OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PPContactTracing: A Privacy-Preserving Contact Tracing Protocol for COVID-19 Pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Several contact tracing solutions have been proposed and implemented all around the globe to combat the spread of COVID-19 pandemic. But, most of these solutions endanger the privacy rights of the individuals and hinder their widespread adoption. We propose a privacy-preserving contact tracing protocol for the efficient tracing of the spread of the global pandemic. It is based on the private set intersection (PSI) protocol and utilizes the homomorphic properties to preserve the privacy at the individual level. A hierarchical model for the representation of landscapes and rate-limiting factor on the number of queries have been adopted to maintain the efficiency of the protocol.
Performance of Hyperbolic Geometry Models on Top-N Recommendation Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a simple autoencoder based on hyperbolic geometry for solving standard collaborative filtering problem. In contrast to many modern deep learning techniques, we build our solution using only a single hidden layer. Remarkably, even with such a minimalistic approach, we not only outperform the Euclidean counterpart but also achieve a competitive performance with respect to the current state-of-the-art. We additionally explore the effects of space curvature on the quality of hyperbolic models and propose an efficient data-driven method for estimating its optimal value.
A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for the Detection of Polyps in Colonoscopy Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Computerized detection of colonic polyps remains an unsolved issue because of the wide variation in the appearance, texture, color, size, and presence of the multiple polyp-like imitators during colonoscopy. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network based model for the computerized detection of polyps within colonoscopy images. The proposed model comprises 16 convolutional layers with 2 fully connected layers, and a Softmax layer, where we implement a unique approach using different convolutional kernels within the same hidden layer for deeper feature extraction. We applied two different activation functions, MISH and rectified linear unit activation functions for deeper propagation of information and self regularized smooth non-monotonicity. Furthermore, we used a generalized intersection of union, thus overcoming issues such as scale invariance, rotation, and shape. Data augmentation techniques such as photometric and geometric distortions are adapted to overcome the obstacles faced in polyp detection. Detailed benchmarked results are provided, showing better performance in terms of precision, sensitivity, F1- score, F2- score, and dice-coefficient, thus proving the efficacy of the proposed model.
Tackling COVID-19 through Responsible AI Innovation: Five Steps in the Right Direction
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2020
Year: 2020

Innovations in data science and AI/ML have a central role to play in supporting global efforts to combat COVID-19. The versatility of AI/ML technologies enables scientists and technologists to address an impressively broad range of biomedical, epidemiological, and socioeconomic challenges. This wide-reaching scientific capacity, however, also raises a diverse array of ethical challenges. The need for researchers to act quickly and globally in tackling SARS-CoV-2 demands unprecedented practices of open research and responsible data sharing at a time when innovation ecosystems are hobbled by proprietary protectionism, inequality, and a lack of public trust. Moreover, societally impactful interventions like digital contact tracing are raising fears of surveillance creep and are challenging widely held commitments to privacy, autonomy, and civil liberties. Prepandemic concerns that data-driven innovations may function to reinforce entrenched dynamics of societal inequity have likewise intensified given the disparate impact of the virus on vulnerable social groups and the life-and-death consequences of biased and discriminatory public health outcomes. To address these concerns, I offer five steps that need to be taken to encourage responsible research and innovation. These provide a practice-based path to responsible AI/ML design and discovery centered on open, accountable, equitable, and democratically governed processes and products. When taken from the start, these steps will not only enhance the capacity of innovators to tackle COVID-19 responsibly, they will, more broadly, help to better equip the data science and AI/ML community to cope with future pandemics and to support a more humane, rational, and just society.
SklCoin: Toward a Scalable Proof-of-Stake and Collective Signature Based Consensus Protocol for Strong Consistency in Blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its corresponding software architecture. This protocol leverages two ideas: 1) the proof-of-stake concept to dynamically form stake proportionate consensus groups that represent block miners (stakeholders), and 2) scalable collective signing to efficiently commit transactions irreversibly. SklCoin has immediate finality characteristic where all miners instantly agree on the validity of blocks. In addition, SklCoin supports high transaction rate because of its fast miner election mechanism
Cascaded channel pruning using hierarchical self-distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose an approach for filter-level pruning with hierarchical knowledge distillation based on the teacher, teaching-assistant, and student framework. Our method makes use of teaching assistants at intermediate pruning levels that share the same architecture and weights as the target student. We propose to prune each model independently using the gradient information from its corresponding teacher. By considering the relative sizes of each student-teacher pair, this formulation provides a natural trade-off between the capacity gap for knowledge distillation and the bias of the filter saliency updates. Our results show improvements in the attainable accuracy and model compression across the CIFAR10 and ImageNet classification tasks using the VGG16and ResNet50 architectures. We provide an extensive evaluation that demonstrates the benefits of using a varying number of teaching assistant models at different sizes.
SMPLpix: Neural Avatars from 3D Human Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advances in deep generative models have led to an unprecedented level of realism for synthetically generated images of humans. However, one of the remaining fundamental limitations of these models is the ability to flexibly control the generative process, e.g.~change the camera and human pose while retaining the subject identity. At the same time, deformable human body models like SMPL and its successors provide full control over pose and shape but rely on classic computer graphics pipelines for rendering. Such rendering pipelines require explicit mesh rasterization that (a) does not have the potential to fix artifacts or lack of realism in the original 3D geometry and (b) until recently, were not fully incorporated into deep learning frameworks. In this work, we propose to bridge the gap between classic geometry-based rendering and the latest generative networks operating in pixel space. We train a network that directly converts a sparse set of 3D mesh vertices into photorealistic images, alleviating the need for traditional rasterization mechanism. We train our model on a large corpus of human 3D models and corresponding real photos, and show the advantage over conventional differentiable renderers both in terms of the level of photorealism and rendering efficiency.
Poet: Product-oriented Video Captioner for E-commerce
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In e-commerce, a growing number of user-generated videos are used for product promotion. How to generate video descriptions that narrate the user-preferred product characteristics depicted in the video is vital for successful promoting. Traditional video captioning methods, which focus on routinely describing what exists and happens in a video, are not amenable for product-oriented video captioning. To address this problem, we propose a product-oriented video captioner framework, abbreviated as Poet. Poet firstly represents the videos as product-oriented spatial-temporal graphs. Then, based on the aspects of the video-associated product, we perform knowledge-enhanced spatial-temporal inference on those graphs for capturing the dynamic change of fine-grained product-part characteristics. The knowledge leveraging module in Poet differs from the traditional design by performing knowledge filtering and dynamic memory modeling. We show that Poet achieves consistent performance improvement over previous methods concerning generation quality, product aspects capturing, and lexical diversity. Experiments are performed on two product-oriented video captioning datasets, buyer-generated fashion video dataset (BFVD) and fan-generated fashion video dataset (FFVD), collected from Mobile Taobao. We will release the desensitized datasets to promote further investigations on both video captioning and general video analysis problems.
Modification of Gesture-Determined-Dynamic Function with Consideration of Margins for Motion Planning of Humanoid Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

The gesture-determined-dynamic function (GDDF) offers an effective way to handle the control problems of humanoid robots. Specifically, GDDF is utilized to constrain the movements of dual arms of humanoid robots and steer specific gestures to conduct demanding tasks under certain conditions. However, there is still a deficiency in this scheme. Through experiments, we found that the joints of the dual arms, which can be regarded as the redundant manipulators, could exceed their limits slightly at the joint angle level. The performance straightly depends on the parameters designed beforehand for the GDDF, which causes a lack of adaptability to the practical applications of this method. In this paper, a modified scheme of GDDF with consideration of margins (MGDDF) is proposed. This MGDDF scheme is based on quadratic programming (QP) framework, which is widely applied to solving the redundancy resolution problems of robot arms. Moreover, three margins are introduced in the proposed MGDDF scheme to avoid joint limits. With consideration of these margins, the joints of manipulators of the humanoid robots will not exceed their limits, and the potential damages which might be caused by exceeding limits will be completely avoided. Computer simulations conducted on MATLAB further verify the feasibility and superiority of the proposed MGDDF scheme.
Applications of Robots for COVID-19 Response
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This paper reviews 262 reports appearing between March 27 and July 4, 2020, in the press, social media, and scientific literature describing 203 instances of actual use of 104 different models of ground and aerial robots for the COVID19 response. The reports are organized by stakeholders and work domain into a novel taxonomy of six application categories, reflecting major differences in work envelope, adoption strategy, and human-robot interaction constraints. Each application category is further divided into a total of 30 subcategories based on differences in mission. The largest number of reported instances were for public safety (74 out of 203) and clinical care (46), though robots for quality of life (27), continuity of work and education (22), laboratory and supply chain automation (21), and non-clinical care (13) were notable. Ground robots were used more frequently (119) than aerial systems (84), but unlike ground robots, aerial applications appeared to take advantage of existing general purpose platforms that were used for multiple applications and missions. Of the 104 models of robots, 82 were determined to be commercially available or already existed as a prototype, 11 were modifications to existing robots, 11 were built from scratch. Teleoperation dominated the control style (105 instances), with the majority of those applications intentionally providing remote presence and thus not amenable to full autonomy in the future. Automation accounted for 74 instances and taskable agency forms of autonomy, 24. The data suggests areas for further research in autonomy, human-robot interaction, and adaptability.
False Detection (Positives and Negatives) in Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Object detection is a very important function of visual perception systems. Since the early days of classical object detection based on HOG to modern deep learning based detectors, object detection has improved in accuracy. Two stage detectors usually have higher accuracy than single stage ones. Both types of detectors use some form of quantization of the search space of rectangular regions of image. There are far more of the quantized elements than true objects. The way these bounding boxes are filtered out possibly results in the false positive and false negatives. This empirical experimental study explores ways of reducing false positives and negatives with labelled data.. In the process also discovered insufficient labelling in Openimage 2019 Object Detection dataset.
Adversarial Concurrent Training: Optimizing Robustness and Accuracy Trade-off of Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Adversarial training has been proven to be an effective technique for improving the adversarial robustness of models. However, there seems to be an inherent trade-off between optimizing the model for accuracy and robustness. To this end, we propose Adversarial Concurrent Training (ACT), which employs adversarial training in a collaborative learning framework whereby we train a robust model in conjunction with a natural model in a minimax game. ACT encourages the two models to align their feature space by using the task-specific decision boundaries and explore the input space more broadly. Furthermore, the natural model acts as a regularizer, enforcing priors on features that the robust model should learn. Our analyses on the behavior of the models show that ACT leads to a robust model with lower model complexity, higher information compression in the learned representations, and high posterior entropy solutions indicative of convergence to a flatter minima. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach across different datasets and network architectures. On ImageNet, ACT achieves 68.20% standard accuracy and 44.29% robustness accuracy under a 100-iteration untargeted attack, improving upon the standard adversarial training method's 65.70% standard accuracy and 42.36% robustness.
Adding Recurrence to Pretrained Transformers for Improved Efficiency and Context Size
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Fine-tuning a pretrained transformer for a downstream task has become a standard method in NLP in the last few years. While the results from these models are impressive, applying them can be extremely computationally expensive, as is pretraining new models with the latest architectures. We present a novel method for applying pretrained transformer language models which lowers their memory requirement both at training and inference time. An additional benefit is that our method removes the fixed context size constraint that most transformer models have, allowing for more flexible use. When applied to the GPT-2 language model, we find that our method attains better perplexity than an unmodified GPT-2 model on the PG-19 and WikiText-103 corpora, for a given amount of computation or memory.
Shifu2: A Network Representation Learning Based Model for Advisor-advisee Relationship Mining
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The advisor-advisee relationship represents direct knowledge heritage, and such relationship may not be readily available from academic libraries and search engines. This work aims to discover advisor-advisee relationships hidden behind scientific collaboration networks. For this purpose, we propose a novel model based on Network Representation Learning (NRL), namely Shifu2, which takes the collaboration network as input and the identified advisor-advisee relationship as output. In contrast to existing NRL models, Shifu2 considers not only the network structure but also the semantic information of nodes and edges. Shifu2 encodes nodes and edges into low-dimensional vectors respectively, both of which are then utilized to identify advisor-advisee relationships. Experimental results illustrate improved stability and effectiveness of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods. In addition, we generate a large-scale academic genealogy dataset by taking advantage of Shifu2.
Learning Interpretable Representation for Controllable Polyphonic Music Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

While deep generative models have become the leading methods for algorithmic composition, it remains a challenging problem to control the generation process because the latent variables of most deep-learning models lack good interpretability. Inspired by the content-style disentanglement idea, we design a novel architecture, under the VAE framework, that effectively learns two interpretable latent factors of polyphonic music: chord and texture. The current model focuses on learning 8-beat long piano composition segments. We show that such chord-texture disentanglement provides a controllable generation pathway leading to a wide spectrum of applications, including compositional style transfer, texture variation, and accompaniment arrangement. Both objective and subjective evaluations show that our method achieves a successful disentanglement and high quality controlled music generation.
Logical Semantics, Dialogical Argumentation, and Textual Entailment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

In this chapter, we introduce a new dialogical system for first order classical logic which is close to natural language argumentation, and we prove its completeness with respect to usual classical validity. We combine our dialogical system with the Grail syntactic and semantic parser developed by the second author in order to address automated textual entailment, that is, we use it for deciding whether or not a sentence is a consequence of a short text. This work-which connects natural language semantics and argumentation with dialogical logic-can be viewed as a step towards an inferentialist view of natural language semantics.
Neutral Face Game Character Auto-Creation via PokerFace-GAN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Game character customization is one of the core features of many recent Role-Playing Games (RPGs), where players can edit the appearance of their in-game characters with their preferences. This paper studies the problem of automatically creating in-game characters with a single photo. In recent literature on this topic, neural networks are introduced to make game engine differentiable and the self-supervised learning is used to predict facial customization parameters. However, in previous methods, the expression parameters and facial identity parameters are highly coupled with each other, making it difficult to model the intrinsic facial features of the character. Besides, the neural network based renderer used in previous methods is also difficult to be extended to multi-view rendering cases. In this paper, considering the above problems, we propose a novel method named "PokerFace-GAN" for neutral face game character auto-creation. We first build a differentiable character renderer which is more flexible than the previous methods in multi-view rendering cases. We then take advantage of the adversarial training to effectively disentangle the expression parameters from the identity parameters and thus generate player-preferred neutral face (expression-less) characters. Since all components of our method are differentiable, our method can be easily trained under a multi-task self-supervised learning paradigm. Experiment results show that our method can generate vivid neutral face game characters that are highly similar to the input photos. The effectiveness of our method is verified by comparison results and ablation studies.
Where to Map? Iterative Rover-Copter Path Planning for Mars Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

In addition to conventional ground rovers, the Mars 2020 mission will send a helicopter to Mars. The copter's high-resolution data helps the rover to identify small hazards such as steps and pointy rocks, as well as providing rich textual information useful to predict perception performance. In this paper, we consider a three-agent system composed of a Mars rover, copter, and orbiter. The objective is to provide good localization to the rover by selecting an optimal path that minimizes the localization uncertainty accumulation during the rover's traverse. To achieve this goal, we quantify the localizability as a goodness measure associated with the map, and conduct a joint-space search over rover's path and copter's perceptual actions given prior information from the orbiter. We jointly address where to map by the copter and where to drive by the rover using the proposed iterative copter-rover path planner. We conducted numerical simulations using the map of Mars 2020 landing site to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed planner.
Cross-stakeholder service orchestration for B5G through capability provisioning
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Cross-stakeholder service orchestration is a generalization of 5G network slices which has potential to increase business agility in Beyond 5G (B5G). An architectural framework is proposed which enables domain operators to expose their functionalities towards E2E services as capabilities. Capability orchestration is proposed as a mechanism for exposure. The use of intent-based management for communicating domain owner's business goals to capability orchestration is analyzed. The combination of business goal input and capability orchestration provides a basis for agile monetization of domain resources for domain owners, and a building block for rich end-to-end B5G services.
Comparison of Syntactic Parsers on Biomedical Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Syntactic parsing is an important step in the automated text analysis which aims at information extraction. Quality of the syntactic parsing determines to a large extent the recall and precision of the text mining results. In this paper we evaluate the performance of several popular syntactic parsers in application to the biomedical text mining.