OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Knowledge Driven Approach to Adaptive Assistance Using Preference Reasoning and Explanation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

There is a need for socially assistive robots (SARs) to provide transparency in their behavior by explaining their reasoning. Additionally, the reasoning and explanation should represent the user's preferences and goals. To work towards satisfying this need for interpretable reasoning and representations, we propose the robot uses Analogical Theory of Mind to infer what the user is trying to do and uses the Hint Engine to find an appropriate assistance based on what the user is trying to do. If the user is unsure or confused, the robot provides the user with an explanation, generated by the Explanation Synthesizer. The explanation helps the user understand what the robot inferred about the user's preferences and why the robot decided to provide the assistance it gave. A knowledge-driven approach provides transparency to reasoning about preferences, assistance, and explanations, thereby facilitating the incorporation of user feedback and allowing the robot to learn and adapt to the user.
Data-Efficient Methods for Dialogue Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Conversational User Interface (CUI) has become ubiquitous in everyday life, in consumer-focused products like Siri and Alexa or business-oriented solutions. Deep learning underlies many recent breakthroughs in dialogue systems but requires very large amounts of training data, often annotated by experts. Trained with smaller data, these methods end up severely lacking robustness (e.g. to disfluencies and out-of-domain input), and often just have too little generalisation power. In this thesis, we address the above issues by introducing a series of methods for training robust dialogue systems from minimal data. Firstly, we study two orthogonal approaches to dialogue: linguistically informed and machine learning-based - from the data efficiency perspective. We outline the steps to obtain data-efficient solutions with either approach. We then introduce two data-efficient models for dialogue response generation: the Dialogue Knowledge Transfer Network based on latent variable dialogue representations, and the hybrid Generative-Retrieval Transformer model (ranked first at the DSTC 8 Fast Domain Adaptation task). Next, we address the problem of robustness given minimal data. As such, propose a multitask LSTM-based model for domain-general disfluency detection. For the problem of out-of-domain input, we present Turn Dropout, a data augmentation technique for anomaly detection only using in-domain data, and introduce autoencoder-augmented models for efficient training with Turn Dropout. Finally, we focus on social dialogue and introduce a neural model for response ranking in social conversation used in Alana, the 3rd place winner in the Amazon Alexa Prize 2017 and 2018. We employ a novel technique of predicting the dialogue length as the main ranking objective and show that this approach improves upon the ratings-based counterpart in terms of data efficiency while matching it in performance.
Joint AGC and Receiver Design for Large-Scale MU-MIMO Systems Using Low-Resolution Signal Processing in C-RANs
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Large-scale multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems and cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) are considered promising technologies for the fifth generation (5G) of wireless networks. In these technologies, the use of low-resolution analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is key for energy efficiency and for complying with constrained fronthaul links. Processing signals with few bits implies a significant performance loss and, therefore, techniques that can compensate for quantization distortion are fundamental. In wireless systems, an automatic gain control (AGC) precedes the ADCs to adjust the input signal level in order to reduce the impact of quantization. In this work, we propose the joint optimization of the AGC, which works in the remote radio heads (RRHs), and a low-resolution aware (LRA) linear receive filter based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE), which works in the cloud unit (CU), for large-scale MU-MIMO systems with coarsely quantized signals. We develop linear and successive interference cancellation (SIC) receivers based on the proposed joint AGC and LRA MMSE (AGC-LRA-MMSE) approach. An analysis of the achievable sum rates along with a computational complexity study is also carried out. Simulations show that the proposed AGC-LRA-MMSE design provides substantial gains in bit error rates and achievable information rates over existing techniques.
FloodNet: A High Resolution Aerial Imagery Dataset for Post Flood Scene Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Visual scene understanding is the core task in making any crucial decision in any computer vision system. Although popular computer vision datasets like Cityscapes, MS-COCO, PASCAL provide good benchmarks for several tasks (e.g. image classification, segmentation, object detection), these datasets are hardly suitable for post disaster damage assessments. On the other hand, existing natural disaster datasets include mainly satellite imagery which have low spatial resolution and a high revisit period. Therefore, they do not have a scope to provide quick and efficient damage assessment tasks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) can effortlessly access difficult places during any disaster and collect high resolution imagery that is required for aforementioned tasks of computer vision. To address these issues we present a high resolution UAV imagery, FloodNet, captured after the hurricane Harvey. This dataset demonstrates the post flooded damages of the affected areas. The images are labeled pixel-wise for semantic segmentation task and questions are produced for the task of visual question answering. FloodNet poses several challenges including detection of flooded roads and buildings and distinguishing between natural water and flooded water. With the advancement of deep learning algorithms, we can analyze the impact of any disaster which can make a precise understanding of the affected areas. In this paper, we compare and contrast the performances of baseline methods for image classification, semantic segmentation, and visual question answering on our dataset.
Aligning geographic entities from historical maps for building knowledge graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Historical maps contain rich geographic information about the past of a region. They are sometimes the only source of information before the availability of digital maps. Despite their valuable content, it is often challenging to access and use the information in historical maps, due to their forms of paper-based maps or scanned images. It is even more time-consuming and labor-intensive to conduct an analysis that requires a synthesis of the information from multiple historical maps. To facilitate the use of the geographic information contained in historical maps, one way is to build a geographic knowledge graph (GKG) from them. This paper proposes a general workflow for completing one important step of building such a GKG, namely aligning the same geographic entities from different maps. We present this workflow and the related methods for implementation, and systematically evaluate their performances using two different datasets of historical maps. The evaluation results show that machine learning and deep learning models for matching place names are sensitive to the thresholds learned from the training data, and a combination of measures based on string similarity, spatial distance, and approximate topological relation achieves the best performance with an average F-score of 0.89.
Semantic Segmentation of Medium-Resolution Satellite Imagery using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Semantic segmentation of satellite imagery is a common approach to identify patterns and detect changes around the planet. Most of the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models are trained in a fully supervised way using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The generalization property of CNN is poor for satellite imagery because the data can be very diverse in terms of landscape types, image resolutions, and scarcity of labels for different geographies and seasons. Hence, the performance of CNN doesn't translate well to images from unseen regions or seasons. Inspired by Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGAN) based approach of image-to-image translation for high-resolution satellite imagery, we propose a CGAN framework for land cover classification using medium-resolution Sentinel-2 imagery. We find that the CGAN model outperforms the CNN model of similar complexity by a significant margin on an unseen imbalanced test dataset.
LandCoverNet: A global benchmark land cover classification training dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Regularly updated and accurate land cover maps are essential for monitoring 14 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Multispectral satellite imagery provide high-quality and valuable information at global scale that can be used to develop land cover classification models. However, such a global application requires a geographically diverse training dataset. Here, we present LandCoverNet, a global training dataset for land cover classification based on Sentinel-2 observations at 10m spatial resolution. Land cover class labels are defined based on annual time-series of Sentinel-2, and verified by consensus among three human annotators.
It's All Around You: Range-Guided Cylindrical Network for 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Modern perception systems in the field of autonomous driving rely on 3D data analysis. LiDAR sensors are frequently used to acquire such data due to their increased resilience to different lighting conditions. Although rotating LiDAR scanners produce ring-shaped patterns in space, most networks analyze their data using an orthogonal voxel sampling strategy. This work presents a novel approach for analyzing 3D data produced by 360-degree depth scanners, utilizing a more suitable coordinate system, which is aligned with the scanning pattern. Furthermore, we introduce a novel notion of range-guided convolutions, adapting the receptive field by distance from the ego vehicle and the object's scale. Our network demonstrates powerful results on the nuScenes challenge, comparable to current state-of-the-art architectures. The backbone architecture introduced in this work can be easily integrated onto other pipelines as well.
Recoverable Mutual Exclusion with Abortability
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advances in non-volatile main memory (NVRAM) technology have spurred research on designing algorithms that are resilient to process crashes. This paper is a fuller version of our conference paper \cite{jayanti:rmeabort}, which presents the first Recoverable Mutual Exclusion (RME) algorithm that supports abortability. Our algorithm uses only the read, write, and CAS operations, which are commonly supported by multiprocessors. It satisfies FCFS and other standard properties. Our algorithm is also adaptive. On DSM and Relaxed-CC multiprocessors, a process incurs $O(\min(k, \log n))$ RMRs in a passage and $O(f+ \min(k, \log n))$ RMRs in an attempt, where $n$ is the number of processes that the algorithm is designed for, $k$ is the point contention of the passage or the attempt, and $f$ is the number of times that $p$ crashes during the attempt. On a Strict CC multiprocessor, the passage and attempt complexities are $O(n)$ and $O(f+n)$. Attiya et al. proved that, with any mutual exclusion algorithm, a process incurs at least $Ω(\log n)$ RMRs in a passage, if the algorithm uses only the read, write, and CAS operations \cite{Attiya:lbound}. This lower bound implies that the worst-case RMR complexity of our algorithm is optimal for the DSM and Relaxed CC multiprocessors.
Majority Opinion Diffusion in Social Networks: An Adversarial Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce and study a novel majority-based opinion diffusion model. Consider a graph $G$, which represents a social network. Assume that initially a subset of nodes, called seed nodes or early adopters, are colored either black or white, which correspond to positive or negative opinion regarding a consumer product or a technological innovation. Then, in each round an uncolored node, which is adjacent to at least one colored node, chooses the most frequent color among its neighbors. Consider a marketing campaign which advertises a product of poor quality and its ultimate goal is that more than half of the population believe in the quality of the product at the end of the opinion diffusion process. We focus on three types of attackers which can select the seed nodes in a deterministic or random fashion and manipulate almost half of them to adopt a positive opinion toward the product (that is, to choose black color). We say that an attacker succeeds if a majority of nodes are black at the end of the process. Our main purpose is to characterize classes of graphs where an attacker cannot succeed. In particular, we prove that if the maximum degree of the underlying graph is not too large or if it has strong expansion properties, then it is fairly resilient to such attacks. Furthermore, we prove tight bounds on the stabilization time of the process (that is, the number of rounds it needs to end) in both settings of choosing the seed nodes deterministically and randomly. We also provide several hardness results for some optimization problems regarding stabilization time and choice of seed nodes.
Any-Width Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Despite remarkable improvements in speed and accuracy, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) still typically operate as monolithic entities at inference time. This poses a challenge for resource-constrained practical applications, where both computational budgets and performance needs can vary with the situation. To address these constraints, we propose the Any-Width Network (AWN), an adjustable-width CNN architecture and associated training routine that allow for fine-grained control over speed and accuracy during inference. Our key innovation is the use of lower-triangular weight matrices which explicitly address width-varying batch statistics while being naturally suited for multi-width operations. We also show that this design facilitates an efficient training routine based on random width sampling. We empirically demonstrate that our proposed AWNs compare favorably to existing methods while providing maximally granular control during inference.
Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Optimal Path Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

Path planning plays an important role in autonomous robot systems. Effective understanding of the surrounding environment and efficient generation of optimal collision-free path are both critical parts for solving path planning problem. Although conventional sampling-based algorithms, such as the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) and its improved optimal version (RRT*), have been widely used in path planning problems because of their ability to find a feasible path in even complex environments, they fail to find an optimal path efficiently. To solve this problem and satisfy the two aforementioned requirements, we propose a novel learning-based path planning algorithm which consists of a novel generative model based on the conditional generative adversarial networks (CGAN) and a modified RRT* algorithm (denoted by CGANRRT*). Given the map information, our CGAN model can generate an efficient possibility distribution of feasible paths, which can be utilized by the CGAN-RRT* algorithm to find the optimal path with a non-uniform sampling strategy. The CGAN model is trained by learning from ground truth maps, each of which is generated by putting all the results of executing RRT algorithm 50 times on one raw map. We demonstrate the efficient performance of this CGAN model by testing it on two groups of maps and comparing CGAN-RRT* algorithm with conventional RRT* algorithm.
Low-complexity and High-performance Receive Beamforming for Secure Directional Modulation Networks against an Eavesdropping-enabled Full-duplex Attacker
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we present a novel scenario for directional modulation (DM) networks with a full-duplex (FD) malicious attacker (Mallory), where Mallory can eavesdrop the confidential message from Alice to Bob and simultaneously interfere Bob by sending a jamming signal. Considering that the jamming plus noise at Bob is colored, an enhanced receive beamforming (RBF), whitening-filter-based maximum ratio combining (MRC) (WFMRC), is proposed. Subsequently, two RBFs of maximizing the secrecy rate (Max-SR) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) are presented to show the same performance as WFMRC. To reduce the computational complexity of conventional MMSE, a low-complexity MMSE is also proposed. Eventually, to completely remove the jamming signal from Mallory and transform the residual interference plus noise to a white one, a new RBF, null-space projection (NSP) based maximizing WF receive power, called NSP-based Max-WFRP, is also proposed. From simulation results, we find that the proposed Max-SR, WFMRC, and low-complexity MMSE have the same SR performance as conventional MMSE, and achieve the best performance while the proposed NSP-based Max-WFRP performs better than MRC in the medium and high signal-to-noise ratio regions. Due to its low-complexity,the proposed low-complexity MMSE is very attractive. More important, the proposed methods are robust to the change in malicious jamming power compared to conventional MRC.
Representaciones del aprendizaje reutilizando los gradientes de la retropropagacion
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

This work proposes an algorithm for taking advantage of backpropagation gradients to determine feature importance at different stages of training. Additionally, we propose a way to represent the learning process qualitatively. Experiments were performed over the Wisconsin cancer dataset provided by sklearn, and results showed an interesting convergence of the so called "learning gradients" towards the most important features. --- Este trabajo propone el algoritmo de gradientes de aprendizaje para encontrar significado en las entradas de una red neuronal. Ademas, se propone una manera de evaluarlas por orden de importancia y representar el proceso de aprendizaje a traves de las etapas de entrenamiento. Los resultados obtenidos utilizan como referencia el conjunto de datos acerca de tumores malignos y benignos en Wisconsin. Esta referencia sirvio para detectar un patron en las variables mas importantes del modelo gracias, asi como su evolucion temporal.
A Data-driven Human Responsibility Management System
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

An ideal safe workplace is described as a place where staffs fulfill responsibilities in a well-organized order, potential hazardous events are being monitored in real-time, as well as the number of accidents and relevant damages are minimized. However, occupational-related death and injury are still increasing and have been highly attended in the last decades due to the lack of comprehensive safety management. A smart safety management system is therefore urgently needed, in which the staffs are instructed to fulfill responsibilities as well as automating risk evaluations and alerting staffs and departments when needed. In this paper, a smart system for safety management in the workplace based on responsibility big data analysis and the internet of things (IoT) are proposed. The real world implementation and assessment demonstrate that the proposed systems have superior accountability performance and improve the responsibility fulfillment through real-time supervision and self-reminder.
Appendix for the Motion Primitives-based Path Planning for Fast and Agile Exploration Method
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This manuscript presents enhancements on our motion-primitives exploration path planning method for agile exploration using aerial robots. The method now further integrates a global planning layer to facilitate reliable large-scale exploration. The implemented bifurcation between local and global planning allows for efficient exploration combined with the ability to plan within very large environments, while also ensuring safe and timely return-to-home. A new set of simulation studies and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the new improvements and enhancements. The method is available open source as a Robot Operating System (ROS) package.
Accurate and Fast Federated Learning via Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Federated learning has emerged as an innovative paradigm of collaborative machine learning. Unlike conventional machine learning, a global model is collaboratively learned while data remains distributed over a tremendous number of client devices, thus not compromising user privacy. However, several challenges still remain despite its glowing popularity; above all, the global aggregation in federated learning involves the challenge of biased model averaging and lack of prior knowledge in client sampling, which, in turn, leads to high generalization error and slow convergence rate, respectively. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm called FedCM that addresses the two challenges by utilizing prior knowledge with multi-armed bandit based client sampling and filtering biased models with combinatorial model averaging. Based on extensive evaluations using various algorithms and representative heterogeneous datasets, we showed that FedCM significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art algorithms by up to 37.25% and 4.17 times, respectively, in terms of generalization accuracy and convergence rate.
Maximizing Social Welfare in a Competitive Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Influence maximization (IM) has garnered a lot of attention in the literature owing to applications such as viral marketing and infection containment. It aims to select a small number of seed users to adopt an item such that adoption propagates to a large number of users in the network. Competitive IM focuses on the propagation of competing items in the network. Existing works on competitive IM have several limitations. (1) They fail to incorporate economic incentives in users' decision making in item adoptions. (2) Majority of the works aim to maximize the adoption of one particular item, and ignore the collective role that different items play. (3) They focus mostly on one aspect of competition -- pure competition. To address these concerns we study competitive IM under a utility-driven propagation model called UIC, and study social welfare maximization. The problem in general is not only NP-hard but also NP-hard to approximate within any constant factor. We, therefore, devise instant dependent efficient approximation algorithms for the general case as well as a $(1-1/e-ε)$-approximation algorithm for a restricted setting. Our algorithms outperform different baselines on competitive IM, both in terms of solution quality and running time on large real networks under both synthetic and real utility configurations.