OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Provably Robust Deep Learning via Adversarially Trained Smoothed Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Recent works have shown the effectiveness of randomized smoothing as a scalable technique for building neural network-based classifiers that are provably robust to $\ell_2$-norm adversarial perturbations. In this paper, we employ adversarial training to improve the performance of randomized smoothing. We design an adapted attack for smoothed classifiers, and we show how this attack can be used in an adversarial training setting to boost the provable robustness of smoothed classifiers. We demonstrate through extensive experimentation that our method consistently outperforms all existing provably $\ell_2$-robust classifiers by a significant margin on ImageNet and CIFAR-10, establishing the state-of-the-art for provable $\ell_2$-defenses. Moreover, we find that pre-training and semi-supervised learning boost adversarially trained smoothed classifiers even further. Our code and trained models are available at http://github.com/Hadisalman/smoothing-adversarial .
Microservices Migration in Industry: Intentions, Strategies, and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

To remain competitive in a fast changing environment, many companies started to migrate their legacy applications towards a Microservices architecture. Such extensive migration processes require careful planning and consideration of implications and challenges likewise. In this regard, hands-on experiences from industry practice are still rare. To fill this gap in scientific literature, we contribute a qualitative study on intentions, strategies, and challenges in the context of migrations to Microservices. We investigated the migration process of 14 systems across different domains and sizes by conducting 16 in-depth interviews with software professionals from 10 companies. We present a separate description of each case and summarize the most important findings. As primary migration drivers, maintainability and scalability were identified. Due to the high complexity of their legacy systems, most companies preferred a rewrite using current technologies over splitting up existing code bases. This was often caused by the absence of a suitable decomposition approach. As such, finding the right service cut was a major technical challenge, next to building the necessary expertise with new technologies. Organizational challenges were especially related to large, traditional companies that simultaneously established agile processes. Initiating a mindset change and ensuring smooth collaboration between teams were crucial for them. Future research on the evolution of software systems will in particular profit from the individual cases presented.
Geo-L: Linking Geospatial Data Made Easy
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Geospatial Linked Data is an emerging domain with growing interest in research and industry. There is an increasing number of publicly available geospatial Linked Data resources and they need to be interlinked and easily integrated with private and industrial Linked Data on the Web. The present paper introduces Geo-L, a system for discovery of RDF spatial links based on topological relations. Experiments show that the proposed system improves state-of-the-art spatial linking processes in terms of mapping-time and -accuracy, as well as concerning resources retrieval efficiency and robustness.
Image Captioning: Transforming Objects into Words
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Image captioning models typically follow an encoder-decoder architecture which uses abstract image feature vectors as input to the encoder. One of the most successful algorithms uses feature vectors extracted from the region proposals obtained from an object detector. In this work we introduce the Object Relation Transformer, that builds upon this approach by explicitly incorporating information about the spatial relationship between input detected objects through geometric attention. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the importance of such geometric attention for image captioning, leading to improvements on all common captioning metrics on the MS-COCO dataset.
Quantitative Comparison of Time-Dependent Treemaps
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

Rectangular treemaps are often the method of choice to visualize large hierarchical datasets. Nowadays such datasets are available over time, hence there is a need for (a) treemaps that can handle time-dependent data, and (b) corresponding quality criteria that cover both a treemap's visual quality and its stability over time. In recent years a wide variety of (stable) treemapping algorithms has been proposed, with various advantages and limitations. We aim to provide insights to researchers and practitioners to allow them to make an informed choice when selecting a treemapping algorithm for specific applications and data. To this end, we perform an extensive quantitative evaluation of rectangular treemaps for time-dependent data. As part of this evaluation we propose a novel classification scheme for time-dependent datasets. Specifically, we observe that the performance of treemapping algorithms depends on the characteristics of the datasets used. We identify four potential representative features that characterize time-dependent hierarchical datasets and classify all datasets used in our experiments accordingly. We experimentally test the validity of this classification on more than 2000 datasets, and analyze the relative performance of 14 state-of-the-art rectangular treemapping algorithms across varying features. Finally, we visually summarize our results with respect to both visual quality and stability to aid users in making an informed choice among treemapping algorithms. All datasets, metrics, and algorithms are openly available to facilitate reuse and further comparative studies.
Dynamic Path-Decomposed Tries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

A keyword dictionary is an associative array whose keys are strings. Recent applications handling massive keyword dictionaries in main memory have a need for a space-efficient implementation. When limited to static applications, there are a number of highly-compressed keyword dictionaries based on the advancements of practical succinct data structures. However, as most succinct data structures are only efficient in the static case, it is still difficult to implement a keyword dictionary that is space efficient and dynamic. In this article, we propose such a keyword dictionary. Our main idea is to embrace the path decomposition technique, which was proposed for constructing cache-friendly tries. To store the path-decomposed trie in small memory, we design data structures based on recent compact hash trie representations. Experiments on real-world datasets reveal that our dynamic keyword dictionary needs up to 68% less space than the existing smallest ones, while achieving a relevant space-time tradeoff.
Explaining Landscape Connectivity of Low-cost Solutions for Multilayer Nets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Mode connectivity is a surprising phenomenon in the loss landscape of deep nets. Optima -- at least those discovered by gradient-based optimization -- turn out to be connected by simple paths on which the loss function is almost constant. Often, these paths can be chosen to be piece-wise linear, with as few as two segments. We give mathematical explanations for this phenomenon, assuming generic properties (such as dropout stability and noise stability) of well-trained deep nets, which have previously been identified as part of understanding the generalization properties of deep nets. Our explanation holds for realistic multilayer nets, and experiments are presented to verify the theory.
Accelerating temporal action proposal generation via high performance computing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Temporal action recognition always depends on temporal action proposal generation to hypothesize actions and algorithms usually need to process very long video sequences and output the starting and ending times of each potential action in each video suffering from high computation cost. To address this, based on boundary sensitive network we propose a new temporal convolution network called Multipath Temporal ConvNet (MTN), which consists of two parts i.e. Multipath DenseNet and SE-ConvNet. In this work, one novel high performance ring parallel architecture based on Message Passing Interface (MPI) is further introduced into temporal action proposal generation, which is a reliable communication protocol, in order to respond to the requirements of large memory occupation and a large number of videos. Remarkably, the total data transmission is reduced by adding a connection between multiple computing load in the newly developed architecture. It is found that, compared to the traditional Parameter Server architecture, our parallel architecture has higher efficiency on temporal action detection task with multiple GPUs, which is suitable for dealing with the tasks of temporal action proposal generation, especially for large datasets of millions of videos. We conduct experiments on ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14, where our method outperforms other state-of-art temporal action detection methods with high recall and high temporal precision. In addition, a time metric is further proposed here to evaluate the speed performance in the distributed training process.
Global optimization via inverse distance weighting and radial basis functions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Global optimization problems whose objective function is expensive to evaluate can be solved effectively by recursively fitting a surrogate function to function samples and minimizing an acquisition function to generate new samples. The acquisition step trades off between seeking for a new optimization vector where the surrogate is minimum (exploitation of the surrogate) and looking for regions of the feasible space that have not yet been visited and that may potentially contain better values of the objective function (exploration of the feasible space). This paper proposes a new global optimization algorithm that uses a combination of inverse distance weighting (IDW) and radial basis functions (RBF) to construct the acquisition function. Rather arbitrary constraints that are simple to evaluate can be easily taken into account. Compared to Bayesian optimization, the proposed algorithm, that we call GLIS (GLobal minimum using Inverse distance weighting and Surrogate radial basis functions), is competitive and computationally lighter, as we show in a set of benchmark global optimization and hyperparameter tuning problems. MATLAB and Python implementations of GLIS are available at \url{http://cse.lab.imtlucca.it/~bemporad/glis}.
Mask Based Unsupervised Content Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We consider the problem of translating, in an unsupervised manner, between two domains where one contains some additional information compared to the other. The proposed method disentangles the common and separate parts of these domains and, through the generation of a mask, focuses the attention of the underlying network to the desired augmentation alone, without wastefully reconstructing the entire target. This enables state-of-the-art quality and variety of content translation, as demonstrated through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Our method is also capable of adding the separate content of different guide images and domains as well as remove existing separate content. Furthermore, our method enables weakly-supervised semantic segmentation of the separate part of each domain, where only class labels are provided. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/rmokady/mbu-content-tansfer.
Deep Set Prediction Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Current approaches for predicting sets from feature vectors ignore the unordered nature of sets and suffer from discontinuity issues as a result. We propose a general model for predicting sets that properly respects the structure of sets and avoids this problem. With a single feature vector as input, we show that our model is able to auto-encode point sets, predict the set of bounding boxes of objects in an image, and predict the set of attributes of these objects.
Addressing database variability in learning from medical data: an ensemble-based approach using convolutional neural networks and a case of study applied to automatic sleep scoring
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this work we examine some of the problems associated with the development of machine learning models with the objective to achieve robust generalization capabilities on common-task multiple-database scenarios. Referred to as the "database variability problem", we focus on a specific medical domain (sleep staging in sleep medicine) to show the non-triviality of translating the estimated model's local generalization capabilities into independent external databases. We analyze some of the scalability problems when multiple-database data are used as inputs to train a single learning model. Then, we introduce a novel approach based on an ensemble of local models, and we show its advantages in terms of inter-database generalization performance and data scalability. In addition, we analyze different model configurations and data pre-processing techniques to determine their effects on the overall generalization performance. For this purpose, we carry out experimentation that involves several sleep databases and evaluates different machine learning models based on convolutional neural networks
Principles alone cannot guarantee ethical AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

AI Ethics is now a global topic of discussion in academic and policy circles. At least 84 public-private initiatives have produced statements describing high-level principles, values, and other tenets to guide the ethical development, deployment, and governance of AI. According to recent meta-analyses, AI Ethics has seemingly converged on a set of principles that closely resemble the four classic principles of medical ethics. Despite the initial credibility granted to a principled approach to AI Ethics by the connection to principles in medical ethics, there are reasons to be concerned about its future impact on AI development and governance. Significant differences exist between medicine and AI development that suggest a principled approach in the latter may not enjoy success comparable to the former. Compared to medicine, AI development lacks (1) common aims and fiduciary duties, (2) professional history and norms, (3) proven methods to translate principles into practice, and (4) robust legal and professional accountability mechanisms. These differences suggest we should not yet celebrate consensus around high-level principles that hide deep political and normative disagreement.
Predicting Research Trends with Semantic and Neural Networks with an application in Quantum Physics
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2020
Year: 2020

The vast and growing number of publications in all disciplines of science cannot be comprehended by a single human researcher. As a consequence, researchers have to specialize in narrow sub-disciplines, which makes it challenging to uncover scientific connections beyond the own field of research. Thus access to structured knowledge from a large corpus of publications could help pushing the frontiers of science. Here we demonstrate a method to build a semantic network from published scientific literature, which we call SemNet. We use SemNet to predict future trends in research and to inspire new, personalized and surprising seeds of ideas in science. We apply it in the discipline of quantum physics, which has seen an unprecedented growth of activity in recent years. In SemNet, scientific knowledge is represented as an evolving network using the content of 750,000 scientific papers published since 1919. The nodes of the network correspond to physical concepts, and links between two nodes are drawn when two physical concepts are concurrently studied in research articles. We identify influential and prize-winning research topics from the past inside SemNet thus confirm that it stores useful semantic knowledge. We train a deep neural network using states of SemNet of the past, to predict future developments in quantum physics research, and confirm high quality predictions using historic data. With the neural network and theoretical network tools we are able to suggest new, personalized, out-of-the-box ideas, by identifying pairs of concepts which have unique and extremal semantic network properties. Finally, we consider possible future developments and implications of our findings.
RIDM: Reinforced Inverse Dynamics Modeling for Learning from a Single Observed Demonstration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Augmenting reinforcement learning with imitation learning is often hailed as a method by which to improve upon learning from scratch. However, most existing methods for integrating these two techniques are subject to several strong assumptions---chief among them that information about demonstrator actions is available. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which this assumption is necessary by introducing and evaluating reinforced inverse dynamics modeling (RIDM), a novel paradigm for combining imitation from observation (IfO) and reinforcement learning with no dependence on demonstrator action information. Moreover, RIDM requires only a single demonstration trajectory and is able to operate directly on raw (unaugmented) state features. We find experimentally that RIDM performs favorably compared to a baseline approach for several tasks in simulation as well as for tasks on a real UR5 robot arm. Experiment videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/ridm-reinforced-inverse-dynami.
Weakly Supervised Clustering by Exploiting Unique Class Count
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

A weakly supervised learning based clustering framework is proposed in this paper. As the core of this framework, we introduce a novel multiple instance learning task based on a bag level label called unique class count ($ucc$), which is the number of unique classes among all instances inside the bag. In this task, no annotations on individual instances inside the bag are needed during training of the models. We mathematically prove that with a perfect $ucc$ classifier, perfect clustering of individual instances inside the bags is possible even when no annotations on individual instances are given during training. We have constructed a neural network based $ucc$ classifier and experimentally shown that the clustering performance of our framework with our weakly supervised $ucc$ classifier is comparable to that of fully supervised learning models where labels for all instances are known. Furthermore, we have tested the applicability of our framework to a real world task of semantic segmentation of breast cancer metastases in histological lymph node sections and shown that the performance of our weakly supervised framework is comparable to the performance of a fully supervised Unet model.
Better transfer learning with inferred successor maps
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Humans and animals show remarkable flexibility in adjusting their behaviour when their goals, or rewards in the environment change. While such flexibility is a hallmark of intelligent behaviour, these multi-task scenarios remain an important challenge for machine learning algorithms and neurobiological models alike. We investigated two approaches that could enable this flexibility: factorized representations, which abstract away general aspects of a task from those prone to change, and nonparametric, memory-based approaches, which can provide a principled way of using similarity to past experiences to guide current behaviour. In particular, we combine the successor representation (SR) that factors the value of actions into expected outcomes and corresponding rewards with evaluating task similarity through clustering the space of reward functions. The proposed algorithm inverts a generative model over tasks, and dynamically samples from a flexible number of distinct SR maps while accumulating evidence about the current task context through amortized inference. It improves SR's transfer capabilities and outperforms competing algorithms and baselines in settings with both known and unsignalled rewards changes. Further, as a neurobiological model of spatial coding in the hippocampus, it explains important signatures of this representation, such as the "flickering" behaviour of hippocampal maps, and trajectory-dependent place cells (so-called splitter cells) and their dynamics. We thus provide a novel algorithmic approach for multi-task learning, as well as a common normative framework that links together these different characteristics of the brain's spatial representation.
On-Body Visualization of Patient Data for Cooperative Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Electronic health records (EHR) systematically represent patient data in digital form. However, text and visualization based EHR systems are poorly integrated in the hospital workflow due to their complex and rather non-intuitive access structure. This is especially disadvantageous in clinical cooperative situations that require an efficient, task specific information transfer. In this paper we introduce a novel concept of anatomically integrated in-place visualization designed to engage with cooperative tasks on a neurosurgical ward. Based on the findings of our field studies and the derived design goals, we propose an approach that follows a visual tradition in medicine, which is tightly related with anatomy, by using a virtual patient's body as spatial representation of visually encoded abstract medical data. More specifically, we provide a generic set of formal requirements for these kinds of in-place visualizations, we apply these requirements in order to achieve a specific visualization of neurological symptoms related to the differential diagnosis of spinal disc herniation, and we present a prototypical implementation of the visualization concept on a mobile device. Moreover, we discuss various challenges related to visual encoding and visibility of the body model components. Finally, the prototype is evaluated by 10 neurosurgeons, who assess the validity and the further potential of the proposed approach.
Learning Directed Graphical Models from Gaussian Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we introduce a new directed graphical model from Gaussian data: the Gaussian graphical interaction model (GGIM). The development of this model comes from considering stationary Gaussian processes on graphs, and leveraging the equations between the resulting steady-state covariance matrix and the Laplacian matrix representing the interaction graph. Through the presentation of conceptually straightforward theory, we develop the new model and provide interpretations of the edges in the graphical model in terms of statistical measures. We show that when restricted to undirected graphs, the Laplacian matrix representing a GGIM is equivalent to the standard inverse covariance matrix that encodes conditional dependence relationships. Furthermore, our approach leads to a natural definition of directed conditional independence of two elements in a stationary Gaussian process. We demonstrate that the problem of learning sparse GGIMs for a given observation set can be framed as a LASSO problem. By comparison with the problem of inverse covariance estimation, we prove a bound on the difference between the covariance matrix corresponding to a sparse GGIM and the covariance matrix corresponding to the $l_1$-norm penalized maximum log-likelihood estimate. Finally, we consider the problem of learning GGIMs associated with sparse directed conditional dependence relationships. In all, the new model presents a novel perspective on directed relationships between variables and significantly expands on the state of the art in Gaussian graphical modeling.