OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Swin2SR: SwinV2 Transformer for Compressed Image Super-Resolution and Restoration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Compression plays an important role on the efficient transmission and storage of images and videos through band-limited systems such as streaming services, virtual reality or videogames. However, compression unavoidably leads to artifacts and the loss of the original information, which may severely degrade the visual quality. For these reasons, quality enhancement of compressed images has become a popular research topic. While most state-of-the-art image restoration methods are based on convolutional neural networks, other transformers-based methods such as SwinIR, show impressive performance on these tasks. In this paper, we explore the novel Swin Transformer V2, to improve SwinIR for image super-resolution, and in particular, the compressed input scenario. Using this method we can tackle the major issues in training transformer vision models, such as training instability, resolution gaps between pre-training and fine-tuning, and hunger on data. We conduct experiments on three representative tasks: JPEG compression artifacts removal, image super-resolution (classical and lightweight), and compressed image super-resolution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method, Swin2SR, can improve the training convergence and performance of SwinIR, and is a top-5 solution at the "AIM 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video".
News Category Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

People rely on news to know what is happening around the world and inform their daily lives. In today's world, when the proliferation of fake news is rampant, having a large-scale and high-quality source of authentic news articles with the published category information is valuable to learning authentic news' Natural Language syntax and semantics. As part of this work, we present a News Category Dataset that contains around 210k news headlines from the year 2012 to 2022 obtained from HuffPost, along with useful metadata to enable various NLP tasks. In this paper, we also produce some novel insights from the dataset and describe various existing and potential applications of our dataset.
Rethinking Performance Gains in Image Dehazing Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Image dehazing is an active topic in low-level vision, and many image dehazing networks have been proposed with the rapid development of deep learning. Although these networks' pipelines work fine, the key mechanism to improving image dehazing performance remains unclear. For this reason, we do not target to propose a dehazing network with fancy modules; rather, we make minimal modifications to popular U-Net to obtain a compact dehazing network. Specifically, we swap out the convolutional blocks in U-Net for residual blocks with the gating mechanism, fuse the feature maps of main paths and skip connections using the selective kernel, and call the resulting U-Net variant gUNet. As a result, with a significantly reduced overhead, gUNet is superior to state-of-the-art methods on multiple image dehazing datasets. Finally, we verify these key designs to the performance gain of image dehazing networks through extensive ablation studies.
Comparison of synthetic dataset generation methods for medical intervention rooms using medical clothing detection as an example
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The availability of real data from areas with high privacy requirements, such as the medical intervention space, is low and the acquisition legally complex. Therefore, this work presents a way to create a synthetic dataset for the medical context, using medical clothing as an example. The goal is to close the reality gap between the synthetic and real data. For this purpose, methods of 3D-scanned clothing and designed clothing are compared in a Domain-Randomization and Structured-Domain-Randomization scenario using an Unreal-Engine plugin or Unity. Additionally a Mixed-Reality dataset in front of a greenscreen and a target domain dataset were used. Our experiments show, that Structured-Domain-Randomization of designed clothing together with Mixed-Reality data provide a baseline achieving 72.0% mAP on a test dataset of the clinical target domain. When additionally using 15% of available target domain train data, the gap towards 100% (660 images) target domain train data could be nearly closed 80.05% mAP (81.95% mAP). Finally we show that when additionally using 100% target domain train data the accuracy could be increased to 83.35% mAP.
Analysis of Fault Tolerant Multi-stage Switch Architecture for TSN
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

We conducted the feasibility analysis of utilizing a highly available multi-stage architecture for TSN switches used for sending high priority, mission-critical traffic within a bounded latency instead of traditional single-stage architectures. To verify the TSN functionality, we implemented the 'strict priority' feature. We evaluated the performance of both architectures on multiple parameters such as fault tolerance, packet latency, throughput, reliability, path length effectiveness, and cost per unit. The fault tolerance analysis demonstrated that the multi-stage architecture fairs better than the single-stage counterpart. The average latency and throughput performance of multi-stage architectures, although low, can be considered comparable with single-stage counterparts. However, the multi-stage architecture fails to meet the performance of single-stage architectures on parameters such as reliability, path length effectiveness, and cost-effectiveness. The improved fault tolerance comes at the cost of increased hardware resources, cost, and complexity. However, with the advent of cost-effective technologies in hardware design and efficient architecture designs, the multi-stage switching architecture-based TSN switches can be made reasonably comparable to single-stage switching TSN switches. This work gives initial confidence that the multi-stage architecture can be pursued further for safety-critical systems that require determinism and reliability in the communication of critical messages.
Synthetic Voice Spoofing Detection Based On Online Hard Example Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

The automatic speaker verification spoofing (ASVspoof) challenge series is crucial for enhancing the spoofing consideration and the countermeasures growth. Although the recent ASVspoof 2019 validation results indicate the significant capability to identify most attacks, the model's recognition effect is still poor for some attacks. This paper presents the Online Hard Example Mining (OHEM) algorithm for detecting unknown voice spoofing attacks. The OHEM is utilized to overcome the imbalance between simple and hard samples in the dataset. The presented system provides an equal error rate (EER) of 0.77% on the ASVspoof 2019 Challenge logical access scenario's evaluation set.
Robust Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Most domain adaptation methods for machine reading comprehension (MRC) use a pre-trained question-answer (QA) construction model to generate pseudo QA pairs for MRC transfer. Such a process will inevitably introduce mismatched pairs (i.e., noisy correspondence) due to i) the unavailable QA pairs in target documents, and ii) the domain shift during applying the QA construction model to the target domain. Undoubtedly, the noisy correspondence will degenerate the performance of MRC, which however is neglected by existing works. To solve such an untouched problem, we propose to construct QA pairs by additionally using the dialogue related to the documents, as well as a new domain adaptation method for MRC. Specifically, we propose Robust Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension (RMRC) method which consists of an answer extractor (AE), a question selector (QS), and an MRC model. Specifically, RMRC filters out the irrelevant answers by estimating the correlation to the document via the AE, and extracts the questions by fusing the candidate questions in multiple rounds of dialogue chats via the QS. With the extracted QA pairs, MRC is fine-tuned and provides the feedback to optimize the QS through a novel reinforced self-training method. Thanks to the optimization of the QS, our method will greatly alleviate the noisy correspondence problem caused by the domain shift. To the best of our knowledge, this could be the first study to reveal the influence of noisy correspondence in domain adaptation MRC models and show a feasible way to achieve robustness to mismatched pairs. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Linear Clustering Process on Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a linear clustering process on a network consisting of two opposite forces: attraction and repulsion between adjacent nodes. Each node is mapped to a position on a one-dimensional line. The attraction and repulsion forces move the nodal position on the line, depending on how similar or different the neighbourhoods of two adjacent nodes are. Based on each node position, the number of clusters in a network, together with each node's cluster membership, is estimated. The performance of the proposed linear clustering process is benchmarked on synthetic networks against widely accepted clustering algorithms such as modularity, the Louvain method and the non-back tracking matrix. The proposed linear clustering process outperforms the most popular modularity-based methods, such as the Louvain method, while possessing a comparable computational complexity.
PNeRF: Probabilistic Neural Scene Representations for Uncertain 3D Visual Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recently neural scene representations have provided very impressive results for representing 3D scenes visually, however, their study and progress have mainly been limited to visualization of virtual models in computer graphics or scene reconstruction in computer vision without explicitly accounting for sensor and pose uncertainty. Using this novel scene representation in robotics applications, however, would require accounting for this uncertainty in the neural map. The aim of this paper is therefore to propose a novel method for training {\em probabilistic neural scene representations} with uncertain training data that could enable the inclusion of these representations in robotics applications. Acquiring images using cameras or depth sensors contains inherent uncertainty, and furthermore, the camera poses used for learning a 3D model are also imperfect. If these measurements are used for training without accounting for their uncertainty, then the resulting models are non-optimal, and the resulting scene representations are likely to contain artifacts such as blur and un-even geometry. In this work, the problem of uncertainty integration to the learning process is investigated by focusing on training with uncertain information in a probabilistic manner. The proposed method involves explicitly augmenting the training likelihood with an uncertainty term such that the learnt probability distribution of the network is minimized with respect to the training uncertainty. It will be shown that this leads to more accurate image rendering quality, in addition to more precise and consistent geometry. Validation has been carried out on both synthetic and real datasets showing that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The results show notably that the proposed method is capable of rendering novel high-quality views even when the training data is limited.
Rate-Distortion in Image Coding for Machines
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in transmission of images to remote servers specifically for the purpose of computer vision. In many applications, such as surveillance, images are mostly transmitted for automated analysis, and rarely seen by humans. Using traditional compression for this scenario has been shown to be inefficient in terms of bit-rate, likely due to the focus on human based distortion metrics. Thus, it is important to create specific image coding methods for joint use by humans and machines. One way to create the machine side of such a codec is to perform feature matching of some intermediate layer in a Deep Neural Network performing the machine task. In this work, we explore the effects of the layer choice used in training a learnable codec for humans and machines. We prove, using the data processing inequality, that matching features from deeper layers is preferable in the sense of rate-distortion. Next, we confirm our findings empirically by re-training an existing model for scalable human-machine coding. In our experiments we show the trade-off between the human and machine sides of such a scalable model, and discuss the benefit of using deeper layers for training in that regard.
Promptagator: Few-shot Dense Retrieval From 8 Examples
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Much recent research on information retrieval has focused on how to transfer from one task (typically with abundant supervised data) to various other tasks where supervision is limited, with the implicit assumption that it is possible to generalize from one task to all the rest. However, this overlooks the fact that there are many diverse and unique retrieval tasks, each targeting different search intents, queries, and search domains. In this paper, we suggest to work on Few-shot Dense Retrieval, a setting where each task comes with a short description and a few examples. To amplify the power of a few examples, we propose Prompt-base Query Generation for Retriever (Promptagator), which leverages large language models (LLM) as a few-shot query generator, and creates task-specific retrievers based on the generated data. Powered by LLM's generalization ability, Promptagator makes it possible to create task-specific end-to-end retrievers solely based on a few examples {without} using Natural Questions or MS MARCO to train %question generators or dual encoders. Surprisingly, LLM prompting with no more than 8 examples allows dual encoders to outperform heavily engineered models trained on MS MARCO like ColBERT v2 by more than 1.2 nDCG on average on 11 retrieval sets. Further training standard-size re-rankers using the same generated data yields another 5.0 point nDCG improvement. Our studies determine that query generation can be far more effective than previously observed, especially when a small amount of task-specific knowledge is given.
Multistage Large Segment Imputation Framework Based on Deep Learning and Statistic Metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Missing value is a very common and unavoidable problem in sensors, and researchers have made numerous attempts for missing value imputation, particularly in deep learning models. However, for real sensor data, the specific data distribution and data periods are rarely considered, making it difficult to choose the appropriate evaluation indexes and models for different sensors. To address this issue, this study proposes a multistage imputation framework based on deep learning with adaptability for missing value imputation. The model presents a mixture measurement index of low- and higher-order statistics for data distribution and a new perspective on data imputation performance metrics, which is more adaptive and effective than the traditional mean squared error. A multistage imputation strategy and dynamic data length are introduced into the imputation process for data periods. Experimental results on different types of sensor data show that the multistage imputation strategy and the mixture index are superior and that the effect of missing value imputation has been improved to some extent, particularly for the large segment imputation problem. The codes and experimental results have been uploaded to GitHub.
Tracking the State and Behavior of People in Response to COVID-1 19 Through the Fusion of Multiple Longitudinal Data Streams
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The changing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of comprehensively considering its impacts and considering changes over time. Most COVID-19 related research addresses narrowly focused research questions and is therefore limited in addressing the complexities created by the interrelated impacts of the pandemic. Such research generally makes use of only one of either 1) actively collected data such as surveys, or 2) passively collected data. While a few studies make use of both actively and passively collected data, only one other study collects it longitudinally. Here we describe a rich panel dataset of active and passive data from U.S. residents collected between August 2020 and July 2021. Active data includes a repeated survey measuring travel behavior, compliance with COVID-19 mandates, physical health, economic well-being, vaccination status, and other factors. Passively collected data consists of all locations visited by study participants, taken from smartphone GPS data. We also closely tracked COVID-19 policies across counties of residence throughout the study period. Such a dataset allows important research questions to be answered; for example, to determine the factors underlying the heterogeneous behavioral responses to COVID-19 restrictions imposed by local governments. Better information about such responses is critical to our ability to understand the societal and economic impacts of this and future pandemics. The development of this data infrastructure can also help researchers explore new frontiers in behavioral science. The article explains how this approach fills gaps in COVID-19 related data collection; describes the study design and data collection procedures; presents key demographic characteristics of study participants; and shows how fusing different data streams helps uncover behavioral insights.
Creating Compact Regions of Social Determinants of Health
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Regionalization is the act of breaking a dataset into contiguous homogeneous regions that are heterogeneous from each other. Many different algorithms exist for performing regionalization; however, using these algorithms on large real world data sets have only become feasible in terms of compute power in recent years. Very few studies have been done comparing different regionalization methods, and those that do lack analysis in memory, scalability, geographic metrics, and large-scale real-world applications. This study compares state-of-the-art regionalization methods, namely, Agglomerative Clustering, SKATER, REDCAP, AZP, and Max-P-Regions using real world social determinant of health (SDOH) data. The scale of real world SDOH data, up to 1 million data points in this study, not only compares the algorithms over different data sets but provides a stress test for each individual regionalization algorithm, most of which have never been run on such scales previously. We use several new geographic metrics to compare algorithms as well as perform a comparative memory analysis. The prevailing regionalization method is then compared with unconstrained K-Means clustering on their ability to separate real health data in Virginia and Washington DC.
KeypartX: Graph-based Perception (Text) Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The availability of big data has opened up big opportunities for individuals, businesses and academics to view big into what is happening in their world. Previous works of text representation mostly focused on informativeness from massive words' frequency or cooccurrence. However, big data is a double-edged sword which is big in volume but unstructured in format. The unstructured edge requires specific techniques to transform 'big' into meaningful instead of informative alone. This study presents KeypartX, a graph-based approach to represent perception (text in general) by key parts of speech. Different from bag-of-words/vector-based machine learning, this technique is human-like learning that could extracts meanings from linguistic (semantic, syntactic and pragmatic) information. Moreover, KeypartX is big-data capable but not hungry, which is even applicable to the minimum unit of text:sentence.
Analysis of the new standard hash function
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

On 2$^{nd}$ October 2012 the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in the United States of America announced the new hashing algorithm which will be adopted as standard from now on. Among a total of 73 candidates, the winner was Keccak, designed by a group of cryptographers from Belgium and Italy. The public selection of a new standard of cryptographic hash function SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) took five years. Its object is to generate a hash a fixed size from a pattern with arbitrary length. The first selection on behalf of NIST on a standard of this family took place in 1993 when SHA-1 was chosen, which later on was replaced by SHA-2. This paper is focused on the analysis both from the point of view of security and the implementation of the Keccak function, which is the base of the new SHA-3 standard. In particular, an implementation in the mobile platform Android is presented here, providing the first known external library in this mobile operating system so that any developer could use the new standard hashing. Finally, the new standard in applications in the Internet of Things is analysed.
DeepChrome 2.0: Investigating and Improving Architectures, Visualizations, & Experiments
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Histone modifications play a critical role in gene regulation. Consequently, predicting gene expression from histone modification signals is a highly motivated problem in epigenetics. We build upon the work of DeepChrome by Singh et al. (2016), who trained classifiers that map histone modification signals to gene expression. We present a novel visualization technique for providing insight into combinatorial relationships among histone modifications for gene regulation that uses a generative adversarial network to generate histone modification signals. We also explore and compare various architectural changes, with results suggesting that the 645k-parameter convolutional neural network from DeepChrome has the same predictive power as a 12-parameter linear network. Results from cross-cell prediction experiments, where the model is trained and tested on datasets of varying sizes, cell-types, and correlations, suggest the relationship between histone modification signals and gene expression is independent of cell type. We release our PyTorch re-implementation of DeepChrome on GitHub \footnote{\url{github.com/ssss1029/gene_expression_294}}.\parfillskip=0pt