OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Proactive Detractor Detection Framework Based on Message-Wise Sentiment Analysis Over Customer Support Interactions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we propose a framework relying solely on chat-based customer support (CS) interactions for predicting the recommendation decision of individual users. For our case study, we analyzed a total number of 16.4k users and 48.7k customer support conversations within the financial vertical of a large e-commerce company in Latin America. Consequently, our main contributions and objectives are to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to assess and predict the recommendation behavior where, in addition to using static sentiment analysis, we exploit the predictive power of each user's sentiment dynamics. Our results show that, with respective feature interpretability, it is possible to predict the likelihood of a user to recommend a product or service, based solely on the message-wise sentiment evolution of their CS conversations in a fully automated way.
Enhanced Low-resolution LiDAR-Camera Calibration Via Depth Interpolation and Supervised Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Motivated by the increasing application of low-resolution LiDAR recently, we target the problem of low-resolution LiDAR-camera calibration in this work. The main challenges are two-fold: sparsity and noise in point clouds. To address the problem, we propose to apply depth interpolation to increase the point density and supervised contrastive learning to learn noise-resistant features. The experiments on RELLIS-3D demonstrate that our approach achieves an average mean absolute rotation/translation errors of 0.15cm/0.33\textdegree on 32-channel LiDAR point cloud data, which significantly outperforms all reference methods.
Assemble Them All: Physics-Based Planning for Generalizable Assembly by Disassembly
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Assembly planning is the core of automating product assembly, maintenance, and recycling for modern industrial manufacturing. Despite its importance and long history of research, planning for mechanical assemblies when given the final assembled state remains a challenging problem. This is due to the complexity of dealing with arbitrary 3D shapes and the highly constrained motion required for real-world assemblies. In this work, we propose a novel method to efficiently plan physically plausible assembly motion and sequences for real-world assemblies. Our method leverages the assembly-by-disassembly principle and physics-based simulation to efficiently explore a reduced search space. To evaluate the generality of our method, we define a large-scale dataset consisting of thousands of physically valid industrial assemblies with a variety of assembly motions required. Our experiments on this new benchmark demonstrate we achieve a state-of-the-art success rate and the highest computational efficiency compared to other baseline algorithms. Our method also generalizes to rotational assemblies (e.g., screws and puzzles) and solves 80-part assemblies within several minutes.
Reinforcement Learning with Stepwise Fairness Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

AI methods are used in societally important settings, ranging from credit to employment to housing, and it is crucial to provide fairness in regard to algorithmic decision making. Moreover, many settings are dynamic, with populations responding to sequential decision policies. We introduce the study of reinforcement learning (RL) with stepwise fairness constraints, requiring group fairness at each time step. Our focus is on tabular episodic RL, and we provide learning algorithms with strong theoretical guarantees in regard to policy optimality and fairness violation. Our framework provides useful tools to study the impact of fairness constraints in sequential settings and brings up new challenges in RL.
SOTIF Entropy: Online SOTIF Risk Quantification and Mitigation for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Autonomous driving confronts great challenges in complex traffic scenarios, where the risk of Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) can be triggered by the dynamic operational environment and system insufficiencies. The SOTIF risk is reflected not only intuitively in the collision risk with objects outside the autonomous vehicles (AVs), but also inherently in the performance limitation risk of the implemented algorithms themselves. How to minimize the SOTIF risk for autonomous driving is currently a critical, difficult, and unresolved issue. Therefore, this paper proposes the "Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System" as a systematic approach to online minimize the SOTIF risk, which aims to provide a systematic solution for monitoring, quantification, and mitigation of inherent and external risks. The core of this system is the risk monitoring of the implemented artificial intelligence algorithms within the AV. As a demonstration of the Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System, the risk monitoring of the perception algorithm, i.e., YOLOv5 is highlighted. Moreover, the inherent perception algorithm risk and external collision risk are jointly quantified via SOTIF entropy, which is then propagated downstream to the decision-making module and mitigated. Finally, several challenging scenarios are demonstrated, and the Hardware-in-the-Loop experiments are conducted to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the system. The results demonstrate that the Self-Surveillance and Self-Adaption System enables dependable online monitoring, quantification, and mitigation of SOTIF risk in real-time critical traffic environments.
An Incremental Phase Mapping Approach for X-ray Diffraction Patterns using Binary Peak Representations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Despite the huge advancement in knowledge discovery and data mining techniques, the X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis process has mostly remained untouched and still involves manual investigation, comparison, and verification. Due to the large volume of XRD samples from high-throughput XRD experiments, it has become impossible for domain scientists to process them manually. Recently, they have started leveraging standard clustering techniques, to reduce the XRD pattern representations requiring manual efforts for labeling and verification. Nevertheless, these standard clustering techniques do not handle problem-specific aspects such as peak shifting, adjacent peaks, background noise, and mixed phases; hence, resulting in incorrect composition-phase diagrams that complicate further steps. Here, we leverage data mining techniques along with domain expertise to handle these issues. In this paper, we introduce an incremental phase mapping approach based on binary peak representations using a new threshold based fuzzy dissimilarity measure. The proposed approach first applies an incremental phase computation algorithm on discrete binary peak representation of XRD samples, followed by hierarchical clustering or manual merging of similar pure phases to obtain the final composition-phase diagram. We evaluate our method on the composition space of two ternary alloy systems- Co-Ni-Ta and Co-Ti-Ta. Our results are verified by domain scientists and closely resembles the manually computed ground-truth composition-phase diagrams. The proposed approach takes us closer towards achieving the goal of complete end-to-end automated XRD analysis.
DNN Filter for Bias Reduction in Distribution-to-Distribution Scan Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Distribution-to-distribution (D2D) point cloud registration techniques such as the Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) can align point clouds sampled from unstructured scenes and provide accurate bounds of their own solution error covariance -- an important feature for safety-of-life navigation tasks. D2D methods rely on the assumption of a static scene and are therefore susceptible to bias from range-shadowing, self-occlusion, moving objects, and distortion artifacts as the recording device moves between frames. Deep Learning-based approaches can achieve higher accuracy in dynamic scenes by relaxing these constraints, however, DNNs produce uninterpretable solutions which can be problematic from a safety perspective. In this paper, we propose a method of down-sampling LIDAR point clouds to exclude voxels that violate the assumption of a static scene and introduce error to the D2D scan matching process. Our approach uses a solution consistency filter -- identifying and suppressing voxels where D2D contributions disagree with local estimates from a PointNet-based registration network. Our results show that this technique provides significant benefits in registration accuracy, and is particularly useful in scenes containing dense foliage.
Caching and Reproducibility: Making Data Science experiments faster and FAIRer
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Small to medium-scale data science experiments often rely on research software developed ad-hoc by individual scientists or small teams. Often there is no time to make the research software fast, reusable, and open access. The consequence is twofold. First, subsequent researchers must spend significant work hours building upon the proposed hypotheses or experimental framework. In the worst case, others cannot reproduce the experiment and reuse the findings for subsequent research. Second, suppose the ad-hoc research software fails during often long-running computationally expensive experiments. In that case, the overall effort to iteratively improve the software and rerun the experiments creates significant time pressure on the researchers. We suggest making caching an integral part of the research software development process, even before the first line of code is written. This article outlines caching recommendations for developing research software in data science projects. Our recommendations provide a perspective to circumvent common problems such as propriety dependence, speed, etc. At the same time, caching contributes to the reproducibility of experiments in the open science workflow. Concerning the four guiding principles, i.e., Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR), we foresee that including the proposed recommendation in a research software development will make the data related to that software FAIRer for both machines and humans. We exhibit the usefulness of some of the proposed recommendations on our recently completed research software project in mathematical information retrieval.
What Knowledge Is Needed? Towards Explainable Memory for kNN-MT Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

kNN-MT presents a new paradigm for domain adaptation by building an external datastore, which usually saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. As a result, the constructed datastore is usually large and possibly redundant. In this paper, we investigate the interpretability issue of this approach: what knowledge does the NMT model need? We propose the notion of local correctness (LAC) as a new angle, which describes the potential translation correctness for a single entry and for a given neighborhood. Empirical study shows that our investigation successfully finds the conditions where the NMT model could easily fail and need related knowledge. Experiments on six diverse target domains and two language-pairs show that pruning according to local correctness brings a light and more explainable memory for kNN-MT domain adaptation.
Linear Self-Attention Approximation via Trainable Feedforward Kernel
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In pursuit of faster computation, Efficient Transformers demonstrate an impressive variety of approaches -- models attaining sub-quadratic attention complexity can utilize a notion of sparsity or a low-rank approximation of inputs to reduce the number of attended keys; other ways to reduce complexity include locality-sensitive hashing, key pooling, additional memory to store information in compacted or hybridization with other architectures, such as CNN. Often based on a strong mathematical basis, kernelized approaches allow for the approximation of attention with linear complexity while retaining high accuracy. Therefore, in the present paper, we aim to expand the idea of trainable kernel methods to approximate the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer architecture.
The Technological Emergence of AutoML: A Survey of Performant Software and Applications in the Context of Industry
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With most technical fields, there exists a delay between fundamental academic research and practical industrial uptake. Whilst some sciences have robust and well-established processes for commercialisation, such as the pharmaceutical practice of regimented drug trials, other fields face transitory periods in which fundamental academic advancements diffuse gradually into the space of commerce and industry. For the still relatively young field of Automated/Autonomous Machine Learning (AutoML/AutonoML), that transitory period is under way, spurred on by a burgeoning interest from broader society. Yet, to date, little research has been undertaken to assess the current state of this dissemination and its uptake. Thus, this review makes two primary contributions to knowledge around this topic. Firstly, it provides the most up-to-date and comprehensive survey of existing AutoML tools, both open-source and commercial. Secondly, it motivates and outlines a framework for assessing whether an AutoML solution designed for real-world application is 'performant'; this framework extends beyond the limitations of typical academic criteria, considering a variety of stakeholder needs and the human-computer interactions required to service them. Thus, additionally supported by an extensive assessment and comparison of academic and commercial case-studies, this review evaluates mainstream engagement with AutoML in the early 2020s, identifying obstacles and opportunities for accelerating future uptake.
Theoretical analysis and experimental validation of volume bias of soft Dice optimized segmentation maps in the context of inherent uncertainty
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The clinical interest is often to measure the volume of a structure, which is typically derived from a segmentation. In order to evaluate and compare segmentation methods, the similarity between a segmentation and a predefined ground truth is measured using popular discrete metrics, such as the Dice score. Recent segmentation methods use a differentiable surrogate metric, such as soft Dice, as part of the loss function during the learning phase. In this work, we first briefly describe how to derive volume estimates from a segmentation that is, potentially, inherently uncertain or ambiguous. This is followed by a theoretical analysis and an experimental validation linking the inherent uncertainty to common loss functions for training CNNs, namely cross-entropy and soft Dice. We find that, even though soft Dice optimization leads to an improved performance with respect to the Dice score and other measures, it may introduce a volume bias for tasks with high inherent uncertainty. These findings indicate some of the method's clinical limitations and suggest doing a closer ad-hoc volume analysis with an optional re-calibration step.
Submission-Aware Reviewer Profiling for Reviewer Recommender System
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Assigning qualified, unbiased and interested reviewers to paper submissions is vital for maintaining the integrity and quality of the academic publishing system and providing valuable reviews to authors. However, matching thousands of submissions with thousands of potential reviewers within a limited time is a daunting challenge for a conference program committee. Prior efforts based on topic modeling have suffered from losing the specific context that help define the topics in a publication or submission abstract. Moreover, in some cases, topics identified are difficult to interpret. We propose an approach that learns from each abstract published by a potential reviewer the topics studied and the explicit context in which the reviewer studied the topics. Furthermore, we contribute a new dataset for evaluating reviewer matching systems. Our experiments show a significant, consistent improvement in precision when compared with the existing methods. We also use examples to demonstrate why our recommendations are more explainable. The new approach has been deployed successfully at top-tier conferences in the last two years.
DetAIL : A Tool to Automatically Detect and Analyze Drift In Language
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Machine learning and deep learning-based decision making has become part of today's software. The goal of this work is to ensure that machine learning and deep learning-based systems are as trusted as traditional software. Traditional software is made dependable by following rigorous practice like static analysis, testing, debugging, verifying, and repairing throughout the development and maintenance life-cycle. Similarly for machine learning systems, we need to keep these models up to date so that their performance is not compromised. For this, current systems rely on scheduled re-training of these models as new data kicks in. In this work, we propose to measure the data drift that takes place when new data kicks in so that one can adaptively re-train the models whenever re-training is actually required irrespective of schedules. In addition to that, we generate various explanations at sentence level and dataset level to capture why a given payload text has drifted.
Toward Human-AI Co-creation to Accelerate Material Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

There is an increasing need in our society to achieve faster advances in Science to tackle urgent problems, such as climate changes, environmental hazards, sustainable energy systems, pandemics, among others. In certain domains like chemistry, scientific discovery carries the extra burden of assessing risks of the proposed novel solutions before moving to the experimental stage. Despite several recent advances in Machine Learning and AI to address some of these challenges, there is still a gap in technologies to support end-to-end discovery applications, integrating the myriad of available technologies into a coherent, orchestrated, yet flexible discovery process. Such applications need to handle complex knowledge management at scale, enabling knowledge consumption and production in a timely and efficient way for subject matter experts (SMEs). Furthermore, the discovery of novel functional materials strongly relies on the development of exploration strategies in the chemical space. For instance, generative models have gained attention within the scientific community due to their ability to generate enormous volumes of novel molecules across material domains. These models exhibit extreme creativity that often translates in low viability of the generated candidates. In this work, we propose a workbench framework that aims at enabling the human-AI co-creation to reduce the time until the first discovery and the opportunity costs involved. This framework relies on a knowledge base with domain and process knowledge, and user-interaction components to acquire knowledge and advise the SMEs. Currently,the framework supports four main activities: generative modeling, dataset triage, molecule adjudication, and risk assessment.
A Semiparametric Efficient Approach To Label Shift Estimation and Quantification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Transfer Learning is an area of statistics and machine learning research that seeks answers to the following question: how do we build successful learning algorithms when the data available for training our model is qualitatively different from the data we hope the model will perform well on? In this thesis, we focus on a specific area of Transfer Learning called label shift, also known as quantification. In quantification, the aforementioned discrepancy is isolated to a shift in the distribution of the response variable. In such a setting, accurately inferring the response variable's new distribution is both an important estimation task in its own right and a crucial step for ensuring that the learning algorithm can adapt to the new data. We make two contributions to this field. First, we present a new procedure called SELSE which estimates the shift in the response variable's distribution. Second, we prove that SELSE is semiparametric efficient among a large family of quantification algorithms, i.e., SELSE's normalized error has the smallest possible asymptotic variance matrix compared to any other algorithm in that family. This family includes nearly all existing algorithms, including ACC/PACC quantifiers and maximum likelihood based quantifiers such as EMQ and MLLS. Empirical experiments reveal that SELSE is competitive with, and in many cases outperforms, existing state-of-the-art quantification methods, and that this improvement is especially large when the number of test samples is far greater than the number of train samples.
Detecting Shortcuts in Medical Images -- A Case Study in Chest X-rays
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The availability of large public datasets and the increased amount of computing power have shifted the interest of the medical community to high-performance algorithms. However, little attention is paid to the quality of the data and their annotations. High performance on benchmark datasets may be reported without considering possible shortcuts or artifacts in the data, besides, models are not tested on subpopulation groups. With this work, we aim to raise awareness about shortcuts problems. We validate previous findings, and present a case study on chest X-rays using two publicly available datasets. We share annotations for a subset of pneumothorax images with drains. We conclude with general recommendations for medical image classification.
Review and Analysis of Pain Research Literature through Keyword Co-occurrence Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Pain is a significant public health problem as the number of individuals with a history of pain globally keeps growing. In response, many synergistic research areas have been coming together to address pain-related issues. This work conducts a review and analysis of a vast body of pain-related literature using the keyword co-occurrence network (KCN) methodology. In this method, a set of KCNs is constructed by treating keywords as nodes and the co-occurrence of keywords as links between the nodes. Since keywords represent the knowledge components of research articles, analysis of KCNs will reveal the knowledge structure and research trends in the literature. This study extracted and analyzed keywords from 264,560 pain-related research articles indexed in IEEE, PubMed, Engineering Village, and Web of Science published between 2002 and 2021. We observed rapid growth in pain literature in the last two decades: the number of articles has grown nearly threefold, and the number of keywords has grown by a factor of 7. We identified emerging and declining research trends in sensors/methods, biomedical, and treatment tracks. We also extracted the most frequently co-occurring keyword pairs and clusters to help researchers recognize the synergies among different pain-related topics.