OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Does Vision-and-Language Pretraining Improve Lexical Grounding?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Linguistic representations derived from text alone have been criticized for their lack of grounding, i.e., connecting words to their meanings in the physical world. Vision-and-Language (VL) models, trained jointly on text and image or video data, have been offered as a response to such criticisms. However, while VL pretraining has shown success on multimodal tasks such as visual question answering, it is not yet known how the internal linguistic representations themselves compare to their text-only counterparts. This paper compares the semantic representations learned via VL vs. text-only pretraining for two recent VL models using a suite of analyses (clustering, probing, and performance on a commonsense question answering task) in a language-only setting. We find that the multimodal models fail to significantly outperform the text-only variants, suggesting that future work is required if multimodal pretraining is to be pursued as a means of improving NLP in general.
Uncertainty Toolbox: an Open-Source Library for Assessing, Visualizing, and Improving Uncertainty Quantification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With increasing deployment of machine learning systems in various real-world tasks, there is a greater need for accurate quantification of predictive uncertainty. While the common goal in uncertainty quantification (UQ) in machine learning is to approximate the true distribution of the target data, many works in UQ tend to be disjoint in the evaluation metrics utilized, and disparate implementations for each metric lead to numerical results that are not directly comparable across different works. To address this, we introduce Uncertainty Toolbox, an open-source python library that helps to assess, visualize, and improve UQ. Uncertainty Toolbox additionally provides pedagogical resources, such as a glossary of key terms and an organized collection of key paper references. We hope that this toolbox is useful for accelerating and uniting research efforts in uncertainty in machine learning.
Comparison of single and multitask learning for predicting cognitive decline based on MRI data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive subscale (ADAS-Cog) is a neuropsychological tool that has been designed to assess the severity of cognitive symptoms of dementia. Personalized prediction of the changes in ADAS-Cog scores could help in timing therapeutic interventions in dementia and at-risk populations. In the present work, we compared single and multitask learning approaches to predict the changes in ADAS-Cog scores based on T1-weighted anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In contrast to most machine learning-based prediction methods ADAS-Cog changes, we stratified the subjects based on their baseline diagnoses and evaluated the prediction performances in each group. Our experiments indicated a positive relationship between the predicted and observed ADAS-Cog score changes in each diagnostic group, suggesting that T1-weighted MRI has a predictive value for evaluating cognitive decline in the entire AD continuum. We further studied whether correction of the differences in the magnetic field strength of MRI would improve the ADAS-Cog score prediction. The partial least square-based domain adaptation slightly improved the prediction performance, but the improvement was marginal. In summary, this study demonstrated that ADAS-Cog change could be, to some extent, predicted based on anatomical MRI. Based on this study, the recommended method for learning the predictive models is a single-task regularized linear regression due to its simplicity and good performance. It appears important to combine the training data across all subject groups for the most effective predictive models.
Artificial Intelligence Edge Applications in 5G Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, the 5th Generation of mobile communications has been thoroughly researched to improve the previous 4G capabilities. As opposed to earlier architectures, 5G Networks provide low latency access to services with high reliability. Additionally, they allow exploring new opportunities for applications that need to offload computing load in the network with a real-time response. This paper analyzes the feasibility of a real-time Computer Vision use case model in small devices using a fully deployed 5G Network. The results show an improvement in Latency and Throughput over previous generations, and a high percentage of Availability and Reliability in the analyzed use case.
Relation-Guided Pre-Training for Open-Domain Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Answering complex open-domain questions requires understanding the latent relations between involving entities. However, we found that the existing QA datasets are extremely imbalanced in some types of relations, which hurts the generalization performance over questions with long-tail relations. To remedy this problem, in this paper, we propose a Relation-Guided Pre-Training (RGPT-QA) framework. We first generate a relational QA dataset covering a wide range of relations from both the Wikidata triplets and Wikipedia hyperlinks. We then pre-train a QA model to infer the latent relations from the question, and then conduct extractive QA to get the target answer entity. We demonstrate that by pretraining with propoed RGPT-QA techique, the popular open-domain QA model, Dense Passage Retriever (DPR), achieves 2.2%, 2.4%, and 6.3% absolute improvement in Exact Match accuracy on Natural Questions, TriviaQA, and WebQuestions. Particularly, we show that RGPT-QA improves significantly on questions with long-tail relations
Towards a Real-Time Facial Analysis System
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Facial analysis is an active research area in computer vision, with many practical applications. Most of the existing studies focus on addressing one specific task and maximizing its performance. For a complete facial analysis system, one needs to solve these tasks efficiently to ensure a smooth experience. In this work, we present a system-level design of a real-time facial analysis system. With a collection of deep neural networks for object detection, classification, and regression, the system recognizes age, gender, facial expression, and facial similarity for each person that appears in the camera view. We investigate the parallelization and interplay of individual tasks. Results on common off-the-shelf architecture show that the system's accuracy is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods, and the recognition speed satisfies real-time requirements. Moreover, we propose a multitask network for jointly predicting the first three attributes, i.e., age, gender, and facial expression. Source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/mahehu/TUT-live-age-estimator.
Social, Environmental, and Technical: Factors at Play in the Current Use and Future Design of Small-Group Captioning
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Real-time captioning is a critical accessibility tool for many d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people. While the vast majority of captioning work has focused on formal settings and technical innovations, in contrast, we investigate captioning for informal, interactive small-group conversations, which have a high degree of spontaneity and foster dynamic social interactions. This paper reports on semi-structured interviews and design probe activities we conducted with 15 DHH participants to understand their use of existing real-time captioning services and future design preferences for both in-person and remote small-group communication. We found that our participants' experiences of captioned small-group conversations are shaped by social, environmental, and technical considerations (e.g., interlocutors' pre-established relationships, the type of captioning displays available, and how far captions lag behind speech). When considering future captioning tools, participants were interested in greater feedback on non-speech elements of conversation (e.g., speaker identity, speech rate, volume) both for their personal use and to guide hearing interlocutors toward more accessible communication. We contribute a qualitative account of DHH people's real-time captioning experiences during small-group conversation and future design considerations to better support the groups being captioned, both in person and online.
What Would it Take to get Biomedical QA Systems into Practice?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Medical question answering (QA) systems have the potential to answer clinicians uncertainties about treatment and diagnosis on demand, informed by the latest evidence. However, despite the significant progress in general QA made by the NLP community, medical QA systems are still not widely used in clinical environments. One likely reason for this is that clinicians may not readily trust QA system outputs, in part because transparency, trustworthiness, and provenance have not been key considerations in the design of such models. In this paper we discuss a set of criteria that, if met, we argue would likely increase the utility of biomedical QA systems, which may in turn lead to adoption of such systems in practice. We assess existing models, tasks, and datasets with respect to these criteria, highlighting shortcomings of previously proposed approaches and pointing toward what might be more usable QA systems.
Graph-based Cluttered Scene Generation and Interactive Exploration using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce a novel method to teach a robotic agent to interactively explore cluttered yet structured scenes, such as kitchen pantries and grocery shelves, by leveraging the physical plausibility of the scene. We propose a novel learning framework to train an effective scene exploration policy to discover hidden objects with minimal interactions. First, we define a novel scene grammar to represent structured clutter. Then we train a Graph Neural Network (GNN) based Scene Generation agent using deep reinforcement learning (deep RL), to manipulate this Scene Grammar to create a diverse set of stable scenes, each containing multiple hidden objects. Given such cluttered scenes, we then train a Scene Exploration agent, using deep RL, to uncover hidden objects by interactively rearranging the scene. We show that our learned agents hide and discover significantly more objects than the baselines. We present quantitative results that prove the generalization capabilities of our agents. We also demonstrate sim-to-real transfer by successfully deploying the learned policy on a real UR10 robot to explore real-world cluttered scenes. The supplemental video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2Jo7wwaXss.
Efficient Partial Rewind of Polar Codes' Successive Cancellation-based Decoders for Re-decoding Attempts
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Successive cancellation (SC) process is an essential component of various decoding algorithms used for polar codes and their variants. Rewinding this process seems trivial if we have access to all intermediate log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) and partial sums. However, as the block length increases, retaining all of the intermediate information becomes inefficient and impractical. Rewinding the SC process in a memory-efficient way is a problem that we address in this paper. We first explore the properties of the SC process based on the binary representation of the bit indices by introducing a new operator used for grouping the bit indices. This special grouping helps us in finding the closest bit index to the target index for rewinding. We also analytically prove that this approach gives access to the untouched intermediate information stored in the memory which is essential in resuming the SC process. Then, we adapt the proposed approach to multiple rewinds and apply it on SC-flip decoding and shifted-pruning based list decoding. The numerical evaluation of the proposed solution shows a significant reduction of >=50% in the complexity of the additional decoding attempts at medium and high SNR regimes for SC-flip decoding and less for shifted-pruning based list decoding.
The First Vision For Vitals (V4V) Challenge for Non-Contact Video-Based Physiological Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Telehealth has the potential to offset the high demand for help during public health emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) - the problem of non-invasively estimating blood volume variations in the microvascular tissue from video - would be well suited for these situations. Over the past few years a number of research groups have made rapid advances in remote PPG methods for estimating heart rate from digital video and obtained impressive results. How these various methods compare in naturalistic conditions, where spontaneous behavior, facial expressions, and illumination changes are present, is relatively unknown. To enable comparisons among alternative methods, the 1st Vision for Vitals Challenge (V4V) presented a novel dataset containing high-resolution videos time-locked with varied physiological signals from a diverse population. In this paper, we outline the evaluation protocol, the data used, and the results. V4V is to be held in conjunction with the 2021 International Conference on Computer Vision.
The NiuTrans Machine Translation Systems for WMT21
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

This paper describes NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT 2021 news translation tasks. We made submissions to 9 language directions, including English$\leftrightarrow$$\{$Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Icelandic$\}$ and English$\rightarrow$Hausa tasks. Our primary systems are built on several effective variants of Transformer, e.g., Transformer-DLCL, ODE-Transformer. We also utilize back-translation, knowledge distillation, post-ensemble, and iterative fine-tuning techniques to enhance the model performance further.
A Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach To Maneuver A Quadrotor Despite Single Rotor Failure
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Ability to recover from faults and continue mission is desirable for many quadrotor applications. The quadrotor's rotor may fail while performing a mission and it is essential to develop recovery strategies so that the vehicle is not damaged. In this paper, we develop a model-free deep reinforcement learning approach for a quadrotor to recover from a single rotor failure. The approach is based on Soft-actor-critic that enables the vehicle to hover, land, and perform complex maneuvers. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed approach using a custom simulator. The results show that the proposed approach achieves hover, landing, and path following in 2D and 3D. We also show that the proposed approach is robust to wind disturbances.
Less is More: Learning from Synthetic Data with Fine-grained Attributes for Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Person re-identification (re-ID) plays an important role in applications such as public security and video surveillance. Recently, learning from synthetic data, which benefits from the popularity of synthetic data engine, has attracted great attention from the public eyes. However, existing datasets are limited in quantity, diversity and realisticity, and cannot be efficiently used for re-ID problem. To address this challenge, we manually construct a large-scale person dataset named FineGPR with fine-grained attribute annotations. Moreover, aiming to fully exploit the potential of FineGPR and promote the efficient training from millions of synthetic data, we propose an attribute analysis pipeline called AOST, which dynamically learns attribute distribution in real domain, then eliminates the gap between synthetic and real-world data and thus is freely deployed to new scenarios. Experiments conducted on benchmarks demonstrate that FineGPR with AOST outperforms (or is on par with) existing real and synthetic datasets, which suggests its feasibility for re-ID task and proves the proverbial less-is-more principle. Our synthetic FineGPR dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/JeremyXSC/FineGPR.
Role of Language Relatedness in Multilingual Fine-tuning of Language Models: A Case Study in Indo-Aryan Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We explore the impact of leveraging the relatedness of languages that belong to the same family in NLP models using multilingual fine-tuning. We hypothesize and validate that multilingual fine-tuning of pre-trained language models can yield better performance on downstream NLP applications, compared to models fine-tuned on individual languages. A first of its kind detailed study is presented to track performance change as languages are added to a base language in a graded and greedy (in the sense of best boost of performance) manner; which reveals that careful selection of subset of related languages can significantly improve performance than utilizing all related languages. The Indo-Aryan (IA) language family is chosen for the study, the exact languages being Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi and Urdu. The script barrier is crossed by simple rule-based transliteration of the text of all languages to Devanagari. Experiments are performed on mBERT, IndicBERT, MuRIL and two RoBERTa-based LMs, the last two being pre-trained by us. Low resource languages, such as Oriya and Punjabi, are found to be the largest beneficiaries of multilingual fine-tuning. Textual Entailment, Entity Classification, Section Title Prediction, tasks of IndicGLUE and POS tagging form our test bed. Compared to monolingual fine tuning we get relative performance improvement of up to 150% in the downstream tasks. The surprise take-away is that for any language there is a particular combination of other languages which yields the best performance, and any additional language is in fact detrimental.
Live Speech Portraits: Real-Time Photorealistic Talking-Head Animation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

To the best of our knowledge, we first present a live system that generates personalized photorealistic talking-head animation only driven by audio signals at over 30 fps. Our system contains three stages. The first stage is a deep neural network that extracts deep audio features along with a manifold projection to project the features to the target person's speech space. In the second stage, we learn facial dynamics and motions from the projected audio features. The predicted motions include head poses and upper body motions, where the former is generated by an autoregressive probabilistic model which models the head pose distribution of the target person. Upper body motions are deduced from head poses. In the final stage, we generate conditional feature maps from previous predictions and send them with a candidate image set to an image-to-image translation network to synthesize photorealistic renderings. Our method generalizes well to wild audio and successfully synthesizes high-fidelity personalized facial details, e.g., wrinkles, teeth. Our method also allows explicit control of head poses. Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, along with user studies, demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art techniques.
Diarisation using location tracking with agglomerative clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Previous works have shown that spatial location information can be complementary to speaker embeddings for a speaker diarisation task. However, the models used often assume that speakers are fairly stationary throughout a meeting. This paper proposes to relax this assumption, by explicitly modelling the movements of speakers within an Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC) diarisation framework. Kalman filters, which track the locations of speakers, are used to compute log-likelihood ratios that contribute to the cluster affinity computations for the AHC merging and stopping decisions. Experiments show that the proposed approach is able to yield improvements on a Microsoft rich meeting transcription task, compared to methods that do not use location information or that make stationarity assumptions.
NOAHQA: Numerical Reasoning with Interpretable Graph Question Answering Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

While diverse question answering (QA) datasets have been proposed and contributed significantly to the development of deep learning models for QA tasks, the existing datasets fall short in two aspects. First, we lack QA datasets covering complex questions that involve answers as well as the reasoning processes to get the answers. As a result, the state-of-the-art QA research on numerical reasoning still focuses on simple calculations and does not provide the mathematical expressions or evidences justifying the answers. Second, the QA community has contributed much effort to improving the interpretability of QA models. However, these models fail to explicitly show the reasoning process, such as the evidence order for reasoning and the interactions between different pieces of evidence. To address the above shortcomings, we introduce NOAHQA, a conversational and bilingual QA dataset with questions requiring numerical reasoning with compound mathematical expressions. With NOAHQA, we develop an interpretable reasoning graph as well as the appropriate evaluation metric to measure the answer quality. We evaluate the state-of-the-art QA models trained using existing QA datasets on NOAHQA and show that the best among them can only achieve 55.5 exact match scores, while the human performance is 89.7. We also present a new QA model for generating a reasoning graph where the reasoning graph metric still has a large gap compared with that of humans, e.g., 28 scores.
Noisy-to-Noisy Voice Conversion Framework with Denoising Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

In a conventional voice conversion (VC) framework, a VC model is often trained with a clean dataset consisting of speech data carefully recorded and selected by minimizing background interference. However, collecting such a high-quality dataset is expensive and time-consuming. Leveraging crowd-sourced speech data in training is more economical. Moreover, for some real-world VC scenarios such as VC in video and VC-based data augmentation for speech recognition systems, the background sounds themselves are also informative and need to be maintained. In this paper, to explore VC with the flexibility of handling background sounds, we propose a noisy-to-noisy (N2N) VC framework composed of a denoising module and a VC module. With the proposed framework, we can convert the speaker's identity while preserving the background sounds. Both objective and subjective evaluations are conducted, and the results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Locality Matters: A Scalable Value Decomposition Approach for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) faces significant scalability issues due to state and action spaces that are exponentially large in the number of agents. As environments grow in size, effective credit assignment becomes increasingly harder and often results in infeasible learning times. Still, in many real-world settings, there exist simplified underlying dynamics that can be leveraged for more scalable solutions. In this work, we exploit such locality structures effectively whilst maintaining global cooperation. We propose a novel, value-based multi-agent algorithm called LOMAQ, which incorporates local rewards in the Centralized Training Decentralized Execution paradigm. Additionally, we provide a direct reward decomposition method for finding these local rewards when only a global signal is provided. We test our method empirically, showing it scales well compared to other methods, significantly improving performance and convergence speed.