of 18 actual and 29 simulated contact events, none of which would be expected to result in severe or life threatening injuries. This paper presents the collision typology and severity for each actual and simulated event, along with diagrams depicting each of the most significant events. Nearly all the events involved one or more road rule violations or other errors by a human driver or road user, including all eight of the most severe events, which we define as involving actual or expected airbag deployment in any involved vehicle. When compared to national collision statistics, the Waymo Driver completely avoided certain collision modes that human driven vehicles are frequently involved in, including road departure and collisions with fixed objects.
Waymo's Safety Methodologies and Safety Readiness Determinations
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Waymo's safety methodologies, which draw on well established engineering processes and address new safety challenges specific to Automated Vehicle technology, provide a firm foundation for safe deployment of Waymo's Level 4 ADS, which Waymo also refers to as the Waymo Driver. Waymo's determination of its readiness to deploy its AVs safely in different settings rests on that firm foundation and on a thorough analysis of risks specific to a particular Operational Design Domain. Waymo's process for making these readiness determinations entails an ordered examination of the relevant outputs from all of its safety methodologies combined with careful safety and engineering judgment focused on the specific facts relevant for a particular determination. Waymo will approve when it determines the ADS is ready for the new conditions without creating any unreasonable risks to safety. This paper explains Waymo's methodologies as applied to the three layers of its technology: hardware, ADS behavior, and operations, and also explains Waymo's safety governance. Waymo will continue to apply and adapt those methodologies, and to learn from the important contributions of others in the AV industry, as Waymo continues to build an ever safer and more able ADS.
Learning Structured Representations of Entity Names using Active Learning and Weak Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Structured representations of entity names are useful for many entity-related tasks such as entity normalization and variant generation. Learning the implicit structured representations of entity names without context and external knowledge is particularly challenging. In this paper, we present a novel learning framework that combines active learning and weak supervision to solve this problem. Our experimental evaluation show that this framework enables the learning of high-quality models from merely a dozen or so labeled examples.
Deep Reactive Planning in Dynamic Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

The main novelty of the proposed approach is that it allows a robot to learn an end-to-end policy which can adapt to changes in the environment during execution. While goal conditioning of policies has been studied in the RL literature, such approaches are not easily extended to cases where the robot's goal can change during execution. This is something that humans are naturally able to do. However, it is difficult for robots to learn such reflexes (i.e., to naturally respond to dynamic environments), especially when the goal location is not explicitly provided to the robot, and instead needs to be perceived through a vision sensor. In the current work, we present a method that can achieve such behavior by combining traditional kinematic planning, deep learning, and deep reinforcement learning in a synergistic fashion to generalize to arbitrary environments. We demonstrate the proposed approach for several reaching and pick-and-place tasks in simulation, as well as on a real system of a 6-DoF industrial manipulator. A video describing our work could be found \url{https://youtu.be/hE-Ew59GRPQ}.
Optimal 1-NN Prototypes for Pathological Geometries
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Using prototype methods to reduce the size of training datasets can drastically reduce the computational cost of classification with instance-based learning algorithms like the k-Nearest Neighbour classifier. The number and distribution of prototypes required for the classifier to match its original performance is intimately related to the geometry of the training data. As a result, it is often difficult to find the optimal prototypes for a given dataset, and heuristic algorithms are used instead. However, we consider a particularly challenging setting where commonly used heuristic algorithms fail to find suitable prototypes and show that the optimal prototypes can instead be found analytically. We also propose an algorithm for finding nearly-optimal prototypes in this setting, and use it to empirically validate the theoretical results.
Tight Capacity Bounds for Indoor Visible Light Communications With Signal-Dependent Noise
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Channel capacity bounds are derived for a point-to-point indoor visible light communications (VLC) system with signal-dependent Gaussian noise. Considering both illumination and communication, the non-negative input of VLC is constrained by peak and average optical intensity constraints. Two scenarios are taken into account: one scenario has both average and peak optical intensity constraints, and the other scenario has only average optical intensity constraint. For both two scenarios, we derive closed-from expressions of capacity lower and upper bounds. Specifically, the capacity lower bound is derived by using the variational method and the property that the output entropy is invariably larger than the input entropy. The capacity upper bound is obtained by utilizing the dual expression of capacity and the principle of "capacity-achieving source distributions that escape to infinity". Moreover, the asymptotic analysis shows that the asymptotic performance gap between the capacity lower and upper bounds approaches zero. Finally, all derived capacity bounds are confirmed using numerical results.
Automation of application-level caching in a seamless way
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

Meeting performance and scalability requirements while delivering services is a critical issue in web applications. Recently, latency and cost of Internet-based services are encouraging the use of application-level caching to continue satisfying users' demands and improve the scalability and availability of origin servers. Application-level caching, in which developers manually control cached content, has been adopted when traditional forms of caching are insufficient to meet such requirements. Despite its popularity, this level of caching is typically addressed in an ad hoc way, given that it depends on specific details of the application. Furthermore, it forces application developers to reason about a crosscutting concern, which is unrelated to the application business logic. As a result, application-level caching is a time-consuming and error-prone task, becoming a common source of bugs. Among all the issues involved with application-level caching, the decision of what should be cached must frequently be adjusted to cope with the application evolution and usage, making it a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce an automated caching approach to automatically identify application-level cache content at runtime by monitoring system execution and adaptively managing caching decisions. Our approach is implemented as a framework that can be seamlessly integrated into new and existing web applications. In addition to the reduction of the effort required from developers to develop a caching solution, an empirical evaluation showed that our approach significantly speeds up and improves hit ratios with improvements ranging from 2.78% to 17.18%.
Partial Functions and Recursion in Univalent Type Theory
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

We investigate partial functions and computability theory from within a constructive, univalent type theory. The focus is on placing computability into a larger mathematical context, rather than on a complete development of computability theory. We begin with a treatment of partial functions, using the notion of dominance, which is used in synthetic domain theory to discuss classes of partial maps. We relate this and other ideas from synthetic domain theory to other approaches to partiality in type theory. We show that the notion of dominance is difficult to apply in our setting: the set of $Σ_0^1$ propositions investigated by Rosolini form a dominance precisely if a weak, but nevertheless unprovable, choice principle holds. To get around this problem, we suggest an alternative notion of partial function we call disciplined maps. In the presence of countable choice, this notion coincides with Rosolini's. Using a general notion of partial function, we take the first steps in constructive computability theory. We do this both with computability as structure, where we have direct access to programs; and with computability as property, where we must work in a program-invariant way. We demonstrate the difference between these two approaches by showing how these approaches relate to facts about computability theory arising from topos-theoretic and type-theoretic concerns. Finally, we tie the two threads together: assuming countable choice and that all total functions $\mathbb{N}\to\mathbb{N}$ are computable (both of which hold in the effective topos), the Rosolini partial functions, the disciplined maps, and the computable partial functions all coincide. We observe, however, that the class of all partial functions includes non-computable partial functions.
Method of the coherence evaluation of Ukrainian text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Due to the growing role of the SEO technologies, it is necessary to perform an automated analysis of the article's quality. Such approach helps both to return the most intelligible pages for the user's query and to raise the web sites positions to the top of query results. An automated assessment of a coherence is a part of the complex analysis of the text. In this article, main methods for text coherence measurements for Ukrainian language are analyzed. Expediency of using the semantic similarity graph method in comparison with other methods are explained. It is suggested the improvement of that method by the pre-training of the neural network for vector representations of sentences. Experimental examination of the original method and its modifications is made. Training and examination procedures are made on the corpus of Ukrainian texts, which were previously retrieved from abstracts and full texts of Ukrainian scientific articles. The testing procedure is implemented by performing of two typical tasks for the text coherence assessment: document discrimination task and insertion task. Accordingly to the analysis it is defined the most effective combination of method's modification and its parameter for the measurement of the text coherence.
Unsupervised Deep Persistent Monocular Visual Odometry and Depth Estimation in Extreme Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, unsupervised deep learning approaches have received significant attention to estimate the depth and visual odometry (VO) from unlabelled monocular image sequences. However, their performance is limited in challenging environments due to perceptual degradation, occlusions and rapid motions. Moreover, the existing unsupervised methods suffer from the lack of scale-consistency constraints across frames, which causes that the VO estimators fail to provide persistent trajectories over long sequences. In this study, we propose an unsupervised monocular deep VO framework that predicts six-degrees-of-freedom pose camera motion and depth map of the scene from unlabelled RGB image sequences. We provide detailed quantitative and qualitative evaluations of the proposed framework on a) a challenging dataset collected during the DARPA Subterranean challenge; and b) the benchmark KITTI and Cityscapes datasets. The proposed approach outperforms both traditional and state-of-the-art unsupervised deep VO methods providing better results for both pose estimation and depth recovery. The presented approach is part of the solution used by the COSTAR team participating at the DARPA Subterranean Challenge.
DL-Reg: A Deep Learning Regularization Technique using Linear Regression
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Regularization plays a vital role in the context of deep learning by preventing deep neural networks from the danger of overfitting. This paper proposes a novel deep learning regularization method named as DL-Reg, which carefully reduces the nonlinearity of deep networks to a certain extent by explicitly enforcing the network to behave as much linear as possible. The key idea is to add a linear constraint to the objective function of the deep neural networks, which is simply the error of a linear mapping from the inputs to the outputs of the model. More precisely, the proposed DL-Reg carefully forces the network to behave in a linear manner. This linear constraint, which is further adjusted by a regularization factor, prevents the network from the risk of overfitting. The performance of DL-Reg is evaluated by training state-of-the-art deep network models on several benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed regularization method: 1) gives major improvements over the existing regularization techniques, and 2) significantly improves the performance of deep neural networks, especially in the case of small-sized training datasets.
A Framework of Combining Short-Term Spatial/Frequency Feature Extraction and Long-Term IndRNN for Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Smartphone sensors based human activity recognition is attracting increasing interests nowadays with the popularization of smartphones. With the high sampling rates of smartphone sensors, it is a highly long-range temporal recognition problem, especially with the large intra-class distances such as the smartphones carried at different locations such as in the bag or on the body, and the small inter-class distances such as taking train or subway. To address this problem, we propose a new framework of combining short-term spatial/frequency feature extraction and a long-term Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN) for activity recognition. Considering the periodic characteristics of the sensor data, short-term temporal features are first extracted in the spatial and frequency domains. Then the IndRNN, which is able to capture long-term patterns, is used to further obtain the long-term features for classification. In view of the large differences when the smartphone is carried at different locations, a group based location recognition is first developed to pinpoint the location of the smartphone. The Sussex-Huawei Locomotion (SHL) dataset from the SHL Challenge is used for evaluation. An earlier version of the proposed method has won the second place award in the SHL Challenge 2020 (the first place if not considering multiple models fusion approach). The proposed method is further improved in this paper and achieves 80.72$\%$ accuracy, better than the existing methods using a single model.
APPLR: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Reinforcement
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Classical navigation systems typically operate using a fixed set of hand-picked parameters (e.g. maximum speed, sampling rate, inflation radius, etc.) and require heavy expert re-tuning in order to work in new environments. To mitigate this requirement, it has been proposed to learn parameters for different contexts in a new environment using human demonstrations collected via teleoperation. However, learning from human demonstration limits deployment to the training environment, and limits overall performance to that of a potentially-suboptimal demonstrator. In this paper, we introduce APPLR, Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Reinforcement, which allows existing navigation systems to adapt to new scenarios by using a parameter selection scheme discovered via reinforcement learning (RL) in a wide variety of simulation environments. We evaluate APPLR on a robot in both simulated and physical experiments, and show that it can outperform both a fixed set of hand-tuned parameters and also a dynamic parameter tuning scheme learned from human demonstration.
Non-Autoregressive Predictive Coding for Learning Speech Representations from Local Dependencies
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Self-supervised speech representations have been shown to be effective in a variety of speech applications. However, existing representation learning methods generally rely on the autoregressive model and/or observed global dependencies while generating the representation. In this work, we propose Non-Autoregressive Predictive Coding (NPC), a self-supervised method, to learn a speech representation in a non-autoregressive manner by relying only on local dependencies of speech. NPC has a conceptually simple objective and can be implemented easily with the introduced Masked Convolution Blocks. NPC offers a significant speedup for inference since it is parallelizable in time and has a fixed inference time for each time step regardless of the input sequence length. We discuss and verify the effectiveness of NPC by theoretically and empirically comparing it with other methods. We show that the NPC representation is comparable to other methods in speech experiments on phonetic and speaker classification while being more efficient.