OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
SketchZooms: Deep multi-view descriptors for matching line drawings
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Finding point-wise correspondences between images is a long-standing problem in image analysis. This becomes particularly challenging for sketch images, due to the varying nature of human drawing style, projection distortions and viewport changes. In this paper we present the first attempt to obtain a learned descriptor for dense registration in line drawings. Based on recent deep learning techniques for corresponding photographs, we designed descriptors to locally match image pairs where the object of interest belongs to the same semantic category, yet still differ drastically in shape, form, and projection angle. To this end, we have specifically crafted a data set of synthetic sketches using non-photorealistic rendering over a large collection of part-based registered 3D models. After training, a neural network generates descriptors for every pixel in an input image, which are shown to generalize correctly in unseen sketches hand-drawn by humans. We evaluate our method against a baseline of correspondences data collected from expert designers, in addition to comparisons with other descriptors that have been proven effective in sketches. Code, data and further resources will be publicly released by the time of publication.
Deep Direct Visual Odometry
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Traditional monocular direct visual odometry (DVO) is one of the most famous methods to estimate the ego-motion of robots and map environments from images simultaneously. However, DVO heavily relies on high-quality images and accurate initial pose estimation during tracking. With the outstanding performance of deep learning, previous works have shown that deep neural networks can effectively learn 6-DoF (Degree of Freedom) poses between frames from monocular image sequences in the unsupervised manner. However, these unsupervised deep learning-based frameworks cannot accurately generate the full trajectory of a long monocular video because of the scale-inconsistency between each pose. To address this problem, we use several geometric constraints to improve the scale-consistency of the pose network, including improving the previous loss function and proposing a novel scale-to-trajectory constraint for unsupervised training. We call the pose network trained by the proposed novel constraint as TrajNet. In addition, a new DVO architecture, called deep direct sparse odometry (DDSO), is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of the previous direct sparse odometry (DSO) framework by embedding TrajNet. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset show that the proposed constraints can effectively improve the scale-consistency of TrajNet when compared with previous unsupervised monocular methods, and integration with TrajNet makes the initialization and tracking of DSO more robust and accurate.
Learning Human Objectives by Evaluating Hypothetical Behavior
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

We seek to align agent behavior with a user's objectives in a reinforcement learning setting with unknown dynamics, an unknown reward function, and unknown unsafe states. The user knows the rewards and unsafe states, but querying the user is expensive. To address this challenge, we propose an algorithm that safely and interactively learns a model of the user's reward function. We start with a generative model of initial states and a forward dynamics model trained on off-policy data. Our method uses these models to synthesize hypothetical behaviors, asks the user to label the behaviors with rewards, and trains a neural network to predict the rewards. The key idea is to actively synthesize the hypothetical behaviors from scratch by maximizing tractable proxies for the value of information, without interacting with the environment. We call this method reward query synthesis via trajectory optimization (ReQueST). We evaluate ReQueST with simulated users on a state-based 2D navigation task and the image-based Car Racing video game. The results show that ReQueST significantly outperforms prior methods in learning reward models that transfer to new environments with different initial state distributions. Moreover, ReQueST safely trains the reward model to detect unsafe states, and corrects reward hacking before deploying the agent.
Deep-Learning Estimation of Band Gap with the Reading-Periodic-Table Method and Periodic Convolution Layer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We verified that the deep learning method named reading periodic table introduced by ref. Deep Learning Model for Finding New Superconductors, which utilizes deep learning to read the periodic table and the laws of the elements, is applicable not only for superconductors, for which the method was originally applied but also for other problems of materials by demonstrating band gap estimations. We then extended the method to learn the laws better by directly learning the cylindrical periodicity between the right- and left-most columns in the periodic table at the learning representation level, that is, by considering the left- and right-most columns to be adjacent to each other. Thus, while the original method handles the table as is, the extended method treats the periodic table as if its two edges are connected. This is achieved using novel layers named periodic convolution layers, which can handle inputs exhibiting periodicity and may be applied to other problems related to computer vision, time series, and so on for data that possess some periodicity. In the reading periodic table method, no material feature or descriptor is required as input. We demonstrated two types of deep learning estimation: methods to estimate the existence of a bandgap, and methods to estimate the value of the bandgap given when the existence of the bandgap in the materials is known. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the dataset and model evaluation method. We may be unable to distinguish good models based on the random train-test split scheme; thus, we must prepare an appropriate dataset where the training and test data are temporally separate. The code and data are open.
TopoAct: Visually Exploring the Shape of Activations in Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2021
Year: 2021

Deep neural networks such as GoogLeNet, ResNet, and BERT have achieved impressive performance in tasks such as image and text classification. To understand how such performance is achieved, we probe a trained deep neural network by studying neuron activations, i.e., combinations of neuron firings, at various layers of the network in response to a particular input. With a large number of inputs, we aim to obtain a global view of what neurons detect by studying their activations. In particular, we develop visualizations that show the shape of the activation space, the organizational principle behind neuron activations, and the relationships of these activations within a layer. Applying tools from topological data analysis, we present TopoAct, a visual exploration system to study topological summaries of activation vectors. We present exploration scenarios using TopoAct that provide valuable insights into learned representations of neural networks. We expect TopoAct to give a topological perspective that enriches the current toolbox of neural network analysis, and to provide a basis for network architecture diagnosis and data anomaly detection.
Flexible Communication Avoiding Matrix Multiplication on FPGA with High-Level Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Data movement is the dominating factor affecting performance and energy in modern computing systems. Consequently, many algorithms have been developed to minimize the number of I/O operations for common computing patterns. Matrix multiplication is no exception, and lower bounds have been proven and implemented both for shared and distributed memory systems. Reconfigurable hardware platforms are a lucrative target for I/O minimizing algorithms, as they offer full control of memory accesses to the programmer. While bounds developed in the context of fixed architectures still apply to these platforms, the spatially distributed nature of their computational and memory resources requires a decentralized approach to optimize algorithms for maximum hardware utilization. We present a model to optimize matrix multiplication for FPGA platforms, simultaneously targeting maximum performance and minimum off-chip data movement, within constraints set by the hardware. We map the model to a concrete architecture using a high-level synthesis tool, maintaining a high level of abstraction, allowing us to support arbitrary data types, and enables maintainability and portability across FPGA devices. Kernels generated from our architecture are shown to offer competitive performance in practice, scaling with both compute and memory resources. We offer our design as an open source project to encourage the open development of linear algebra and I/O minimizing algorithms on reconfigurable hardware platforms.
Approximate and Robust Bounded Job Start Scheduling for Royal Mail Delivery Offices
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

Motivated by mail delivery scheduling problems arising in Royal Mail, we study a generalization of the fundamental makespan scheduling P||Cmax problem which we call the bounded job start scheduling problem. Given a set of jobs, each specified by an integer processing time p_j, that have to be executed non-preemptively by a set of m parallel identical machines, the objective is to compute a minimum makespan schedule subject to an upper bound g<=m on the number of jobs that may simultaneously begin per unit of time. With perfect input knowledge, we show that Longest Processing Time First (LPT) algorithm is tightly 2-approximate. After proving that the problem is strongly NP-hard even when g=1, we elaborate on improving the 2-approximation ratio for this case. We distinguish the classes of long and short instances satisfying p_j>=m and p_j<m, respectively, for each job j. We show that LPT is 5/3-approximate for the former and optimal for the latter. Then, we explore scheduling long jobs in parallel with short jobs to obtain tightly satisfied packing and bounded job start constraints. For a broad family of instances excluding degenerate instances with many very long jobs, we derive a 1.985-approximation ratio. For general instances, we require machine augmentation to obtain better than 2-approximate schedules. Under uncertain job processing times, we exploit machine augmentation and lexicographic optimization to propose a two-stage robust optimization approach for bounded job start scheduling under uncertainty aiming in a low number of used machines. Given a collection of schedules of makespan <= D, this approach allows distinguishing which are the more robust. We substantiate both the heuristics and our recovery approach numerically using Royal Mail data. We show that, for the Royal Mail application, machine augmentation, i.e. short-term van rental, is especially relevant.
Hierarchical Coded Matrix Multiplication
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In distributed computing systems slow working nodes, known as stragglers, can greatly extend finishing times. Coded computing is a technique that enables straggler-resistant computation. Most coded computing techniques presented to date provide robustness by ensuring that the time to finish depends only on a set of the fastest nodes. However, while stragglers do compute less work than non-stragglers, in real-world commercial cloud computing systems (e.g., Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)) the distinction is often a soft one. In this paper, we develop hierarchical coded computing that exploits the work completed by all nodes, both fast and slow, automatically integrating the potential contribution of each. We first present a conceptual framework to represent the division of work amongst nodes in coded matrix multiplication as a cuboid partitioning problem. This framework allows us to unify existing methods and motivates new techniques. We then develop three methods of hierarchical coded computing that we term bit-interleaved coded computation (BICC), multilevel coded computation (MLCC), and hybrid hierarchical coded computation (HHCC). In this paradigm, each worker is tasked with completing a sequence (a hierarchy) of ordered subtasks. The sequence of subtasks, and the complexity of each, is designed so that partial work completed by stragglers can be used, rather than ignored. We note that our methods can be used in conjunction with any coded computing method. We illustrate this by showing how we can use our methods to accelerate all previously developed coded computing techniques by enabling them to exploit stragglers. Under a widely studied statistical model of completion time, our approach realizes a $66\%$ improvement in the expected finishing time. On Amazon EC2, the gain was $27\%$ when stragglers are simulated.
DerainCycleGAN: Rain Attentive CycleGAN for Single Image Deraining and Rainmaking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Single image deraining (SID) is an important and challenging topic in emerging vision applications, and most of emerged deraining methods are supervised relying on the ground truth (i.e., paired images) in recent years. However, in practice it is rather common to have no un-paired images in real deraining task, in such cases how to remove the rain streaks in an unsupervised way will be a very challenging task due to lack of constraints between images and hence suffering from low-quality recovery results. In this paper, we explore the unsupervised SID task using unpaired data and propose a novel net called Attention-guided Deraining by Constrained CycleGAN (or shortly, DerainCycleGAN), which can fully utilize the constrained transfer learning abilitiy and circulatory structure of CycleGAN. Specifically, we design an unsu-pervised attention guided rain streak extractor (U-ARSE) that utilizes a memory to extract the rain streak masks with two constrained cycle-consistency branches jointly by paying attention to both the rainy and rain-free image domains. As a by-product, we also contribute a new paired rain image dataset called Rain200A, which is constructed by our network automatically. Compared with existing synthesis datasets, the rainy streaks in Rain200A contains more obvious and diverse shapes and directions. As a result, existing supervised methods trained on Rain200A can perform much better for processing real rainy images. Extensive experiments on synthesis and real datasets show that our net is superior to existing unsupervised deraining networks, and is also very competitive to other related supervised networks.
Mimetics: Towards Understanding Human Actions Out of Context
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recent methods for video action recognition have reached outstanding performances on existing benchmarks. However, they tend to leverage context such as scenes or objects instead of focusing on understanding the human action itself. For instance, a tennis field leads to the prediction playing tennis irrespectively of the actions performed in the video. In contrast, humans have a more complete understanding of actions and can recognize them without context. The best example of out-of-context actions are mimes, that people can typically recognize despite missing relevant objects and scenes. In this paper, we propose to benchmark action recognition methods in such absence of context and introduce a novel dataset, Mimetics, consisting of mimed actions for a subset of 50 classes from the Kinetics benchmark. Our experiments show that (a) state-of-the-art 3D convolutional neural networks obtain disappointing results on such videos, highlighting the lack of true understanding of the human actions and (b) models leveraging body language via human pose are less prone to context biases. In particular, we show that applying a shallow neural network with a single temporal convolution over body pose features transferred to the action recognition problem performs surprisingly well compared to 3D action recognition methods.
On-manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation Improves Uncertainty Calibration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Uncertainty estimates help to identify ambiguous, novel, or anomalous inputs, but the reliable quantification of uncertainty has proven to be challenging for modern deep networks. In order to improve uncertainty estimation, we propose On-Manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation or OMADA, which specifically attempts to generate the most challenging examples by following an on-manifold adversarial attack path in the latent space of an autoencoder-based generative model that closely approximates decision boundaries between two or more classes. On a variety of datasets as well as on multiple diverse network architectures, OMADA consistently yields more accurate and better calibrated classifiers than baseline models, and outperforms competing approaches such as Mixup, as well as achieving similar performance to (at times better than) post-processing calibration methods such as temperature scaling. Variants of OMADA can employ different sampling schemes for ambiguous on-manifold examples based on the entropy of their estimated soft labels, which exhibit specific strengths for generalization, calibration of predicted uncertainty, or detection of out-of-distribution inputs.
PETSc TSAdjoint: a discrete adjoint ODE solver for first-order and second-order sensitivity analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2021
Year: 2021

We present a new software system PETSc TSAdjoint for first-order and second-order adjoint sensitivity analysis of time-dependent nonlinear differential equations. The derivative calculation in PETSc TSAdjoint is essentially a high-level algorithmic differentiation process. The adjoint models are derived by differentiating the timestepping algorithms and implemented based on the parallel infrastructure in PETSc. Full differentiation of the library code including MPI routines thus is avoided, and users do not need to derive their own adjoint models for their specific applications. PETSc TSAdjoint can compute the first-order derivative, that is, the gradient of a scalar functional, and the Hessian-vector product that carries second-order derivative information, while requiring minimal input (a few callbacks) from the users. Optimal checkpointing schemes are employed by the adjoint model in a manner that is transparent to users. Usability, efficiency, and scalability are demonstrated through examples from a variety of applications.
A Survey on Document-level Neural Machine Translation: Methods and Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Machine translation (MT) is an important task in natural language processing (NLP) as it automates the translation process and reduces the reliance on human translators. With the resurgence of neural networks, the translation quality surpasses that of the translations obtained using statistical techniques for most language-pairs. Up until a few years ago, almost all of the neural translation models translated sentences independently, without incorporating the wider document-context and inter-dependencies among the sentences. The aim of this survey paper is to highlight the major works that have been undertaken in the space of document-level machine translation after the neural revolution, so that researchers can recognise the current state and future directions of this field. We provide an organisation of the literature based on novelties in modelling and architectures as well as training and decoding strategies. In addition, we cover evaluation strategies that have been introduced to account for the improvements in document MT, including automatic metrics and discourse-targeted test sets. We conclude by presenting possible avenues for future exploration in this research field.
Graphical Representation and Hierarchical Decomposition Mechanism for Vertex-Cover Solution Space
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, solution space organization of minimum vertex-cover problem is deeply investigated using the König-Egérvary (KE) graph and theorem, in which a hierarchical decomposition mechanism named KE-layer structure of general graphs is proposed to reveal the complexity of vertex-cover. An algorithm to verify the KE graph is given by the solution space expression of vertex-cover, and the relation between multi-layer KE graphs and maximal matching is illustrated and proved. Furthermore, a framework to calculate the KE-layer number and approximate the minimal vertex-cover is provided, with different strategies of switching nodes and counting energy. The phase transition phenomenon between different KE-layers are studied with the transition points located, and searching of vertex-cover got by this strategy presents comparable advantage against several other methods. The graphical representation and hierarchical decomposition provide a new perspective to illustrate the intrinsic complexity for large-scale graphs/systems recognition.
Pruning by Explaining: A Novel Criterion for Deep Neural Network Pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in various applications is accompanied by a significant increase in computation and parameter storage costs. Recent efforts to reduce these overheads involve pruning and compressing the weights of various layers while at the same time aiming to not sacrifice performance. In this paper, we propose a novel criterion for CNN pruning inspired by neural network interpretability: The most relevant units, i.e. weights or filters, are automatically found using their relevance scores obtained from concepts of explainable AI (XAI). By exploring this idea, we connect the lines of interpretability and model compression research. We show that our proposed method can efficiently prune CNN models in transfer-learning setups in which networks pre-trained on large corpora are adapted to specialized tasks. The method is evaluated on a broad range of computer vision datasets. Notably, our novel criterion is not only competitive or better compared to state-of-the-art pruning criteria when successive retraining is performed, but clearly outperforms these previous criteria in the resource-constrained application scenario in which the data of the task to be transferred to is very scarce and one chooses to refrain from fine-tuning. Our method is able to compress the model iteratively while maintaining or even improving accuracy. At the same time, it has a computational cost in the order of gradient computation and is comparatively simple to apply without the need for tuning hyperparameters for pruning.
Hyperbolic Multiplex Network Embedding with Maps of Random Walk
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Recent research on network embedding in hyperbolic space have proven successful in several applications. However, nodes in real world networks tend to interact through several distinct channels. Simple aggregation or ignorance of this multiplexity will lead to misleading results. On the other hand, there exists redundant information between different interaction patterns between nodes. Recent research reveals the analogy between the community structure and the hyperbolic coordinate. To learn each node's effective embedding representation while reducing the redundancy of multiplex network, we then propose a unified framework combing multiplex network hyperbolic embedding and multiplex community detection. The intuitive rationale is that high order node embedding approach is expected to alleviate the observed network's sparse and noisy structure which will benefit the community detection task. On the contrary, the improved community structure will also guide the node embedding task. To incorporate the common features between channels while preserving unique features, a random walk approach which traversing in latent multiplex hyperbolic space is proposed to detect the community across channels and bridge the connection between node embedding and community detection. The proposed framework is evaluated on several network tasks using different real world dataset. The results demonstrates that our framework is effective and efficiency compared with state-of-the-art approaches.