OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A User Interface for Sense-making of the Reasoning Process while Interacting with Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

As knowledge graph has the potential to bridge the gap between commonsense knowledge and reasoning over actionable capabilities of mobile robotic platforms, incorporating knowledge graph into robotic system attracted increasing attention in recent years. Previously, graph visualization has been used wildly by developers to make sense of knowledge representations. However, due to lacking the link between abstract knowledge of the real-world environment and the robot's actions, transitional visualization tools are incompatible for expert-user to understand, test, supervise and modify the graph-based reasoning system with the embodiment of the robots. Therefore, we developed an interface which enables robotic experts to send commands to the robot in natural language, then interface visualizes the procedures of the robot mapping the command to the functions for querying in the commonsense knowledge database, links the result to the real world instances in a 3D map and demonstrate the execution of the robot from the first-person perspective of the robot. After 3 weeks of usage of the system by robotic experts in their daily development, some feedback was collected, which provides insight for designing such systems.
A Policy-Guided Imitation Approach for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generally be categorized into two types: RL-based and Imitation-based. RL-based methods could in principle enjoy out-of-distribution generalization but suffer from erroneous off-policy evaluation. Imitation-based methods avoid off-policy evaluation but are too conservative to surpass the dataset. In this study, we propose an alternative approach, inheriting the training stability of imitation-style methods while still allowing logical out-of-distribution generalization. We decompose the conventional reward-maximizing policy in offline RL into a guide-policy and an execute-policy. During training, the guide-poicy and execute-policy are learned using only data from the dataset, in a supervised and decoupled manner. During evaluation, the guide-policy guides the execute-policy by telling where it should go so that the reward can be maximized, serving as the \textit{Prophet}. By doing so, our algorithm allows \textit{state-compositionality} from the dataset, rather than \textit{action-compositionality} conducted in prior imitation-style methods. We dumb this new approach Policy-guided Offline RL (\texttt{POR}). \texttt{POR} demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on D4RL, a standard benchmark for offline RL. We also highlight the benefits of \texttt{POR} in terms of improving with supplementary suboptimal data and easily adapting to new tasks by only changing the guide-poicy.
Data-Efficient Augmentation for Training Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Data augmentation is essential to achieve state-of-the-art performance in many deep learning applications. However, the most effective augmentation techniques become computationally prohibitive for even medium-sized datasets. To address this, we propose a rigorous technique to select subsets of data points that when augmented, closely capture the training dynamics of full data augmentation. We first show that data augmentation, modeled as additive perturbations, improves learning and generalization by relatively enlarging and perturbing the smaller singular values of the network Jacobian, while preserving its prominent directions. This prevents overfitting and enhances learning the harder to learn information. Then, we propose a framework to iteratively extract small subsets of training data that when augmented, closely capture the alignment of the fully augmented Jacobian with labels/residuals. We prove that stochastic gradient descent applied to the augmented subsets found by our approach has similar training dynamics to that of fully augmented data. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves 6.3x speedup on CIFAR10 and 2.2x speedup on SVHN, and outperforms the baselines by up to 10% across various subset sizes. Similarly, on TinyImageNet and ImageNet, our method beats the baselines by up to 8%, while achieving up to 3.3x speedup across various subset sizes. Finally, training on and augmenting 50% subsets using our method on a version of CIFAR10 corrupted with label noise even outperforms using the full dataset. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tianyu139/data-efficient-augmentation
Stability of Accuracy for the Training of DNNs Via the Uniform Doubling Condition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We study the stability of accuracy during the training of deep neural networks (DNNs). In this context, the training of a DNN is performed via the minimization of a cross-entropy loss function, and the performance metric is accuracy (the proportion of objects that are classified correctly). While training results in a decrease of loss, the accuracy does not necessarily increase during the process and may sometimes even decrease. The goal of achieving stability of accuracy is to ensure that if accuracy is high at some initial time, it remains high throughout training. A recent result by Berlyand, Jabin, and Safsten introduces a doubling condition on the training data, which ensures the stability of accuracy during training for DNNs using the absolute value activation function. For training data in $\mathbb{R}^n$, this doubling condition is formulated using slabs in $\mathbb{R}^n$ and depends on the choice of the slabs. The goal of this paper is twofold. First, to make the doubling condition uniform, that is, independent of the choice of slabs. This leads to sufficient conditions for stability in terms of training data only. In other words, for a training set $T$ that satisfies the uniform doubling condition, there exists a family of DNNs such that a DNN from this family with high accuracy on the training set at some training time $t_0$ will have high accuracy for all time $t>t_0$. Moreover, establishing uniformity is necessary for the numerical implementation of the doubling condition. The second goal is to extend the original stability results from the absolute value activation function to a broader class of piecewise linear activation functions with finitely many critical points, such as the popular Leaky ReLU.
Towards Effective Image Manipulation Detection with Proposal Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep models have been widely and successfully used in image manipulation detection, which aims to classify tampered images and localize tampered regions. Most existing methods mainly focus on extracting global features from tampered images, while neglecting the relationships of local features between tampered and authentic regions within a single tampered image. To exploit such spatial relationships, we propose Proposal Contrastive Learning (PCL) for effective image manipulation detection. Our PCL consists of a two-stream architecture by extracting two types of global features from RGB and noise views respectively. To further improve the discriminative power, we exploit the relationships of local features through a proxy proposal contrastive learning task by attracting/repelling proposal-based positive/negative sample pairs. Moreover, we show that our PCL can be easily adapted to unlabeled data in practice, which can reduce manual labeling costs and promote more generalizable features. Extensive experiments among several standard datasets demonstrate that our PCL can be a general module to obtain consistent improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/Sandy-Zeng/PCL.
A General Framework for Auditing Differentially Private Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present a framework to statistically audit the privacy guarantee conferred by a differentially private machine learner in practice. While previous works have taken steps toward evaluating privacy loss through poisoning attacks or membership inference, they have been tailored to specific models or have demonstrated low statistical power. Our work develops a general methodology to empirically evaluate the privacy of differentially private machine learning implementations, combining improved privacy search and verification methods with a toolkit of influence-based poisoning attacks. We demonstrate significantly improved auditing power over previous approaches on a variety of models including logistic regression, Naive Bayes, and random forest. Our method can be used to detect privacy violations due to implementation errors or misuse. When violations are not present, it can aid in understanding the amount of information that can be leaked from a given dataset, algorithm, and privacy specification.
Handling Label Uncertainty for Camera Incremental Person Re-Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Incremental learning for person re-identification (ReID) aims to develop models that can be trained with a continuous data stream, which is a more practical setting for real-world applications. However, the existing incremental ReID methods make two strong assumptions that the cameras are fixed and the new-emerging data is class-disjoint from previous classes. This is unrealistic as previously observed pedestrians may re-appear and be captured again by new cameras. In this paper, we investigate person ReID in an unexplored scenario named Camera Incremental Person ReID (CIPR), which advances existing lifelong person ReID by taking into account the class overlap issue. Specifically, new data collected from new cameras may probably contain an unknown proportion of identities seen before. This subsequently leads to the lack of cross-camera annotations for new data due to privacy concerns. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework ExtendOVA. First, to handle the class overlap issue, we introduce an instance-wise seen-class identification module to discover previously seen identities at the instance level. Then, we propose a criterion for selecting confident ID-wise candidates and also devise an early learning regularization term to correct noise issues in pseudo labels. Furthermore, to compensate for the lack of previous data, we resort prototypical memory bank to create surrogate features, along with a cross-camera distillation loss to further retain the inter-camera relationship. The comprehensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks show that ExtendOVA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts with remarkable advantages.
Digital Twins for Industry 4.0 in the 6G Era
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Having the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile communication system recently rolled out in many countries, the wireless community is now setting its eyes on the next era of Sixth Generation (6G). Inheriting from 5G its focus on industrial use cases, 6G is envisaged to become the infrastructural backbone of future intelligent industry. Especially, a combination of 6G and the emerging technologies of Digital Twins (DT) will give impetus to the next evolution of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) systems. This article provides a survey in the research area of 6G-empowered industrial DT system. With a novel vision of 6G industrial DT ecosystem, this survey discusses the ambitions and potential applications of industrial DT in the 6G era, identifying the emerging challenges as well as the key enabling technologies. The introduced ecosystem is supposed to bridge the gaps between humans, machines, and the data infrastructure, and therewith enable numerous novel application scenarios.
An introduction to programming Physics-Informed Neural Network-based computational solid mechanics
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

Physics-informed neural network (PINN) has recently gained increasing interest in computational mechanics. In this work, we present a detailed introduction to programming PINN-based computational solid mechanics. Besides, two prevailingly used physics-informed loss functions for PINN-based computational solid mechanics are summarised. Moreover, numerical examples ranging from 1D to 3D solid problems are presented to show the performance of PINN-based computational solid mechanics. The programs are built via Python coding language and TensorFlow library with step-by-step explanations. It is worth highlighting that PINN-based computational mechanics is easy to implement and can be extended for more challenging applications. This work aims to help the researchers who are interested in the PINN-based solid mechanics solver to have a clear insight into this emerging area. The programs for all the numerical examples presented in this work are available on https://github.com/JinshuaiBai/PINN_Comp_Mech.
A Solver-Free Framework for Scalable Learning in Neural ILP Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

There is a recent focus on designing architectures that have an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) layer within a neural model (referred to as Neural ILP in this paper). Neural ILP architectures are suitable for pure reasoning tasks that require data-driven constraint learning or for tasks requiring both perception (neural) and reasoning (ILP). A recent SOTA approach for end-to-end training of Neural ILP explicitly defines gradients through the ILP black box (Paulus et al. 2021) - this trains extremely slowly, owing to a call to the underlying ILP solver for every training data point in a minibatch. In response, we present an alternative training strategy that is solver-free, i.e., does not call the ILP solver at all at training time. Neural ILP has a set of trainable hyperplanes (for cost and constraints in ILP), together representing a polyhedron. Our key idea is that the training loss should impose that the final polyhedron separates the positives (all constraints satisfied) from the negatives (at least one violated constraint or a suboptimal cost value), via a soft-margin formulation. While positive example(s) are provided as part of the training data, we devise novel techniques for generating negative samples. Our solution is flexible enough to handle equality as well as inequality constraints. Experiments on several problems, both perceptual as well as symbolic, which require learning the constraints of an ILP, show that our approach has superior performance and scales much better compared to purely neural baselines and other state-of-the-art models that require solver-based training. In particular, we are able to obtain excellent performance in 9 x 9 symbolic and visual sudoku, to which the other Neural ILP solver is not able to scale.
Data-driven Modeling of Mach-Zehnder Interferometer-based Optical Matrix Multipliers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Photonic integrated circuits are facilitating the development of optical neural networks, which have the potential to be both faster and more energy efficient than their electronic counterparts since optical signals are especially well-suited for implementing matrix multiplications. However, accurate programming of photonic chips for optical matrix multiplication remains a difficult challenge. Here, we describe both simple analytical models and data-driven models for offline training of optical matrix multipliers. We train and evaluate the models using experimental data obtained from a fabricated chip featuring a Mach-Zehnder interferometer mesh implementing 3-by-3 matrix multiplication. The neural network-based models outperform the simple physics-based models in terms of prediction error. Furthermore, the neural network models are also able to predict the spectral variations in the matrix weights for up to 100 frequency channels covering the C-band. The use of neural network models for programming the chip for optical matrix multiplication yields increased performance on multiple machine learning tasks.
Probabilistic Categorical Adversarial Attack & Adversarial Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The existence of adversarial examples brings huge concern for people to apply Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in safety-critical tasks. However, how to generate adversarial examples with categorical data is an important problem but lack of extensive exploration. Previously established methods leverage greedy search method, which can be very time-consuming to conduct successful attack. This also limits the development of adversarial training and potential defenses for categorical data. To tackle this problem, we propose Probabilistic Categorical Adversarial Attack (PCAA), which transfers the discrete optimization problem to a continuous problem that can be solved efficiently by Projected Gradient Descent. In our paper, we theoretically analyze its optimality and time complexity to demonstrate its significant advantage over current greedy based attacks. Moreover, based on our attack, we propose an efficient adversarial training framework. Through a comprehensive empirical study, we justify the effectiveness of our proposed attack and defense algorithms.
Weakly Supervised Learning with Automated Labels from Radiology Reports for Glioma Change Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Gliomas are the most frequent primary brain tumors in adults. Glioma change detection aims at finding the relevant parts of the image that change over time. Although Deep Learning (DL) shows promising performances in similar change detection tasks, the creation of large annotated datasets represents a major bottleneck for supervised DL applications in radiology. To overcome this, we propose a combined use of weak labels (imprecise, but fast-to-create annotations) and Transfer Learning (TL). Specifically, we explore inductive TL, where source and target domains are identical, but tasks are different due to a label shift: our target labels are created manually by three radiologists, whereas our source weak labels are generated automatically from radiology reports via NLP. We frame knowledge transfer as hyperparameter optimization, thus avoiding heuristic choices that are frequent in related works. We investigate the relationship between model size and TL, comparing a low-capacity VGG with a higher-capacity ResNeXt model. We evaluate our models on 1693 T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging difference maps created from 183 patients, by classifying them into stable or unstable according to tumor evolution. The weak labels extracted from radiology reports allowed us to increase dataset size more than 3-fold, and improve VGG classification results from 75% to 82% AUC. Mixed training from scratch led to higher performance than fine-tuning or feature extraction. To assess generalizability, we ran inference on an open dataset (BraTS-2015: 15 patients, 51 difference maps), reaching up to 76% AUC. Overall, results suggest that medical imaging problems may benefit from smaller models and different TL strategies with respect to computer vision datasets, and that report-generated weak labels are effective in improving model performances. Code, in-house dataset and BraTS labels are released.
How to Play Optimally for Regular Objectives?
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

This paper studies two-player zero-sum games played on graphs and makes contributions toward the following question: given an objective, how much memory is required to play optimally for that objective? We study regular objectives, where the goal of one of the two players is that eventually the sequence of colors along the play belongs to some regular language of finite words. We obtain different characterizations of the chromatic memory requirements for such objectives for both players, from which we derive complexity-theoretic statements: deciding whether there exist small memory structures sufficient to play optimally is NP-complete for both players. Some of our characterization results apply to a more general class of objectives: topologically closed and topologically open sets.
Taxonomy of Abstractive Dialogue Summarization: Scenarios, Approaches and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Abstractive dialogue summarization is to generate a concise and fluent summary covering the salient information in a dialogue among two or more interlocutors. It has attracted great attention in recent years based on the massive emergence of social communication platforms and an urgent requirement for efficient dialogue information understanding and digestion. Different from news or articles in traditional document summarization, dialogues bring unique characteristics and additional challenges, including different language styles and formats, scattered information, flexible discourse structures and unclear topic boundaries. This survey provides a comprehensive investigation on existing work for abstractive dialogue summarization from scenarios, approaches to evaluations. It categorizes the task into two broad categories according to the type of input dialogues, i.e., open-domain and task-oriented, and presents a taxonomy of existing techniques in three directions, namely, injecting dialogue features, designing auxiliary training tasks and using additional data.A list of datasets under different scenarios and widely-accepted evaluation metrics are summarized for completeness. After that, the trends of scenarios and techniques are summarized, together with deep insights on correlations between extensively exploited features and different scenarios. Based on these analyses, we recommend future directions including more controlled and complicated scenarios, technical innovations and comparisons, publicly available datasets in special domains, etc.
Computing MEMs and Relatives on Repetitive Text Collections
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of computing the Maximal Exact Matches (MEMs) of a given pattern $P[1 .. m]$ on a large repetitive text collection $T[1 .. n]$, which is represented as a (hopefully much smaller) run-length context-free grammar of size $g_{rl}$. We show that the problem can be solved in time $O(m^2 \log^εn)$, for any constant $ε> 0$, on a data structure of size $O(g_{rl})$. Further, on a locally consistent grammar of size $O(δ\log\frac{n}δ)$, the time decreases to $O(m\log m(\log m + \log^εn))$. The value $δ$ is a function of the substring complexity of $T$ and $Ω(δ\log\frac{n}δ)$ is a tight lower bound on the compressibility of repetitive texts $T$, so our structure has optimal size in terms of $n$ and $δ$. We extend our results to several related problems, such as finding $k$-MEMs, MUMs, rare MEMs, and applications.
AnalogVNN: A fully modular framework for modeling and optimizing photonic neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

AnalogVNN, a simulation framework built on PyTorch which can simulate the effects of optoelectronic noise, limited precision, and signal normalization present in photonic neural network accelerators. We use this framework to train and optimize linear and convolutional neural networks with up to 9 layers and ~1.7 million parameters, while gaining insights into how normalization, activation function, reduced precision, and noise influence accuracy in analog photonic neural networks. By following the same layer structure design present in PyTorch, the AnalogVNN framework allows users to convert most digital neural network models to their analog counterparts with just a few lines of code, taking full advantage of the open-source optimization, deep learning, and GPU acceleration libraries available through PyTorch. Code is available at https://analogvnn.github.io