OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Automated Essay Scoring Using Transformer Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Automated essay scoring (AES) is gaining increasing attention in the education sector as it significantly reduces the burden of manual scoring and allows ad hoc feedback for learners. Natural language processing based on machine learning has been shown to be particularly suitable for text classification and AES. While many machine-learning approaches for AES still rely on a bag-of-words (BOW) approach, we consider a transformer-based approach in this paper, compare its performance to a logistic regression model based on the BOW approach and discuss their differences. The analysis is based on 2,088 email responses to a problem-solving task, that were manually labeled in terms of politeness. Both transformer models considered in that analysis outperformed without any hyper-parameter tuning the regression-based model. We argue that for AES tasks such as politeness classification, the transformer-based approach has significant advantages, while a BOW approach suffers from not taking word order into account and reducing the words to their stem. Further, we show how such models can help increase the accuracy of human raters, and we provide a detailed instruction on how to implement transformer-based models for one's own purpose.
ConditionalQA: A Complex Reading Comprehension Dataset with Conditional Answers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We describe a Question Answering (QA) dataset that contains complex questions with conditional answers, i.e. the answers are only applicable when certain conditions apply. We call this dataset ConditionalQA. In addition to conditional answers, the dataset also features: (1) long context documents with information that is related in logically complex ways; (2) multi-hop questions that require compositional logical reasoning; (3) a combination of extractive questions, yes/no questions, questions with multiple answers, and not-answerable questions; (4) questions asked without knowing the answers. We show that ConditionalQA is challenging for many of the existing QA models, especially in selecting answer conditions. We believe that this dataset will motivate further research in answering complex questions over long documents. Data and leaderboard are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/haitian-sun/ConditionalQA}.
Sustainability Through Cognition Aware Safety Systems -- Next Level Human-Machine-Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Industrial Safety deals with the physical integrity of humans, machines and the environment when they interact during production scenarios. Industrial Safety is subject to a rigorous certification process that leads to inflexible settings, in which all changes are forbidden. With the progressing introduction of smart robotics and smart machinery to the factory floor, combined with an increasing shortage of skilled workers, it becomes imperative that safety scenarios incorporate a flexible handling of the boundary between humans, machines and the environment. In order to increase the well-being of workers, reduce accidents, and compensate for different skill sets, the configuration of machines and the factory floor should be dynamically adapted, while still enforcing functional safety requirements. The contribution of this paper is as follows: (1) We present a set of three scenarios, and discuss how industrial safety mechanisms could be augmented through dynamic changes to the work environment in order to decrease potential accidents, and thus increase productivity. (2) We introduce the concept of a Cognition Aware Safety System (CASS) and its architecture. The idea behind CASS is to integrate AI based reasoning about human load, stress, and attention with AI based selection of actions to avoid the triggering of safety stops. (3) And finally, we will describe the required performance measurement dimensions for a quantitative performance measurement model to enable a comprehensive (triple bottom line) impact assessment of CASS. Additionally we introduce a detailed guideline for expert interviews to explore the feasibility of the approach for given scenarios.
Adaptive Elastic Training for Sparse Deep Learning on Heterogeneous Multi-GPU Servers
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Motivated by extreme multi-label classification applications, we consider training deep learning models over sparse data in multi-GPU servers. The variance in the number of non-zero features across training batches and the intrinsic GPU heterogeneity combine to limit accuracy and increase the time to convergence. We address these challenges with Adaptive SGD, an adaptive elastic model averaging stochastic gradient descent algorithm for heterogeneous multi-GPUs that is characterized by dynamic scheduling, adaptive batch size scaling, and normalized model merging. Instead of statically partitioning batches to GPUs, batches are routed based on the relative processing speed. Batch size scaling assigns larger batches to the faster GPUs and smaller batches to the slower ones, with the goal to arrive at a steady state in which all the GPUs perform the same number of model updates. Normalized model merging computes optimal weights for every GPU based on the assigned batches such that the combined model achieves better accuracy. We show experimentally that Adaptive SGD outperforms four state-of-the-art solutions in time-to-accuracy and is scalable with the number of GPUs.
Presenting a Larger Up-to-date Movie Dataset and Investigating the Effects of Pre-released Attributes on Gross Revenue
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Movie-making has become one of the most costly and risky endeavors in the entertainment industry. Continuous change in the preference of the audience makes it harder to predict what kind of movie will be financially successful at the box office. So, it is no wonder that cautious, intelligent stakeholders and large production houses will always want to know the probable revenue that will be generated by a movie before making an investment. Researchers have been working on finding an optimal strategy to help investors in making the right decisions. But the lack of a large, up-to-date dataset makes their work harder. In this work, we introduce an up-to-date, richer, and larger dataset that we have prepared by scraping IMDb for researchers and data analysts to work with. The compiled dataset contains the summery data of 7.5 million titles and detail information of more than 200K movies. Additionally, we perform different statistical analysis approaches on our dataset to find out how a movie's revenue is affected by different pre-released attributes such as budget, runtime, release month, content rating, genre etc. In our analysis, we have found that having a star cast/director has a positive impact on generated revenue. We introduce a novel approach for calculating the star power of a movie. Based on our analysis we select a set of attributes as features and train different machine learning algorithms to predict a movie's expected revenue. Based on generated revenue, we classified the movies in 10 categories and achieved a one-class-away accuracy rate of almost 60% (bingo accuracy of 30%). All the generated datasets and analysis codes are available online. We also made the source codes of our scraper bots public, so that researchers interested in extending this work can easily modify these bots as they need and prepare their own up-to-date datasets.
Identifying Introductions in Podcast Episodes from Automatically Generated Transcripts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

As the volume of long-form spoken-word content such as podcasts explodes, many platforms desire to present short, meaningful, and logically coherent segments extracted from the full content. Such segments can be consumed by users to sample content before diving in, as well as used by the platform to promote and recommend content. However, little published work is focused on the segmentation of spoken-word content, where the errors (noise) in transcripts generated by automatic speech recognition (ASR) services poses many challenges. Here we build a novel dataset of complete transcriptions of over 400 podcast episodes, in which we label the position of introductions in each episode. These introductions contain information about the episodes' topics, hosts, and guests, providing a valuable summary of the episode content, as it is created by the authors. We further augment our dataset with word substitutions to increase the amount of available training data. We train three Transformer models based on the pre-trained BERT and different augmentation strategies, which achieve significantly better performance compared with a static embedding model, showing that it is possible to capture generalized, larger-scale structural information from noisy, loosely-organized speech data. This is further demonstrated through an analysis of the models' inner architecture. Our methods and dataset can be used to facilitate future work on the structure-based segmentation of spoken-word content.
Video-based cattle identification and action recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We demonstrate a working prototype for the monitoring of cow welfare by automatically analysing the animal behaviours. Deep learning models have been developed and tested with videos acquired in a farm, and a precision of 81.2\% has been achieved for cow identification. An accuracy of 84.4\% has been achieved for the detection of drinking events, and 94.4\% for the detection of grazing events. Experimental results show that the proposed deep learning method can be used to identify the behaviours of individual animals to enable automated farm provenance. Our raw and ground-truth dataset will be released as the first public video dataset for cow identification and action recognition. Recommendations for further development are also provided.
A Novel Traffic Simulation Framework for Testing Autonomous Vehicles Using SUMO and CARLA
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Traffic simulation is an efficient and cost-effective way to test Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) in a complex and dynamic environment. Numerous studies have been conducted for AV evaluation using traffic simulation over the past decades. However, the current simulation environments fall behind on two fronts -- the background vehicles (BVs) fail to simulate naturalistic driving behavior and the existing environments do not test the entire pipeline in a modular fashion. This study aims to propose a simulation framework that creates a complex and naturalistic traffic environment. Specifically, we combine a modified version of the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) simulator with the Cars Learning to Act (CARLA) simulator to generate a simulation environment that could emulate the complexities of the external environment while providing realistic sensor outputs to the AV pipeline. In a past research work, we created an open-source Python package called SUMO-Gym which generates a realistic road network and naturalistic traffic through SUMO and combines that with OpenAI Gym to provide ease of use for the end user. We propose to extend our developed software by adding CARLA, which in turn will enrich the perception of the ego vehicle by providing realistic sensors outputs of the AVs surrounding environment. Using the proposed framework, AVs perception, planning, and control could be tested in a complex and realistic driving environment. The performance of the proposed framework in constructing output generation and AV evaluations are demonstrated using several case studies.
Secure Precoding in MIMO-NOMA: A Deep Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A novel signaling design for secure transmission over two-user multiple-input multiple-output non-orthogonal multiple access channel using deep neural networks (DNNs) is proposed. The goal of the DNN is to form the covariance matrix of users' signals such that the message of each user is transmitted reliably while being confidential from its counterpart. The proposed DNN linearly precodes each user's signal before superimposing them and achieves near-optimal performance with significantly lower run time. Simulation results show that the proposed models reach about 98% of the secrecy capacity rates. The spectral efficiency of the DNN precoder is much higher than that of existing analytical linear precoders--e.g., generalized singular value decomposition--and its on-the-fly complexity is several times less than the existing iterative methods.
Monitoring the Mental State of Cooperativeness for Guiding an Elderly Person in Sit-to-Stand Assistance
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In providing physical assistance to elderly people, ensuring cooperative behavior from the elderly persons is a critical requirement. In sit-to-stand assistance, for example, an older adult must lean forward, so that the body mass can shift towards the feet before a caregiver starts lifting the body. An experienced caregiver guides the older adult through verbal communications and physical interactions, so that the older adult may be cooperative throughout the process. This guidance is of paramount importance and is a major challenge in introducing a robotic aid to the eldercare environment. The wide-scope goal of the current work is to develop an intelligent eldercare robot that can a) monitor the mental state of an older adult, and b) guide the older adult through an assisting procedure so that he/she can be cooperative in being assisted. The current work presents a basic modeling framework for describing a human's physical behaviors reflecting an internal mental state, and an algorithm for estimating the mental state through interactive observations. The sit-to-stand assistance problem is considered for the initial study. A simple Kalman Filter is constructed for estimating the level of cooperativeness in response to applied cues, with a thresholding scheme being used to make judgments on the cooperativeness state.
Reverse Maximum Inner Product Search: How to efficiently find users who would like to buy my item?
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

The MIPS (maximum inner product search), which finds the item with the highest inner product with a given query user, is an essential problem in the recommendation field. It is usual that e-commerce companies face situations where they want to promote and sell new or discounted items. In these situations, we have to consider a question: who are interested in the items and how to find them? This paper answers this question by addressing a new problem called reverse maximum inner product search (reverse MIPS). Given a query vector and two sets of vectors (user vectors and item vectors), the problem of reverse MIPS finds a set of user vectors whose inner product with the query vector is the maximum among the query and item vectors. Although the importance of this problem is clear, its straightforward implementation incurs a computationally expensive cost. We therefore propose Simpfer, a simple, fast, and exact algorithm for reverse MIPS. In an offline phase, Simpfer builds a simple index that maintains a lower-bound of the maximum inner product. By exploiting this index, Simpfer judges whether the query vector can have the maximum inner product or not, for a given user vector, in a constant time. Besides, our index enables filtering user vectors, which cannot have the maximum inner product with the query vector, in a batch. We theoretically demonstrate that Simpfer outperforms baselines employing state-of-the-art MIPS techniques. Furthermore, our extensive experiments on real datasets show that Simpfer is at least two orders magnitude faster than the baselines.
SoGCN: Second-Order Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) with multi-hop aggregation is more expressive than one-hop GCN but suffers from higher model complexity. Finding the shortest aggregation range that achieves comparable expressiveness and minimizes this side effect remains an open question. We answer this question by showing that multi-layer second-order graph convolution (SoGC) is sufficient to attain the ability of expressing polynomial spectral filters with arbitrary coefficients. Compared to models with one-hop aggregation, multi-hop propagation, and jump connections, SoGC possesses filter representational completeness while being lightweight, efficient, and easy to implement. Thereby, we suggest that SoGC is a simple design capable of forming the basic building block of GCNs, playing the same role as $3 \times 3$ kernels in CNNs. We build our Second-Order Graph Convolutional Networks (SoGCN) with SoGC and design a synthetic dataset to verify its filter fitting capability to validate these points. For real-world tasks, we present the state-of-the-art performance of SoGCN on the benchmark of node classification, graph classification, and graph regression datasets.
bert2BERT: Towards Reusable Pretrained Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, researchers tend to pre-train ever-larger language models to explore the upper limit of deep models. However, large language model pre-training costs intensive computational resources and most of the models are trained from scratch without reusing the existing pre-trained models, which is wasteful. In this paper, we propose bert2BERT, which can effectively transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model (e.g., BERT_BASE) to a large model (e.g., BERT_LARGE) through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. Specifically, we extend the previous function-preserving on Transformer-based language model, and further improve it by proposing advanced knowledge for large model's initialization. In addition, a two-stage pre-training method is proposed to further accelerate the training process. We did extensive experiments on representative PLMs (e.g., BERT and GPT) and demonstrate that (1) our method can save a significant amount of training cost compared with baselines including learning from scratch, StackBERT and MSLT; (2) our method is generic and applicable to different types of pre-trained models. In particular, bert2BERT saves about 45% and 47% computational cost of pre-training BERT_BASE and GPT_BASE by reusing the models of almost their half sizes. The source code will be publicly available upon publication.
SGoLAM: Simultaneous Goal Localization and Mapping for Multi-Object Goal Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present SGoLAM, short for simultaneous goal localization and mapping, which is a simple and efficient algorithm for Multi-Object Goal navigation. Given an agent equipped with an RGB-D camera and a GPS/Compass sensor, our objective is to have the agent navigate to a sequence of target objects in realistic 3D environments. Our pipeline fully leverages the strength of classical approaches for visual navigation, by decomposing the problem into two key components: mapping and goal localization. The mapping module converts the depth observations into an occupancy map, and the goal localization module marks the locations of goal objects. The agent's policy is determined using the information provided by the two modules: if a current goal is found, plan towards the goal and otherwise, perform exploration. As our approach does not require any training of neural networks, it could be used in an off-the-shelf manner, and amenable for fast generalization in new, unseen environments. Nonetheless, our approach performs on par with the state-of-the-art learning-based approaches. SGoLAM is ranked 2nd in the CVPR 2021 MultiON (Multi-Object Goal Navigation) challenge. We have made our code publicly available at \emph{https://github.com/eunsunlee/SGoLAM}.
Optimal Update in Energy Harvesting Aided Terahertz Communications with Random Blocking
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we consider an information update system where wireless sensor sends timely updates to the destination over a random blocking terahertz channel with the supply of harvested energy and reliable energy backup. The paper aims to find the optimal information updating policy that minimize the time-average weighted sum of the Age of information(AoI) and the reliable energy costs by formulating an infinite state Markov decision process(MDP). With the derivation of the monotonicity of value function on each component, the optimal information updating policy is proved to have a threshold structure. Based on this special structure, an algorithm for efficiently computing the optimal policy is proposed. Numerical results show that the optimal updating policy proposed outperforms baseline policies.
Relighting Humans in the Wild: Monocular Full-Body Human Relighting with Domain Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

The modern supervised approaches for human image relighting rely on training data generated from 3D human models. However, such datasets are often small (e.g., Light Stage data with a small number of individuals) or limited to diffuse materials (e.g., commercial 3D scanned human models). Thus, the human relighting techniques suffer from the poor generalization capability and synthetic-to-real domain gap. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for single-image human relighting with domain adaptation. In the first stage, we train a neural network for diffuse-only relighting. In the second stage, we train another network for enhancing non-diffuse reflection by learning residuals between real photos and images reconstructed by the diffuse-only network. Thanks to the second stage, we can achieve higher generalization capability against various cloth textures, while reducing the domain gap. Furthermore, to handle input videos, we integrate illumination-aware deep video prior to greatly reduce flickering artifacts even with challenging settings under dynamic illuminations.
Aspect-Sentiment-Multiple-Opinion Triplet Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to extract aspect term (aspect), sentiment and opinion term (opinion) triplets from sentences and can tell a complete story, i.e., the discussed aspect, the sentiment toward the aspect, and the cause of the sentiment. ASTE is a charming task, however, one triplet extracted by ASTE only includes one opinion of the aspect, but an aspect in a sentence may have multiple corresponding opinions and one opinion only provides part of the reason why the aspect has this sentiment, as a consequence, some triplets extracted by ASTE are hard to understand, and provide erroneous information for downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce a new task, named Aspect Sentiment Multiple Opinions Triplet Extraction (ASMOTE). ASMOTE aims to extract aspect, sentiment and multiple opinions triplets. Specifically, one triplet extracted by ASMOTE contains all opinions about the aspect and can tell the exact reason that the aspect has the sentiment. We propose an Aspect-Guided Framework (AGF) to address this task. AGF first extracts aspects, then predicts their opinions and sentiments. Moreover, with the help of the proposed Sequence Labeling Attention(SLA), AGF improves the performance of the sentiment classification using the extracted opinions. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.