OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Artificial Intelligence in the Low-Level Realm -- A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Resource-aware machine learning has been a trending topic in recent years, focusing on making ML computational aspects more exploitable by the edge devices in the Internet of Things. This paper attempts to review a conceptually and practically related area concentrated on efforts and challenges for applying ML in the operating systems' main tasks in a low-resource environment. Artificial Intelligence has been integrated into the operating system with applications such as voice or image recognition. However, this integration is only in user space. Here, we seek methods and efforts that exploit AI approaches, specifically machine learning, in the OSes' primary responsibilities. We provide the improvements that ML can bring to OS to make them more trustworthy. In other words, the main question to be answered is how AI has played/can play a role directly in improving the traditional OS kernel main tasks. Also, the challenges and limitations in the way of this combination are provided.
On the Usage of Networked Tethered Flying Platforms for Massive Events -- Case Study: Hajj Pilgrimage
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The Hajj is a religious Muslim pilgrimage undertaken annually by 2-3 million people in Makkah. Consequently, several problems arise due to the sheer number of pilgrims, and therefore negatively impact their stay and the conduct of the rituals. During the Hajj, several problems occur related to mobility, security, and connectivity. The current solutions used to deal with these problems have limitations and they usually require a lot of resources with suboptimal results. In this paper, we proposed an aerial-based solution that rely on Networked Tethered Flying Platforms (NTFPs). NTFPs are flying vehicles such as drones, Helikites, and blimps, that are tethered to the ground via a cable that supplies them with constant data and power. NTFPs can fly at high altitude with a great backhaul capacity and large coverage. We show in this paper how NTFP-based solution solve mobility, security, and connectivity problems during the Hajj and the main advantages and benefits as well as the cost-efficiency of such solution. For the sake of completeness, we also present other similar case studies in which NTFPs can be used.
Click-Based Student Performance Prediction: A Clustering Guided Meta-Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We study the problem of predicting student knowledge acquisition in online courses from clickstream behavior. Motivated by the proliferation of eLearning lecture delivery, we specifically focus on student in-video activity in lectures videos, which consist of content and in-video quizzes. Our methodology for predicting in-video quiz performance is based on three key ideas we develop. First, we model students' clicking behavior via time-series learning architectures operating on raw event data, rather than defining hand-crafted features as in existing approaches that may lose important information embedded within the click sequences. Second, we develop a self-supervised clickstream pre-training to learn informative representations of clickstream events that can initialize the prediction model effectively. Third, we propose a clustering guided meta-learning-based training that optimizes the prediction model to exploit clusters of frequent patterns in student clickstream sequences. Through experiments on three real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our method obtains substantial improvements over two baseline models in predicting students' in-video quiz performance. Further, we validate the importance of the pre-training and meta-learning components of our framework through ablation studies. Finally, we show how our methodology reveals insights on video-watching behavior associated with knowledge acquisition for useful learning analytics.
Smart Fashion: A Review of AI Applications in the Fashion & Apparel Industry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The fashion industry is on the verge of an unprecedented change. The implementation of machine learning, computer vision, and artificial intelligence (AI) in fashion applications is opening lots of new opportunities for this industry. This paper provides a comprehensive survey on this matter, categorizing more than 580 related articles into 22 well-defined fashion-related tasks. Such structured task-based multi-label classification of fashion research articles provides researchers with explicit research directions and facilitates their access to the related studies, improving the visibility of studies simultaneously. For each task, a time chart is provided to analyze the progress through the years. Furthermore, we provide a list of 86 public fashion datasets accompanied by a list of suggested applications and additional information for each.
Turning Traffic Monitoring Cameras into Intelligent Sensors for Traffic Density Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Accurate traffic state information plays a pivotal role in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), and it is an essential input to various smart mobility applications such as signal coordination and traffic flow prediction. The current practice to obtain the traffic state information is through specialized sensors such as loop detectors and speed cameras. In most metropolitan areas, traffic monitoring cameras have been installed to monitor the traffic conditions on arterial roads and expressways, and the collected videos or images are mainly used for visual inspection by traffic engineers. Unfortunately, the data collected from traffic monitoring cameras are affected by the 4L characteristics: Low frame rate, Low resolution, Lack of annotated data, and Located in complex road environments. Therefore, despite the great potentials of the traffic monitoring cameras, the 4L characteristics hinder them from providing useful traffic state information (e.g., speed, flow, density). This paper focuses on the traffic density estimation problem as it is widely applicable to various traffic surveillance systems. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of the holistic framework for addressing the 4L characteristics and extracting the traffic density information from traffic monitoring camera data. In view of this, this paper proposes a framework for estimating traffic density using uncalibrated traffic monitoring cameras with 4L characteristics. The proposed framework consists of two major components: camera calibration and vehicle detection. The camera calibration method estimates the actual length between pixels in the images and videos, and the vehicle counts are extracted from the deep-learning-based vehicle detection method. Combining the two components, high-granular traffic density can be estimated. To validate the proposed framework, two case studies were conducted in Hong Kong and Sacramento. The results show that the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in camera calibration is less than 0.2 meters out of 6 meters, and the accuracy of vehicle detection under various conditions is approximately 90%. Overall, the MAE for the estimated density is 9.04 veh/km/lane in Hong Kong and 1.30 veh/km/lane in Sacramento. The research outcomes can be used to calibrate the speed-density fundamental diagrams, and the proposed framework can provide accurate and real-time traffic information without installing additional sensors.
Machine Learning aided Crop Yield Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We present a crop simulation environment with an OpenAI Gym interface, and apply modern deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms to optimize yield. We empirically show that DRL algorithms may be useful in discovering new policies and approaches to help optimize crop yield, while simultaneously minimizing constraining factors such as water and fertilizer usage. We propose that this hybrid plant modeling and data-driven approach for discovering new strategies to optimize crop yield may help address upcoming global food demands due to population expansion and climate change.
Fast Convolution based on Winograd Minimum Filtering: Introduction and Development
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been widely used in various fields and played an important role. Convolution operators are the fundamental component of convolutional neural networks, and it is also the most time-consuming part of network training and inference. In recent years, researchers have proposed several fast convolution algorithms including FFT and Winograd. Among them, Winograd convolution significantly reduces the multiplication operations in convolution, and it also takes up less memory space than FFT convolution. Therefore, Winograd convolution has quickly become the first choice for fast convolution implementation within a few years. At present, there is no systematic summary of the convolution algorithm. This article aims to fill this gap and provide detailed references for follow-up researchers. This article summarizes the development of Winograd convolution from the three aspects of algorithm expansion, algorithm optimization, implementation, and application, and finally makes a simple outlook on the possible future directions.
Cross-lingual Hate Speech Detection using Transformer Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Hate speech detection within a cross-lingual setting represents a paramount area of interest for all medium and large-scale online platforms. Failing to properly address this issue on a global scale has already led over time to morally questionable real-life events, human deaths, and the perpetuation of hate itself. This paper illustrates the capabilities of fine-tuned altered multi-lingual Transformer models (mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa) regarding this crucial social data science task with cross-lingual training from English to French, vice-versa and each language on its own, including sections about iterative improvement and comparative error analysis.
Partial-Adaptive Submodular Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The goal of a typical adaptive sequential decision making problem is to design an interactive policy that selects a group of items sequentially, based on some partial observations, to maximize the expected utility. It has been shown that the utility functions of many real-world applications, including pooled-based active learning and adaptive influence maximization, satisfy the property of adaptive submodularity. However, most of existing studies on adaptive submodular maximization focus on the fully adaptive setting, i.e., one must wait for the feedback from \emph{all} past selections before making the next selection. Although this approach can take full advantage of feedback from the past to make informed decisions, it may take a longer time to complete the selection process as compared with the non-adaptive solution where all selections are made in advance before any observations take place. In this paper, we explore the problem of partial-adaptive submodular maximization where one is allowed to make multiple selections in a batch simultaneously and observe their realizations together. Our approach enjoys the benefits of adaptivity while reducing the time spent on waiting for the observations from past selections. To the best of our knowledge, no results are known for partial-adaptive policies for the non-monotone adaptive submodular maximization problem. We study this problem under both cardinality constraint and knapsack constraints, and develop effective and efficient solutions for both cases. We also analyze the batch query complexity, i.e., the number of batches a policy takes to complete the selection process, of our policy under some additional assumptions.
Sign-to-Speech Model for Sign Language Understanding: A Case Study of Nigerian Sign Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Through this paper, we seek to reduce the communication barrier between the hearing-impaired community and the larger society who are usually not familiar with sign language in the sub-Saharan region of Africa with the largest occurrences of hearing disability cases, while using Nigeria as a case study. The dataset is a pioneer dataset for the Nigerian Sign Language and was created in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. We pre-processed the data in readiness for two different object detection models and a classification model and employed diverse evaluation metrics to gauge model performance on sign-language to text conversion tasks. Finally, we convert the predicted sign texts to speech and deploy the best performing model in a lightweight application that works in real-time and achieves impressive results converting sign words/phrases to text and subsequently, into speech.
HyperPINN: Learning parameterized differential equations with physics-informed hypernetworks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Many types of physics-informed neural network models have been proposed in recent years as approaches for learning solutions to differential equations. When a particular task requires solving a differential equation at multiple parameterizations, this requires either re-training the model, or expanding its representation capacity to include the parameterization -- both solution that increase its computational cost. We propose the HyperPINN, which uses hypernetworks to learn to generate neural networks that can solve a differential equation from a given parameterization. We demonstrate with experiments on both a PDE and an ODE that this type of model can lead to neural network solutions to differential equations that maintain a small size, even when learning a family of solutions over a parameter space.
Dynamic Distances in Hyperbolic Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the following dynamic problem: given a fixed (small) template graph with colored vertices C and a large graph with colored vertices G (whose colors can be changed dynamically), how many mappings m are there from the vertices of C to vertices of G in such a way that the colors agree, and the distances between m(v) and m(w) have given values for every edge? We show that this problem can be solved efficiently on triangulations of the hyperbolic plane, as well as other Gromov hyperbolic graphs. For various template graphs C, this result lets us efficiently solve various computational problems which are relevant in applications, such as visualization of hierarchical data and social network analysis.
ZeBRA: Precisely Destroying Neural Networks with Zero-Data Based Repeated Bit Flip Attack
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we present Zero-data Based Repeated bit flip Attack (ZeBRA) that precisely destroys deep neural networks (DNNs) by synthesizing its own attack datasets. Many prior works on adversarial weight attack require not only the weight parameters, but also the training or test dataset in searching vulnerable bits to be attacked. We propose to synthesize the attack dataset, named distilled target data, by utilizing the statistics of batch normalization layers in the victim DNN model. Equipped with the distilled target data, our ZeBRA algorithm can search vulnerable bits in the model without accessing training or test dataset. Thus, our approach makes the adversarial weight attack more fatal to the security of DNNs. Our experimental results show that 2.0x (CIFAR-10) and 1.6x (ImageNet) less number of bit flips are required on average to destroy DNNs compared to the previous attack method. Our code is available at https://github. com/pdh930105/ZeBRA.
ASMDD: Arabic Speech Mispronunciation Detection Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The largest dataset of Arabic speech mispronunciation detections in Egyptian dialogues is introduced. The dataset is composed of annotated audio files representing the top 100 words that are most frequently used in the Arabic language, pronounced by 100 Egyptian children (aged between 2 and 8 years old). The dataset is collected and annotated on segmental pronunciation error detections by expert listeners.
Sig-Wasserstein GANs for Time Series Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Synthetic data is an emerging technology that can significantly accelerate the development and deployment of AI machine learning pipelines. In this work, we develop high-fidelity time-series generators, the SigWGAN, by combining continuous-time stochastic models with the newly proposed signature $W_1$ metric. The former are the Logsig-RNN models based on the stochastic differential equations, whereas the latter originates from the universal and principled mathematical features to characterize the measure induced by time series. SigWGAN allows turning computationally challenging GAN min-max problem into supervised learning while generating high fidelity samples. We validate the proposed model on both synthetic data generated by popular quantitative risk models and empirical financial data. Codes are available at https://github.com/SigCGANs/Sig-Wasserstein-GANs.git.
Implicit Model Specialization through DAG-based Decentralized Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning allows a group of distributed clients to train a common machine learning model on private data. The exchange of model updates is managed either by a central entity or in a decentralized way, e.g. by a blockchain. However, the strong generalization across all clients makes these approaches unsuited for non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data. We propose a unified approach to decentralization and personalization in federated learning that is based on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of model updates. Instead of training a single global model, clients specialize on their local data while using the model updates from other clients dependent on the similarity of their respective data. This specialization implicitly emerges from the DAG-based communication and selection of model updates. Thus, we enable the evolution of specialized models, which focus on a subset of the data and therefore cover non-IID data better than federated learning in a centralized or blockchain-based setup. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed solution is the first to unite personalization and poisoning robustness in fully decentralized federated learning. Our evaluation shows that the specialization of models emerges directly from the DAG-based communication of model updates on three different datasets. Furthermore, we show stable model accuracy and less variance across clients when compared to federated averaging.
Human-Level Control without Server-Grade Hardware
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep Q-Network (DQN) marked a major milestone for reinforcement learning, demonstrating for the first time that human-level control policies could be learned directly from raw visual inputs via reward maximization. Even years after its introduction, DQN remains highly relevant to the research community since many of its innovations have been adopted by successor methods. Nevertheless, despite significant hardware advances in the interim, DQN's original Atari 2600 experiments remain costly to replicate in full. This poses an immense barrier to researchers who cannot afford state-of-the-art hardware or lack access to large-scale cloud computing resources. To facilitate improved access to deep reinforcement learning research, we introduce a DQN implementation that leverages a novel concurrent and synchronized execution framework designed to maximally utilize a heterogeneous CPU-GPU desktop system. With just one NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU, our implementation reduces the training time of a 200-million-frame Atari experiment from 25 hours to just 9 hours. The ideas introduced in our paper should be generalizable to a large number of off-policy deep reinforcement learning methods.
Explaining Documents' Relevance to Search Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

We present GenEx, a generative model to explain search results to users beyond just showing matches between query and document words. Adding GenEx explanations to search results greatly impacts user satisfaction and search performance. Search engines mostly provide document titles, URLs, and snippets for each result. Existing model-agnostic explanation methods similarly focus on word matching or content-based features. However, a recent user study shows that word matching features are quite obvious to users and thus of slight value. GenEx explains a search result by providing a terse description for the query aspect covered by that result. We cast the task as a sequence transduction problem and propose a novel model based on the Transformer architecture. To represent documents with respect to the given queries and yet not generate the queries themselves as explanations, two query-attention layers and masked-query decoding are added to the Transformer architecture. The model is trained without using any human-generated explanations. Training data are instead automatically constructed to ensure a tolerable noise level and a generalizable learned model. Experimental evaluation shows that our explanation models significantly outperform the baseline models. Evaluation through user studies also demonstrates that our explanation model generates short yet useful explanations.
Improved Loss Function-Based Prediction Method of Extreme Temperatures in Greenhouses
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The prediction of extreme greenhouse temperatures to which crops are susceptible is essential in the field of greenhouse planting. It can help avoid heat or freezing damage and economic losses. Therefore, it's important to develop models that can predict them accurately. Due to the lack of extreme temperature data in datasets, it is challenging for models to accurately predict it. In this paper, we propose an improved loss function, which is suitable for a variety of machine learning models. By increasing the weight of extreme temperature samples and reducing the possibility of misjudging extreme temperature as normal, the proposed loss function can enhance the prediction results in extreme situations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, we implement the improved loss function in LightGBM, long short-term memory, and artificial neural network and conduct experiments on a real-world greenhouse dataset. The results show that the performance of models with the improved loss function is enhanced compared to the original models in extreme cases. The improved models can be used to guarantee the timely judgment of extreme temperatures in agricultural greenhouses, thereby preventing unnecessary losses caused by incorrect predictions.