OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fractional SDE-Net: Generation of Time Series Data with Long-term Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we focus on the generation of time-series data using neural networks. It is often the case that input time-series data have only one realized (and usually irregularly sampled) path, which makes it difficult to extract time-series characteristics, and its noise structure is more complicated than i.i.d. type. Time series data, especially from hydrology, telecommunications, economics, and finance, exhibit long-term memory also called long-range dependency (LRD). The main purpose of this paper is to artificially generate time series with the help of neural networks, making the LRD of paths into account. We propose fSDE-Net: neural fractional Stochastic Differential Equation Network. It generalizes the neural stochastic differential equation model by using fractional Brownian motion with a Hurst index larger than half, which exhibits the LRD property. We derive the solver of fSDE-Net and theoretically analyze the existence and uniqueness of the solution to fSDE-Net. Our experiments with artificial and real time-series data demonstrate that the fSDE-Net model can replicate distributional properties well.
Audio-Driven Talking Face Video Generation with Dynamic Convolution Kernels
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present a dynamic convolution kernel (DCK) strategy for convolutional neural networks. Using a fully convolutional network with the proposed DCKs, high-quality talking-face video can be generated from multi-modal sources (i.e., unmatched audio and video) in real time, and our trained model is robust to different identities, head postures, and input audios. Our proposed DCKs are specially designed for audio-driven talking face video generation, leading to a simple yet effective end-to-end system. We also provide a theoretical analysis to interpret why DCKs work. Experimental results show that our method can generate high-quality talking-face video with background at 60 fps. Comparison and evaluation between our method and the state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Toward Among-Device AI from On-Device AI with Stream Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Modern consumer electronic devices often provide intelligence services with deep neural networks. We have started migrating the computing locations of intelligence services from cloud servers (traditional AI systems) to the corresponding devices (on-device AI systems). On-device AI systems generally have the advantages of preserving privacy, removing network latency, and saving cloud costs. With the emergent of on-device AI systems having relatively low computing power, the inconsistent and varying hardware resources and capabilities pose difficulties. Authors' affiliation has started applying a stream pipeline framework, NNStreamer, for on-device AI systems, saving developmental costs and hardware resources and improving performance. We want to expand the types of devices and applications with on-device AI services products of both the affiliation and second/third parties. We also want to make each AI service atomic, re-deployable, and shared among connected devices of arbitrary vendors; we now have yet another requirement introduced as it always has been. The new requirement of "among-device AI" includes connectivity between AI pipelines so that they may share computing resources and hardware capabilities across a wide range of devices regardless of vendors and manufacturers. We propose extensions of the stream pipeline framework, NNStreamer, for on-device AI so that NNStreamer may provide among-device AI capability. This work is a Linux Foundation (LF AI and Data) open source project accepting contributions from the general public.
PETS-SWINF: A regression method that considers images with metadata based Neural Network for pawpularity prediction on 2021 Kaggle Competition "PetFinder.my"
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Millions of stray animals suffer on the streets or are euthanized in shelters every day around the world. In order to better adopt stray animals, scoring the pawpularity (cuteness) of stray animals is very important, but evaluating the pawpularity of animals is a very labor-intensive thing. Consequently, there has been an urgent surge of interest to develop an algorithm that scores pawpularity of animals. However, the dataset in Kaggle not only has images, but also metadata describing images. Most methods basically focus on the most advanced image regression methods in recent years, but there is no good method to deal with the metadata of images. To address the above challenges, the paper proposes an image regression model called PETS-SWINF that considers metadata of the images. Our results based on a dataset of Kaggle competition, "PetFinder.my", show that PETS-SWINF has an advantage over only based images models. Our results shows that the RMSE loss of the proposed model on the test dataset is 17.71876 but 17.76449 without metadata. The advantage of the proposed method is that PETS-SWINF can consider both low-order and high-order features of metadata, and adaptively adjust the weights of the image model and the metadata model. The performance is promising as our leadboard score is ranked 15 out of 3545 teams (Gold medal) currently for 2021 Kaggle competition on the challenge "PetFinder.my".
An Edge Map based Ensemble Solution to Detect Water Level in Stream
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Flooding is one of the most dangerous weather events today. Between $2015-2019$, on average, flooding has caused more than $130$ deaths every year in the USA alone. The devastating nature of flood necessitates the continuous monitoring of water level in the rivers and streams to detect the incoming flood. In this work, we have designed and implemented an efficient vision-based ensemble solution to continuously detect the water level in the creek. Our solution adapts template matching algorithm to find the region of interest by leveraging edge maps, and combines two parallel approach to identify the water level. While first approach fits a linear regression model in edge map to identify the water line, second approach uses a split sliding window to compute the sum of squared difference in pixel intensities to find the water surface. We evaluated the proposed system on $4306$ images collected between $3$rd October and $18$th December in 2019 with the frequency of $1$ image in every $10$ minutes. The system exhibited low error rate as it achieved $4.8$, $3.1\%$ and $0.92$ scores for MAE, MAPE and $R^2$ evaluation metrics, respectively. We believe the proposed solution is very practical as it is pervasive, accurate, doesn't require installation of any additional infrastructure in the water body and can be easily adapted to other locations.
The Normalized Edit Distance with Uniform Operation Costs is a Metric
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2022
Year: 2022

We prove that the normalized edit distance proposed in [Marzal and Vidal 1993] is a metric when the cost of all the edit operations are the same. This closes a long standing gap in the literature where several authors noted that this distance does not satisfy the triangle inequality in the general case, and that it was not known whether it is satisfied in the uniform case where all the edit costs are equal. We compare this metric to two normalized metrics proposed as alternatives in the literature, when people thought that Marzal's and Vidal's distance is not a metric, and identify key properties that explain why the original distance, now known to also be a metric, is better for some applications. Our examination is from a point of view of formal verification, but the properties and their significance are stated in an application agnostic way.
Modeling the Repetition-based Recovering of Acoustic and Visual Sources with Dendritic Neurons
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

In natural auditory environments, acoustic signals originate from the temporal superimposition of different sound sources. The problem of inferring individual sources from ambiguous mixtures of sounds is known as blind source decomposition. Experiments on humans have demonstrated that the auditory system can identify sound sources as repeating patterns embedded in the acoustic input. Source repetition produces temporal regularities that can be detected and used for segregation. Specifically, listeners can identify sounds occurring more than once across different mixtures, but not sounds heard only in a single mixture. However, whether such a behaviour can be computationally modelled has not yet been explored. Here, we propose a biologically inspired computational model to perform blind source separation on sequences of mixtures of acoustic stimuli. Our method relies on a somatodendritic neuron model trained with a Hebbian-like learning rule which can detect spatio-temporal patterns recurring in synaptic inputs. We show that the segregation capabilities of our model are reminiscent of the features of human performance in a variety of experimental settings involving synthesized sounds with naturalistic properties. Furthermore, we extend the study to investigate the properties of segregation on task settings not yet explored with human subjects, namely natural sounds and images. Overall, our work suggests that somatodendritic neuron models offer a promising neuro-inspired learning strategy to account for the characteristics of the brain segregation capabilities as well as to make predictions on yet untested experimental settings.
Data augmentation through multivariate scenario forecasting in Data Centers using Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

The Cloud paradigm is at a critical point in which the existing energy-efficiency techniques are reaching a plateau, while the computing resources demand at Data Center facilities continues to increase exponentially. The main challenge in achieving a global energy efficiency strategy based on Artificial Intelligence is that we need massive amounts of data to feed the algorithms. This paper proposes a time-series data augmentation methodology based on synthetic scenario forecasting within the Data Center. For this purpose, we will implement a powerful generative algorithm: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Specifically, our work combines the disciplines of GAN-based data augmentation and scenario forecasting, filling the gap in the generation of synthetic data in DCs. Furthermore, we propose a methodology to increase the variability and heterogeneity of the generated data by introducing on-demand anomalies without additional effort or expert knowledge. We also suggest the use of Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Mean Squared Error as new metrics in the validation of synthetic time series generation, as they provide a better overall comparison of multivariate data distributions. We validate our approach using real data collected in an operating Data Center, successfully generating synthetic data helpful for prediction and optimization models. Our research will help optimize the energy consumed in Data Centers, although the proposed methodology can be employed in any similar time-series-like problem.
Proficiency Matters Quality Estimation in Grammatical Error Correction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This study investigates how supervised quality estimation (QE) models of grammatical error correction (GEC) are affected by the learners' proficiency with the data. QE models for GEC evaluations in prior work have obtained a high correlation with manual evaluations. However, when functioning in a real-world context, the data used for the reported results have limitations because prior works were biased toward data by learners with relatively high proficiency levels. To address this issue, we created a QE dataset that includes multiple proficiency levels and explored the necessity of performing proficiency-wise evaluation for QE of GEC. Our experiments demonstrated that differences in evaluation dataset proficiency affect the performance of QE models, and proficiency-wise evaluation helps create more robust models.
Neighboring Backdoor Attacks on Graph Convolutional Network
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Backdoor attacks have been widely studied to hide the misclassification rules in the normal models, which are only activated when the model is aware of the specific inputs (i.e., the trigger). However, despite their success in the conventional Euclidean space, there are few studies of backdoor attacks on graph structured data. In this paper, we propose a new type of backdoor which is specific to graph data, called neighboring backdoor. Considering the discreteness of graph data, how to effectively design the triggers while retaining the model accuracy on the original task is the major challenge. To address such a challenge, we set the trigger as a single node, and the backdoor is activated when the trigger node is connected to the target node. To preserve the model accuracy, the model parameters are not allowed to be modified. Thus, when the trigger node is not connected, the model performs normally. Under these settings, in this work, we focus on generating the features of the trigger node. Two types of backdoors are proposed: (1) Linear Graph Convolution Backdoor which finds an approximation solution for the feature generation (can be viewed as an integer programming problem) by looking at the linear part of GCNs. (2) Variants of existing graph attacks. We extend current gradient-based attack methods to our backdoor attack scenario. Extensive experiments on two social networks and two citation networks datasets demonstrate that all proposed backdoors can achieve an almost 100\% attack success rate while having no impact on predictive accuracy.
Balancing Performance and Energy Consumption of Bagging Ensembles for the Classification of Data Streams in Edge Computing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, the Edge Computing (EC) paradigm has emerged as an enabling factor for developing technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G networks, bridging the gap between Cloud Computing services and end-users, supporting low latency, mobility, and location awareness to delay-sensitive applications. Most solutions in EC employ machine learning (ML) methods to perform data classification and other information processing tasks on continuous and evolving data streams. Usually, such solutions have to cope with vast amounts of data that come as data streams while balancing energy consumption, latency, and the predictive performance of the algorithms. Ensemble methods achieve remarkable predictive performance when applied to evolving data streams due to the combination of several models and the possibility of selective resets. This work investigates strategies for optimizing the performance (i.e., delay, throughput) and energy consumption of bagging ensembles to classify data streams. The experimental evaluation involved six state-of-art ensemble algorithms (OzaBag, OzaBag Adaptive Size Hoeffding Tree, Online Bagging ADWIN, Leveraging Bagging, Adaptive RandomForest, and Streaming Random Patches) applying five widely used machine learning benchmark datasets with varied characteristics on three computer platforms. Such strategies can significantly reduce energy consumption in 96% of the experimental scenarios evaluated. Despite the trade-offs, it is possible to balance them to avoid significant loss in predictive performance.
Discourse Analysis for Evaluating Coherence in Video Paragraph Captions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video paragraph captioning is the task of automatically generating a coherent paragraph description of the actions in a video. Previous linguistic studies have demonstrated that coherence of a natural language text is reflected by its discourse structure and relations. However, existing video captioning methods evaluate the coherence of generated paragraphs by comparing them merely against human paragraph annotations and fail to reason about the underlying discourse structure. At UCLA, we are currently exploring a novel discourse based framework to evaluate the coherence of video paragraphs. Central to our approach is the discourse representation of videos, which helps in modeling coherence of paragraphs conditioned on coherence of videos. We also introduce DisNet, a novel dataset containing the proposed visual discourse annotations of 3000 videos and their paragraphs. Our experiment results have shown that the proposed framework evaluates coherence of video paragraphs significantly better than all the baseline methods. We believe that many other multi-discipline Artificial Intelligence problems such as Visual Dialog and Visual Storytelling would also greatly benefit from the proposed visual discourse framework and the DisNet dataset.
An Empirical Study on the Overlapping Problem of Open-Domain Dialogue Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Open-domain dialogue systems aim to converse with humans through text, and dialogue research has heavily relied on benchmark datasets. In this work, we observe the overlapping problem in DailyDialog and OpenSubtitles, two popular open-domain dialogue benchmark datasets. Our systematic analysis then shows that such overlapping can be exploited to obtain fake state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we address this issue by cleaning these datasets and setting up a proper data processing procedure for future research.
Face Detection in Extreme Conditions: A Machine-learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Face detection in unrestricted conditions has been a trouble for years due to various expressions, brightness, and coloration fringing. Recent studies show that deep learning knowledge of strategies can acquire spectacular performance inside the identification of different gadgets and patterns. This face detection in unconstrained surroundings is difficult due to various poses, illuminations, and occlusions. Figuring out someone with a picture has been popularized through the mass media. However, it's miles less sturdy to fingerprint or retina scanning. The latest research shows that deep mastering techniques can gain mind-blowing performance on those two responsibilities. In this paper, I recommend a deep cascaded multi-venture framework that exploits the inherent correlation among them to boost up their performance. In particular, my framework adopts a cascaded shape with 3 layers of cautiously designed deep convolutional networks that expect face and landmark region in a coarse-to-fine way. Besides, within the gaining knowledge of the procedure, I propose a new online tough sample mining method that can enhance the performance robotically without manual pattern choice.
Unintended Bias in Language Model-driven Conversational Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRSs) have recently started to leverage pretrained language models (LM) such as BERT for their ability to semantically interpret a wide range of preference statement variations. However, pretrained LMs are well-known to be prone to intrinsic biases in their training data, which may be exacerbated by biases embedded in domain-specific language data(e.g., user reviews) used to fine-tune LMs for CRSs. We study a recently introduced LM-driven recommendation backbone (termed LMRec) of a CRS to investigate how unintended bias i.e., language variations such as name references or indirect indicators of sexual orientation or location that should not affect recommendations manifests in significantly shifted price and category distributions of restaurant recommendations. The alarming results we observe strongly indicate that LMRec has learned to reinforce harmful stereotypes through its recommendations. For example, offhand mention of names associated with the black community significantly lowers the price distribution of recommended restaurants, while offhand mentions of common male-associated names lead to an increase in recommended alcohol-serving establishments. These and many related results presented in this work raise a red flag that advances in the language handling capability of LM-drivenCRSs do not come without significant challenges related to mitigating unintended bias in future deployed CRS assistants with a potential reach of hundreds of millions of end-users.
A Class of Minimum Storage Cooperative Regenerating Codes with Low Access Property
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, a new repair scheme for a modified construction of MDS codes is studied. The obtained repair scheme has optimal bandwidth for multiple failed nodes under the cooperative repair model. In addition, the repair scheme has relatively low access property, where the number of data accessed is less than two times the optimal value.
Rethinking Activity Awareness: The Design, Evaluation & Implication of Integrating Activity Awareness into Mobile Messaging
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Nowadays, different types of context information are integrated into mobile messaging to increase expressiveness and awareness, including mobile device setting, location, activity, and heart rate. Due to low recognition accuracy, sometimes users cannot accurately infer others' status through activity awareness. Recently, activity recognition technology has advanced. However, the user behaviors of activity awareness with improved technology have not been studied. In this study, we design ActAware, a mobile instant messaging application that integrates activity awareness based on improved activity recognition technology, i.e., improved recognition accuracy and the addition of activity transition notification. We conduct a field study to explore user behaviors and found that activity awareness allows users to speculate on the reasons for chat interruption, plan communication, speculate on whether the chat partner is departing/arriving, and deepen the understanding of living patterns. Compared with disclosing other types of context information, users have fewer privacy concerns about disclosing activity information in ActAware. Based on these findings, we provide design recommendations for mobile messaging to better support activity awareness.
Towards Realistic Visual Dubbing with Heterogeneous Sources
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The task of few-shot visual dubbing focuses on synchronizing the lip movements with arbitrary speech input for any talking head video. Albeit moderate improvements in current approaches, they commonly require high-quality homologous data sources of videos and audios, thus causing the failure to leverage heterogeneous data sufficiently. In practice, it may be intractable to collect the perfect homologous data in some cases, for example, audio-corrupted or picture-blurry videos. To explore this kind of data and support high-fidelity few-shot visual dubbing, in this paper, we novelly propose a simple yet efficient two-stage framework with a higher flexibility of mining heterogeneous data. Specifically, our two-stage paradigm employs facial landmarks as intermediate prior of latent representations and disentangles the lip movements prediction from the core task of realistic talking head generation. By this means, our method makes it possible to independently utilize the training corpus for two-stage sub-networks using more available heterogeneous data easily acquired. Besides, thanks to the disentanglement, our framework allows a further fine-tuning for a given talking head, thereby leading to better speaker-identity preserving in the final synthesized results. Moreover, the proposed method can also transfer appearance features from others to the target speaker. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in generating highly realistic videos synchronized with the speech over the state-of-the-art.