OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Arabic Sentiment Analysis with Noisy Deep Explainable Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is an indispensable task for many real-world applications. Compared to limited resourced languages (i.e., Arabic, Bengali), most of the research on SA are conducted for high resourced languages (i.e., English, Chinese). Moreover, the reasons behind any prediction of the Arabic sentiment analysis methods exploiting advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches are like black-box - quite difficult to understand. This paper proposes an explainable sentiment classification framework for the Arabic language by introducing a noise layer on Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-BiLSTM models that overcome over-fitting problem. The proposed framework can explain specific predictions by training a local surrogate explainable model to understand why a particular sentiment (positive or negative) is being predicted. We carried out experiments on public benchmark Arabic SA datasets. The results concluded that adding noise layers improves the performance in sentiment analysis for the Arabic language by reducing overfitting and our method outperformed some known state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the introduced explainability with noise layer could make the model more transparent and accountable and hence help adopting AI-enabled system in practice.
Terrestrial Locomotion of PogoX: From Hardware Design to Energy Shaping and Step-to-step Dynamics Based Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

We present a novel controller design on a robotic locomotor that combines an aerial vehicle with a spring-loaded leg. The main motivation is to enable the terrestrial locomotion capability on aerial vehicles so that they can carry heavy loads: heavy enough that flying is no longer possible, e.g., when the thrust-to-weight ratio (TWR) is small. The robot is designed with a pogo-stick leg and a quadrotor, and thus it is named as PogoX. We show that with a simple and lightweight spring-loaded leg, the robot is capable of hopping with TWR $<1$. The control of hopping is realized via two components: a vertical height control via control Lyapunov function-based energy shaping, and a step-to-step (S2S) dynamics based horizontal velocity control that is inspired by the hopping of the Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP). The controller is successfully realized on the physical robot, showing dynamic terrestrial locomotion of PogoX which can hop at variable heights and different horizontal velocities with robustness to ground height variations and external pushes.
Policy Stitching: Learning Transferable Robot Policies
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Training robots with reinforcement learning (RL) typically involves heavy interactions with the environment, and the acquired skills are often sensitive to changes in task environments and robot kinematics. Transfer RL aims to leverage previous knowledge to accelerate learning of new tasks or new body configurations. However, existing methods struggle to generalize to novel robot-task combinations and scale to realistic tasks due to complex architecture design or strong regularization that limits the capacity of the learned policy. We propose Policy Stitching, a novel framework that facilitates robot transfer learning for novel combinations of robots and tasks. Our key idea is to apply modular policy design and align the latent representations between the modular interfaces. Our method allows direct stitching of the robot and task modules trained separately to form a new policy for fast adaptation. Our simulated and real-world experiments on various 3D manipulation tasks demonstrate the superior zero-shot and few-shot transfer learning performances of our method. Our project website is at: http://generalroboticslab.com/PolicyStitching/ .
Text Classification: A Perspective of Deep Learning Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, with the rapid development of information on the Internet, the number of complex texts and documents has increased exponentially, which requires a deeper understanding of deep learning methods in order to accurately classify texts using deep learning techniques, and thus deep learning methods have become increasingly important in text classification. Text classification is a class of tasks that automatically classifies a set of documents into multiple predefined categories based on their content and subject matter. Thus, the main goal of text classification is to enable users to extract information from textual resources and process processes such as retrieval, classification, and machine learning techniques together in order to classify different categories. Many new techniques of deep learning have already achieved excellent results in natural language processing. The success of these learning algorithms relies on their ability to understand complex models and non-linear relationships in data. However, finding the right structure, architecture, and techniques for text classification is a challenge for researchers. This paper introduces deep learning-based text classification algorithms, including important steps required for text classification tasks such as feature extraction, feature reduction, and evaluation strategies and methods. At the end of the article, different deep learning text classification methods are compared and summarized.
GHN-QAT: Training Graph Hypernetworks to Predict Quantization-Robust Parameters of Unseen Limited Precision Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Hypernetworks (GHN) can predict the parameters of varying unseen CNN architectures with surprisingly good accuracy at a fraction of the cost of iterative optimization. Following these successes, preliminary research has explored the use of GHNs to predict quantization-robust parameters for 8-bit and 4-bit quantized CNNs. However, this early work leveraged full-precision float32 training and only quantized for testing. We explore the impact of quantization-aware training and/or other quantization-based training strategies on quantized robustness and performance of GHN predicted parameters for low-precision CNNs. We show that quantization-aware training can significantly improve quantized accuracy for GHN predicted parameters of 4-bit quantized CNNs and even lead to greater-than-random accuracy for 2-bit quantized CNNs. These promising results open the door for future explorations such as investigating the use of GHN predicted parameters as initialization for further quantized training of individual CNNs, further exploration of "extreme bitwidth" quantization, and mixed precision quantization schemes.
A Formalized Extension of the Substitution Lemma in Coq
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

The substitution lemma is a renowned theorem within the realm of lambda-calculus theory and concerns the interactional behaviour of the metasubstitution operation. In this work, we augment the lambda-calculus's grammar with an uninterpreted explicit substitution operator, which allows the use of our framework for different calculi with explicit substitutions. Our primary contribution lies in verifying that, despite these modifications, the substitution lemma continues to remain valid. This confirmation was achieved using the Coq proof assistant. Our formalization methodology employs a nominal approach, which provides a direct implementation of the alpha-equivalence concept. The strategy involved in variable renaming within the proofs presents a challenge, specially on ensuring an exploration of the implications of our extension to the grammar of the lambda-calculus.
Efficient RRT*-based Safety-Constrained Motion Planning for Continuum Robots in Dynamic Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Continuum robots, characterized by their high flexibility and infinite degrees of freedom (DoFs), have gained prominence in applications such as minimally invasive surgery and hazardous environment exploration. However, the intrinsic complexity of continuum robots requires a significant amount of time for their motion planning, posing a hurdle to their practical implementation. To tackle these challenges, efficient motion planning methods such as Rapidly Exploring Random Trees (RRT) and its variant, RRT*, have been employed. This paper introduces a unique RRT*-based motion control method tailored for continuum robots. Our approach embeds safety constraints derived from the robots' posture states, facilitating autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance in rapidly changing environments. Simulation results show efficient trajectory planning amidst multiple dynamic obstacles and provide a robust performance evaluation based on the generated postures. Finally, preliminary tests were conducted on a two-segment cable-driven continuum robot prototype, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed planning approach. This method is versatile and can be adapted and deployed for various types of continuum robots through parameter adjustments.
Impact of Human-AI Interaction on User Trust and Reliance in AI-Assisted Qualitative Coding
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

While AI shows promise for enhancing the efficiency of qualitative analysis, the unique human-AI interaction resulting from varied coding strategies makes it challenging to develop a trustworthy AI-assisted qualitative coding system (AIQCs) that supports coding tasks effectively. We bridge this gap by exploring the impact of varying coding strategies on user trust and reliance on AI. We conducted a mixed-methods split-plot 3x3 study, involving 30 participants, and a follow-up study with 6 participants, exploring varying text selection and code length in the use of our AIQCs system for qualitative analysis. Our results indicate that qualitative open coding should be conceptualized as a series of distinct subtasks, each with differing levels of complexity, and therefore, should be given tailored design considerations. We further observed a discrepancy between perceived and behavioral measures, and emphasized the potential challenges of under- and over-reliance on AIQCs systems. Additional design implications were also proposed for consideration.
Matrix Factorization in Tropical and Mixed Tropical-Linear Algebras
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Matrix Factorization (MF) has found numerous applications in Machine Learning and Data Mining, including collaborative filtering recommendation systems, dimensionality reduction, data visualization, and community detection. Motivated by the recent successes of tropical algebra and geometry in machine learning, we investigate two problems involving matrix factorization over the tropical algebra. For the first problem, Tropical Matrix Factorization (TMF), which has been studied already in the literature, we propose an improved algorithm that avoids many of the local optima. The second formulation considers the approximate decomposition of a given matrix into the product of three matrices where a usual matrix product is followed by a tropical product. This formulation has a very interesting interpretation in terms of the learning of the utility functions of multiple users. We also present numerical results illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, as well as an application to recommendation systems with promising results.
Recursive Counterfactual Deconfounding for Object Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Image recognition is a classic and common task in the computer vision field, which has been widely applied in the past decade. Most existing methods in literature aim to learn discriminative features from labeled images for classification, however, they generally neglect confounders that infiltrate into the learned features, resulting in low performances for discriminating test images. To address this problem, we propose a Recursive Counterfactual Deconfounding model for object recognition in both closed-set and open-set scenarios based on counterfactual analysis, called RCD. The proposed model consists of a factual graph and a counterfactual graph, where the relationships among image features, model predictions, and confounders are built and updated recursively for learning more discriminative features. It performs in a recursive manner so that subtler counterfactual features could be learned and eliminated progressively, and both the discriminability and generalization of the proposed model could be improved accordingly. In addition, a negative correlation constraint is designed for alleviating the negative effects of the counterfactual features further at the model training stage. Extensive experimental results on both closed-set recognition task and open-set recognition task demonstrate that the proposed RCD model performs better than 11 state-of-the-art baselines significantly in most cases.
Newton Method-based Subspace Support Vector Data Description
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we present an adaptation of Newton's method for the optimization of Subspace Support Vector Data Description (S-SVDD). The objective of S-SVDD is to map the original data to a subspace optimized for one-class classification, and the iterative optimization process of data mapping and description in S-SVDD relies on gradient descent. However, gradient descent only utilizes first-order information, which may lead to suboptimal results. To address this limitation, we leverage Newton's method to enhance data mapping and data description for an improved optimization of subspace learning-based one-class classification. By incorporating this auxiliary information, Newton's method offers a more efficient strategy for subspace learning in one-class classification as compared to gradient-based optimization. The paper discusses the limitations of gradient descent and the advantages of using Newton's method in subspace learning for one-class classification tasks. We provide both linear and nonlinear formulations of Newton's method-based optimization for S-SVDD. In our experiments, we explored both the minimization and maximization strategies of the objective. The results demonstrate that the proposed optimization strategy outperforms the gradient-based S-SVDD in most cases.
Egocentric RGB+Depth Action Recognition in Industry-Like Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Action recognition from an egocentric viewpoint is a crucial perception task in robotics and enables a wide range of human-robot interactions. While most computer vision approaches prioritize the RGB camera, the Depth modality - which can further amplify the subtleties of actions from an egocentric perspective - remains underexplored. Our work focuses on recognizing actions from egocentric RGB and Depth modalities in an industry-like environment. To study this problem, we consider the recent MECCANO dataset, which provides a wide range of assembling actions. Our framework is based on the 3D Video SWIN Transformer to encode both RGB and Depth modalities effectively. To address the inherent skewness in real-world multimodal action occurrences, we propose a training strategy using an exponentially decaying variant of the focal loss modulating factor. Additionally, to leverage the information in both RGB and Depth modalities, we opt for late fusion to combine the predictions from each modality. We thoroughly evaluate our method on the action recognition task of the MECCANO dataset, and it significantly outperforms the prior work. Notably, our method also secured first place at the multimodal action recognition challenge at ICIAP 2023.
LORD: Low Rank Decomposition Of Monolingual Code LLMs For One-Shot Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Low Rank Decomposition of matrix - splitting a large matrix into a product of two smaller matrix offers a means for compression that reduces the parameters of a model without sparsification, and hence delivering more speedup on modern hardware. Moreover, unlike quantization, the compressed linear layers remain fully differentiable and all the parameters trainable, while being able to leverage the existing highly efficient kernels over floating point matrices. We study the potential to compress Large Language Models (LLMs) for monolingual Code generation via Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) and observe that ranks for the linear layers in these models can be reduced by upto 39.58% with less than 1% increase in perplexity. We then use Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) to compress StarCoder 16B to 13.2B parameter with no drop and to 12.3B with minimal drop in HumanEval Pass@1 score, in less than 10 minutes on a single A100. The compressed models speeds up inference by up to 22.35% with just a single line of change in code over huggingface's implementation with pytorch backend. Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) models remain compatible with state of the art near-lossless quantization method such as SpQR, which allows leveraging further compression gains of quantization. Lastly, QLoRA over Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) model further reduces memory requirements by as much as 21.2% over vanilla QLoRA while offering similar gains from parameter efficient fine tuning. Our work shows Low Rank Decomposition (LoRD) as a promising new paradigm for LLM compression.
An Upper-Bound on the Decoding Failure Probability of the LRPC Decoder
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Low Rank Parity Check (LRPC) codes form a class of rank-metric error-correcting codes that was purposely introduced to design public-key encryption schemes. An LRPC code is defined from a parity check matrix whose entries belong to a relatively low dimensional vector subspace of a large finite field. This particular algebraic feature can then be exploited to correct with high probability rank errors when the parameters are appropriately chosen. In this paper, we present theoretical upper-bounds on the probability that the LRPC decoding algorithm fails.
Diversify and Conquer: Bandits and Diversity for an Enhanced E-commerce Homepage Experience
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

In the realm of e-commerce, popular platforms utilize widgets to recommend advertisements and products to their users. However, the prevalence of mobile device usage on these platforms introduces a unique challenge due to the limited screen real estate available. Consequently, the positioning of relevant widgets becomes pivotal in capturing and maintaining customer engagement. Given the restricted screen size of mobile devices, widgets placed at the top of the interface are more prominently displayed and thus attract greater user attention. Conversely, widgets positioned further down the page require users to scroll, resulting in reduced visibility and subsequent lower impression rates. Therefore it becomes imperative to place relevant widgets on top. However, selecting relevant widgets to display is a challenging task as the widgets can be heterogeneous, widgets can be introduced or removed at any given time from the platform. In this work, we model the vertical widget reordering as a contextual multi-arm bandit problem with delayed batch feedback. The objective is to rank the vertical widgets in a personalized manner. We present a two-stage ranking framework that combines contextual bandits with a diversity layer to improve the overall ranking. We demonstrate its effectiveness through offline and online A/B results, conducted on proprietary data from Myntra, a major fashion e-commerce platform in India.
Convolutional autoencoder-based multimodal one-class classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

One-class classification refers to approaches of learning using data from a single class only. In this paper, we propose a deep learning one-class classification method suitable for multimodal data, which relies on two convolutional autoencoders jointly trained to reconstruct the positive input data while obtaining the data representations in the latent space as compact as possible. During inference, the distance of the latent representation of an input to the origin can be used as an anomaly score. Experimental results using a multimodal macroinvertebrate image classification dataset show that the proposed multimodal method yields better results as compared to the unimodal approach. Furthermore, study the effect of different input image sizes, and we investigate how recently proposed feature diversity regularizers affect the performance of our approach. We show that such regularizers improve performance.
Tracking Control for a Spherical Pendulum via Curriculum Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Reinforcement Learning (RL) allows learning non-trivial robot control laws purely from data. However, many successful applications of RL have relied on ad-hoc regularizations, such as hand-crafted curricula, to regularize the learning performance. In this paper, we pair a recent algorithm for automatically building curricula with RL on massively parallelized simulations to learn a tracking controller for a spherical pendulum on a robotic arm via RL. Through an improved optimization scheme that better respects the non-Euclidean task structure, we allow the method to reliably generate curricula of trajectories to be tracked, resulting in faster and more robust learning compared to an RL baseline that does not exploit this form of structured learning. The learned policy matches the performance of an optimal control baseline on the real system, demonstrating the potential of curriculum RL to jointly learn state estimation and control for non-linear tracking tasks.
Exploring the Impact of Serverless Computing on Peer To Peer Training Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

The increasing demand for computational power in big data and machine learning has driven the development of distributed training methodologies. Among these, peer-to-peer (P2P) networks provide advantages such as enhanced scalability and fault tolerance. However, they also encounter challenges related to resource consumption, costs, and communication overhead as the number of participating peers grows. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture that combines serverless computing with P2P networks for distributed training and present a method for efficient parallel gradient computation under resource constraints. Our findings show a significant enhancement in gradient computation time, with up to a 97.34\% improvement compared to conventional P2P distributed training methods. As for costs, our examination confirmed that the serverless architecture could incur higher expenses, reaching up to 5.4 times more than instance-based architectures. It is essential to consider that these higher costs are associated with marked improvements in computation time, particularly under resource-constrained scenarios. Despite the cost-time trade-off, the serverless approach still holds promise due to its pay-as-you-go model. Utilizing dynamic resource allocation, it enables faster training times and optimized resource utilization, making it a promising candidate for a wide range of machine learning applications.