OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Signing Outside the Studio: Benchmarking Background Robustness for Continuous Sign Language Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The goal of this work is background-robust continuous sign language recognition. Most existing Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) benchmarks have fixed backgrounds and are filmed in studios with a static monochromatic background. However, signing is not limited only to studios in the real world. In order to analyze the robustness of CSLR models under background shifts, we first evaluate existing state-of-the-art CSLR models on diverse backgrounds. To synthesize the sign videos with a variety of backgrounds, we propose a pipeline to automatically generate a benchmark dataset utilizing existing CSLR benchmarks. Our newly constructed benchmark dataset consists of diverse scenes to simulate a real-world environment. We observe even the most recent CSLR method cannot recognize glosses well on our new dataset with changed backgrounds. In this regard, we also propose a simple yet effective training scheme including (1) background randomization and (2) feature disentanglement for CSLR models. The experimental results on our dataset demonstrate that our method generalizes well to other unseen background data with minimal additional training images.
CPG-RL: Learning Central Pattern Generators for Quadruped Locomotion
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this letter, we present a method for integrating central pattern generators (CPGs), i.e. systems of coupled oscillators, into the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to produce robust and omnidirectional quadruped locomotion. The agent learns to directly modulate the intrinsic oscillator setpoints (amplitude and frequency) and coordinate rhythmic behavior among different oscillators. This approach also allows the use of DRL to explore questions related to neuroscience, namely the role of descending pathways, interoscillator couplings, and sensory feedback in gait generation. We train our policies in simulation and perform a sim-to-real transfer to the Unitree A1 quadruped, where we observe robust behavior to disturbances unseen during training, most notably to a dynamically added 13.75 kg load representing 115% of the nominal quadruped mass. We test several different observation spaces based on proprioceptive sensing and show that our framework is deployable with no domain randomization and very little feedback, where along with the oscillator states, it is possible to provide only contact booleans in the observation space. Video results can be found at https://youtu.be/xqXHLzLsEV4.
Self-Supervised Intensity-Event Stereo Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Event cameras are novel bio-inspired vision sensors that output pixel-level intensity changes in microsecond accuracy with a high dynamic range and low power consumption. Despite these advantages, event cameras cannot be directly applied to computational imaging tasks due to the inability to obtain high-quality intensity and events simultaneously. This paper aims to connect a standalone event camera and a modern intensity camera so that the applications can take advantage of both two sensors. We establish this connection through a multi-modal stereo matching task. We first convert events to a reconstructed image and extend the existing stereo networks to this multi-modality condition. We propose a self-supervised method to train the multi-modal stereo network without using ground truth disparity data. The structure loss calculated on image gradients is used to enable self-supervised learning on such multi-modal data. Exploiting the internal stereo constraint between views with different modalities, we introduce general stereo loss functions, including disparity cross-consistency loss and internal disparity loss, leading to improved performance and robustness compared to existing approaches. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, especially the proposed general stereo loss functions, on both synthetic and real datasets. At last, we shed light on employing the aligned events and intensity images in downstream tasks, e.g., video interpolation application.
E2E Refined Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Although the well-known MR-to-text E2E dataset has been used by many researchers, its MR-text pairs include many deletion/insertion/substitution errors. Since such errors affect the quality of MR-to-text systems, they must be fixed as much as possible. Therefore, we developed a refined dataset and some python programs that convert the original E2E dataset into a refined dataset.
Leveraging commonsense for object localisation in partial scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose an end-to-end solution to address the problem of object localisation in partial scenes, where we aim to estimate the position of an object in an unknown area given only a partial 3D scan of the scene. We propose a novel scene representation to facilitate the geometric reasoning, Directed Spatial Commonsense Graph (D-SCG), a spatial scene graph that is enriched with additional concept nodes from a commonsense knowledge base. Specifically, the nodes of D-SCG represent the scene objects and the edges are their relative positions. Each object node is then connected via different commonsense relationships to a set of concept nodes. With the proposed graph-based scene representation, we estimate the unknown position of the target object using a Graph Neural Network that implements a novel attentional message passing mechanism. The network first predicts the relative positions between the target object and each visible object by learning a rich representation of the objects via aggregating both the object nodes and the concept nodes in D-SCG. These relative positions then are merged to obtain the final position. We evaluate our method using Partial ScanNet, improving the state-of-the-art by 5.9% in terms of the localisation accuracy at a 8x faster training speed.
Consistent Training via Energy-Based GFlowNets for Modeling Discrete Joint Distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) have demonstrated significant performance improvements for generating diverse discrete objects $x$ given a reward function $R(x)$, indicating the utility of the object and trained independently from the GFlowNet by supervised learning to predict a desirable property $y$ given $x$. We hypothesize that this can lead to incompatibility between the inductive optimization biases in training $R$ and in training the GFlowNet, potentially leading to worse samples and slow adaptation to changes in the distribution. In this work, we build upon recent work on jointly learning energy-based models with GFlowNets and extend it to learn the joint over multiple variables, which we call Joint Energy-Based GFlowNets (JEBGFNs), such as peptide sequences and their antimicrobial activity. Joint learning of the energy-based model, used as a reward for the GFlowNet, can resolve the issues of incompatibility since both the reward function $R$ and the GFlowNet sampler are trained jointly. We find that this joint training or joint energy-based formulation leads to significant improvements in generating anti-microbial peptides. As the training sequences arose out of evolutionary or artificial selection for high antibiotic activity, there is presumably some structure in the distribution of sequences that reveals information about the antibiotic activity. This results in an advantage to modeling their joint generatively vs. pure discriminative modeling. We also evaluate JEBGFN in an active learning setting for discovering anti-microbial peptides.
UNFIS: A Novel Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System with Unstructured Fuzzy Rules for Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

An important constraint of Fuzzy Inference Systems (FIS) is their structured rules defined based on evaluating all input variables. Indeed, the length of all fuzzy rules and the number of input variables are equal. However, in many decision-making problems evaluating some conditions on a limited set of input variables is sufficient to decide properly (unstructured rules). Therefore, this constraint limits the performance, generalization, and interpretability of the FIS. To address this issue, this paper presents a neuro-fuzzy inference system for classification applications that can select different sets of input variables for constructing each fuzzy rule. To realize this capability, a new fuzzy selector neuron with an adaptive parameter is proposed that can select input variables in the antecedent part of each fuzzy rule. Moreover, in this paper, the consequent part of the Takagi-Sugeno-Kang FIS is also changed properly to consider only the selected set of input variables. To learn the parameters of the proposed architecture, a trust-region-based learning method (General quasi-Levenberg-Marquardt (GqLM)) is proposed to minimize cross-entropy in multiclass problems. The performance of the proposed method is compared with some related previous approaches in some real-world classification problems. Based on these comparisons the proposed method has better or very close performance with a parsimonious structure consisting of unstructured fuzzy.
Asymmetric Hashing for Fast Ranking via Neural Network Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Fast item ranking is an important task in recommender systems. In previous works, graph-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) approaches have demonstrated good performance on item ranking tasks with generic searching/matching measures (including complex measures such as neural network measures). However, since these ANN approaches must go through the neural measures several times during ranking, the computation is not practical if the neural measure is a large network. On the other hand, fast item ranking using existing hashing-based approaches, such as Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), only works with a limited set of measures. Previous learning-to-hash approaches are also not suitable to solve the fast item ranking problem since they can take a significant amount of time and computation to train the hash functions. Hashing approaches, however, are attractive because they provide a principle and efficient way to retrieve candidate items. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective learning-to-hash approach for the fast item ranking problem that can be used for any type of measure, including neural network measures. Specifically, we solve this problem with an asymmetric hashing framework based on discrete inner product fitting. We learn a pair of related hash functions that map heterogeneous objects (e.g., users and items) into a common discrete space where the inner product of their binary codes reveals their true similarity defined via the original searching measure. The fast ranking problem is reduced to an ANN search via this asymmetric hashing scheme. Then, we propose a sampling strategy to efficiently select relevant and contrastive samples to train the hashing model. We empirically validate the proposed method against the existing state-of-the-art fast item ranking methods in several combinations of non-linear searching functions and prominent datasets.
Transposed Variational Auto-encoder with Intrinsic Feature Learning for Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this technical report, we present our solutions to the Traffic4cast 2022 core challenge and extended challenge. In this competition, the participants are required to predict the traffic states for the future 15-minute based on the vehicle counter data in the previous hour. Compared to other competitions in the same series, this year focuses on the prediction of different data sources and sparse vertex-to-edge generalization. To address these issues, we introduce the Transposed Variational Auto-encoder (TVAE) model to reconstruct the missing data and Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to strengthen the correlations between learned representations. We further apply feature selection to learn traffic patterns from diverse but easily available data. Our solutions have ranked first in both challenges on the final leaderboard. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Daftstone/Traffic4cast}
Simplified Prophet Inequalities for Combinatorial Auctions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

We consider prophet inequalities for XOS and MPH-$k$ combinatorial auctions and give a simplified proof for the existence of static and anonymous item prices which recover the state-of-the-art competitive ratios. Our proofs make use of a linear programming formulation which has a non-negative objective value if there are prices which admit a given competitive ratio $α\geq 1$. Changing our perspective to dual space by an application of strong LP duality, we use an interpretation of the dual variables as probabilities to directly obtain our result. In contrast to previous work, our proofs do not require to argue about specific values of buyers for bundles, but only about the presence or absence of items. As a side remark, for any $k \geq 2$, this simplification also leads to a tiny improvement in the best competitive ratio for MPH-$k$ combinatorial auctions from $4k-2$ to $2k + 2 \sqrt{k(k-1)} -1$.
Using Unused: Non-Invasive Dynamic FaaS Infrastructure with HPC-Whisk
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Modern HPC workload managers and their careful tuning contribute to the high utilization of HPC clusters. However, due to inevitable uncertainty it is impossible to completely avoid node idleness. Although such idle slots are usually too short for any HPC job, they are too long to ignore them. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) paradigm promisingly fills this gap, and can be a good match, as typical FaaS functions last seconds, not hours. Here we show how to build a FaaS infrastructure on idle nodes in an HPC cluster in such a way that it does not affect the performance of the HPC jobs significantly. We dynamically adapt to a changing set of idle physical machines, by integrating open-source software Slurm and OpenWhisk. We designed and implemented a prototype solution that allowed us to cover up to 90\% of the idle time slots on a 50k-core cluster that runs production workloads.
State-of-the-art Models for Object Detection in Various Fields of Application
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We present a list of datasets and their best models with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in object detection by placing the question of object recognition in the context of the two types of state-of-the-art methods: one-stage methods and two stage-methods. We provided an in-depth statistical analysis of the five top datasets in the light of recent developments in granulated Deep Learning models - COCO minival, COCO test, Pascal VOC 2007, ADE20K, and ImageNet. The datasets are handpicked after closely comparing them with the rest in terms of diversity, quality of data, minimal bias, labeling quality etc. More importantly, our work extends to provide the best combination of these datasets with the emerging models in the last two years. It lists the top models and their optimal use cases for each of the respective datasets. We have provided a comprehensive overview of a variety of both generic and specific object detection models, enlisting comparative results like inference time and average precision of box (AP) fixed at different Intersection Over Union (IoUs) and for different sized objects. The qualitative and quantitative analysis will allow experts to achieve new performance records using the best combination of datasets and models.
Counting and Computing Join-Endomorphisms in Lattices (Revisited)
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2022
Year: 2022

Structures involving a lattice and join-endomorphisms on it are ubiquitous in computer science. We study the cardinality of the set $\mathcal{E}(L)$ of all join-endomorphisms of a given finite lattice $L$. In particular, we show for $\mathbf{M}_n$, the discrete order of $n$ elements extended with top and bottom, $| \mathcal{E}(\mathbf{M}_n) | =n!\mathcal{L}_n(-1)+(n+1)^2$ where $\mathcal{L}_n(x)$ is the Laguerre polynomial of degree $n$. We also study the following problem: Given a lattice $L$ of size $n$ and a set $S\subseteq \mathcal{E}(L)$ of size $m$, find the greatest lower bound ${\large\sqcap}_{\mathcal{E}(L)} S$. The join-endomorphism ${\large\sqcap}_{\mathcal{E}(L)} S$ has meaningful interpretations in epistemic logic, distributed systems, and Aumann structures. We show that this problem can be solved with worst-case time complexity in $O(mn)$ for distributive lattices and $O(mn + n^3)$ for arbitrary lattices. In the particular case of modular lattices, we present an adaptation of the latter algorithm that reduces its average time complexity. We provide theoretical and experimental results to support this enhancement. The complexity is expressed in terms of the basic binary lattice operations performed by the algorithm.
Impact Of Missing Data Imputation On The Fairness And Accuracy Of Graph Node Classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Analysis of the fairness of machine learning (ML) algorithms recently attracted many researchers' interest. Most ML methods show bias toward protected groups, which limits the applicability of ML models in many applications like crime rate prediction etc. Since the data may have missing values which, if not appropriately handled, are known to further harmfully affect fairness. Many imputation methods are proposed to deal with missing data. However, the effect of missing data imputation on fairness is not studied well. In this paper, we analyze the effect on fairness in the context of graph data (node attributes) imputation using different embedding and neural network methods. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate severe fairness issues in missing data imputation under graph node classification. We also find that the choice of the imputation method affects both fairness and accuracy. Our results provide valuable insights into graph data fairness and how to handle missingness in graphs efficiently. This work also provides directions regarding theoretical studies on fairness in graph data.
Unified End-to-End Speech Recognition and Endpointing for Fast and Efficient Speech Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems typically rely on an external endpointer (EP) model to identify speech boundaries. In this work, we propose a method to jointly train the ASR and EP tasks in a single end-to-end (E2E) multitask model, improving EP quality by optionally leveraging information from the ASR audio encoder. We introduce a "switch" connection, which trains the EP to consume either the audio frames directly or low-level latent representations from the ASR model. This results in a single E2E model that can be used during inference to perform frame filtering at low cost, and also make high quality end-of-query (EOQ) predictions based on ongoing ASR computation. We present results on a voice search test set showing that, compared to separate single-task models, this approach reduces median endpoint latency by 120 ms (30.8% reduction), and 90th percentile latency by 170 ms (23.0% reduction), without regressing word error rate. For continuous recognition, WER improves by 10.6% (relative).
Multi-task Learning for Source Attribution and Field Reconstruction for Methane Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Inferring the source information of greenhouse gases, such as methane, from spatially sparse sensor observations is an essential element in mitigating climate change. While it is well understood that the complex behavior of the atmospheric dispersion of such pollutants is governed by the Advection-Diffusion equation, it is difficult to directly apply the governing equations to identify the source location and magnitude (inverse problem) because of the spatially sparse and noisy observations, i.e., the pollution concentration is known only at the sensor locations and sensors sensitivity is limited. Here, we develop a multi-task learning framework that can provide high-fidelity reconstruction of the concentration field and identify emission characteristics of the pollution sources such as their location, emission strength, etc. from sparse sensor observations. We demonstrate that our proposed framework is able to achieve accurate reconstruction of the methane concentrations from sparse sensor measurements as well as precisely pin-point the location and emission strength of these pollution sources.
On the equivalence of linear cyclic and constacyclic codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce new sufficient conditions for permutation and monomial equivalence of linear cyclic codes over various finite fields. We recall that monomial equivalence and isometric equivalence are the same relation for linear codes over finite fields. A necessary and sufficient condition for the monomial equivalence of linear cyclic codes through a shift map on their defining set is also given. Moreover, we provide new algebraic criteria for the monomial equivalence of constacyclic codes over $\mathbb{F}_4$. Finally, we prove that if $\gcd(3n,ϕ(3n))=1$, then all permutation equivalent constacyclic codes of length $n$ over $\mathbb{F}_4$ are given by the action of multipliers. The results of this work allow us to prune the search algorithm for new linear codes and discover record-breaking linear and quantum codes.
Nonverbal Social Behavior Generation for Social Robots Using End-to-End Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

To provide effective and enjoyable human-robot interaction, it is important for social robots to exhibit nonverbal behaviors, such as a handshake or a hug. However, the traditional approach of reproducing pre-coded motions allows users to easily predict the reaction of the robot, giving the impression that the robot is a machine rather than a real agent. Therefore, we propose a neural network architecture based on the Seq2Seq model that learns social behaviors from human-human interactions in an end-to-end manner. We adopted a generative adversarial network to prevent invalid pose sequences from occurring when generating long-term behavior. To verify the proposed method, experiments were performed using the humanoid robot Pepper in a simulated environment. Because it is difficult to determine success or failure in social behavior generation, we propose new metrics to calculate the difference between the generated behavior and the ground-truth behavior. We used these metrics to show how different network architectural choices affect the performance of behavior generation, and we compared the performance of learning multiple behaviors and that of learning a single behavior. We expect that our proposed method can be used not only with home service robots, but also for guide robots, delivery robots, educational robots, and virtual robots, enabling the users to enjoy and effectively interact with the robots.