OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Deep Learning Based Successive Interference Cancellation for the Non-Orthogonal Downlink
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Non-orthogonal communications are expected to play a key role in future wireless systems. In downlink transmissions, the data symbols are broadcast from a base station to different users, which are superimposed with different power to facilitate high-integrity detection using successive interference cancellation (SIC). However, SIC requires accurate knowledge of both the channel model and channel state information (CSI), which may be difficult to acquire. We propose a deep learningaided SIC detector termed SICNet, which replaces the interference cancellation blocks of SIC by deep neural networks (DNNs). Explicitly, SICNet jointly trains its internal DNN-aided blocks for inferring the soft information representing the interfering symbols in a data-driven fashion, rather than using hard-decision decoders as in classical SIC. As a result, SICNet reliably detects the superimposed symbols in the downlink of non-orthogonal systems without requiring any prior knowledge of the channel model, while being less sensitive to CSI uncertainty than its model-based counterpart. SICNet is also robust to changes in the number of users and to their power allocation. Furthermore, SICNet learns to produce accurate soft outputs, which facilitates improved soft-input error correction decoding compared to model-based SIC. Finally, we propose an online training method for SICNet under block fading, which exploits the channel decoding for accurately recovering online data labels for retraining, hence, allowing it to smoothly track the fading envelope without requiring dedicated pilots. Our numerical results show that SICNet approaches the performance of classical SIC under perfect CSI, while outperforming it under realistic CSI uncertainty.
QuCloud+: A Holistic Qubit Mapping Scheme for Single/Multi-programming on 2D/3D NISQ Quantum Computers
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2022
Year: 2022

Qubit mapping is essential to quantum computing's fidelity and quantum computers' resource utilization. Yet, the existing qubit mapping schemes meet some challenges (e.g., crosstalk, SWAP overheads, diverse device topologies, etc.), leading to qubit resource under-utilization, high error rate, and low fidelity in computing results. This paper presents QuCloud+, a new qubit mapping scheme capable of handling these challenges. QuCloud+ has several new designs. (1) QuCloud+ enables multi-programming quantum computing on quantum chips with 2D/3D topology. (2) It partitions physical qubits for concurrent quantum programs with the crosstalk-aware community detection technique and further allocates qubits according to qubit degree, improving fidelity and resource utilization. (3) QuCloud+ includes an X-SWAP mechanism that avoids SWAPs with high crosstalk errors and enables inter-program SWAPs to reduce the SWAP overheads. (4) QuCloud+ schedules concurrent quantum programs to be mapped and executed based on estimated fidelity for the best practice. QuCloud+ outperforms the previous multi-programming work on various devices by 6.84% on fidelity and saves 40.9% additional gates required during mapping transition.
Curriculum Learning for Data-Efficient Vision-Language Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Aligning image and text encoders from scratch using contrastive learning requires large amounts of paired image-text data. We alleviate this need by aligning individually pre-trained language and vision representation models using a much smaller amount of paired data, augmented with a curriculum learning algorithm to learn fine-grained vision-language alignments. TOnICS (Training with Ontology-Informed Contrastive Sampling) initially samples minibatches whose image-text pairs contain a wide variety of objects to learn object-level alignment, and progressively samples minibatches where all image-text pairs contain the same object to learn finer-grained contextual alignment. Aligning pre-trained BERT and VinVL models to each other using TOnICS outperforms CLIP on downstream zero-shot image retrieval while using less than 1% as much training data.
Decentralized Machine Learning for Intelligent Health Care Systems on the Computing Continuum
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The introduction of electronic personal health records (EHR) enables nationwide information exchange and curation among different health care systems. However, the current EHR systems do not provide transparent means for diagnosis support, medical research or can utilize the omnipresent data produced by the personal medical devices. Besides, the EHR systems are centrally orchestrated, which could potentially lead to a single point of failure. Therefore, in this article, we explore novel approaches for decentralizing machine learning over distributed ledgers to create intelligent EHR systems that can utilize information from personal medical devices for improved knowledge extraction. Consequently, we proposed and evaluated a conceptual EHR to enable anonymous predictive analysis across multiple medical institutions. The evaluation results indicate that the decentralized EHR can be deployed over the computing continuum with reduced machine learning time of up to 60% and consensus latency of below 8 seconds.
Generative Design of Physical Objects using Modular Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

In recent years generative design techniques have become firmly established in numerous applied fields, especially in engineering. These methods are demonstrating intensive growth owing to promising outlook. However, existing approaches are limited by the specificity of problem under consideration. In addition, they do not provide desired flexibility. In this paper we formulate general approach to an arbitrary generative design problem and propose novel framework called GEFEST (Generative Evolution For Encoded STructure) on its basis. The developed approach is based on three general principles: sampling, estimation and optimization. This ensures the freedom of method adjustment for solution of particular generative design problem and therefore enables to construct the most suitable one. A series of experimental studies was conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the GEFEST framework. It involved synthetic and real-world cases (coastal engineering, microfluidics, thermodynamics and oil field planning). Flexible structure of the GEFEST makes it possible to obtain the results that surpassing baseline solutions.
Detecting Spam Reviews on Vietnamese E-commerce Websites
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The reviews of customers play an essential role in online shopping. People often refer to reviews or comments of previous customers to decide whether to buy a new product. Catching up with this behavior, some people create untruths and illegitimate reviews to hoax customers about the fake quality of products. These are called spam reviews, confusing consumers on online shopping platforms and negatively affecting online shopping behaviors. We propose the dataset called ViSpamReviews, which has a strict annotation procedure for detecting spam reviews on e-commerce platforms. Our dataset consists of two tasks: the binary classification task for detecting whether a review is spam or not and the multi-class classification task for identifying the type of spam. The PhoBERT obtained the highest results on both tasks, 86.89% and 72.17%, respectively, by macro average F1 score.
Multimodal SuperCon: Classifier for Drivers of Deforestation in Indonesia
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deforestation is one of the contributing factors to climate change. Climate change has a serious impact on human life, and it occurs due to emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, to the atmosphere. It is important to know the causes of deforestation for mitigation efforts, but there is a lack of data-driven research studies to predict these deforestation drivers. In this work, we propose a contrastive learning architecture, called Multimodal SuperCon, for classifying drivers of deforestation in Indonesia using satellite images obtained from Landsat 8. Multimodal SuperCon is an architecture which combines contrastive learning and multimodal fusion to handle the available deforestation dataset. Our proposed model outperforms previous work on driver classification, giving a 7% improvement in accuracy in comparison to a state-of-the-art rotation equivariant model for the same task.
High Dynamic Range and Super-Resolution from Raw Image Bursts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Photographs captured by smartphones and mid-range cameras have limited spatial resolution and dynamic range, with noisy response in underexposed regions and color artefacts in saturated areas. This paper introduces the first approach (to the best of our knowledge) to the reconstruction of high-resolution, high-dynamic range color images from raw photographic bursts captured by a handheld camera with exposure bracketing. This method uses a physically-accurate model of image formation to combine an iterative optimization algorithm for solving the corresponding inverse problem with a learned image representation for robust alignment and a learned natural image prior. The proposed algorithm is fast, with low memory requirements compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches to image restoration, and features that are learned end to end from synthetic yet realistic data. Extensive experiments demonstrate its excellent performance with super-resolution factors of up to $\times 4$ on real photographs taken in the wild with hand-held cameras, and high robustness to low-light conditions, noise, camera shake, and moderate object motion.
Big Data and Analytics Implementation in Tertiary Institutions to Predict Students Performance in Nigeria
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

The term Big Data has been coined to refer to the gargantuan bulk of data that cannot be dealt with by traditional data-handling techniques. Big Data is still a novel concept, and in the following literature, we intend to elaborate on it in a palpable fashion. It commences with the concept of the subject in itself, along with its properties and the two general approaches to dealing with it. Big Data provides an opportunity for educational Institutions to use their Information Technology resources strategically to improve educational quality, guide students to higher completion rates and improve student persistence and outcomes. This paper explores the attributes of big data that are relevant to educational institutions, investigates the factors influencing the adoption of big data and analytics in learning institutions, and seeks to establish the limiting factors hindering the use of big data in Institutions of higher learning. A survey research design was adopted in conducting this research, and Questionnaires were the instrument employed for data collection.
Understanding the Relation of User and News Representations in Content-Based Neural News Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

A number of models for neural content-based news recommendation have been proposed. However, there is limited understanding of the relative importances of the three main components of such systems (news encoder, user encoder, and scoring function) and the trade-offs involved. In this paper, we assess the hypothesis that the most widely used means of matching user and candidate news representations is not expressive enough. We allow our system to model more complex relations between the two by assessing more expressive scoring functions. Across a wide range of baseline and established systems this results in consistent improvements of around 6 points in AUC. Our results also indicate a trade-off between the complexity of news encoder and scoring function: A fairly simple baseline model scores well above 68% AUC on the MIND dataset and comes within 2 points of the published state-of-the-art, while requiring a fraction of the computational costs.
Meta Reinforcement Learning with Successor Feature Based Context
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods only focus on learning a single task from scratch and are not able to use prior knowledge to learn other tasks more effectively. Context-based meta RL techniques are recently proposed as a possible solution to tackle this. However, they are usually less efficient than conventional RL and may require many trial-and-errors during training. To address this, we propose a novel meta-RL approach that achieves competitive performance comparing to existing meta-RL algorithms, while requires significantly fewer environmental interactions. By combining context variables with the idea of decomposing reward in successor feature framework, our method does not only learn high-quality policies for multiple tasks simultaneously but also can quickly adapt to new tasks with a small amount of training. Compared with state-of-the-art meta-RL baselines, we empirically show the effectiveness and data efficiency of our method on several continuous control tasks.
Recognition of Handwritten Chinese Text by Segmentation: A Segment-annotation-free Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Online and offline handwritten Chinese text recognition (HTCR) has been studied for decades. Early methods adopted oversegmentation-based strategies but suffered from low speed, insufficient accuracy, and high cost of character segmentation annotations. Recently, segmentation-free methods based on connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention mechanism, have dominated the field of HCTR. However, people actually read text character by character, especially for ideograms such as Chinese. This raises the question: are segmentation-free strategies really the best solution to HCTR? To explore this issue, we propose a new segmentation-based method for recognizing handwritten Chinese text that is implemented using a simple yet efficient fully convolutional network. A novel weakly supervised learning method is proposed to enable the network to be trained using only transcript annotations; thus, the expensive character segmentation annotations required by previous segmentation-based methods can be avoided. Owing to the lack of context modeling in fully convolutional networks, we propose a contextual regularization method to integrate contextual information into the network during the training stage, which can further improve the recognition performance. Extensive experiments conducted on four widely used benchmarks, namely CASIA-HWDB, CASIA-OLHWDB, ICDAR2013, and SCUT-HCCDoc, show that our method significantly surpasses existing methods on both online and offline HCTR, and exhibits a considerably higher inference speed than CTC/attention-based approaches.
A method for analyzing stakeholders' influence on an open source software ecosystem's requirements engineering process
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

For a firm in an open source software (OSS) ecosystem, the requirements engineering (RE) process is rather multifaceted. Apart from its typical RE process, there is a competing process, external to the firm and inherent to the firm's ecosystem. When trying to impose an agenda in competition with other firms, and aiming to align internal product planning with the ecosystem's RE process, firms need to consider who and how influential the other stakeholders are, and what their agendas are. The aim of the presented research is to help firms identify and analyze stakeholders in OSS ecosystems, in terms of their influence and interactions, to create awareness of their agendas, their collaborators, and how they invest their resources. To arrive at a solution artifact, we applied a design science research approach where we base artifact design on the literature and earlier work. A stakeholder influence analysis (SIA) method is proposed and demonstrated in terms of applicability and utility through a case study on the Apache Hadoop OSS ecosystem. SIA uses social network constructs to measure the stakeholders' influence and interactions and considers the special characteristics of OSS RE to help firms structure their stakeholder analysis processes in relation to an OSS ecosystem. SIA adds a strategic aspect to the stakeholder analysis process by addressing the concepts of influence and interactions, which are important to consider while acting in collaborative and meritocratic RE cultures of OSS ecosystems.
IMUNet: Efficient Regression Architecture for IMU Navigation and Positioning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Data-driven based method for navigation and positioning has absorbed attention in recent years and it outperforms all its competitor methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency. This paper introduces a new architecture called IMUNet which is accurate and efficient for position estimation on edge device implementation receiving a sequence of raw IMU measurements. The architecture has been compared with one dimension version of the state-of-the-art CNN networks that have been introduced recently for edge device implementation in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, a new method for collecting a dataset using IMU sensors on cell phones and Google ARCore API has been proposed and a publicly available dataset has been recorded. A comprehensive evaluation using four different datasets as well as the proposed dataset and real device implementation has been done to prove the performance of the architecture. All the code in both Pytorch and Tensorflow framework as well as the Android application code have been shared to improve further research.
Low-complexity Approximate Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present an approach for minimizing the computational complexity of trained Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNet). The idea is to approximate all elements of a given ConvNet and replace the original convolutional filters and parameters (pooling and bias coefficients; and activation function) with efficient approximations capable of extreme reductions in computational complexity. Low-complexity convolution filters are obtained through a binary (zero-one) linear programming scheme based on the Frobenius norm over sets of dyadic rationals. The resulting matrices allow for multiplication-free computations requiring only addition and bit-shifting operations. Such low-complexity structures pave the way for low-power, efficient hardware designs. We applied our approach on three use cases of different complexity: (i) a "light" but efficient ConvNet for face detection (with around 1000 parameters); (ii) another one for hand-written digit classification (with more than 180000 parameters); and (iii) a significantly larger ConvNet: AlexNet with $\approx$1.2 million matrices. We evaluated the overall performance on the respective tasks for different levels of approximations. In all considered applications, very low-complexity approximations have been derived maintaining an almost equal classification performance.
Celeritas: Fast Optimizer for Large Dataflow Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

The rapidly enlarging neural network models are becoming increasingly challenging to run on a single device. Hence model parallelism over multiple devices is critical to guarantee the efficiency of training large models. Recent proposals fall short either in long processing time or poor performance. Therefore, we propose Celeritas, a fast framework for optimizing device placement for large models. Celeritas employs a simple but efficient model parallelization strategy in the Standard Evaluation, and generates placement policies through a series of scheduling algorithms. We conduct experiments to deploy and evaluate Celeritas on numerous large models. The results show that Celeritas not only reduces the placement policy generation time by 26.4\% but also improves the model running time by 34.2\% compared to most advanced methods.
Streaming Algorithms for Diversity Maximization with Fairness Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Diversity maximization is a fundamental problem with wide applications in data summarization, web search, and recommender systems. Given a set $X$ of $n$ elements, it asks to select a subset $S$ of $k \ll n$ elements with maximum \emph{diversity}, as quantified by the dissimilarities among the elements in $S$. In this paper, we focus on the diversity maximization problem with fairness constraints in the streaming setting. Specifically, we consider the max-min diversity objective, which selects a subset $S$ that maximizes the minimum distance (dissimilarity) between any pair of distinct elements within it. Assuming that the set $X$ is partitioned into $m$ disjoint groups by some sensitive attribute, e.g., sex or race, ensuring \emph{fairness} requires that the selected subset $S$ contains $k_i$ elements from each group $i \in [1,m]$. A streaming algorithm should process $X$ sequentially in one pass and return a subset with maximum \emph{diversity} while guaranteeing the fairness constraint. Although diversity maximization has been extensively studied, the only known algorithms that can work with the max-min diversity objective and fairness constraints are very inefficient for data streams. Since diversity maximization is NP-hard in general, we propose two approximation algorithms for fair diversity maximization in data streams, the first of which is $\frac{1-\varepsilon}{4}$-approximate and specific for $m=2$, where $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$, and the second of which achieves a $\frac{1-\varepsilon}{3m+2}$-approximation for an arbitrary $m$. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic datasets show that both algorithms provide solutions of comparable quality to the state-of-the-art algorithms while running several orders of magnitude faster in the streaming setting.
Multiple Categories Of Visual Smoke Detection Database
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Smoke detection has become a significant task in associated industries due to the close relationship between the petrochemical industry's smoke emission and its safety production and environmental damage. There are several production situations in the real industrial production environment, including complete combustion of exhaust gas, inadequate combustion of exhaust gas, direct emission of exhaust gas, etc. We discovered that the datasets used in previous research work can only determine whether smoke is present or not, not its type. That is, the dataset's category does not map to the real-world production situations, which are not conducive to the precise regulation of the production system. As a result, we created a multi-categories smoke detection database that includes a total of 70196 images. We further employed multiple models to conduct the experiment on the proposed database, the results show that the performance of the current algorithms needs to be improved and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed database.
Improving Fine-tuning of Self-supervised Models with Contrastive Initialization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved remarkable performance in pretraining the models that can be further used in downstream tasks via fine-tuning. However, these self-supervised models may not capture meaningful semantic information since the images belonging to the same class are always regarded as negative pairs in the contrastive loss. Consequently, the images of the same class are often located far away from each other in learned feature space, which would inevitably hamper the fine-tuning process. To address this issue, we seek to provide a better initialization for the self-supervised models by enhancing the semantic information. To this end, we propose a Contrastive Initialization (COIN) method that breaks the standard fine-tuning pipeline by introducing an extra initialization stage before fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that, with the enriched semantics, our COIN significantly outperforms existing methods without introducing extra training cost and sets new state-of-the-arts on multiple downstream tasks.