OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
FACEGAN: Facial Attribute Controllable rEenactment GAN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

The face reenactment is a popular facial animation method where the person's identity is taken from the source image and the facial motion from the driving image. Recent works have demonstrated high quality results by combining the facial landmark based motion representations with the generative adversarial networks. These models perform best if the source and driving images depict the same person or if the facial structures are otherwise very similar. However, if the identity differs, the driving facial structures leak to the output distorting the reenactment result. We propose a novel Facial Attribute Controllable rEenactment GAN (FACEGAN), which transfers the facial motion from the driving face via the Action Unit (AU) representation. Unlike facial landmarks, the AUs are independent of the facial structure preventing the identity leak. Moreover, AUs provide a human interpretable way to control the reenactment. FACEGAN processes background and face regions separately for optimized output quality. The extensive quantitative and qualitative comparisons show a clear improvement over the state-of-the-art in a single source reenactment task. The results are best illustrated in the reenactment video provided in the supplementary material. The source code will be made available upon publication of the paper.
Bangla Text Classification using Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Text classification has been one of the earliest problems in NLP. Over time the scope of application areas has broadened and the difficulty of dealing with new areas (e.g., noisy social media content) has increased. The problem-solving strategy switched from classical machine learning to deep learning algorithms. One of the recent deep neural network architecture is the Transformer. Models designed with this type of network and its variants recently showed their success in many downstream natural language processing tasks, especially for resource-rich languages, e.g., English. However, these models have not been explored fully for Bangla text classification tasks. In this work, we fine-tune multilingual transformer models for Bangla text classification tasks in different domains, including sentiment analysis, emotion detection, news categorization, and authorship attribution. We obtain the state of the art results on six benchmark datasets, improving upon the previous results by 5-29% accuracy across different tasks.
Dynamic Power Control for Time-Critical Networking with Heterogeneous Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Future wireless networks will be characterized by heterogeneous traffic requirements. Such requirements can be low-latency or minimum-throughput. Therefore, the network has to adjust to different needs. Usually, users with low-latency requirements have to deliver their demand within a specific time frame, i.e., before a deadline, and they co-exist with throughput oriented users. In addition, the users are mobile and they share the same wireless channel. Therefore, they have to adjust their power transmission to achieve reliable communication. However, due to the limited power budget of wireless mobile devices, a power-efficient scheduling scheme is required by the network. In this work, we cast a stochastic network optimization problem for minimizing the packet drop rate while guaranteeing a minimum throughput and taking into account the limited-power capabilities of the users. We apply tools from Lyapunov optimization theory in order to provide an algorithm, named Dynamic Power Control (DPC) algorithm, that solves the formulated problem in realtime. It is proved that the DPC algorithm gives a solution arbitrarily close to the optimal one. Simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms the baseline Largest-Debt-First (LDF) algorithm for short deadlines and multiple users.
A Theory of Universal Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

How quickly can a given class of concepts be learned from examples? It is common to measure the performance of a supervised machine learning algorithm by plotting its "learning curve", that is, the decay of the error rate as a function of the number of training examples. However, the classical theoretical framework for understanding learnability, the PAC model of Vapnik-Chervonenkis and Valiant, does not explain the behavior of learning curves: the distribution-free PAC model of learning can only bound the upper envelope of the learning curves over all possible data distributions. This does not match the practice of machine learning, where the data source is typically fixed in any given scenario, while the learner may choose the number of training examples on the basis of factors such as computational resources and desired accuracy. In this paper, we study an alternative learning model that better captures such practical aspects of machine learning, but still gives rise to a complete theory of the learnable in the spirit of the PAC model. More precisely, we consider the problem of universal learning, which aims to understand the performance of learning algorithms on every data distribution, but without requiring uniformity over the distribution. The main result of this paper is a remarkable trichotomy: there are only three possible rates of universal learning. More precisely, we show that the learning curves of any given concept class decay either at an exponential, linear, or arbitrarily slow rates. Moreover, each of these cases is completely characterized by appropriate combinatorial parameters, and we exhibit optimal learning algorithms that achieve the best possible rate in each case. For concreteness, we consider in this paper only the realizable case, though analogous results are expected to extend to more general learning scenarios.
Synonym Knowledge Enhanced Reader for Chinese Idiom Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is the task that asks a machine to answer questions based on a given context. For Chinese MRC, due to the non-literal and non-compositional semantic characteristics, Chinese idioms pose unique challenges for machines to understand. Previous studies tend to treat idioms separately without fully exploiting the relationship among them. In this paper, we first define the concept of literal meaning coverage to measure the consistency between semantics and literal meanings for Chinese idioms. With the definition, we prove that the literal meanings of many idioms are far from their semantics, and we also verify that the synonymic relationship can mitigate this inconsistency, which would be beneficial for idiom comprehension. Furthermore, to fully utilize the synonymic relationship, we propose the synonym knowledge enhanced reader. Specifically, for each idiom, we first construct a synonym graph according to the annotations from a high-quality synonym dictionary or the cosine similarity between the pre-trained idiom embeddings and then incorporate the graph attention network and gate mechanism to encode the graph. Experimental results on ChID, a large-scale Chinese idiom reading comprehension dataset, show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Musical analysis of Stravinski's "The Rite of Spring" based on computational methods
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Stravinski's "The Rite of Spring" is one of the most well-known pieces from the classical contemporary music repertoire. However, its analysis has aroused different opinions within its construction and compositional foundations. In this sense, I here proposed my own manual analysis and a computational approach which aims to find a similar analysis, giving the opportunity of discovering new possible points of view and supplying the current deficiencies of the Musi"c Computing common analysis systems.
Speaker De-identification System using Autoencoders and Adversarial Training
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

The fast increase of web services and mobile apps, which collect personal data from users, increases the risk that their privacy may be severely compromised. In particular, the increasing variety of spoken language interfaces and voice assistants empowered by the vertiginous breakthroughs in Deep Learning are prompting important concerns in the European Union to preserve speech data privacy. For instance, an attacker can record speech from users and impersonate them to get access to systems requiring voice identification. Hacking speaker profiles from users is also possible by means of existing technology to extract speaker, linguistic (e.g., dialect) and paralinguistic features (e.g., age) from the speech signal. In order to mitigate these weaknesses, in this paper, we propose a speaker de-identification system based on adversarial training and autoencoders in order to suppress speaker, gender, and accent information from speech. Experimental results show that combining adversarial learning and autoencoders increase the equal error rate of a speaker verification system while preserving the intelligibility of the anonymized spoken content.
Ontology-driven Event Type Classification in Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Event classification can add valuable information for semantic search and the increasingly important topic of fact validation in news. So far, only few approaches address image classification for newsworthy event types such as natural disasters, sports events, or elections. Previous work distinguishes only between a limited number of event types and relies on rather small datasets for training. In this paper, we present a novel ontology-driven approach for the classification of event types in images. We leverage a large number of real-world news events to pursue two objectives: First, we create an ontology based on Wikidata comprising the majority of event types. Second, we introduce a novel large-scale dataset that was acquired through Web crawling. Several baselines are proposed including an ontology-driven learning approach that aims to exploit structured information of a knowledge graph to learn relevant event relations using deep neural networks. Experimental results on existing as well as novel benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ontology-driven approach.
von Neumann's missing "Second Draft": what it should contain
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2020
Year: 2020

Computing science is based on a computing paradigm that is not valid anymore for today's technological conditions. The reason is that the transmission time even inside the processor chip, but especially between the components of the system, is not negligible anymore. The paper introduces a quantitative measure for dispersion, which is vital for both computing performance and energy consumption, and demonstrates how its value increased with the changing technology. The temporal behavior (including the dispersion of the commonly used synchronization clock time) of computing components has a critical impact on the system's performance at all levels, as demonstrated from gate-level operation to supercomputing. The same effect limits the utility of the researched new materials/effects if the related transfer time cannot be proportionally mitigated. von Neumann's model is perfect, but now it is used outside of its range of validity. The correct procedure to consider the transfer time for the present technological background is also derived.
CLAR: A Cross-Lingual Argument Regularizer for Semantic Role Labeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Semantic role labeling (SRL) identifies predicate-argument structure(s) in a given sentence. Although different languages have different argument annotations, polyglot training, the idea of training one model on multiple languages, has previously been shown to outperform monolingual baselines, especially for low resource languages. In fact, even a simple combination of data has been shown to be effective with polyglot training by representing the distant vocabularies in a shared representation space. Meanwhile, despite the dissimilarity in argument annotations between languages, certain argument labels do share common semantic meaning across languages (e.g. adjuncts have more or less similar semantic meaning across languages). To leverage such similarity in annotation space across languages, we propose a method called Cross-Lingual Argument Regularizer (CLAR). CLAR identifies such linguistic annotation similarity across languages and exploits this information to map the target language arguments using a transformation of the space on which source language arguments lie. By doing so, our experimental results show that CLAR consistently improves SRL performance on multiple languages over monolingual and polyglot baselines for low resource languages.
Personalized Query Rewriting in Conversational AI Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in conversational AI agents often experience errors in the form of misrecognitions by automatic speech recognition (ASR) or semantic gaps in natural language understanding (NLU). These errors easily translate to user frustrations, particularly so in recurrent events e.g. regularly toggling an appliance, calling a frequent contact, etc. In this work, we propose a query rewriting approach by leveraging users' historically successful interactions as a form of memory. We present a neural retrieval model and a pointer-generator network with hierarchical attention and show that they perform significantly better at the query rewriting task with the aforementioned user memories than without. We also highlight how our approach with the proposed models leverages the structural and semantic diversity in ASR's output towards recovering users' intents.
Predicting the Future is like Completing a Painting!
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

This article is an introductory work towards a larger research framework relative to Scientific Prediction. It is a mixed between science and philosophy of science, therefore we can talk about Experimental Philosophy of Science. As a first result, we introduce a new forecasting method based on image completion, named Forecasting Method by Image Inpainting (FM2I). In fact, time series forecasting is transformed into fully images- and signal-based processing procedures. After transforming a time series data into its corresponding image, the problem of data forecasting becomes essentially a problem of image inpainting problem, i.e., completing missing data in the image. An extensive experimental evaluation is conducted using a large dataset proposed by the well-known M3-competition. Results show that FM2I represents an efficient and robust tool for time series forecasting. It has achieved prominent results in terms of accuracy and outperforms the best M3 forecasting methods.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Navigation in AAA Video Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In video games, non-player characters (NPCs) are used to enhance the players' experience in a variety of ways, e.g., as enemies, allies, or innocent bystanders. A crucial component of NPCs is navigation, which allows them to move from one point to another on the map. The most popular approach for NPC navigation in the video game industry is to use a navigation mesh (NavMesh), which is a graph representation of the map, with nodes and edges indicating traversable areas. Unfortunately, complex navigation abilities that extend the character's capacity for movement, e.g., grappling hooks, jetpacks, teleportation, or double-jumps, increases the complexity of the NavMesh, making it intractable in many practical scenarios. Game designers are thus constrained to only add abilities that can be handled by a NavMesh if they want to have NPC navigation. As an alternative, we propose to use Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) to learn how to navigate 3D maps using any navigation ability. We test our approach on complex 3D environments in the Unity game engine that are notably an order of magnitude larger than maps typically used in the Deep RL literature. One of these maps is directly modeled after a Ubisoft AAA game. We find that our approach performs surprisingly well, achieving at least $90\%$ success rate on all tested scenarios. A video of our results is available at https://youtu.be/WFIf9Wwlq8M.
Answer Graph: Factorization Matters in Large Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Our answer-graph method to evaluate SPARQL conjunctive queries (CQs) finds a factorized answer set first, an answer graph, and then finds the embedding tuples from this. This approach can reduce greatly the cost to evaluate CQs. This affords a second advantage: we can construct a cost-based planner. We present the answer-graph approach, and overview our prototype system, Wireframe. We then offer proof of concept via a micro-benchmark over the YAGO2s dataset with two prevalent shapes of queries, snowflake and diamond. We compare Wireframe's performance over these against PostgreSQL, Virtuoso, MonetDB, and Neo4J to illustrate the performance advantages of our answer-graph approach.
Spring-Rod System Identification via Differentiable Physics Engine
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a novel differentiable physics engine for system identification of complex spring-rod assemblies. Unlike black-box data-driven methods for learning the evolution of a dynamical system \emph{and} its parameters, we modularize the design of our engine using a discrete form of the governing equations of motion, similar to a traditional physics engine. We further reduce the dimension from 3D to 1D for each module, which allows efficient learning of system parameters using linear regression. The regression parameters correspond to physical quantities, such as spring stiffness or the mass of the rod, making the pipeline explainable. The approach significantly reduces the amount of training data required, and also avoids iterative identification of data sampling and model training. We compare the performance of the proposed engine with previous solutions, and demonstrate its efficacy on tensegrity systems, such as NASA's icosahedron.
Evolving Nano Particle Cancer Treatments with Multiple Particle Types
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Evolutionary algorithms have long been used for optimization problems where the appropriate size of solutions is unclear a priori. The applicability of this methodology is here investigated on the problem of designing a nano-particle (NP) based drug delivery system targeting cancer tumours. Utilizing a treatment comprising of multiple types of NPs is expected to be more effective due to the higher complexity of the treatment. This paper begins by utilizing the well-known NK model to explore the effects of fitness landscape ruggedness upon the evolution of genome length and, hence, solution complexity. The size of a novel sequence and the absence or presence of sequence deletion are also considered. Results show that whilst landscape ruggedness can alter the dynamics of the process, it does not hinder the evolution of genome length. These findings are then explored within the aforementioned real-world problem. In the first known instance, treatments with multiple types of NPs are used simultaneously, via an agent-based open source physics-based cell simulator. The results suggest that utilizing multiple types of NPs is more efficient when the solution space is explored with the evolutionary techniques under a predefined computational budget.
Input Bias in Rectified Gradients and Modified Saliency Maps
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Interpretation and improvement of deep neural networks relies on better understanding of their underlying mechanisms. In particular, gradients of classes or concepts with respect to the input features (e.g., pixels in images) are often used as importance scores or estimators, which are visualized in saliency maps. Thus, a family of saliency methods provide an intuitive way to identify input features with substantial influences on classifications or latent concepts. Several modifications to conventional saliency maps, such as Rectified Gradients and Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), have been introduced to allegedly denoise and improve interpretability. While visually coherent in certain cases, Rectified Gradients and other modified saliency maps introduce a strong input bias (e.g., brightness in the RGB space) because of inappropriate uses of the input features. We demonstrate that dark areas of an input image are not highlighted by a saliency map using Rectified Gradients, even if it is relevant for the class or concept. Even in the scaled images, the input bias exists around an artificial point in color spectrum. Our modification, which simply eliminates multiplication with input features, removes this bias. This showcases how a visual criteria may not align with true explainability of deep learning models.
A step towards neural genome assembly
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

De novo genome assembly focuses on finding connections between a vast amount of short sequences in order to reconstruct the original genome. The central problem of genome assembly could be described as finding a Hamiltonian path through a large directed graph with a constraint that an unknown number of nodes and edges should be avoided. However, due to local structures in the graph and biological features, the problem can be reduced to graph simplification, which includes removal of redundant information. Motivated by recent advancements in graph representation learning and neural execution of algorithms, in this work we train the MPNN model with max-aggregator to execute several algorithms for graph simplification. We show that the algorithms were learned successfully and can be scaled to graphs of sizes up to 20 times larger than the ones used in training. We also test on graphs obtained from real-world genomic data---that of a lambda phage and E. coli.
Distributed Learning with Low Communication Cost via Gradient Boosting Untrained Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

For high-dimensional data, there are huge communication costs for distributed GBDT because the communication volume of GBDT is related to the number of features. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel gradient boosting algorithm, the Gradient Boosting Untrained Neural Network(GBUN). GBUN ensembles the untrained randomly generated neural network that softly distributes data samples to multiple neuron outputs and dramatically reduces the communication costs for distributed learning. To avoid creating huge neural networks for high-dimensional data, we extend Simhash algorithm to mimic forward calculation of the neural network. Our experiments on multiple public datasets show that GBUN is as good as conventional GBDT in terms of prediction accuracy and much better than it in scaling property for distributed learning. Comparing to conventional GBDT varieties, GBUN speeds up the training process up to 13 times on the cluster with 64 machines, and up to 4614 times on the cluster with 100KB/s network bandwidth. Therefore, GBUN is not only an efficient distributed learning algorithm but also has great potentials for federated learning.