OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Introduction to Kernel and Operator Learning Methods for Homogenization by Self-consistent Clustering Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recent advances in operator learning theory have improved our knowledge about learning maps between infinite dimensional spaces. However, for large-scale engineering problems such as concurrent multiscale simulation for mechanical properties, the training cost for the current operator learning methods is very high. The article presents a thorough analysis on the mathematical underpinnings of the operator learning paradigm and proposes a kernel learning method that maps between function spaces. We first provide a survey of modern kernel and operator learning theory, as well as discuss recent results and open problems. From there, the article presents an algorithm to how we can analytically approximate the piecewise constant functions on R for operator learning. This implies the potential feasibility of success of neural operators on clustered functions. Finally, a k-means clustered domain on the basis of a mechanistic response is considered and the Lippmann-Schwinger equation for micro-mechanical homogenization is solved. The article briefly discusses the mathematics of previous kernel learning methods and some preliminary results with those methods. The proposed kernel operator learning method uses graph kernel networks to come up with a mechanistic reduced order method for multiscale homogenization.
When Neural Networks Fail to Generalize? A Model Sensitivity Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Domain generalization (DG) aims to train a model to perform well in unseen domains under different distributions. This paper considers a more realistic yet more challenging scenario,namely Single Domain Generalization (Single-DG), where only a single source domain is available for training. To tackle this challenge, we first try to understand when neural networks fail to generalize? We empirically ascertain a property of a model that correlates strongly with its generalization that we coin as "model sensitivity". Based on our analysis, we propose a novel strategy of Spectral Adversarial Data Augmentation (SADA) to generate augmented images targeted at the highly sensitive frequencies. Models trained with these hard-to-learn samples can effectively suppress the sensitivity in the frequency space, which leads to improved generalization performance. Extensive experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach, which surpasses the state-of-the-art single-DG methods.
Navigating to Objects in the Real World
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the classical pipeline for spatial navigation, which builds a geometric map using depth sensors and plans to reach point goals. Broadly, end-to-end learning approaches reactively map sensor inputs to actions with deep neural networks, while modular learning approaches enrich the classical pipeline with learning-based semantic sensing and exploration. But learned visual navigation policies have predominantly been evaluated in simulation. How well do different classes of methods work on a robot? We present a large-scale empirical study of semantic visual navigation methods comparing representative methods from classical, modular, and end-to-end learning approaches across six homes with no prior experience, maps, or instrumentation. We find that modular learning works well in the real world, attaining a 90% success rate. In contrast, end-to-end learning does not, dropping from 77% simulation to 23% real-world success rate due to a large image domain gap between simulation and reality. For practitioners, we show that modular learning is a reliable approach to navigate to objects: modularity and abstraction in policy design enable Sim-to-Real transfer. For researchers, we identify two key issues that prevent today's simulators from being reliable evaluation benchmarks - (A) a large Sim-to-Real gap in images and (B) a disconnect between simulation and real-world error modes - and propose concrete steps forward.
JAX-FEM: A differentiable GPU-accelerated 3D finite element solver for automatic inverse design and mechanistic data science
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2022
Year: 2022

This paper introduces JAX-FEM, an open-source differentiable finite element method (FEM) library. Constructed on top of Google JAX, a rising machine learning library focusing on high-performance numerical computing, JAX-FEM is implemented with pure Python while scalable to efficiently solve problems with moderate to large sizes. For example, in a 3D tensile loading problem with 7.7 million degrees of freedom, JAX-FEM with GPU achieves around 10$\times$ acceleration compared to a commercial FEM code depending on platform. Beyond efficiently solving forward problems, JAX-FEM employs the automatic differentiation technique so that inverse problems are solved in a fully automatic manner without the need to manually derive sensitivities. Examples of 3D topology optimization of nonlinear materials are shown to achieve optimal compliance. Finally, JAX-FEM is an integrated platform for machine learning-aided computational mechanics. We show an example of data-driven multi-scale computations of a composite material where JAX-FEM provides an all-in-one solution from microscopic data generation and model training to macroscopic FE computations. The source code of the library and these examples are shared with the community to facilitate computational mechanics research.
PSPC: Efficient Parallel Shortest Path Counting on Large-Scale Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

In modern graph analytics, the shortest path is a fundamental concept. Numerous \rrev{recent works} concentrate mostly on the distance of these shortest paths. Nevertheless, in the era of betweenness analysis, the counting of the shortest path between $s$ and $t$ is equally crucial. \rrev{It} is \rev{also} an important issue in the area of graph databases. In recent years, several studies have been conducted in an effort to tackle such issues. Nonetheless, the present technique faces a considerable barrier to parallel due to the dependencies in the index construction stage, hence limiting its application possibilities and wasting the potential hardware performance. To address this problem, we provide a parallel shortest path counting method that could avoid these dependencies and obtain approximately linear index time speedup as the number of threads increases. Our empirical evaluations verify the efficiency and effectiveness.
Octocopter Design: Modelling, Control and Motion Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This book provides a solution to the control and motion planning design for an octocopter system. It includes a particular choice of control and motion planning algorithms which is based on the authors' previous research work, so it can be used as a reference design guidance for students, researchers as well as autonomous vehicles hobbyists. The control is constructed based on a fault tolerant approach aiming to increase the chances of the system to detect and isolate a potential failure in order to produce feasible control signals to the remaining active motors. The used motion planning algorithm is risk-aware by means that it takes into account the constraints related to the fault-dependant and mission-related maneuverability analysis of the octocopter system during the planning stage. Such a planner generates only those reference trajectories along which the octocopter system would be safe and capable of good tracking in case of a single motor fault and of majority of double motor fault scenarios. The control and motion planning algorithms presented in the book aim to increase the overall reliability of the system for completing the mission.
SolarDK: A high-resolution urban solar panel image classification and localization dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The body of research on classification of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery is increasing, yet there are still not many public benchmark datasets. This paper introduces two novel benchmark datasets for classifying and localizing solar panel arrays in Denmark: A human annotated dataset for classification and segmentation, as well as a classification dataset acquired using self-reported data from the Danish national building registry. We explore the performance of prior works on the new benchmark dataset, and present results after fine-tuning models using a similar approach as recent works. Furthermore, we train models of newer architectures and provide benchmark baselines to our datasets in several scenarios. We believe the release of these datasets may improve future research in both local and global geospatial domains for identifying and mapping of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery. The data is accessible at https://osf.io/aj539/.
SARAS-Net: Scale and Relation Aware Siamese Network for Change Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Change detection (CD) aims to find the difference between two images at different times and outputs a change map to represent whether the region has changed or not. To achieve a better result in generating the change map, many State-of-The-Art (SoTA) methods design a deep learning model that has a powerful discriminative ability. However, these methods still get lower performance because they ignore spatial information and scaling changes between objects, giving rise to blurry or wrong boundaries. In addition to these, they also neglect the interactive information of two different images. To alleviate these problems, we propose our network, the Scale and Relation-Aware Siamese Network (SARAS-Net) to deal with this issue. In this paper, three modules are proposed that include relation-aware, scale-aware, and cross-transformer to tackle the problem of scene change detection more effectively. To verify our model, we tested three public datasets, including LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSFIN, and obtained SoTA accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/f64051041/SARAS-Net.
Resource Allocation for Augmented Reality Empowered Vehicular Edge Metaverse
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Metaverse is considered to be the evolution of the next-generation networks, providing users with experience sharing at the intersection between physical and digital. Augmented reality (AR) is one of the primary supporting technologies in the Metaverse, which can seamlessly integrate real-world information with virtual world information to provide users with an immersive interactive experience. Extraordinarily, AR has brought new opportunities for assisting safe driving. Nevertheless, achieving efficient execution of AR tasks and increasing system revenue are the main challenges faced by the Metaverse's AR in-vehicle applications. In this paper, we are the first to propose an efficient resource allocation framework for AR-empowered vehicular edge Metaverse to improve system utility. We formulate an optimization problem featuring multidimensional control to concurrently maximize data utility at the Metaverse operator side and minimize energy consumption at the vehicles' side, which jointly considers the computational resource allocation on the Metaverse server, and AR vehicles' CPU frequency, transmit power, and computation model size. Notwithstanding, the major impediment is how to design an efficient algorithm to obtain the solutions of the optimization. Wherefore, we do this by decoupling the optimization variables. We first derive the optimal computation model size by the binary search, followed by obtaining the optimal power allocation by the bisection method and finding a closed-form solution to the optimal CPU frequency of AR vehicles, and finally, attain the optimal allocation of computational resource on the server by the Lagrangian dual method. To estimate the performance of our proposed scheme, we establish three baseline schemes as a comparison, and simulation manifests that our proposed scheme balances the operator's reward and the energy consumption of vehicles.
Sequential Anomaly Detection Against Demodulation Reference Signal Spoofing in 5G NR
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

In fifth generation (5G) new radio (NR), the demodulation reference signal (DMRS) is employed for channel estimation as part of coherent demodulation of the physical uplink shared channel. However, DMRS spoofing poses a serious threat to 5G NR since inaccurate channel estimation will severely degrade the decoding performance. In this correspondence, we propose to exploit the spatial sparsity structure of the channel to detect the DMRS spoofing, which is motivated by the fact that the spatial sparsity structure of the channel will be significantly impacted if the DMRS spoofing happens. We first extract the spatial sparsity structure of the channel by solving a sparse feature retrieval problem, then propose a sequential sparsity structure anomaly detection method to detect DMRS spoofing. In simulation experiments, we exploit clustered delay line based channel model from 3GPP standards for verifications. Numerical results show that our method outperforms both the subspace dimension based and energy detector based methods.
D2DF2WOD: Learning Object Proposals for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection via Progressive Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) models attempt to leverage image-level annotations in lieu of accurate but costly-to-obtain object localization labels. This oftentimes leads to substandard object detection and localization at inference time. To tackle this issue, we propose D2DF2WOD, a Dual-Domain Fully-to-Weakly Supervised Object Detection framework that leverages synthetic data, annotated with precise object localization, to supplement a natural image target domain, where only image-level labels are available. In its warm-up domain adaptation stage, the model learns a fully-supervised object detector (FSOD) to improve the precision of the object proposals in the target domain, and at the same time learns target-domain-specific and detection-aware proposal features. In its main WSOD stage, a WSOD model is specifically tuned to the target domain. The feature extractor and the object proposal generator of the WSOD model are built upon the fine-tuned FSOD model. We test D2DF2WOD on five dual-domain image benchmarks. The results show that our method results in consistently improved object detection and localization compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Thread With Caution: Proactively Helping Users Assess and Deescalate Tension in Their Online Discussions
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Incivility remains a major challenge for online discussion platforms, to such an extent that even conversations between well-intentioned users can often derail into uncivil behavior. Traditionally, platforms have relied on moderators to -- with or without algorithmic assistance -- take corrective actions such as removing comments or banning users. In this work we propose a complementary paradigm that directly empowers users by proactively enhancing their awareness about existing tension in the conversation they are engaging in and actively guides them as they are drafting their replies to avoid further escalation. As a proof of concept for this paradigm, we design an algorithmic tool that provides such proactive information directly to users, and conduct a user study in a popular discussion platform. Through a mixed methods approach combining surveys with a randomized controlled experiment, we uncover qualitative and quantitative insights regarding how the participants utilize and react to this information. Most participants report finding this proactive paradigm valuable, noting that it helps them to identify tension that they may have otherwise missed and prompts them to further reflect on their own replies and to revise them. These effects are corroborated by a comparison of how the participants draft their reply when our tool warns them that their conversation is at risk of derailing into uncivil behavior versus in a control condition where the tool is disabled. These preliminary findings highlight the potential of this user-centered paradigm and point to concrete directions for future implementations.
PROB: Probabilistic Objectness for Open World Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a new and challenging computer vision task that bridges the gap between classic object detection (OD) benchmarks and object detection in the real world. In addition to detecting and classifying seen/labeled objects, OWOD algorithms are expected to detect novel/unknown objects - which can be classified and incrementally learned. In standard OD, object proposals not overlapping with a labeled object are automatically classified as background. Therefore, simply applying OD methods to OWOD fails as unknown objects would be predicted as background. The challenge of detecting unknown objects stems from the lack of supervision in distinguishing unknown objects and background object proposals. Previous OWOD methods have attempted to overcome this issue by generating supervision using pseudo-labeling - however, unknown object detection has remained low. Probabilistic/generative models may provide a solution for this challenge. Herein, we introduce a novel probabilistic framework for objectness estimation, where we alternate between probability distribution estimation and objectness likelihood maximization of known objects in the embedded feature space - ultimately allowing us to estimate the objectness probability of different proposals. The resulting Probabilistic Objectness transformer-based open-world detector, PROB, integrates our framework into traditional object detection models, adapting them for the open-world setting. Comprehensive experiments on OWOD benchmarks show that PROB outperforms all existing OWOD methods in both unknown object detection ($\sim 2\times$ unknown recall) and known object detection ($\sim 10\%$ mAP). Our code will be made available upon publication at https://github.com/orrzohar/PROB.
MeshDQN: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Improving Meshes in Computational Fluid Dynamics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Meshing is a critical, but user-intensive process necessary for stable and accurate simulations in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Mesh generation is often a bottleneck in CFD pipelines. Adaptive meshing techniques allow the mesh to be updated automatically to produce an accurate solution for the problem at hand. Existing classical techniques for adaptive meshing require either additional functionality out of solvers, many training simulations, or both. Current machine learning techniques often require substantial computational cost for training data generation, and are restricted in scope to the training data flow regime. MeshDQN is developed as a general purpose deep reinforcement learning framework to iteratively coarsen meshes while preserving target property calculation. A graph neural network based deep Q network is used to select mesh vertices for removal and solution interpolation is used to bypass expensive simulations at each step in the improvement process. MeshDQN requires a single simulation prior to mesh coarsening, while making no assumptions about flow regime, mesh type, or solver, only requiring the ability to modify meshes directly in a CFD pipeline. MeshDQN successfully improves meshes for two 2D airfoils.
Time Governors for Safe Path-Following Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Safe and smooth robot motion around obstacles is an essential skill for autonomous robots, especially when operating around people and other robots. Conventionally, due to real-time operation requirements and onboard computation limitations, many robot motion planning and control methods follow a two-step approach: first construct a (e.g., piecewise linear) collision-free reference path for a simplified robot model, and then execute the reference plan via path-following control for a more accurate and complex robot model. A challenge of such a decoupled robot motion planning and control method for highly dynamic robotic systems is ensuring the safety of path-following control as well as the successful completion of the reference plan. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamical systems approach for online closed-loop time parametrization, called $\textit{a time governor}$, of a reference path for provably correct and safe path-following control based on feedback motion prediction, where the safety of robot motion under path-following control is continuously monitored using predicted robot motion. After introducing the general framework of time governors for safe path following, we present an example application for the fully actuated high-order robot dynamics using proportional-and-higher-order-derivative (PhD) path-following control whose feedback motion prediction is performed by Lyapunov ellipsoids and Vandemonde simplexes. In numerical simulations, we investigate the role of reference position and velocity feedback, and motion prediction on path-following performance and robot motion.
Drones-aided Asset Maintenance in Hospitals
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

The rapid outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic invoked scientists and researchers to prepare the world for future disasters. During the pandemic, global authorities on healthcare urged the importance of disinfection of objects and surfaces. To implement efficient and safe disinfection services during the pandemic, robots have been utilized for indoor assets. In this paper, we envision the use of drones for disinfection of outdoor assets in hospitals and other facilities. Such heterogeneous assets may have different service demands (e.g., service time, quantity of the disinfectant material etc.), whereas drones have typically limited capacity (i.e., travel time, disinfectant carrying capacity). To serve all the facility assets in an efficient manner, the drone to assets allocation and drone travel routes must be optimized. In this paper, we formulate the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) to find optimal route for each drone such that the total service time is minimized, while simultaneously the drones meet the demands of each asset allocated to it. The problem is solved using mixed integer programming (MIP). As CVRP is an NP-hard problem, we propose a lightweight heuristic to achieve sub-optimal performance while reducing the time complexity in solving the problem involving a large number of assets.
Discovering Class-Specific GAN Controls for Semantic Image Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Prior work has extensively studied the latent space structure of GANs for unconditional image synthesis, enabling global editing of generated images by the unsupervised discovery of interpretable latent directions. However, the discovery of latent directions for conditional GANs for semantic image synthesis (SIS) has remained unexplored. In this work, we specifically focus on addressing this gap. We propose a novel optimization method for finding spatially disentangled class-specific directions in the latent space of pretrained SIS models. We show that the latent directions found by our method can effectively control the local appearance of semantic classes, e.g., changing their internal structure, texture or color independently from each other. Visual inspection and quantitative evaluation of the discovered GAN controls on various datasets demonstrate that our method discovers a diverse set of unique and semantically meaningful latent directions for class-specific edits.