OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
PAVEL: Decorative Patterns with Packed Volumetric Elements
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

Many real-world hand-crafted objects are decorated with elements that are packed onto the object's surface and deformed to cover it as much as possible. Examples are artisanal ceramics and metal jewelry. Inspired by these objects, we present a method to enrich surfaces with packed volumetric decorations. Our algorithm works by first determining the locations in which to add the decorative elements and then removing the non-physical overlap between them while preserving the decoration volume. For the placement, we support several strategies depending on the desired overall motif. To remove the overlap, we use an approach based on implicit deformable models creating the qualitative effect of plastic warping while avoiding expensive and hard-to-control physical simulations. Our decorative elements can be used to enhance virtual surfaces, as well as 3D-printed pieces, by assembling the decorations onto real-surfaces to obtain tangible reproductions.
SGD Generalizes Better Than GD (And Regularization Doesn't Help)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We give a new separation result between the generalization performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and of full-batch gradient descent (GD) in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization model. While for SGD it is well-known that $O(1/ε^2)$ iterations suffice for obtaining a solution with $ε$ excess expected risk, we show that with the same number of steps GD may overfit and emit a solution with $Ω(1)$ generalization error. Moreover, we show that in fact $Ω(1/ε^4)$ iterations are necessary for GD to match the generalization performance of SGD, which is also tight due to recent work by Bassily et al. (2020). We further discuss how regularizing the empirical risk minimized by GD essentially does not change the above result, and revisit the concepts of stability, implicit bias and the role of the learning algorithm in generalization.
RectiNet-v2: A stacked network architecture for document image dewarping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

With the advent of mobile and hand-held cameras, document images have found their way into almost every domain. Dewarping of these images for the removal of perspective distortions and folds is essential so that they can be understood by document recognition algorithms. For this, we propose an end-to-end CNN architecture that can produce distortion free document images from warped documents it takes as input. We train this model on warped document images simulated synthetically to compensate for lack of enough natural data. Our method is novel in the use of a bifurcated decoder with shared weights to prevent intermingling of grid coordinates, in the use of residual networks in the U-Net skip connections to allow flow of data from different receptive fields in the model, and in the use of a gated network to help the model focus on structure and line level detail of the document image. We evaluate our method on the DocUNet dataset, a benchmark in this domain, and obtain results comparable to state-of-the-art methods.
Outage Analysis of Uplink IRS-Assisted NOMA under Elements Splitting
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we investigate the outage performance of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) uplink, in which a group of the surface reflecting elements are configured to boost the signal of one of the user equipments (UEs), while the remaining elements are used to boost the other UE. By approximating the received powers as Gamma random variables, tractable expressions for the outage probability under NOMA interference cancellation are obtained. We evaluate the outage over different splits of the elements and varying pathloss differences between the two UEs. The analysis shows that for small pathloss differences, the split should be chosen such that most of the IRS elements are configured to boost the stronger UE, while for large pathloss differences, it is more beneficial to boost the weaker UE. Finally, we investigate a robust selection of the elements' split under the criterion of minimizing the maximum outage between the two UEs.
"Is depression related to cannabis?": A knowledge-infused model for Entity and Relation Extraction with Limited Supervision
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

With strong marketing advocacy of the benefits of cannabis use for improved mental health, cannabis legalization is a priority among legislators. However, preliminary scientific research does not conclusively associate cannabis with improved mental health. In this study, we explore the relationship between depression and consumption of cannabis in a targeted social media corpus involving personal use of cannabis with the intent to derive its potential mental health benefit. We use tweets that contain an association among three categories annotated by domain experts - Reason, Effect, and Addiction. The state-of-the-art Natural Langauge Processing techniques fall short in extracting these relationships between cannabis phrases and the depression indicators. We seek to address the limitation by using domain knowledge; specifically, the Drug Abuse Ontology for addiction augmented with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lexicons for mental health. Because of the lack of annotations due to the limited availability of the domain experts' time, we use supervised contrastive learning in conjunction with GPT-3 trained on a vast corpus to achieve improved performance even with limited supervision. Experimental results show that our method can significantly extract cannabis-depression relationships better than the state-of-the-art relation extractor. High-quality annotations can be provided using a nearest neighbor approach using the learned representations that can be used by the scientific community to understand the association between cannabis and depression better.
Characterizing the Energy Trade-Offs of End-to-End Vehicular Communications using an Hyperfractal Urban Modelling
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

We characterize trade-offs between the end-to-end communication delay and the energy in urban vehicular communications with infrastructure assistance. Our study exploits the self-similarity of the location of communication entities in cities by modeling them with an innovative model called "hyperfractal". We show that the hyperfractal model can be extended to incorporate road-side infrastructure and provide stochastic geometry tools to allow a rigorous analysis. We compute theoretical bounds for the end-to-end communication hop count considering two different energy-minimizing goals: either total accumulated energy or maximum energy per node. We prove that the hop count for an end-to-end transmission is bounded by $O(n^{1-α/(d_F-1)})$ where $α<1$ and $d_F>2$ is the fractal dimension of the mobile nodes process. This proves that for both constraints the energy decreases as we allow choosing routing paths of higher length. The asymptotic limit of the energy becomes significantly small when the number of nodes becomes asymptotically large. A lower bound on the network throughput capacity with constraints on path energy is also given. We show that our model fits real deployments where open data sets are available. The results are confirmed through simulations using different fractal dimensions in a Matlab simulator.
The impact of external innovation on new drug approvals: A retrospective analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Pharmaceutical companies are relying more often on external sources of innovation to boost their discovery research productivity. However, more in-depth knowledge about how external innovation may translate to successful product launches is still required in order to better understand how to best leverage the innovation ecosystem. We analyzed the pre-approval publication histories for FDA-approved new molecular entities (NMEs) and new biologic entities (NBEs) launched by 13 top research pharma companies during the last decade (2006-2016). We found that academic institutions contributed the majority of pre-approval publications and that publication subject matter is closely aligned with the strengths of the respective innovator. We found this to also be true for candidate drugs terminated in Phase 3, but the volume of literature on these molecules is substantially less than for approved drugs. This may suggest that approved drugs are often associated with a more robust dataset provided by a large number of institutes. Collectively, the results of our analysis support the hypothesis that a collaborative research innovation environment spanning across academia, industry and government is highly conducive to successful drug approvals.
The Limits of Global Inclusion in AI Development
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Those best-positioned to profit from the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems are those with the most economic power. Extant global inequality has motivated Western institutions to involve more diverse groups in the development and application of AI systems, including hiring foreign labour and establishing extra-national data centers and laboratories. However, given both the propensity of wealth to abet its own accumulation and the lack of contextual knowledge in top-down AI solutions, we argue that more focus should be placed on the redistribution of power, rather than just on including underrepresented groups. Unless more is done to ensure that opportunities to lead AI development are distributed justly, the future may hold only AI systems which are unsuited to their conditions of application, and exacerbate inequality.
Deep Online Fused Video Stabilization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present a deep neural network (DNN) that uses both sensor data (gyroscope) and image content (optical flow) to stabilize videos through unsupervised learning. The network fuses optical flow with real/virtual camera pose histories into a joint motion representation. Next, the LSTM block infers the new virtual camera pose, and this virtual pose is used to generate a warping grid that stabilizes the frame. Novel relative motion representation as well as a multi-stage training process are presented to optimize our model without any supervision. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first DNN solution that adopts both sensor data and image for stabilization. We validate the proposed framework through ablation studies and demonstrated the proposed method outperforms the state-of-art alternative solutions via quantitative evaluations and a user study.
Scaling Laws for Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We study empirical scaling laws for transfer learning between distributions in an unsupervised, fine-tuning setting. When we train increasingly large neural networks from-scratch on a fixed-size dataset, they eventually become data-limited and stop improving in performance (cross-entropy loss). When we do the same for models pre-trained on a large language dataset, the slope in performance gains is merely reduced rather than going to zero. We calculate the effective data "transferred" from pre-training by determining how much data a transformer of the same size would have required to achieve the same loss when training from scratch. In other words, we focus on units of data while holding everything else fixed. We find that the effective data transferred is described well in the low data regime by a power-law of parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size. We believe the exponents in these power-laws correspond to measures of the generality of a model and proximity of distributions (in a directed rather than symmetric sense). We find that pre-training effectively multiplies the fine-tuning dataset size. Transfer, like overall performance, scales predictably in terms of parameters, data, and compute.
Reinforcement Learning with Probabilistic Boolean Network Models of Smart Grid Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The area of Smart Power Grids needs to constantly improve its efficiency and resilience, to pro-vide high quality electrical power, in a resistant grid, managing faults and avoiding failures. Achieving this requires high component reliability, adequate maintenance, and a studied failure occurrence. Correct system operation involves those activities, and novel methodologies to detect, classify, and isolate faults and failures, model and simulate processes with predictive algorithms and analytics (using data analysis and asset condition to plan and perform activities). We show-case the application of a complex-adaptive, self-organizing modeling method, Probabilistic Boolean Networks (PBN), as a way towards the understanding of the dynamics of smart grid devices, and to model and characterize their behavior. This work demonstrates that PBNs are is equivalent to the standard Reinforcement Learning Cycle, in which the agent/model has an inter-action with its environment and receives feedback from it in the form of a reward signal. Differ-ent reward structures were created in order to characterize preferred behavior. This information can be used to guide the PBN to avoid fault conditions and failures.
AI4VIS: Survey on Artificial Intelligence Approaches for Data Visualization
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Visualizations themselves have become a data format. Akin to other data formats such as text and images, visualizations are increasingly created, stored, shared, and (re-)used with artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. In this survey, we probe the underlying vision of formalizing visualizations as an emerging data format and review the recent advance in applying AI techniques to visualization data (AI4VIS). We define visualization data as the digital representations of visualizations in computers and focus on data visualization (e.g., charts and infographics). We build our survey upon a corpus spanning ten different fields in computer science with an eye toward identifying important common interests. Our resulting taxonomy is organized around WHAT is visualization data and its representation, WHY and HOW to apply AI to visualization data. We highlight a set of common tasks that researchers apply to the visualization data and present a detailed discussion of AI approaches developed to accomplish those tasks. Drawing upon our literature review, we discuss several important research questions surrounding the management and exploitation of visualization data, as well as the role of AI in support of those processes. We make the list of surveyed papers and related material available online at ai4vis.github.io.
QoS-Aware Power Minimization of Distributed Many-Core Servers using Transfer Q-Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

Web servers scaled across distributed systems necessitate complex runtime controls for providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees as well as minimizing the energy costs under dynamic workloads. This paper presents a QoS-aware runtime controller using horizontal scaling (node allocation) and vertical scaling (resource allocation within nodes) methods synergistically to provide adaptation to workloads while minimizing the power consumption under QoS constraint (i.e., response time). A horizontal scaling determines the number of active nodes based on workload demands and the required QoS according to a set of rules. Then, it is coupled with vertical scaling using transfer Q-learning, which further tunes power/performance based on workload profile using dynamic voltage/frequency scaling (DVFS). It transfers Q-values within minimally explored states reducing exploration requirements. In addition, the approach exploits a scalable architecture of the many-core server allowing to reuse available knowledge from fully or partially explored nodes. When combined, these methods allow to reduce the exploration time and QoS violations when compared to model-free Q-learning. The technique balances design-time and runtime costs to maximize the portability and operational optimality demonstrated through persistent power reductions with minimal QoS violations under different workload scenarios on heterogeneous multi-processing nodes of a server cluster.
Two Demonstrations of the Machine Translation Applications to Historical Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present our demonstration of two machine translation applications to historical documents. The first task consists in generating a new version of a historical document, written in the modern version of its original language. The second application is limited to a document's orthography. It adapts the document's spelling to modern standards in order to achieve an orthography consistency and accounting for the lack of spelling conventions. We followed an interactive, adaptive framework that allows the user to introduce corrections to the system's hypothesis. The system reacts to these corrections by generating a new hypothesis that takes them into account. Once the user is satisfied with the system's hypothesis and validates it, the system adapts its model following an online learning strategy. This system is implemented following a client-server architecture. We developed a website which communicates with the neural models. All code is open-source and publicly available. The demonstration is hosted at http://demosmt.prhlt.upv.es/mthd/.
Vision Based Autonomous UAV Plane Estimation And Following for Building Inspection
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has already demonstrated its potential in many civilian applications, and the façade inspection is among the most promising ones. In this paper, we focus on enabling the autonomous perception and control of a small UAV for a façade inspection task. Specifically, we consider the perception as a planar object pose estimation problem by simplifying the building structure as concatenation of planes, and the control as an optimal reference tracking control problem. First, a vision based adaptive observer is proposed which can realize stable plane pose estimation under very mild observation conditions. Second, a model predictive controller is designed to achieve stable tracking and smooth transition in a multi-plane scenario, while the persistent excitation (PE) condition of the observer and the maneuver constraints of the UAV are satisfied. The proposed autonomous plane pose estimation and plane tracking methods are tested in both simulation and practical building fasçade inspection scenarios, which demonstrate their effectiveness and practicability.
Optimal Coding Scheme and Resource Allocation for Distributed Computation with Limited Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

A central issue of distributed computing systems is how to optimally allocate computing and storage resources and design data shuffling strategies such that the total execution time for computing and data shuffling is minimized. This is extremely critical when the computation, storage and communication resources are limited. In this paper, we study the resource allocation and coding scheme for the MapReduce-type framework with limited resources. In particular, we focus on the coded distributed computing (CDC) approach proposed by Li et al.. We first extend the asymmetric CDC (ACDC) scheme proposed by Yu et al. to the cascade case where each output function is computed by multiple servers. Then we demonstrate that whether CDC or ACDC is better depends on system parameters (e.g., number of computing servers) and task parameters (e.g., number of input files), implying that neither CDC nor ACDC is optimal. By merging the ideas of CDC and ACDC, we propose a hybrid scheme and show that it can strictly outperform CDC and ACDC. Furthermore, we derive an information-theoretic converse showing that for the MapReduce task using a type of weakly symmetric Reduce assignment, which includes the Reduce assignments of CDC and ACDC as special cases, the hybrid scheme with a corresponding resource allocation strategy is optimal, i.e., achieves the minimum execution time, for an arbitrary amount of computing servers and storage memories.
Detecting Anomalies in Software Execution Logs with Siamese Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Logs are semi-structured text files that represent software's execution paths and states during its run-time. Therefore, detecting anomalies in software logs reflect anomalies in the software's execution path or state. So, it has become a notable concern in software engineering. We use LSTM like many prior works, and on top of LSTM, we propose a novel anomaly detection approach based on the Siamese network. This paper also provides an authentic validation of the approach on the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) log dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach outperforms other methods on the same dataset at the F1 score of 0.996, resulting in a new state-of-the-art performance on the dataset. Along with the primary method, we introduce a novel training pair generation algorithm that reduces generated training pairs by the factor of 3000 while maintaining the F1 score, merely a modest decay from 0.996 to 0.995. Additionally, we propose a hybrid model by combining the Siamese network with a traditional feedforward neural network to make end-to-end training possible, reducing engineering effort in setting up a deep-learning-based log anomaly detector. Furthermore, we examine our method's robustness to log evolutions by evaluating the model on synthetically evolved log sequences; we got the F1 score of 0.95 at the noise ratio of 20%. Finally, we dive deep into some of the side benefits of the Siamese network. Accordingly, we introduce a method of monitoring the evolutions of logs without label requirements at run-time. Additionally, we present a visualization technique that facilitates human administrations of log anomaly detection.
Fast Parametric Model Checking through Model Fragmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Parametric model checking (PMC) computes algebraic formulae that express key non-functional properties of a system (reliability, performance, etc.) as rational functions of the system and environment parameters. In software engineering, PMC formulae can be used during design, e.g., to analyse the sensitivity of different system architectures to parametric variability, or to find optimal system configurations. They can also be used at runtime, e.g., to check if non-functional requirements are still satisfied after environmental changes, or to select new configurations after such changes. However, current PMC techniques do not scale well to systems with complex behaviour and more than a few parameters. Our paper introduces a fast PMC (fPMC) approach that overcomes this limitation, extending the applicability of PMC to a broader class of systems than previously possible. To this end, fPMC partitions the Markov models that PMC operates with into \emph{fragments} whose reachability properties are analysed independently, and obtains PMC reachability formulae by combining the results of these fragment analyses. To demonstrate the effectiveness of fPMC, we show how our fPMC tool can analyse three systems (taken from the research literature, and belonging to different application domains) with which current PMC techniques and tools struggle.