OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Online Body Schema Adaptation through Cost-Sensitive Active Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Humanoid robots have complex bodies and kinematic chains with several Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) which are difficult to model. Learning the parameters of a kinematic model can be achieved by observing the position of the robot links during prospective motions and minimising the prediction errors. This work proposes a movement efficient approach for estimating online the body-schema of a humanoid robot arm in the form of Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) parameters. A cost-sensitive active learning approach based on the A-Optimality criterion is used to select optimal joint configurations. The chosen joint configurations simultaneously minimise the error in the estimation of the body schema and minimise the movement between samples. This reduces energy consumption, along with mechanical fatigue and wear, while not compromising the learning accuracy. The work was implemented in a simulation environment, using the 7DoF arm of the iCub robot simulator. The hand pose is measured with a single camera via markers placed in the palm and back of the robot's hand. A non-parametric occlusion model is proposed to avoid choosing joint configurations where the markers are not visible, thus preventing worthless attempts. The results show cost-sensitive active learning has similar accuracy to the standard active learning approach, while reducing in about half the executed movement.
Classical simulations of communication channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

We investigate whether certain non-classical communication channels can be simulated by a classical channel with a given number of states and a given `amount' of noise. It is proved that any noisy quantum channel can be simulated by a corresponding classical channel with `the same amount' of noise. Classical simulations of general probabilistic channels are also studied.
Designing for Engaging with News using Moral Framing towards Bridging Ideological Divides
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Society is showing signs of strong ideological polarization. When pushed to seek perspectives different from their own, people often reject diverse ideas or find them unfathomable. Work has shown that framing controversial issues using the values of the audience can improve understanding of opposing views. In this paper, we present our work designing systems for addressing ideological division through educating U.S. news consumers to engage using a framework of fundamental human values known as Moral Foundations. We design and implement a series of new features that encourage users to challenge their understanding of opposing views, including annotation of moral frames in news articles, discussion of those frames via inline comments, and recommendations based on relevant moral frames. We describe two versions of features -- the first covering a suite of ways to interact with moral framing in news, and the second tailored towards collaborative annotation and discussion. We conduct a field evaluation of each design iteration with 71 participants in total over a period of 6-8 days, finding evidence suggesting users learned to re-frame their discourse in moral values of the opposing side. Our work provides several design considerations for building systems to engage with moral framing.
Number Parsing at a Gigabyte per Second
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

With disks and networks providing gigabytes per second, parsing decimal numbers from strings becomes a bottleneck. We consider the problem of parsing decimal numbers to the nearest binary floating-point value. The general problem requires variable-precision arithmetic. However, we need at most 17 digits to represent 64-bit standard floating-point numbers (IEEE 754). Thus we can represent the decimal significand with a single 64-bit word. By combining the significand and precomputed tables, we can compute the nearest floating-point number using as few as one or two 64-bit multiplications. Our implementation can be several times faster than conventional functions present in standard C libraries on modern 64-bit systems (Intel, AMD, ARM and POWER9). Our work is available as open source software used by major systems such as Apache Arrow and Yandex ClickHouse. The Go standard library has adopted a version of our approach.
BIP! DB: A Dataset of Impact Measures for Scientific Publications
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

The growth rate of the number of scientific publications is constantly increasing, creating important challenges in the identification of valuable research and in various scholarly data management applications, in general. In this context, measures which can effectively quantify the scientific impact could be invaluable. In this work, we present BIP! DB, an open dataset that contains a variety of impact measures calculated for a large collection of more than 100 million scientific publications from various disciplines.
Edge Federated Learning Via Unit-Modulus Over-The-Air Computation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Edge federated learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm that trains a global parametric model from distributed datasets based on wireless communications. This paper proposes a unit-modulus over-the-air computation (UMAirComp) framework to facilitate efficient edge federated learning, which simultaneously uploads local model parameters and updates global model parameters via analog beamforming. The proposed framework avoids sophisticated baseband signal processing, leading to low communication delays and implementation costs. Training loss bounds of UMAirComp FL systems are derived and two low-complexity large-scale optimization algorithms, termed penalty alternating minimization (PAM) and accelerated gradient projection (AGP), are proposed to minimize the nonconvex nonsmooth loss bound. Simulation results show that the proposed UMAirComp framework with PAM algorithm achieves a smaller mean square error of model parameters' estimation, training loss, and test error compared with other benchmark schemes. Moreover, the proposed UMAirComp framework with AGP algorithm achieves satisfactory performance while reduces the computational complexity by orders of magnitude compared with existing optimization algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate the implementation of UMAirComp in a vehicle-to-everything autonomous driving simulation platform. It is found that autonomous driving tasks are more sensitive to model parameter errors than other tasks since the neural networks for autonomous driving contain sparser model parameters.
Low-complexity Rank-Efficient Tensor Completion For Prediction And Online Wireless Edge Caching
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Wireless edge caching is a popular strategy to avoid backhaul congestion in the next generation networks, where the content is cached in advance at base stations to serve redundant requests during peak congestion periods. In the edge caching data, the missing observations are inevitable due to dynamic selective popularity. Among the completion methods, the tensor-based models have been shown to be the most advantageous for missing data imputation. Also, since the observations are correlated across time, files, and base stations, in this paper, we formulate the cooperative caching with recommendations as a fourth-order tensor completion and prediction problem. Since the content library can be large leading to a large dimension tensor, we modify the latent norm-based Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm with towards a much lower time complexity using multi-rank updates, rather than rank-1 updates in literature. This significantly lower time computational overhead leads in developing an online caching algorithm. With MovieLens dataset, simulations show lower reconstruction errors for the proposed algorithm as compared to that of the recent FW algorithm, albeit with lower computation overhead. It is also demonstrated that the completed tensor improves normalized cache hit rates for linear prediction schemes.
Uniform Object Rearrangement: From Complete Monotone Primitives to Efficient Non-Monotone Informed Search
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Object rearrangement is a widely-applicable and challenging task for robots. Geometric constraints must be carefully examined to avoid collisions and combinatorial issues arise as the number of objects increases. This work studies the algorithmic structure of rearranging uniform objects, where robot-object collisions do not occur but object-object collisions have to be avoided. The objective is minimizing the number of object transfers under the assumption that the robot can manipulate one object at a time. An efficiently computable decomposition of the configuration space is used to create a "region graph", which classifies all continuous paths of equivalent collision possibilities. Based on this compact but rich representation, a complete dynamic programming primitive DFSDP performs a recursive depth first search to solve monotone problems quickly, i.e., those instances that do not require objects to be moved first to an intermediate buffer. DFSDP is extended to solve single-buffer, non-monotone instances, given a choice of an object and a buffer. This work utilizes these primitives as local planners in an informed search framework for more general, non-monotone instances. The search utilizes partial solutions from the primitives to identify the most promising choice of objects and buffers. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution returns near-optimal paths with higher success rate, even for challenging non-monotone instances, than other leading alternatives.
Constrained Probabilistic Movement Primitives for Robot Trajectory Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Placing robots outside controlled conditions requires versatile movement representations that allow robots to learn new tasks and adapt them to environmental changes. The introduction of obstacles or the placement of additional robots in the workspace, the modification of the joint range due to faults or range-of-motion constraints are typical cases where the adaptation capabilities play a key role for safely performing the robot's task. Probabilistic movement primitives (ProMPs) have been proposed for representing adaptable movement skills, which are modelled as Gaussian distributions over trajectories. These are analytically tractable and can be learned from a small number of demonstrations. However, both the original ProMP formulation and the subsequent approaches only provide solutions to specific movement adaptation problems, e.g., obstacle avoidance, and a generic, unifying, probabilistic approach to adaptation is missing. In this paper we develop a generic probabilistic framework for adapting ProMPs. We unify previous adaptation techniques, for example, various types of obstacle avoidance, via-points, mutual avoidance, in one single framework and combine them to solve complex robotic problems. Additionally, we derive novel adaptation techniques such as temporally unbound via-points and mutual avoidance. We formulate adaptation as a constrained optimisation problem where we minimise the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the adapted distribution and the distribution of the original primitive while we constrain the probability mass associated with undesired trajectories to be low. We demonstrate our approach on several adaptation problems on simulated planar robot arms and 7-DOF Franka-Emika robots in a dual robot arm setting.
Enhancing the Transformer Decoder with Transition-based Syntax
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Notwithstanding recent advances, syntactic generalization remains a challenge for text decoders. While some studies showed gains from incorporating source-side symbolic syntactic and semantic structure into text generation Transformers, very little work addressed the decoding of such structure. We propose a general approach for tree decoding using a transition-based approach. Examining the challenging test case of incorporating Universal Dependencies syntax into machine translation, we present substantial improvements on test sets that focus on syntactic generalization, while presenting improved or comparable performance on standard MT benchmarks. Further qualitative analysis addresses cases where syntactic generalization in the vanilla Transformer decoder is inadequate and demonstrates the advantages afforded by integrating syntactic information.
Topological Interference Management with Adversarial Topology Perturbation: An Algorithmic Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we consider the topological interference management (TIM) problem in a dynamic setting, where an adversary perturbs network topology to prevent the exploitation of sophisticated coding opportunities (e.g., interference alignment). Focusing on a special class of network topology - chordal networks - we investigate algorithmic aspects of the TIM problem under adversarial topology perturbation. In particular, given the adversarial perturbation with respect to edge insertion/deletion, we propose a dynamic graph coloring algorithm that allows for a constant number of re-coloring updates against each inserted/deleted edge to achieve the information-theoretic optimality. This is a sharp reduction of the general graph re-coloring, whose optimal number of updates scales as the size of the network, thanks to the delicate exploitation of the structural properties of chordal graph classes.
On the Indecisiveness of Kelly-Strategyproof Social Choice Functions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

Social choice functions (SCFs) map the preferences of a group of agents over some set of alternatives to a non-empty subset of alternatives. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem has shown that only extremely restrictive SCFs are strategyproof when there are more than two alternatives. For set-valued SCFs, or so-called social choice correspondences, the situation is less clear. There are miscellaneous - mostly negative - results using a variety of strategyproofness notions and additional requirements. The simple and intuitive notion of Kelly-strategyproofness has turned out to be particularly compelling because it is weak enough to still allow for positive results. For example, the Pareto rule is strategyproof even when preferences are weak, and a number of attractive SCFs (such as the top cycle, the uncovered set, and the essential set) are strategyproof for strict preferences. In this paper, we show that, for weak preferences, only indecisive SCFs can satisfy strategyproofness. In particular, (i) every strategyproof rank-based SCF violates Pareto-optimality, (ii) every strategyproof support-based SCF (which generalize Fishburn's C2 SCFs) that satisfies Pareto-optimality returns at least one most preferred alternative of every voter, and (iii) every strategyproof non-imposing SCF returns the Condorcet loser in at least one profile. We also discuss the consequences of these results for randomized social choice.
Progressive Localization Networks for Language-based Moment Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper targets the task of language-based video moment localization. The language-based setting of this task allows for an open set of target activities, resulting in a large variation of the temporal lengths of video moments. Most existing methods prefer to first sample sufficient candidate moments with various temporal lengths, and then match them with the given query to determine the target moment. However, candidate moments generated with a fixed temporal granularity may be suboptimal to handle the large variation in moment lengths. To this end, we propose a novel multi-stage Progressive Localization Network (PLN) which progressively localizes the target moment in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, each stage of PLN has a localization branch, and focuses on candidate moments that are generated with a specific temporal granularity. The temporal granularities of candidate moments are different across the stages. Moreover, we devise a conditional feature manipulation module and an upsampling connection to bridge the multiple localization branches. In this fashion, the later stages are able to absorb the previously learned information, thus facilitating the more fine-grained localization. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PLN for language-based moment localization, especially for localizing short moments in long videos.
Learning to Segment Human Body Parts with Synthetically Trained Deep Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a new framework for human body part segmentation based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks trained using only synthetic data. The proposed approach achieves cutting-edge results without the need of training the models with real annotated data of human body parts. Our contributions include a data generation pipeline, that exploits a game engine for the creation of the synthetic data used for training the network, and a novel pre-processing module, that combines edge response maps and adaptive histogram equalization to guide the network to learn the shape of the human body parts ensuring robustness to changes in the illumination conditions. For selecting the best candidate architecture, we perform exhaustive tests on manually annotated images of real human body limbs. We further compare our method against several high-end commercial segmentation tools on the body parts segmentation task. The results show that our method outperforms the other models by a significant margin. Finally, we present an ablation study to validate our pre-processing module. With this paper, we release an implementation of the proposed approach along with the acquired datasets.
Heterogeneous Graph based Deep Learning for Biomedical Network Link Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2022
Year: 2022

Multi-scale biomedical knowledge networks are expanding with emerging experimental technologies that generates multi-scale biomedical big data. Link prediction is increasingly used especially in bipartite biomedical networks to identify hidden biological interactions and relationshipts between key entities such as compounds, targets, gene and diseases. We propose a Graph Neural Networks (GNN) method, namely Graph Pair based Link Prediction model (GPLP), for predicting biomedical network links simply based on their topological interaction information. In GPLP, 1-hop subgraphs extracted from known network interaction matrix is learnt to predict missing links. To evaluate our method, three heterogeneous biomedical networks were used, i.e. Drug-Target Interaction network (DTI), Compound-Protein Interaction network (CPI) from NIH Tox21, and Compound-Virus Inhibition network (CVI). Our proposed GPLP method significantly outperforms over the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, different network incompleteness is analysed with our devised protocol, and we also design an effective approach to improve the model robustness towards incomplete networks. Our method demonstrates the potential applications in other biomedical networks.
AHAR: Adaptive CNN for Energy-efficient Human Activity Recognition in Low-power Edge Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one of the key applications of health monitoring that requires continuous use of wearable devices to track daily activities. This paper proposes an Adaptive CNN for energy-efficient HAR (AHAR) suitable for low-power edge devices. Unlike traditional early exit architecture that makes the exit decision based on classification confidence, AHAR proposes a novel adaptive architecture that uses an output block predictor to select a portion of the baseline architecture to use during the inference phase. Experimental results show that traditional early exit architectures suffer from performance loss whereas our adaptive architecture provides similar or better performance as the baseline one while being energy-efficient. We validate our methodology in classifying locomotion activities from two datasets- Opportunity and w-HAR. Compared to the fog/cloud computing approaches for the Opportunity dataset, our baseline and adaptive architecture shows a comparable weighted F1 score of 91.79%, and 91.57%, respectively. For the w-HAR dataset, our baseline and adaptive architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art works with a weighted F1 score of 97.55%, and 97.64%, respectively. Evaluation on real hardware shows that our baseline architecture is significantly energy-efficient (422.38x less) and memory-efficient (14.29x less) compared to the works on the Opportunity dataset. For the w-HAR dataset, our baseline architecture requires 2.04x less energy and 2.18x less memory compared to the state-of-the-art work. Moreover, experimental results show that our adaptive architecture is 12.32% (Opportunity) and 11.14% (w-HAR) energy-efficient than our baseline while providing similar (Opportunity) or better (w-HAR) performance with no significant memory overhead.
A study of referencing changes in preprint-publication pairs across multiple fields
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

Manuscripts have a complex development process with multiple influencing factors. Reconstructing this process is difficult without large-scale, comparable data on different versions of manuscripts. Preprints are increasingly available and may provide access to the earliest manuscript versions. Here, we matched 6,024 preprint-publication pairs across multiple fields and examined changes in their reference lists between the manuscript versions as one aspect of manuscripts' development. We also qualitatively analysed the context of references to investigate the potential reasons for changes. We found that 90 percent of references were unchanged between versions and 8 percent were newly added. We found that manuscripts in the natural and medical sciences undergo more extensive reframing of the literature while changes in engineering mostly focused on methodological details. Our qualitative analysis suggests that peer review increases the methodological soundness of scientific claims, improves the communication of findings, and ensures appropriate credit for previous research.
CharacterGAN: Few-Shot Keypoint Character Animation and Reposing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce CharacterGAN, a generative model that can be trained on only a few samples (8 - 15) of a given character. Our model generates novel poses based on keypoint locations, which can be modified in real time while providing interactive feedback, allowing for intuitive reposing and animation. Since we only have very limited training samples, one of the key challenges lies in how to address (dis)occlusions, e.g. when a hand moves behind or in front of a body. To address this, we introduce a novel layering approach which explicitly splits the input keypoints into different layers which are processed independently. These layers represent different parts of the character and provide a strong implicit bias that helps to obtain realistic results even with strong (dis)occlusions. To combine the features of individual layers we use an adaptive scaling approach conditioned on all keypoints. Finally, we introduce a mask connectivity constraint to reduce distortion artifacts that occur with extreme out-of-distribution poses at test time. We show that our approach outperforms recent baselines and creates realistic animations for diverse characters. We also show that our model can handle discrete state changes, for example a profile facing left or right, that the different layers do indeed learn features specific for the respective keypoints in those layers, and that our model scales to larger datasets when more data is available.