OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Multi-Objective reward generalization: Improving performance of Deep Reinforcement Learning for applications in single-asset trading
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We investigate the potential of Multi-Objective, Deep Reinforcement Learning for stock and cryptocurrency single-asset trading: in particular, we consider a Multi-Objective algorithm which generalizes the reward functions and discount factor (i.e., these components are not specified a priori, but incorporated in the learning process). Firstly, using several important assets (cryptocurrency pairs BTCUSD, ETHUSDT, XRPUSDT, and stock indexes AAPL, SPY, NIFTY50), we verify the reward generalization property of the proposed Multi-Objective algorithm, and provide preliminary statistical evidence showing increased predictive stability over the corresponding Single-Objective strategy. Secondly, we show that the Multi-Objective algorithm has a clear edge over the corresponding Single-Objective strategy when the reward mechanism is sparse (i.e., when non-null feedback is infrequent over time). Finally, we discuss the generalization properties with respect to the discount factor. The entirety of our code is provided in open source format.
Practical Mission Planning for Optimized UAV-Sensor Wireless Recharging
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Optimal maintenance of sensor nodes in a Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Network (WRSN) requires effective scheduling of power delivery vehicles by solving the Charging Scheduling Problem (CSP). Deploying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as mobile chargers has emerged as a promising solution due to their mobility and flexibility. The CSP can be formulated as a Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Programming problem whose optimization objective is maximizing the recharged energy of sensor nodes within the UAV battery constraint. While many studies have demonstrated satisfactory performance of heuristic algorithms in addressing specific routing problems, few studies explore online updating (i.e., mission re-planning `on the fly') in the CSP context. Here we present a new offline and online mission planner leveraging a first-principles power consumption model that uses real-time state information and environmental information. The planner, namely Rapid Online Metaheuristic-based Planner (ROMP), supplements solutions from a Guided Local Search (GLS) with our Context-aware Black Hole Algorithm. Our results demonstrate that ROMP outperforms GLS in most cases tested. We developed and proposed FastROMP to speed up the online mission (re-)planning algorithm by introducing a new online adjustment operator that uses the latest state information as input, eliminating the need for re-initialization. FastROMP not only provides a better quality route, but it also significantly reduces computational time. The reduction ranges from 39.57% in sparse deployment to 93.3% in denser deployments.
Memory Efficient Continual Learning with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is known as catastrophic forgetting and it is difficult to prevent due to practical constraints. For instance, the amount of data that can be stored or the computational resources that can be used might be limited. Moreover, applications increasingly rely on large pre-trained neural networks, such as pre-trained Transformers, since the resources or data might not be available in sufficiently large quantities to practitioners to train the model from scratch. In this paper, we devise a method to incrementally train a model on a sequence of tasks using pre-trained Transformers and extending them with Adapters. Different than the existing approaches, our method is able to scale to a large number of tasks without significant overhead and allows sharing information across tasks. On both image and text classification tasks, we empirically demonstrate that our method maintains a good predictive performance without retraining the model or increasing the number of model parameters over time. The resulting model is also significantly faster at inference time compared to Adapter-based state-of-the-art methods.
Benchmarking Graphormer on Large-Scale Molecular Modeling Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This technical note describes the recent updates of Graphormer, including architecture design modifications, and the adaption to 3D molecular dynamics simulation. With these simple modifications, Graphormer could attain better results on large-scale molecular modeling datasets than the vanilla one, and the performance gain could be consistently obtained on 2D and 3D molecular graph modeling tasks. In addition, we show that with a global receptive field and an adaptive aggregation strategy, Graphormer is more powerful than classic message-passing-based GNNs. Empirically, Graphormer could achieve much less MAE than the originally reported results on the PCQM4M quantum chemistry dataset used in KDD Cup 2021. In the meanwhile, it greatly outperforms the competitors in the recent Open Catalyst Challenge, which is a competition track on NeurIPS 2021 workshop, and aims to model the catalyst-adsorbate reaction system with advanced AI models. All codes could be found at https://github.com/Microsoft/Graphormer.
SynWoodScape: Synthetic Surround-view Fisheye Camera Dataset for Autonomous Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Surround-view cameras are a primary sensor for automated driving, used for near-field perception. It is one of the most commonly used sensors in commercial vehicles primarily used for parking visualization and automated parking. Four fisheye cameras with a 190° field of view cover the 360° around the vehicle. Due to its high radial distortion, the standard algorithms do not extend easily. Previously, we released the first public fisheye surround-view dataset named WoodScape. In this work, we release a synthetic version of the surround-view dataset, covering many of its weaknesses and extending it. Firstly, it is not possible to obtain ground truth for pixel-wise optical flow and depth. Secondly, WoodScape did not have all four cameras annotated simultaneously in order to sample diverse frames. However, this means that multi-camera algorithms cannot be designed to obtain a unified output in birds-eye space, which is enabled in the new dataset. We implemented surround-view fisheye geometric projections in CARLA Simulator matching WoodScape's configuration and created SynWoodScape. We release 80k images from the synthetic dataset with annotations for 10+ tasks. We also release the baseline code and supporting scripts.
Universal Regression with Adversarial Responses
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We provide algorithms for regression with adversarial responses under large classes of non-i.i.d. instance sequences, on general separable metric spaces, with provably minimal assumptions. We also give characterizations of learnability in this regression context. We consider universal consistency which asks for strong consistency of a learner without restrictions on the value responses. Our analysis shows that such an objective is achievable for a significantly larger class of instance sequences than stationary processes, and unveils a fundamental dichotomy between value spaces: whether finite-horizon mean estimation is achievable or not. We further provide optimistically universal learning rules, i.e., such that if they fail to achieve universal consistency, any other algorithms will fail as well. For unbounded losses, we propose a mild integrability condition under which there exist algorithms for adversarial regression under large classes of non-i.i.d. instance sequences. In addition, our analysis also provides a learning rule for mean estimation in general metric spaces that is consistent under adversarial responses without any moment conditions on the sequence, a result of independent interest.
Testing Indexability and Computing Whittle and Gittins Index in Subcubic Time
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2023
Year: 2023

Whittle index is a generalization of Gittins index that provides very efficient allocation rules for restless multi-armed bandits. In this work, we develop an algorithm to test the indexability and compute the Whittle indices of any finite-state restless bandit arm. This algorithm works in the discounted and non-discounted cases, and can compute Gittins index. Our algorithm builds on three tools: (1) a careful characterization of Whittle index that allows one to compute recursively the kth smallest index from the $(k - 1)$th smallest, and to test indexability, (2) the use of the Sherman-Morrison formula to make this recursive computation efficient, and (3) a sporadic use of the fastest matrix inversion and multiplication methods to obtain a subcubic complexity. We show that an efficient use of the Sherman-Morrison formula leads to an algorithm that computes Whittle index in $(2/3)n^3 + o(n^3)$ arithmetic operations, where $n$ is the number of states of the arm. The careful use of fast matrix multiplication leads to the first subcubic algorithm to compute Whittle or Gittins index: By using the current fastest matrix multiplication, the theoretical complexity of our algorithm is O(n^2.5286 ). We also develop an efficient implementation of our algorithm that can compute indices of Markov chains with several thousands of states in less than a few seconds.
SUPERNOVA: Automating Test Selection and Defect Prevention in AAA Video Games Using Risk Based Testing and Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Testing video games is an increasingly difficult task as traditional methods fail to scale with growing software systems. Manual testing is a very labor-intensive process, and therefore quickly becomes cost prohibitive. Using scripts for automated testing is affordable, however scripts are ineffective in non-deterministic environments, and knowing when to run each test is another problem altogether. The modern game's complexity, scope, and player expectations are rapidly increasing where quality control is a big portion of the production cost and delivery risk. Reducing this risk and making production happen is a big challenge for the industry currently. To keep production costs realistic up-to and after release, we are focusing on preventive quality assurance tactics alongside testing and data analysis automation. We present SUPERNOVA (Selection of tests and Universal defect Prevention in External Repositories for Novel Objective Verification of software Anomalies), a system responsible for test selection and defect prevention while also functioning as an automation hub. By integrating data analysis functionality with machine and deep learning capability, SUPERNOVA assists quality assurance testers in finding bugs and developers in reducing defects, which improves stability during the production cycle and keeps testing costs under control. The direct impact of this has been observed to be a reduction in 55% or more testing hours for an undisclosed sports game title that has shipped, which was using these test selection optimizations. Furthermore, using risk scores generated by a semi-supervised machine learning model, we are able to detect with 71% precision and 77% recall the probability of a change-list being bug inducing, and provide a detailed breakdown of this inference to developers. These efforts improve workflow and reduce testing hours required on game titles in development.
Synopses of Movie Narratives: a Video-Language Dataset for Story Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Despite recent advances of AI, story understanding remains an open and under-investigated problem. We collect, preprocess, and publicly release a video-language story dataset, Synopses of Movie Narratives (SyMoN), containing 5,193 video summaries of popular movies and TV series with a total length of 869 hours. SyMoN captures naturalistic storytelling videos made by human creators and intended for a human audience. As a prototypical and naturalistic story dataset, SyMoN features high coverage of multimodal story events and abundant mental-state descriptions. Its use of storytelling techniques cause cross-domain semantic gaps that provide appropriate challenges to existing models. We establish benchmarks on video-text retrieval and zero-shot alignment on movie summary videos, which showcase the importance of in-domain data and long-term memory in story understanding. With SyMoN, we hope to lay the groundwork for progress in multimodal story understanding.
Deep Learning-Based Blind Multiple User Detection for Grant-free SCMA and MUSA Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Massive machine-type communications (mMTC) in 6G requires supporting a massive number of devices with limited resources, posing challenges in efficient random access. Grant-free random access and uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are introduced to increase the overload factor and reduce transmission latency with signaling overhead in mMTC. Sparse code multiple access (SCMA) and Multi-user shared access (MUSA) are introduced as advanced code domain NOMA schemes. In grant-free NOMA, machine-type devices (MTD) transmit information to the base station (BS) without a grant, creating a challenging task for the BS to identify the active MTD among all potential active devices. In this paper, a novel pre-activated residual neural network-based multi-user detection (MUD) scheme for the grant-free SCMA and MUSA system in an mMTC uplink framework is proposed to jointly identify the number of active MTDs and their respective messages in the received signal's sparsity and the active MTDs in the absence of channel state information. A novel residual unit designed to learn the properties of multi-dimensional SCMA codebooks, MUSA spreading sequences, and corresponding combinations of active devices with diverse settings. The proposed scheme learns from the labeled dataset of the received signal and identifies the active MTDs from the received signal without any prior knowledge of the device sparsity level. A calibration curve is evaluated to verify the model's calibration. The application of the proposed MUD scheme is investigated in an indoor factory setting using four different mmWave channel models. Numerical results show that when the number of active MTDs in the system is large, the proposed MUD has a significantly higher probability of detection compared to existing approaches over the signal-to-noise ratio range of interest.
EventFormer: AU Event Transformer for Facial Action Unit Event Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Facial action units (AUs) play an indispensable role in human emotion analysis. We observe that although AU-based high-level emotion analysis is urgently needed by real-world applications, frame-level AU results provided by previous works cannot be directly used for such analysis. Moreover, as AUs are dynamic processes, the utilization of global temporal information is important but has been gravely ignored in the literature. To this end, we propose EventFormer for AU event detection, which is the first work directly detecting AU events from a video sequence by viewing AU event detection as a multiple class-specific sets prediction problem. Extensive experiments conducted on a commonly used AU benchmark dataset, BP4D, show the superiority of EventFormer under suitable metrics.
Contrastive Learning for Automotive mmWave Radar Detection Points Based Instance Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The automotive mmWave radar plays a key role in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. Deep learning-based instance segmentation enables real-time object identification from the radar detection points. In the conventional training process, accurate annotation is the key. However, high-quality annotations of radar detection points are challenging to achieve due to their ambiguity and sparsity. To address this issue, we propose a contrastive learning approach for implementing radar detection points-based instance segmentation. We define the positive and negative samples according to the ground-truth label, apply the contrastive loss to train the model first, and then perform fine-tuning for the following downstream task. In addition, these two steps can be merged into one, and pseudo labels can be generated for the unlabeled data to improve the performance further. Thus, there are four different training settings for our method. Experiments show that when the ground-truth information is only available for a small proportion of the training data, our method still achieves a comparable performance to the approach trained in a supervised manner with 100% ground-truth information.
Semidefinite programming bounds for binary codes from a split Terwilliger algebra
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

We study the upper bounds for $A(n,d)$, the maximum size of codewords with length $n$ and Hamming distance at least $d$. Schrijver studied the Terwilliger algebra of the Hamming scheme and proposed a semidefinite program to bound $A(n, d)$. We derive more sophisticated matrix inequalities based on a split Terwilliger algebra to improve Schrijver's semidefinite programming bounds on $A(n, d)$. In particular, we improve the semidefinite programming bounds on $A(18,4)$ to $6551$.
Neural Message Passing for Objective-Based Uncertainty Quantification and Optimal Experimental Design
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Various real-world scientific applications involve the mathematical modeling of complex uncertain systems with numerous unknown parameters. Accurate parameter estimation is often practically infeasible in such systems, as the available training data may be insufficient and the cost of acquiring additional data may be high. In such cases, based on a Bayesian paradigm, we can design robust operators retaining the best overall performance across all possible models and design optimal experiments that can effectively reduce uncertainty to enhance the performance of such operators maximally. While objective-based uncertainty quantification (objective-UQ) based on MOCU (mean objective cost of uncertainty) provides an effective means for quantifying uncertainty in complex systems, the high computational cost of estimating MOCU has been a challenge in applying it to real-world scientific/engineering problems. In this work, we propose a novel scheme to reduce the computational cost for objective-UQ via MOCU based on a data-driven approach. We adopt a neural message-passing model for surrogate modeling, incorporating a novel axiomatic constraint loss that penalizes an increase in the estimated system uncertainty. As an illustrative example, we consider the optimal experimental design (OED) problem for uncertain Kuramoto models, where the goal is to predict the experiments that can most effectively enhance robust synchronization performance through uncertainty reduction. We show that our proposed approach can accelerate MOCU-based OED by four to five orders of magnitude, without any visible performance loss compared to the state-of-the-art. The proposed approach applies to general OED tasks, beyond the Kuramoto model.
What's the Difference? The potential for Convolutional Neural Networks for transient detection without template subtraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We present a study of the potential for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to enable separation of astrophysical transients from image artifacts, a task known as "real-bogus" classification without requiring a template subtracted (or difference) image which requires a computationally expensive process to generate, involving image matching on small spatial scales in large volumes of data. Using data from the Dark Energy Survey, we explore the use of CNNs to (1) automate the "real-bogus" classification, (2) reduce the computational costs of transient discovery. We compare the efficiency of two CNNs with similar architectures, one that uses "image triplets" (templates, search, and difference image) and one that takes as input the template and search only. We measure the decrease in efficiency associated with the loss of information in input finding that the testing accuracy is reduced from 96% to 91.1%. We further investigate how the latter model learns the required information from the template and search by exploring the saliency maps. Our work (1) confirms that CNNs are excellent models for "real-bogus" classification that rely exclusively on the imaging data and require no feature engineering task; (2) demonstrates that high-accuracy (> 90%) models can be built without the need to construct difference images, but some accuracy is lost. Since once trained, neural networks can generate predictions at minimal computational costs, we argue that future implementations of this methodology could dramatically reduce the computational costs in the detection of transients in synoptic surveys like Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time by bypassing the Difference Image Analysis entirely.
SATS: Self-Attention Transfer for Continual Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Continually learning to segment more and more types of image regions is a desired capability for many intelligent systems. However, such continual semantic segmentation suffers from the same catastrophic forgetting issue as in continual classification learning. While multiple knowledge distillation strategies originally for continual classification have been well adapted to continual semantic segmentation, they only consider transferring old knowledge based on the outputs from one or more layers of deep fully convolutional networks. Different from existing solutions, this study proposes to transfer a new type of information relevant to knowledge, i.e. the relationships between elements (Eg. pixels or small local regions) within each image which can capture both within-class and between-class knowledge. The relationship information can be effectively obtained from the self-attention maps in a Transformer-style segmentation model. Considering that pixels belonging to the same class in each image often share similar visual properties, a class-specific region pooling is applied to provide more efficient relationship information for knowledge transfer. Extensive evaluations on multiple public benchmarks support that the proposed self-attention transfer method can further effectively alleviate the catastrophic forgetting issue, and its flexible combination with one or more widely adopted strategies significantly outperforms state-of-the-art solutions.