OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Unified and Biologically-Plausible Relational Graph Representation of Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

Vision transformer (ViT) and its variants have achieved remarkable successes in various visual tasks. The key characteristic of these ViT models is to adopt different aggregation strategies of spatial patch information within the artificial neural networks (ANNs). However, there is still a key lack of unified representation of different ViT architectures for systematic understanding and assessment of model representation performance. Moreover, how those well-performing ViT ANNs are similar to real biological neural networks (BNNs) is largely unexplored. To answer these fundamental questions, we, for the first time, propose a unified and biologically-plausible relational graph representation of ViT models. Specifically, the proposed relational graph representation consists of two key sub-graphs: aggregation graph and affine graph. The former one considers ViT tokens as nodes and describes their spatial interaction, while the latter one regards network channels as nodes and reflects the information communication between channels. Using this unified relational graph representation, we found that: a) a sweet spot of the aggregation graph leads to ViTs with significantly improved predictive performance; b) the graph measures of clustering coefficient and average path length are two effective indicators of model prediction performance, especially when applying on the datasets with small samples; c) our findings are consistent across various ViT architectures and multiple datasets; d) the proposed relational graph representation of ViT has high similarity with real BNNs derived from brain science data. Overall, our work provides a novel unified and biologically-plausible paradigm for more interpretable and effective representation of ViT ANNs.
Traffic-Twitter Transformer: A Nature Language Processing-joined Framework For Network-wide Traffic Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With accurate and timely traffic forecasting, the impacted traffic conditions can be predicted in advance to guide agencies and residents to respond to changes in traffic patterns appropriately. However, existing works on traffic forecasting mainly relied on historical traffic patterns confining to short-term prediction, under 1 hour, for instance. To better manage future roadway capacity and accommodate social and human impacts, it is crucial to propose a flexible and comprehensive framework to predict physical-aware long-term traffic conditions for public users and transportation agencies. In this paper, the gap of robust long-term traffic forecasting was bridged by taking social media features into consideration. A correlation study and a linear regression model were first implemented to evaluate the significance of the correlation between two time-series data, traffic intensity and Twitter data intensity. Two time-series data were then fed into our proposed social-aware framework, Traffic-Twitter Transformer, which integrated Nature Language representations into time-series records for long-term traffic prediction. Experimental results in the Great Seattle Area showed that our proposed model outperformed baseline models in all evaluation matrices. This NLP-joined social-aware framework can become a valuable implement of network-wide traffic prediction and management for traffic agencies.
ICC++: Explainable Image Retrieval for Art Historical Corpora using Image Composition Canvas
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Image compositions are helpful in the study of image structures and assist in discovering the semantics of the underlying scene portrayed across art forms and styles. With the digitization of artworks in recent years, thousands of images of a particular scene or narrative could potentially be linked together. However, manually linking this data with consistent objectiveness can be a highly challenging and time-consuming task. In this work, we present a novel approach called Image Composition Canvas (ICC++) to compare and retrieve images having similar compositional elements. ICC++ is an improvement over ICC specializing in generating low and high-level features (compositional elements) motivated by Max Imdahl's work. To this end, we present a rigorous quantitative and qualitative comparison of our approach with traditional and state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods showing that our proposed method outperforms all of them. In combination with deep features, our method outperforms the best deep learning-based method, opening the research direction for explainable machine learning for digital humanities. We will release the code and the data post-publication.
StaDRe and StaDRo: Reliability and Robustness Estimation of ML-based Forecasting using Statistical Distance Measures
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Reliability estimation of Machine Learning (ML) models is becoming a crucial subject. This is particularly the case when such \mbox{models} are deployed in safety-critical applications, as the decisions based on model predictions can result in hazardous situations. In this regard, recent research has proposed methods to achieve safe, \mbox{dependable}, and reliable ML systems. One such method consists of detecting and analyzing distributional shift, and then measuring how such systems respond to these shifts. This was proposed in earlier work in SafeML. This work focuses on the use of SafeML for time series data, and on reliability and robustness estimation of ML-forecasting methods using statistical distance measures. To this end, distance measures based on the Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function (ECDF) proposed in SafeML are explored to measure Statistical-Distance Dissimilarity (SDD) across time series. We then propose SDD-based Reliability Estimate (StaDRe) and SDD-based Robustness (StaDRo) measures. With the help of a clustering technique, the similarity between the statistical properties of data seen during training and the forecasts is identified. The proposed method is capable of providing a link between dataset SDD and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of the ML models.
Open Vocabulary Object Detection with Proposal Mining and Prediction Equalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims to scale up vocabulary size to detect objects of novel categories beyond the training vocabulary. Recent work resorts to the rich knowledge in pre-trained vision-language models. However, existing methods are ineffective in proposal-level vision-language alignment. Meanwhile, the models usually suffer from confidence bias toward base categories and perform worse on novel ones. To overcome the challenges, we present MEDet, a novel and effective OVD framework with proposal mining and prediction equalization. First, we design an online proposal mining to refine the inherited vision-semantic knowledge from coarse to fine, allowing for proposal-level detection-oriented feature alignment. Second, based on causal inference theory, we introduce a class-wise backdoor adjustment to reinforce the predictions on novel categories to improve the overall OVD performance. Extensive experiments on COCO and LVIS benchmarks verify the superiority of MEDet over the competing approaches in detecting objects of novel categories, e.g., 32.6% AP50 on COCO and 22.4% mask mAP on LVIS.
Modeling Emergent Lexicon Formation with a Self-Reinforcing Stochastic Process
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce FiLex, a self-reinforcing stochastic process which models finite lexicons in emergent language experiments. The central property of FiLex is that it is a self-reinforcing process, parallel to the intuition that the more a word is used in a language, the more its use will continue. As a theoretical model, FiLex serves as a way to both explain and predict the behavior of the emergent language system. We empirically test FiLex's ability to capture the relationship between the emergent language's hyperparameters and the lexicon's Shannon entropy.
The Problem of Semantic Shift in Longitudinal Monitoring of Social Media: A Case Study on Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Social media allows researchers to track societal and cultural changes over time based on language analysis tools. Many of these tools rely on statistical algorithms which need to be tuned to specific types of language. Recent studies have shown the absence of appropriate tuning, specifically in the presence of semantic shift, can hinder robustness of the underlying methods. However, little is known about the practical effect this sensitivity may have on downstream longitudinal analyses. We explore this gap in the literature through a timely case study: understanding shifts in depression during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that inclusion of only a small number of semantically-unstable features can promote significant changes in longitudinal estimates of our target outcome. At the same time, we demonstrate that a recently-introduced method for measuring semantic shift may be used to proactively identify failure points of language-based models and, in turn, improve predictive generalization.
Kafka Consumer Group Autoscaler
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Message brokers enable asynchronous communication between data producers and consumers in distributed environments by assigning messages to ordered queues. Message broker systems often provide with mechanisms to parallelize tasks between consumers to increase the rate at which data is consumed. The consumption rate must exceed the production rate or queues would grow indefinitely. Still, consumers are costly and their number should be minimized. We model the problem of determining the required number of consumers, and the partition-consumer assignments, as a variable item size bin packing variant. Data cannot be read when a queue is being migrated to another consumer. Hence, we propose the R-score metric to account for these rebalancing costs. Then, we introduce an assortment of R-score based algorithms, and compare their performance to established heuristics for the Bin Packing Problem for this application. We instantiate our method within an existing system, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our approach guarantees adequate consumption rates something the previous system was unable to at lower operational costs.
HTTPS Event-Flow Correlation: Improving Situational Awareness in Encrypted Web Traffic
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Achieving situational awareness is a challenging process in current HTTPS-dominant web traffic. In this paper, we propose a new approach to encrypted web traffic monitoring. First, we design a method for correlating host-based and network monitoring data based on their common features and a correlation time-window. Then we analyze the correlation results in detail to identify configurations of web servers and monitoring infrastructure that negatively affect the correlation. We describe these properties and possible data preprocessing techniques to minimize their impact on correlation performance. Furthermore, to test the correlation method's behavior in different web server setups and for recent encryption protocols, we modify it by adapting the correlation features to TLS 1.3 and QUIC. Finally, we evaluate the correlation method on a dataset collected from a campus network. The results show that while the correlation requires monitoring of custom event and flow features, it remains feasible even when using encryption protocols designed for the near future.
Automated Compliance Blueprint Optimization with Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

For highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare, one of the major hindrances to the adoption of cloud computing is compliance with regulatory standards. This is a complex problem due to many regulatory and technical specification (techspec) documents that the companies need to comply with. The critical problem is to establish the mapping between techspecs and regulation controls so that from day one, companies can comply with regulations with minimal effort. We demonstrate the practicality of an approach to automatically analyze regulatory standards using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. We present early results to identify the mapping between techspecs and regulation controls, and discuss challenges that must be overcome for this solution to be fully practical.
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Evaluation in machine learning is usually informed by past choices, for example which datasets or metrics to use. This standardization enables the comparison on equal footing using leaderboards, but the evaluation choices become sub-optimal as better alternatives arise. This problem is especially pertinent in natural language generation which requires ever-improving suites of datasets, metrics, and human evaluation to make definitive claims. To make following best model evaluation practices easier, we introduce GEMv2. The new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark introduces a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each others work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages. Models for all datasets can be evaluated online and our interactive data card creation and rendering tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.
Real-Time Online Skeleton Extraction and Gesture Recognition on Pepper
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We present a multi-stage pipeline for simple gesture recognition. The novelty of our approach is the association of different technologies, resulting in the first real-time system as of now to conjointly extract skeletons and recognise gesture on a Pepper robot. For this task, Pepper has been augmented with an embedded GPU for running deep CNNs and a fish-eye camera to capture whole scene interaction. We show in this article that real-case scenarios are challenging, and the state-of-the-art approaches hardly deal with unknown human gestures. We present here a way to handle such cases.
Context matters for fairness -- a case study on the effect of spatial distribution shifts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With the ever growing involvement of data-driven AI-based decision making technologies in our daily social lives, the fairness of these systems is becoming a crucial phenomenon. However, an important and often challenging aspect in utilizing such systems is to distinguish validity for the range of their application especially under distribution shifts, i.e., when a model is deployed on data with different distribution than the training set. In this paper, we present a case study on the newly released American Census datasets, a reconstruction of the popular Adult dataset, to illustrate the importance of context for fairness and show how remarkably can spatial distribution shifts affect predictive- and fairness-related performance of a model. The problem persists for fairness-aware learning models with the effects of context-specific fairness interventions differing across the states and different population groups. Our study suggests that robustness to distribution shifts is necessary before deploying a model to another context.
CGAR: Critic Guided Action Redistribution in Reinforcement Leaning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Training a game-playing reinforcement learning agent requires multiple interactions with the environment. Ignorant random exploration may cause a waste of time and resources. It's essential to alleviate such waste. As discussed in this paper, under the settings of the off-policy actor critic algorithms, we demonstrate that the critic can bring more expected discounted rewards than or at least equal to the actor. Thus, the Q value predicted by the critic is a better signal to redistribute the action originally sampled from the policy distribution predicted by the actor. This paper introduces the novel Critic Guided Action Redistribution (CGAR) algorithm and tests it on the OpenAI MuJoCo tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the sample efficiency and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code can be found at https://github.com/tairanhuang/CGAR.
ICOS Protein Expression Segmentation: Can Transformer Networks Give Better Results?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Biomarkers identify a patients response to treatment. With the recent advances in artificial intelligence based on the Transformer networks, there is only limited research has been done to measure the performance on challenging histopathology images. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of the numerous state-of-the-art Transformer networks for immune-checkpoint biomarker, Inducible Tcell COStimulator (ICOS) protein cell segmentation in colon cancer from immunohistochemistry (IHC) slides. Extensive and comprehensive experimental results confirm that MiSSFormer achieved the highest Dice score of 74.85% than the rest evaluated Transformer and Efficient U-Net methods.
Online Event Selection for Mu3e using GPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

In the search for physics beyond the Standard Model the Mu3e experiment tries to observe the lepton flavor violating decay $μ^+ \rightarrow e^+ e^- e^+$. By observing the decay products of $1 \cdot 10^8μ$/s it aims to either observe the process, or set a new upper limit on its estimated branching ratio. The high muon rates result in high data rates of $80$\,Gbps, dominated by data produced through background processes. We present the Online Event Selection, a three step algorithm running on the graphics processing units (GPU) of the $12$ Mu3e filter farm computers. By using simple and fast geometric selection criteria, the algorithm first reduces the amount of possible event candidates to below $5\%$ of the initial set. These candidates are then used to reconstruct full particle tracks, correctly reconstructing over $97\%$ of signal tracks. Finally a possible decay vertex is reconstructed using simple geometric considerations instead of a full reconstruction, correctly identifying over $94\%$ of signal events. We also present a full implementation of the algorithm, fulfilling all performance requirements at the targeted muon rate and successfully reducing the data rate by a factor of $200$.
A Neuromorphic Vision-Based Measurement for Robust Relative Localization in Future Space Exploration Missions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Space exploration has witnessed revolutionary changes upon landing of the Perseverance Rover on the Martian surface and demonstrating the first flight beyond Earth by the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity. During their mission on Mars, Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity collaboratively explore the Martian surface, where Ingenuity scouts terrain information for rover's safe traversability. Hence, determining the relative poses between both the platforms is of paramount importance for the success of this mission. Driven by this necessity, this work proposes a robust relative localization system based on a fusion of neuromorphic vision-based measurements (NVBMs) and inertial measurements. The emergence of neuromorphic vision triggered a paradigm shift in the computer vision community, due to its unique working principle delineated with asynchronous events triggered by variations of light intensities occurring in the scene. This implies that observations cannot be acquired in static scenes due to illumination invariance. To circumvent this limitation, high frequency active landmarks are inserted in the scene to guarantee consistent event firing. These landmarks are adopted as salient features to facilitate relative localization. A novel event-based landmark identification algorithm using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) is developed for matching the landmarks correspondences formulating our NVBMs. The NVBMs are fused with inertial measurements in proposed state estimators, landmark tracking Kalman filter (LTKF) and translation decoupled Kalman filter (TDKF) for landmark tracking and relative localization, respectively. The proposed system was tested in a variety of experiments and has outperformed state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy and range.
LED: Latent Variable-based Estimation of Density
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Modern generative models are roughly divided into two main categories: (1) models that can produce high-quality random samples, but cannot estimate the exact density of new data points and (2) those that provide exact density estimation, at the expense of sample quality and compactness of the latent space. In this work we propose LED, a new generative model closely related to GANs, that allows not only efficient sampling but also efficient density estimation. By maximizing log-likelihood on the output of the discriminator, we arrive at an alternative adversarial optimization objective that encourages generated data diversity. This formulation provides insights into the relationships between several popular generative models. Additionally, we construct a flow-based generator that can compute exact probabilities for generated samples, while allowing low-dimensional latent variables as input. Our experimental results, on various datasets, show that our density estimator produces accurate estimates, while retaining good quality in the generated samples.
Restoring speech intelligibility for hearing aid users with deep learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Almost half a billion people world-wide suffer from disabling hearing loss. While hearing aids can partially compensate for this, a large proportion of users struggle to understand speech in situations with background noise. Here, we present a deep learning-based algorithm that selectively suppresses noise while maintaining speech signals. The algorithm restores speech intelligibility for hearing aid users to the level of control subjects with normal hearing. It consists of a deep network that is trained on a large custom database of noisy speech signals and is further optimized by a neural architecture search, using a novel deep learning-based metric for speech intelligibility. The network achieves state-of-the-art denoising on a range of human-graded assessments, generalizes across different noise categories and - in contrast to classic beamforming approaches - operates on a single microphone. The system runs in real time on a laptop, suggesting that large-scale deployment on hearing aid chips could be achieved within a few years. Deep learning-based denoising therefore holds the potential to improve the quality of life of millions of hearing impaired people soon.