OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Active Learning with Label Comparisons
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Supervised learning typically relies on manual annotation of the true labels. When there are many potential classes, searching for the best one can be prohibitive for a human annotator. On the other hand, comparing two candidate labels is often much easier. We focus on this type of pairwise supervision and ask how it can be used effectively in learning, and in particular in active learning. We obtain several insightful results in this context. In principle, finding the best of $k$ labels can be done with $k-1$ active queries. We show that there is a natural class where this approach is sub-optimal, and that there is a more comparison-efficient active learning scheme. A key element in our analysis is the "label neighborhood graph" of the true distribution, which has an edge between two classes if they share a decision boundary. We also show that in the PAC setting, pairwise comparisons cannot provide improved sample complexity in the worst case. We complement our theoretical results with experiments, clearly demonstrating the effect of the neighborhood graph on sample complexity.
EPTAS for the dual of splittable bin packing with cardinality constraint
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

The problem considered is the splittable bin packing with cardinality constraint. It is a variant of the bin packing problem where items are allowed to be split into parts but the number of parts in each bin is at most a given upper bound. Two versions of the splittable bin packing with cardinality constraint have been studied in the literature. Among these variants we consider the dual one where the objective is to minimize the maximum bin size while packing (may be fractional) the items to a given set of bins. We exhibit an EPTAS for the dual problem when the cardinality upper bound is part of the input. This result answers an open question raised by Epstein, Levin, and van Stee.
MA-Dreamer: Coordination and communication through shared imagination
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Multi-agent RL is rendered difficult due to the non-stationary nature of environment perceived by individual agents. Theoretically sound methods using the REINFORCE estimator are impeded by its high-variance, whereas value-function based methods are affected by issues stemming from their ad-hoc handling of situations like inter-agent communication. Methods like MADDPG are further constrained due to their requirement of centralized critics etc. In order to address these issues, we present MA-Dreamer, a model-based method that uses both agent-centric and global differentiable models of the environment in order to train decentralized agents' policies and critics using model-rollouts a.k.a `imagination'. Since only the model-training is done off-policy, inter-agent communication/coordination and `language emergence' can be handled in a straight-forward manner. We compare the performance of MA-Dreamer with other methods on two soccer-based games. Our experiments show that in long-term speaker-listener tasks and in cooperative games with strong partial-observability, MA-Dreamer finds a solution that makes effective use of coordination, whereas competing methods obtain marginal scores and fail outright, respectively. By effectively achieving coordination and communication under more relaxed and general conditions, out method opens the door to the study of more complex problems and population-based training.
ClioQuery: Interactive Query-Oriented Text Analytics for Comprehensive Investigation of Historical News Archives
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

Historians and archivists often find and analyze the occurrences of query words in newspaper archives, to help answer fundamental questions about society. But much work in text analytics focuses on helping people investigate other textual units, such as events, clusters, ranked documents, entity relationships, or thematic hierarchies. Informed by a study into the needs of historians and archivists, we thus propose ClioQuery, a text analytics system uniquely organized around the analysis of query words in context. ClioQuery applies text simplification techniques from natural language processing to help historians quickly and comprehensively gather and analyze all occurrences of a query word across an archive. It also pairs these new NLP methods with more traditional features like linked views and in-text highlighting to help engender trust in summarization techniques. We evaluate ClioQuery with two separate user studies, in which historians explain how ClioQuery's novel text simplification features can help facilitate historical research. We also evaluate with a separate quantitative comparison study, which shows that ClioQuery helps crowdworkers find and remember historical information. Such results suggest possible new directions for text analytics in other query-oriented settings.
Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Augmentation in Agriculture: A Systematic Review
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In agricultural image analysis, optimal model performance is keenly pursued for better fulfilling visual recognition tasks (e.g., image classification, segmentation, object detection and localization), in the presence of challenges with biological variability and unstructured environments. Large-scale, balanced and ground-truthed image datasets, however, are often difficult to obtain to fuel the development of advanced, high-performance models. As artificial intelligence through deep learning is impacting analysis and modeling of agricultural images, data augmentation plays a crucial role in boosting model performance while reducing manual efforts for data preparation, by algorithmically expanding training datasets. Beyond traditional data augmentation techniques, generative adversarial network (GAN) invented in 2014 in the computer vision community, provides a suite of novel approaches that can learn good data representations and generate highly realistic samples. Since 2017, there has been a growth of research into GANs for image augmentation or synthesis in agriculture for improved model performance. This paper presents an overview of the evolution of GAN architectures followed by a systematic review of their application to agriculture (https://github.com/Derekabc/GANs-Agriculture), involving various vision tasks for plant health, weeds, fruits, aquaculture, animal farming, plant phenotyping as well as postharvest detection of fruit defects. Challenges and opportunities of GANs are discussed for future research.
FUM: Fine-grained and Fast User Modeling for News Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

User modeling is important for news recommendation. Existing methods usually first encode user's clicked news into news embeddings independently and then aggregate them into user embedding. However, the word-level interactions across different clicked news from the same user, which contain rich detailed clues to infer user interest, are ignored by these methods. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained and fast user modeling framework (FUM) to model user interest from fine-grained behavior interactions for news recommendation. The core idea of FUM is to concatenate the clicked news into a long document and transform user modeling into a document modeling task with both intra-news and inter-news word-level interactions. Since vanilla transformer cannot efficiently handle long document, we apply an efficient transformer named Fastformer to model fine-grained behavior interactions. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets verify that FUM can effectively and efficiently model user interest for news recommendation.
Measuring the False Sense of Security
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, several papers have demonstrated how widespread gradient masking is amongst proposed adversarial defenses. Defenses that rely on this phenomenon are considered failed, and can easily be broken. Despite this, there has been little investigation into ways of measuring the phenomenon of gradient masking and enabling comparisons of its extent amongst different networks. In this work, we investigate gradient masking under the lens of its mensurability, departing from the idea that it is a binary phenomenon. We propose and motivate several metrics for it, performing extensive empirical tests on defenses suspected of exhibiting different degrees of gradient masking. These are computationally cheaper than strong attacks, enable comparisons between models, and do not require the large time investment of tailor-made attacks for specific models. Our results reveal metrics that are successful in measuring the extent of gradient masking across different networks
On the pragmatism of using binary classifiers over data intensive neural network classifiers for detection of COVID-19 from voice
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Lately, there has been a global effort by multiple research groups to detect COVID-19 from voice. Different researchers use different kinds of information from the voice signal to achieve this. Various types of phonated sounds and the sound of cough and breath have all been used with varying degree of success in automated voice-based COVID-19 detection apps. In this paper, we show that detecting COVID-19 from voice does not require custom-made non-standard features or complicated neural network classifiers rather it can be successfully done with just standard features and simple binary classifiers. In fact, we show that the latter is not only more accurate and interpretable but also more computationally efficient in that they can be run locally on small devices. We demonstrate this on a human-curated dataset of over 1000 subjects, collected and calibrated in clinical settings.
HFL at SemEval-2022 Task 8: A Linguistics-inspired Regression Model with Data Augmentation for Multilingual News Similarity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes our system designed for SemEval-2022 Task 8: Multilingual News Article Similarity. We proposed a linguistics-inspired model trained with a few task-specific strategies. The main techniques of our system are: 1) data augmentation, 2) multi-label loss, 3) adapted R-Drop, 4) samples reconstruction with the head-tail combination. We also present a brief analysis of some negative methods like two-tower architecture. Our system ranked 1st on the leaderboard while achieving a Pearson's Correlation Coefficient of 0.818 on the official evaluation set.
A Survey on Legal Judgment Prediction: Datasets, Metrics, Models and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Legal judgment prediction (LJP) applies Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to predict judgment results based on fact descriptions automatically. Recently, large-scale public datasets and advances in NLP research have led to increasing interest in LJP. Despite a clear gap between machine and human performance, impressive results have been achieved in various benchmark datasets. In this paper, to address the current lack of comprehensive survey of existing LJP tasks, datasets, models and evaluations, (1) we analyze 31 LJP datasets in 6 languages, present their construction process and define a classification method of LJP with 3 different attributes; (2) we summarize 14 evaluation metrics under four categories for different outputs of LJP tasks; (3) we review 12 legal-domain pretrained models in 3 languages and highlight 3 major research directions for LJP; (4) we show the state-of-art results for 8 representative datasets from different court cases and discuss the open challenges. This paper can provide up-to-date and comprehensive reviews to help readers understand the status of LJP. We hope to facilitate both NLP researchers and legal professionals for further joint efforts in this problem.
Methods of Informational Trends Analytics and Fake News Detection on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In the paper, different approaches for the analysis of news trends on Twitter has been considered. For the analysis and case study, informational trends on Twitter caused by Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 year have been studied. A deep learning approach for fake news detection has been analyzed. The use of the theory of frequent itemsets and association rules, graph theory for news trends analytics have been considered.
When NAS Meets Trees: An Efficient Algorithm for Neural Architecture Search
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The key challenge in neural architecture search (NAS) is designing how to explore wisely in the huge search space. We propose a new NAS method called TNAS (NAS with trees), which improves search efficiency by exploring only a small number of architectures while also achieving a higher search accuracy. TNAS introduces an architecture tree and a binary operation tree, to factorize the search space and substantially reduce the exploration size. TNAS performs a modified bi-level Breadth-First Search in the proposed trees to discover a high-performance architecture. Impressively, TNAS finds the global optimal architecture on CIFAR-10 with test accuracy of 94.37\% in four GPU hours in NAS-Bench-201. The average test accuracy is 94.35\%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/guochengqian/TNAS}.
Value-based Practical Reasoning: Modal Logic + Argumentation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Autonomous agents are supposed to be able to finish tasks or achieve goals that are assigned by their users through performing a sequence of actions. Since there might exist multiple plans that an agent can follow and each plan might promote or demote different values along each action, the agent should be able to resolve the conflicts between them and evaluate which plan he should follow. In this paper, we develop a logic-based framework that combines modal logic and argumentation for value-based practical reasoning with plans. Modal logic is used as a technique to represent and verify whether a plan with its local properties of value promotion or demotion can be followed to achieve an agent's goal. We then propose an argumentation-based approach that allows an agent to reason about his plans in the form of supporting or objecting to a plan using the verification results.
Regularization-based Pruning of Irrelevant Weights in Deep Neural Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural networks exploiting millions of parameters are nowadays the norm in deep learning applications. This is a potential issue because of the great amount of computational resources needed for training, and of the possible loss of generalization performance of overparametrized networks. We propose in this paper a method for learning sparse neural topologies via a regularization technique which identifies non relevant weights and selectively shrinks their norm, while performing a classic update for relevant ones. This technique, which is an improvement of classical weight decay, is based on the definition of a regularization term which can be added to any loss functional regardless of its form, resulting in a unified general framework exploitable in many different contexts. The actual elimination of parameters identified as irrelevant is handled by an iterative pruning algorithm. We tested the proposed technique on different image classification and Natural language generation tasks, obtaining results on par or better then competitors in terms of sparsity and metrics, while achieving strong models compression.
Hermite-type modifications of BOBYQA for optimization with some partial derivatives
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2022
Year: 2022

In this work we propose two Hermite-type optimization methods, Hermite least squares and Hermite BOBYQA, specialized for the case that some partial derivatives of the objective function are available and others are not. The main objective is to reduce the number of objective function calls by maintaining the convergence properties. Both methods are modifications of Powell's derivative-free BOBYQA algorithm. But instead of (underdetermined) interpolation for building the quadratic subproblem in each iteration, the training data is enriched with first and -- if possible -- second order derivatives and then (weighted) least squares regression is used. Proofs for global convergence are discussed and numerical results are presented. Further, the applicability is verified for a realistic test case in the context of yield optimization. Numerical tests show that the Hermite least squares approach outperforms classic BOBYQA if half or more partial derivatives are available. In addition, the Hermite-type approaches achieve more robustness and thus better performance in case of noisy objective functions.
SAL-CNN: Estimate the Remaining Useful Life of Bearings Using Time-frequency Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In modern industrial production, the prediction ability of the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings directly affects the safety and stability of the system. Traditional methods require rigorous physical modeling and perform poorly for complex systems. In this paper, an end-to-end RUL prediction method is proposed, which uses short-time Fourier transform (STFT) as preprocessing. Considering the time correlation of signal sequences, a long and short-term memory network is designed in CNN, incorporating the convolutional block attention module, and understanding the decision-making process of the network from the interpretability level. Experiments were carried out on the 2012PHM dataset and compared with other methods, and the results proved the effectiveness of the method.
What do complexity measures measure? Correlating and validating corpus-based measures of morphological complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We present an analysis of eight measures used for quantifying morphological complexity of natural languages. The measures we study are corpus-based measures of morphological complexity with varying requirements for corpus annotation. We present similarities and differences between these measures visually and through correlation analyses, as well as their relation to the relevant typological variables. Our analysis focuses on whether these `measures' are measures of the same underlying variable, or whether they measure more than one dimension of morphological complexity. The principal component analysis indicates that the first principal component explains 92.62 % of the variation in eight measures, indicating a strong linear dependence between the complexity measures studied.
Forecasting new diseases in low-data settings using transfer learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Recent infectious disease outbreaks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Zika epidemic in Brazil, have demonstrated both the importance and difficulty of accurately forecasting novel infectious diseases. When new diseases first emerge, we have little knowledge of the transmission process, the level and duration of immunity to reinfection, or other parameters required to build realistic epidemiological models. Time series forecasts and machine learning, while less reliant on assumptions about the disease, require large amounts of data that are also not available in early stages of an outbreak. In this study, we examine how knowledge of related diseases can help make predictions of new diseases in data-scarce environments using transfer learning. We implement both an empirical and a theoretical approach. Using empirical data from Brazil, we compare how well different machine learning models transfer knowledge between two different disease pairs: (i) dengue and Zika, and (ii) influenza and COVID-19. In the theoretical analysis, we generate data using different transmission and recovery rates with an SIR compartmental model, and then compare the effectiveness of different transfer learning methods. We find that transfer learning offers the potential to improve predictions, even beyond a model based on data from the target disease, though the appropriate source disease must be chosen carefully. While imperfect, these models offer an additional input for decision makers during pandemic response.
HFT: Lifting Perspective Representations via Hybrid Feature Transformation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Autonomous driving requires accurate and detailed Bird's Eye View (BEV) semantic segmentation for decision making, which is one of the most challenging tasks for high-level scene perception. Feature transformation from frontal view to BEV is the pivotal technology for BEV semantic segmentation. Existing works can be roughly classified into two categories, i.e., Camera model-Based Feature Transformation (CBFT) and Camera model-Free Feature Transformation (CFFT). In this paper, we empirically analyze the vital differences between CBFT and CFFT. The former transforms features based on the flat-world assumption, which may cause distortion of regions lying above the ground plane. The latter is limited in the segmentation performance due to the absence of geometric priors and time-consuming computation. In order to reap the benefits and avoid the drawbacks of CBFT and CFFT, we propose a novel framework with a Hybrid Feature Transformation module (HFT). Specifically, we decouple the feature maps produced by HFT for estimating the layout of outdoor scenes in BEV. Furthermore, we design a mutual learning scheme to augment hybrid transformation by applying feature mimicking. Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that with negligible extra overhead, HFT achieves a relative improvement of 13.3% on the Argoverse dataset and 16.8% on the KITTI 3D Object datasets compared to the best-performing existing method. The codes are available at https://github.com/JiayuZou2020/HFT.
Few-Shot Object Detection in Unseen Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) has thrived in recent years to learn novel object classes with limited data by transferring knowledge gained on abundant base classes. FSOD approaches commonly assume that both the scarcely provided examples of novel classes and test-time data belong to the same domain. However, this assumption does not hold in various industrial and robotics applications, where a model can learn novel classes from a source domain while inferring on classes from a target domain. In this work, we address the task of zero-shot domain adaptation, also known as domain generalization, for FSOD. Specifically, we assume that neither images nor labels of the novel classes in the target domain are available during training. Our approach for solving the domain gap is two-fold. First, we leverage a meta-training paradigm, where we learn the domain shift on the base classes, then transfer the domain knowledge to the novel classes. Second, we propose various data augmentations techniques on the few shots of novel classes to account for all possible domain-specific information. To constraint the network into encoding domain-agnostic class-specific representations only, a contrastive loss is proposed to maximize the mutual information between foreground proposals and class embeddings and reduce the network's bias to the background information from target domain. Our experiments on the T-LESS, PASCAL-VOC, and ExDark datasets show that the proposed approach succeeds in alleviating the domain gap considerably without utilizing labels or images of novel categories from the target domain.