OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On the Philosophical, Cognitive and Mathematical Foundations of Symbiotic Autonomous Systems (SAS)
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Symbiotic Autonomous Systems (SAS) are advanced intelligent and cognitive systems exhibiting autonomous collective intelligence enabled by coherent symbiosis of human-machine interactions in hybrid societies. Basic research in the emerging field of SAS has triggered advanced general AI technologies functioning without human intervention or hybrid symbiotic systems synergizing humans and intelligent machines into coherent cognitive systems. This work presents a theoretical framework of SAS underpinned by the latest advances in intelligence, cognition, computer, and system sciences. SAS are characterized by the composition of autonomous and symbiotic systems that adopt bio-brain-social-inspired and heterogeneously synergized structures and autonomous behaviors. This paper explores their cognitive and mathematical foundations. The challenge to seamless human-machine interactions in a hybrid environment is addressed. SAS-based collective intelligence is explored in order to augment human capability by autonomous machine intelligence towards the next generation of general AI, autonomous computers, and trustworthy mission-critical intelligent systems. Emerging paradigms and engineering applications of SAS are elaborated via an autonomous knowledge learning system that symbiotically works between humans and cognitive robots.
MaskNet: Introducing Feature-Wise Multiplication to CTR Ranking Models by Instance-Guided Mask
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Click-Through Rate(CTR) estimation has become one of the most fundamental tasks in many real-world applications and it's important for ranking models to effectively capture complex high-order features. Shallow feed-forward network is widely used in many state-of-the-art DNN models such as FNN, DeepFM and xDeepFM to implicitly capture high-order feature interactions. However, some research has proved that addictive feature interaction, particular feed-forward neural networks, is inefficient in capturing common feature interaction. To resolve this problem, we introduce specific multiplicative operation into DNN ranking system by proposing instance-guided mask which performs element-wise product both on the feature embedding and feed-forward layers guided by input instance. We also turn the feed-forward layer in DNN model into a mixture of addictive and multiplicative feature interactions by proposing MaskBlock in this paper. MaskBlock combines the layer normalization, instance-guided mask, and feed-forward layer and it is a basic building block to be used to design new ranking model under various configurations. The model consisting of MaskBlock is called MaskNet in this paper and two new MaskNet models are proposed to show the effectiveness of MaskBlock as basic building block for composing high performance ranking systems. The experiment results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed MaskNet models outperform state-of-the-art models such as DeepFM and xDeepFM significantly, which implies MaskBlock is an effective basic building unit for composing new high performance ranking systems.
Improved Customer Transaction Classification using Semi-Supervised Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In pickup and delivery services, transaction classification based on customer provided free text is a challenging problem. It involves the association of a wide variety of customer inputs to a fixed set of categories while adapting to the various customer writing styles. This categorization is important for the business: it helps understand the market needs and trends, and also assist in building a personalized experience for different segments of the customers. Hence, it is vital to capture these category information trends at scale, with high precision and recall. In this paper, we focus on a specific use-case where a single category drives each transaction. We propose a cost-effective transaction classification approach based on semi-supervision and knowledge distillation frameworks. The approach identifies the category of a transaction using free text input given by the customer. We use weak labelling and notice that the performance gains are similar to that of using human-annotated samples. On a large internal dataset and on 20Newsgroup dataset, we see that RoBERTa performs the best for the categorization tasks. Further, using an ALBERT model (it has 33x fewer parameters vis-a-vis parameters of RoBERTa), with RoBERTa as the Teacher, we see a performance similar to that of RoBERTa and better performance over unadapted ALBERT. This framework, with ALBERT as a student and RoBERTa as teacher, is further referred to as R-ALBERT in this paper. The model is in production and is used by business to understand changing trends and take appropriate decisions.
AI Uncertainty Based on Rademacher Complexity and Shannon Entropy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper from communication channel coding perspective we are able to present both a theoretical and practical discussion of AI's uncertainty, capacity and evolution for pattern classification based on the classical Rademacher complexity and Shannon entropy. First AI capacity is defined as in communication channels. It is shown qualitatively that the classical Rademacher complexity and Shannon entropy used in communication theory is closely related by their definitions, given a pattern classification problem with a complexity measured by Rademacher complexity. Secondly based on the Shannon mathematical theory on communication coding, we derive several sufficient and necessary conditions for an AI's error rate approaching zero in classifications problems. A 1/2 criteria on Shannon entropy is derived in this paper so that error rate can approach zero or is zero for AI pattern classification problems. Last but not least, we show our analysis and theory by providing examples of AI pattern classifications with error rate approaching zero or being zero.
Diverse Auto-Curriculum is Critical for Successful Real-World Multiagent Learning Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved a remarkable amount of success in solving various types of video games. A cornerstone of this success is the auto-curriculum framework, which shapes the learning process by continually creating new challenging tasks for agents to adapt to, thereby facilitating the acquisition of new skills. In order to extend MARL methods to real-world domains outside of video games, we envision in this blue sky paper that maintaining a diversity-aware auto-curriculum is critical for successful MARL applications. Specifically, we argue that \emph{behavioural diversity} is a pivotal, yet under-explored, component for real-world multiagent learning systems, and that significant work remains in understanding how to design a diversity-aware auto-curriculum. We list four open challenges for auto-curriculum techniques, which we believe deserve more attention from this community. Towards validating our vision, we recommend modelling realistic interactive behaviours in autonomous driving as an important test bed, and recommend the SMARTS/ULTRA benchmark.
Geometric feature performance under downsampling for EEG classification tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We experimentally investigate a collection of feature engineering pipelines for use with a CNN for classifying eyes-open or eyes-closed from electroencephalogram (EEG) time-series from the Bonn dataset. Using the Takens' embedding--a geometric representation of time-series--we construct simplicial complexes from EEG data. We then compare $ε$-series of Betti-numbers and $ε$-series of graph spectra (a novel construction)--two topological invariants of the latent geometry from these complexes--to raw time series of the EEG to fill in a gap in the literature for benchmarking. These methods, inspired by Topological Data Analysis, are used for feature engineering to capture local geometry of the time-series. Additionally, we test these feature pipelines' robustness to downsampling and data reduction. This paper seeks to establish clearer expectations for both time-series classification via geometric features, and how CNNs for time-series respond to data of degraded resolution.
A Gated Fusion Network for Dynamic Saliency Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Predicting saliency in videos is a challenging problem due to complex modeling of interactions between spatial and temporal information, especially when ever-changing, dynamic nature of videos is considered. Recently, researchers have proposed large-scale datasets and models that take advantage of deep learning as a way to understand what's important for video saliency. These approaches, however, learn to combine spatial and temporal features in a static manner and do not adapt themselves much to the changes in the video content. In this paper, we introduce Gated Fusion Network for dynamic saliency (GFSalNet), the first deep saliency model capable of making predictions in a dynamic way via gated fusion mechanism. Moreover, our model also exploits spatial and channel-wise attention within a multi-scale architecture that further allows for highly accurate predictions. We evaluate the proposed approach on a number of datasets, and our experimental analysis demonstrates that it outperforms or is highly competitive with the state of the art. Importantly, we show that it has a good generalization ability, and moreover, exploits temporal information more effectively via its adaptive fusion scheme.
Learning from Demonstrations using Signal Temporal Logic
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Learning-from-demonstrations is an emerging paradigm to obtain effective robot control policies for complex tasks via reinforcement learning without the need to explicitly design reward functions. However, it is susceptible to imperfections in demonstrations and also raises concerns of safety and interpretability in the learned control policies. To address these issues, we use Signal Temporal Logic to evaluate and rank the quality of demonstrations. Temporal logic-based specifications allow us to create non-Markovian rewards, and also define interesting causal dependencies between tasks such as sequential task specifications. We validate our approach through experiments on discrete-world and OpenAI Gym environments, and show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art Maximum Causal Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning.
KnowledgeCheckR: Intelligent Techniques for Counteracting Forgetting
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Existing e-learning environments primarily focus on the aspect of providing intuitive learning contents and to recommend learning units in a personalized fashion. The major focus of the KnowledgeCheckR environment is to take into account forgetting processes which immediately start after a learning unit has been completed. In this context, techniques are needed that are able to predict which learning units are the most relevant ones to be repeated in future learning sessions. In this paper, we provide an overview of the recommendation approaches integrated in KnowledgeCheckR. Examples thereof are utility-based recommendation that helps to identify learning contents to be repeated in the future, collaborative filtering approaches that help to implement session-based recommendation, and content-based recommendation that supports intelligent question answering. In order to show the applicability of the presented techniques, we provide an overview of the results of empirical studies that have been conducted in real-world scenarios.
Quasi-Monte Carlo Software
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2021
Year: 2021

Practitioners wishing to experience the efficiency gains from using low discrepancy sequences need correct, robust, well-written software. This article, based on our MCQMC 2020 tutorial, describes some of the better quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) software available. We highlight the key software components required by QMC to approximate multivariate integrals or expectations of functions of vector random variables. We have combined these components in QMCPy, a Python open-source library, which we hope will draw the support of the QMC community. Here we introduce QMCPy.
One Line To Rule Them All: Generating LO-Shot Soft-Label Prototypes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Increasingly large datasets are rapidly driving up the computational costs of machine learning. Prototype generation methods aim to create a small set of synthetic observations that accurately represent a training dataset but greatly reduce the computational cost of learning from it. Assigning soft labels to prototypes can allow increasingly small sets of prototypes to accurately represent the original training dataset. Although foundational work on `less than one'-shot learning has proven the theoretical plausibility of learning with fewer than one observation per class, developing practical algorithms for generating such prototypes remains an unexplored territory. We propose a novel, modular method for generating soft-label prototypical lines that still maintains representational accuracy even when there are fewer prototypes than the number of classes in the data. In addition, we propose the Hierarchical Soft-Label Prototype k-Nearest Neighbor classification algorithm based on these prototypical lines. We show that our method maintains high classification accuracy while greatly reducing the number of prototypes required to represent a dataset, even when working with severely imbalanced and difficult data. Our code is available at https://github.com/ilia10000/SLkNN.
Information Ranking Using Optimum-Path Forest
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The task of learning to rank has been widely studied by the machine learning community, mainly due to its use and great importance in information retrieval, data mining, and natural language processing. Therefore, ranking accurately and learning to rank are crucial tasks. Context-Based Information Retrieval systems have been of great importance to reduce the effort of finding relevant data. Such systems have evolved by using machine learning techniques to improve their results, but they are mainly dependent on user feedback. Although information retrieval has been addressed in different works along with classifiers based on Optimum-Path Forest (OPF), these have so far not been applied to the learning to rank task. Therefore, the main contribution of this work is to evaluate classifiers based on Optimum-Path Forest, in such a context. Experiments were performed considering the image retrieval and ranking scenarios, and the performance of OPF-based approaches was compared to the well-known SVM-Rank pairwise technique and a baseline based on distance calculation. The experiments showed competitive results concerning precision and outperformed traditional techniques in terms of computational load.
A Sub-band Approach to Deep Denoising Wavelet Networks and a Frequency-adaptive Loss for Perceptual Quality
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose two contributions to neural network based denoising. First, we propose applying separate convolutional layers to each sub-band of discrete wavelet transform (DWT) as opposed to the common usage of DWT which concatenates all sub-bands and applies a single convolution layer. We show that our approach to using DWT in neural networks improves the accuracy notably, due to keeping the sub-band order uncorrupted prior to inverse DWT. Our second contribution is a denoising loss based on top k-percent of errors in frequency domain. A neural network trained with this loss, adaptively focuses on frequencies that it fails to recover the most in each iteration. We show that this loss results into better perceptual quality by providing an image that is more balanced in terms of the errors in frequency components.
A2-FPN for Semantic Segmentation of Fine-Resolution Remotely Sensed Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semantic segmentation using fine-resolution remotely sensed images plays a critical role in many practical applications, such as urban planning, environmental protection, natural and anthropogenic landscape monitoring, etc. However, the automation of semantic segmentation, i.e., automatic categorization/labeling and segmentation is still a challenging task, particularly for fine-resolution images with huge spatial and spectral complexity. Addressing such a problem represents an exciting research field, which paves the way for scene-level landscape pattern analysis and decision making. In this paper, we propose an approach for automatic land segmentation based on the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN). As a classic architecture, FPN can build a feature pyramid with high-level semantics throughout. However, intrinsic defects in feature extraction and fusion hinder FPN from further aggregating more discriminative features. Hence, we propose an Attention Aggregation Module (AAM) to enhance multi-scale feature learning through attention-guided feature aggregation. Based on FPN and AAM, a novel framework named Attention Aggregation Feature Pyramid Network (A2-FPN) is developed for semantic segmentation of fine-resolution remotely sensed images. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our A2 -FPN in segmentation accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/lironui/A2-FPN.
EfficientLPS: Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Panoptic segmentation of point clouds is a crucial task that enables autonomous vehicles to comprehend their vicinity using their highly accurate and reliable LiDAR sensors. Existing top-down approaches tackle this problem by either combining independent task-specific networks or translating methods from the image domain ignoring the intricacies of LiDAR data and thus often resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we present the novel top-down Efficient LiDAR Panoptic Segmentation (EfficientLPS) architecture that addresses multiple challenges in segmenting LiDAR point clouds including distance-dependent sparsity, severe occlusions, large scale-variations, and re-projection errors. EfficientLPS comprises of a novel shared backbone that encodes with strengthened geometric transformation modeling capacity and aggregates semantically rich range-aware multi-scale features. It incorporates new scale-invariant semantic and instance segmentation heads along with the panoptic fusion module which is supervised by our proposed panoptic periphery loss function. Additionally, we formulate a regularized pseudo labeling framework to further improve the performance of EfficientLPS by training on unlabelled data. We benchmark our proposed model on two large-scale LiDAR datasets: nuScenes, for which we also provide ground truth annotations, and SemanticKITTI. Notably, EfficientLPS sets the new state-of-the-art on both these datasets.
A Thorough View of Exact Inference in Graphs from the Degree-4 Sum-of-Squares Hierarchy
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Performing inference in graphs is a common task within several machine learning problems, e.g., image segmentation, community detection, among others. For a given undirected connected graph, we tackle the statistical problem of exactly recovering an unknown ground-truth binary labeling of the nodes from a single corrupted observation of each edge. Such problem can be formulated as a quadratic combinatorial optimization problem over the boolean hypercube, where it has been shown before that one can (with high probability and in polynomial time) exactly recover the ground-truth labeling of graphs that have an isoperimetric number that grows with respect to the number of nodes (e.g., complete graphs, regular expanders). In this work, we apply a powerful hierarchy of relaxations, known as the sum-of-squares (SoS) hierarchy, to the combinatorial problem. Motivated by empirical evidence on the improvement in exact recoverability, we center our attention on the degree-4 SoS relaxation and set out to understand the origin of such improvement from a graph theoretical perspective. We show that the solution of the dual of the relaxed problem is related to finding edge weights of the Johnson and Kneser graphs, where the weights fulfill the SoS constraints and intuitively allow the input graph to increase its algebraic connectivity. Finally, as byproduct of our analysis, we derive a novel Cheeger-type lower bound for the algebraic connectivity of graphs with signed edge weights.
Uncertainty-based method for improving poorly labeled segmentation datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The success of modern deep learning algorithms for image segmentation heavily depends on the availability of large datasets with clean pixel-level annotations (masks), where the objects of interest are accurately delineated. Lack of time and expertise during data annotation leads to incorrect boundaries and label noise. It is known that deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) can memorize even completely random labels, resulting in poor accuracy. We propose a framework to train binary segmentation DCNNs using sets of unreliable pixel-level annotations. Erroneously labeled pixels are identified based on the estimated aleatoric uncertainty of the segmentation and are relabeled to the true value.
A comparative study on movement feature in different directions for micro-expression recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Micro-expression can reflect people's real emotions. Recognizing micro-expressions is difficult because they are small motions and have a short duration. As the research is deepening into micro-expression recognition, many effective features and methods have been proposed. To determine which direction of movement feature is easier for distinguishing micro-expressions, this paper selects 18 directions (including three types of horizontal, vertical and oblique movements) and proposes a new low-dimensional feature called the Histogram of Single Direction Gradient (HSDG) to study this topic. In this paper, HSDG in every direction is concatenated with LBP-TOP to obtain the LBP with Single Direction Gradient (LBP-SDG) and analyze which direction of movement feature is more discriminative for micro-expression recognition. As with some existing work, Euler Video Magnification (EVM) is employed as a preprocessing step. The experiments on the CASME II and SMIC-HS databases summarize the effective and optimal directions and demonstrate that HSDG in an optimal direction is discriminative, and the corresponding LBP-SDG achieves state-of-the-art performance using EVM.
Steadily Learn to Drive with Virtual Memory
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in developing high-level autonomous driving. However, for high-dimensional tasks, current RL methods suffer from low data efficiency and oscillation in the training process. This paper proposes an algorithm called Learn to drive with Virtual Memory (LVM) to overcome these problems. LVM compresses the high-dimensional information into compact latent states and learns a latent dynamic model to summarize the agent's experience. Various imagined latent trajectories are generated as virtual memory by the latent dynamic model. The policy is learned by propagating gradient through the learned latent model with the imagined latent trajectories and thus leads to high data efficiency. Furthermore, a double critic structure is designed to reduce the oscillation during the training process. The effectiveness of LVM is demonstrated by an image-input autonomous driving task, in which LVM outperforms the existing method in terms of data efficiency, learning stability, and control performance.