OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Motion Planning by Combined Experience-based Planning and Self-Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

High-quality and representative data is essential for both Imitation Learning (IL)- and Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based motion planning tasks. For real robots, it is challenging to collect enough qualified data either as demonstrations for IL or experiences for RL due to safety considerations in environments with obstacles. We target this challenge by proposing the self-imitation learning by planning plus (SILP+) algorithm, which efficiently embeds experience-based planning into the learning architecture to mitigate the data-collection problem. The planner generates demonstrations based on successfully visited states from the current RL policy, and the policy improves by learning from these demonstrations. In this way, we relieve the demand for human expert operators to collect demonstrations required by IL and improve the RL performance as well. Various experimental results show that SILP+ achieves better training efficiency higher and more stable success rate in complex motion planning tasks compared to several other methods. Extensive tests on physical robots illustrate the effectiveness of SILP+ in a physical setting.
When Do Annotator Demographics Matter? Measuring the Influence of Annotator Demographics with the POPQUORN Dataset
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Annotators are not fungible. Their demographics, life experiences, and backgrounds all contribute to how they label data. However, NLP has only recently considered how annotator identity might influence their decisions. Here, we present POPQUORN (the POtato-Prolific dataset for QUestion-Answering, Offensiveness, text Rewriting, and politeness rating with demographic Nuance). POPQUORN contains 45,000 annotations from 1,484 annotators, drawn from a representative sample regarding sex, age, and race as the US population. Through a series of analyses, we show that annotators' background plays a significant role in their judgments. Further, our work shows that backgrounds not previously considered in NLP (e.g., education), are meaningful and should be considered. Our study suggests that understanding the background of annotators and collecting labels from a demographically balanced pool of crowd workers is important to reduce the bias of datasets. The dataset, annotator background, and annotation interface are available at https://github.com/Jiaxin-Pei/potato-prolific-dataset .
Motivational models for validating agile requirements in Software Engineering subjects
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

This paper describes how motivational models can be used to cross check agile requirements artifacts to improve consistency and completeness of software requirements. Motivational models provide a high level understanding of the purposes of a software system. They complement personas and user stories which focus more on user needs rather than on system features. We present an exploratory case study sought to understand how software engineering students could use motivational models to create better requirements artifacts so they are understandable to non-technical users, easily understood by developers, and are consistent with each other. Nine consistency principles were created as an outcome of our study and are now successfully adopted by software engineering students at the University of Melbourne to ensure consistency between motivational models, personas, and user stories in requirements engineering.
Leveraging Skill-to-Skill Supervision for Knowledge Tracing
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Knowledge tracing plays a pivotal role in intelligent tutoring systems. This task aims to predict the probability of students answering correctly to specific questions. To do so, knowledge tracing systems should trace the knowledge state of the students by utilizing their problem-solving history and knowledge about the problems. Recent advances in knowledge tracing models have enabled better exploitation of problem solving history. However, knowledge about problems has not been studied, as well compared to students' answering histories. Knowledge tracing algorithms that incorporate knowledge directly are important to settings with limited data or cold starts. Therefore, we consider the problem of utilizing skill-to-skill relation to knowledge tracing. In this work, we introduce expert labeled skill-to-skill relationships. Moreover, we also provide novel methods to construct a knowledge-tracing model to leverage human experts' insight regarding relationships between skills. The results of an extensive experimental analysis show that our method outperformed a baseline Transformer model. Furthermore, we found that the extent of our model's superiority was greater in situations with limited data, which allows a smooth cold start of our model.
Volume-DROID: A Real-Time Implementation of Volumetric Mapping with DROID-SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents Volume-DROID, a novel approach for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) that integrates Volumetric Mapping and Differentiable Recurrent Optimization-Inspired Design (DROID). Volume-DROID takes camera images (monocular or stereo) or frames from a video as input and combines DROID-SLAM, point cloud registration, an off-the-shelf semantic segmentation network, and Convolutional Bayesian Kernel Inference (ConvBKI) to generate a 3D semantic map of the environment and provide accurate localization for the robot. The key innovation of our method is the real-time fusion of DROID-SLAM and Convolutional Bayesian Kernel Inference (ConvBKI), achieved through the introduction of point cloud generation from RGB-Depth frames and optimized camera poses. This integration, engineered to enable efficient and timely processing, minimizes lag and ensures effective performance of the system. Our approach facilitates functional real-time online semantic mapping with just camera images or stereo video input. Our paper offers an open-source Python implementation of the algorithm, available at https://github.com/peterstratton/Volume-DROID.
Generating Synthetic Datasets by Interpolating along Generalized Geodesics
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Data for pretraining machine learning models often consists of collections of heterogeneous datasets. Although training on their union is reasonable in agnostic settings, it might be suboptimal when the target domain -- where the model will ultimately be used -- is known in advance. In that case, one would ideally pretrain only on the dataset(s) most similar to the target one. Instead of limiting this choice to those datasets already present in the pretraining collection, here we explore extending this search to all datasets that can be synthesized as `combinations' of them. We define such combinations as multi-dataset interpolations, formalized through the notion of generalized geodesics from optimal transport (OT) theory. We compute these geodesics using a recent notion of distance between labeled datasets, and derive alternative interpolation schemes based on it: using either barycentric projections or optimal transport maps, the latter computed using recent neural OT methods. These methods are scalable, efficient, and -- notably -- can be used to interpolate even between datasets with distinct and unrelated label sets. Through various experiments in transfer learning in computer vision, we demonstrate this is a promising new approach for targeted on-demand dataset synthesis.
Fitch Graph Completion
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Horizontal gene transfer is an important contributor to evolution. According to Walter M.\ Fitch, two genes are xenologs if they are separated by at least one HGT. More formally, the directed Fitch graph has a set of genes is its vertices, and directed edges $(x,y)$ for all pairs of genes $x$ and $y$ for which $y$ has been horizontally transferred at least once since it diverged from the last common ancestor of $x$ and $y$. Subgraphs of Fitch graphs can be inferred by comparative sequence analysis. In many cases, however, only partial knowledge about the ``full'' Fitch graph can be obtained. Here, we characterize Fitch-satisfiable graphs that can be extended to a biologically feasible ``full'' Fitch graph and derive a simple polynomial-time recognition algorithm. We then proceed to showing that finding the Fitch graphs with total maximum (confidence) edge-weights is an NP-hard problem.
MPPN: Multi-Resolution Periodic Pattern Network For Long-Term Time Series Forecasting
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Long-term time series forecasting plays an important role in various real-world scenarios. Recent deep learning methods for long-term series forecasting tend to capture the intricate patterns of time series by decomposition-based or sampling-based methods. However, most of the extracted patterns may include unpredictable noise and lack good interpretability. Moreover, the multivariate series forecasting methods usually ignore the individual characteristics of each variate, which may affecting the prediction accuracy. To capture the intrinsic patterns of time series, we propose a novel deep learning network architecture, named Multi-resolution Periodic Pattern Network (MPPN), for long-term series forecasting. We first construct context-aware multi-resolution semantic units of time series and employ multi-periodic pattern mining to capture the key patterns of time series. Then, we propose a channel adaptive module to capture the perceptions of multivariate towards different patterns. In addition, we present an entropy-based method for evaluating the predictability of time series and providing an upper bound on the prediction accuracy before forecasting. Our experimental evaluation on nine real-world benchmarks demonstrated that MPPN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art Transformer-based, decomposition-based and sampling-based methods for long-term series forecasting.
Engaging Engineering Teams Through Moral Imagination: A Bottom-Up Approach for Responsible Innovation and Ethical Culture Change in Technology Companies
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a "Moral Imagination" methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some of the distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular.
Active Learning Guided Fine-Tuning for enhancing Self-Supervised Based Multi-Label Classification of Remote Sensing Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found very successful for multi-label classification (MLC) of remote sensing (RS) images. Self-supervised pre-training combined with fine-tuning on a randomly selected small training set has become a popular approach to minimize annotation efforts of data-demanding DNNs. However, fine-tuning on a small and biased training set may limit model performance. To address this issue, we investigate the effectiveness of the joint use of self-supervised pre-training with active learning (AL). The considered AL strategy aims at guiding the MLC fine-tuning of a self-supervised model by selecting informative training samples to annotate in an iterative manner. Experimental results show the effectiveness of applying AL-guided fine-tuning (particularly for the case where strong class-imbalance is present in MLC problems) compared to the application of fine-tuning using a randomly constructed small training set.
TASRA: a Taxonomy and Analysis of Societal-Scale Risks from AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

While several recent works have identified societal-scale and extinction-level risks to humanity arising from artificial intelligence, few have attempted an {\em exhaustive taxonomy} of such risks. Many exhaustive taxonomies are possible, and some are useful -- particularly if they reveal new risks or practical approaches to safety. This paper explores a taxonomy based on accountability: whose actions lead to the risk, are the actors unified, and are they deliberate? We also provide stories to illustrate how the various risk types could each play out, including risks arising from unanticipated interactions of many AI systems, as well as risks from deliberate misuse, for which combined technical and policy solutions are indicated.
Sparse-Inductive Generative Adversarial Hashing for Nearest Neighbor Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Unsupervised hashing has received extensive research focus on the past decade, which typically aims at preserving a predefined metric (i.e. Euclidean metric) in the Hamming space. To this end, the encoding functions of the existing hashing are typically quasi-isometric, which devote to reducing the quantization loss from the target metric space to the discrete Hamming space. However, it is indeed problematic to directly minimize such error, since such mentioned two metric spaces are heterogeneous, and the quasi-isometric mapping is non-linear. The former leads to inconsistent feature distributions, while the latter leads to problematic optimization issues. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised hashing method, termed Sparsity-Induced Generative Adversarial Hashing (SiGAH), to encode large-scale high-dimensional features into binary codes, which well solves the two problems through a generative adversarial training framework. Instead of minimizing the quantization loss, our key innovation lies in enforcing the learned Hamming space to have similar data distribution to the target metric space via a generative model. In particular, we formulate a ReLU-based neural network as a generator to output binary codes and an MSE-loss based auto-encoder network as a discriminator, upon which a generative adversarial learning is carried out to train hash functions. Furthermore, to generate the synthetic features from the hash codes, a compressed sensing procedure is introduced into the generative model, which enforces the reconstruction boundary of binary codes to be consistent with that of original features. Finally, such generative adversarial framework can be trained via the Adam optimizer. Experimental results on four benchmarks, i.e., Tiny100K, GIST1M, Deep1M, and MNIST, have shown that the proposed SiGAH has superior performance over the state-of-the-art approaches.
SecOComp: A Fast and Secure Simultaneous Compression and Encryption Scheme
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

We live in a data-driven era that involves the generation, collection and processing of a massive amount of data. This data often contains valuable intellectual property and sensitive user information that must be safeguarded. There is a need to both encrypt and compress the data at line speed and sometimes with added power constraints. The majority of the currently available simultaneous compression and encryption (SCE) schemes are tailored for a specific type of data such as images for instance. This reduces their generic applicability. In this paper, we tackle this issue and propose a generic, efficient, and secure simultaneous compression and encryption scheme where the data is simultaneously encrypted using chaotic maps and compressed using a fast lossless compression algorithm. We claim that employing multiple chaotic maps and a lossless compression method can help us create not only an efficient encryption scheme but also compress the data efficiently in a hardware-friendly manner. We avoid all the known pitfalls of chaos theory based encryption that have prevented its widespread usage. Our algorithm passes all the NIST tests for nine different types of popular datasets. The proposed implementation uses 1.51x less storage as compared to the nearest computing work.
Viewpoint Generation using Feature-Based Constrained Spaces for Robot Vision Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

The efficient computation of viewpoints under consideration of various system and process constraints is a common challenge that any robot vision system is confronted with when trying to execute a vision task. Although fundamental research has provided solid and sound solutions for tackling this problem, a holistic framework that poses its formal description, considers the heterogeneity of robot vision systems, and offers an integrated solution remains unaddressed. Hence, this publication outlines the generation of viewpoints as a geometrical problem and introduces a generalized theoretical framework based on Feature-Based Constrained Spaces ($\mathcal{C}$-spaces) as the backbone for solving it. A $\mathcal{C}$-space can be understood as the topological space that a viewpoint constraint spans, where the sensor can be positioned for acquiring a feature while fulfilling the regarded constraint. The present study demonstrates that many viewpoint constraints can be efficiently formulated as $\mathcal{C}$-spaces providing geometric, deterministic, and closed solutions. The introduced $\mathcal{C}$-spaces are characterized based on generic domain and viewpoint constraints models to ease the transferability of the present framework to different applications and robot vision systems. The effectiveness and efficiency of the concepts introduced are verified on a simulation-based scenario and validated on a real robot vision system comprising two different sensors.
Cancellation-Free Regret Bounds for Lagrangian Approaches in Constrained Markov Decision Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) are one of the common ways to model safe reinforcement learning problems, where constraint functions model the safety objectives. Lagrangian-based dual or primal-dual algorithms provide efficient methods for learning in CMDPs. For these algorithms, the currently known regret bounds in the finite-horizon setting allow for a "cancellation of errors"; one can compensate for a constraint violation in one episode with a strict constraint satisfaction in another. However, we do not consider such a behavior safe in practical applications. In this paper, we overcome this weakness by proposing a novel model-based dual algorithm OptAug-CMDP for tabular finite-horizon CMDPs. Our algorithm is motivated by the augmented Lagrangian method and can be performed efficiently. We show that during $K$ episodes of exploring the CMDP, our algorithm obtains a regret of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{K})$ for both the objective and the constraint violation. Unlike existing Lagrangian approaches, our algorithm achieves this regret without the need for the cancellation of errors.
Resource Efficient Neural Networks Using Hessian Based Pruning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Neural network pruning is a practical way for reducing the size of trained models and the number of floating-point operations. One way of pruning is to use the relative Hessian trace to calculate sensitivity of each channel, as compared to the more common magnitude pruning approach. However, the stochastic approach used to estimate the Hessian trace needs to iterate over many times before it can converge. This can be time-consuming when used for larger models with many millions of parameters. To address this problem, we modify the existing approach by estimating the Hessian trace using FP16 precision instead of FP32. We test the modified approach (EHAP) on ResNet-32/ResNet-56/WideResNet-28-8 trained on CIFAR10/CIFAR100 image classification tasks and achieve faster computation of the Hessian trace. Specifically, our modified approach can achieve speed ups ranging from 17% to as much as 44% during our experiments on different combinations of model architectures and GPU devices. Our modified approach also takes up around 40% less GPU memory when pruning ResNet-32 and ResNet-56 models, which allows for a larger Hessian batch size to be used for estimating the Hessian trace. Meanwhile, we also present the results of pruning using both FP16 and FP32 Hessian trace calculation and show that there are no noticeable accuracy differences between the two. Overall, it is a simple and effective way to compute the relative Hessian trace faster without sacrificing on pruned model performance. We also present a full pipeline using EHAP and quantization aware training (QAT), using INT8 QAT to compress the network further after pruning. In particular, we use symmetric quantization for the weights and asymmetric quantization for the activations.
Enhanced Floating Isogeometric Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

The numerical simulation of additive manufacturing techniques promises the acceleration of costly experimental procedures to identify suitable process parameters. We recently proposed Floating Isogeometric Analysis (FLIGA), a new computational solid mechanics approach, which is mesh distortion-free in one characteristic spatial direction. FLIGA emanates from Isogeometric Analysis and its key novel aspect is the concept of deformation-dependent "floating" of individual B-spline basis functions along one parametric axis of the mesh. Our previous work showed that FLIGA not only overcomes the problem of mesh distortion associated to this direction, but is also ideally compatible with material point integration and enjoys a stability similar to that of conventional Lagrangian mesh-based methods. These features make the method applicable to the simulation of large deformation problems with history-dependent constitutive behavior, such as additive manufacturing based on polymer extrusion. In this work, we enhance the first version of FLIGA by (i) a novel quadrature scheme which further improves the robustness against mesh distortion, (ii) a procedure to automatically regulate floating of the basis functions (as opposed to the manual procedure of the first version), and (iii) an adaptive refinement strategy. We demonstrate the performance of enhanced FLIGA on relevant numerical examples including a selection of viscoelastic extrusion problems.
Locally adaptive cellular automata for goal-oriented self-organization
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

The essential ingredient for studying the phenomena of emergence is the ability to generate and manipulate emergent systems that span large scales. Cellular automata are the model class particularly known for their effective scalability but are also typically constrained by fixed local rules. In this paper, we propose a new model class of adaptive cellular automata that allows for the generation of scalable and expressive models. We show how to implement computation-effective adaptation by coupling the update rule of the cellular automaton with itself and the system state in a localized way. To demonstrate the applications of this approach, we implement two different emergent models: a self-organizing Ising model and two types of plastic neural networks, a rate and spiking model. With the Ising model, we show how coupling local/global temperatures to local/global measurements can tune the model to stay in the vicinity of the critical temperature. With the neural models, we reproduce a classical balanced state in large recurrent neuronal networks with excitatory and inhibitory neurons and various plasticity mechanisms. Our study opens multiple directions for studying collective behavior and emergence.