OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fairness for Unobserved Characteristics: Insights from Technological Impacts on Queer Communities
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Advances in algorithmic fairness have largely omitted sexual orientation and gender identity. We explore queer concerns in privacy, censorship, language, online safety, health, and employment to study the positive and negative effects of artificial intelligence on queer communities. These issues underscore the need for new directions in fairness research that take into account a multiplicity of considerations, from privacy preservation, context sensitivity and process fairness, to an awareness of sociotechnical impact and the increasingly important role of inclusive and participatory research processes. Most current approaches for algorithmic fairness assume that the target characteristics for fairness--frequently, race and legal gender--can be observed or recorded. Sexual orientation and gender identity are prototypical instances of unobserved characteristics, which are frequently missing, unknown or fundamentally unmeasurable. This paper highlights the importance of developing new approaches for algorithmic fairness that break away from the prevailing assumption of observed characteristics.
Prophet Matching Meets Probing with Commitment
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the online stochastic matching problem for bipartite graphs where edges adjacent to an online node must be probed to determine if they exist, based on known edge probabilities. Our algorithms respect commitment, in that if a probed edge exists, it must be used in the matching. We study this matching problem subject to a downward-closed constraint on each online node's allowable edge probes. Our setting generalizes the commonly studied patience (or time-out) constraint which limits the number of probes that can be made to an online node's adjacent edges. We introduce a new LP that we prove is a relaxation of an optimal offline probing algorithm (the adaptive benchmark) and which overcomes the limitations of previous LP relaxations. (1) A tight $\frac{1}{2}$ ratio when the stochastic graph is generated from a known stochastic type graph where the $t^{th}$ online node is drawn independently from a known distribution $\scr{D}_{π(t)}$ and $π$ is chosen adversarially. We refer to this setting as the known i.d. stochastic matching problem with adversarial arrivals. (2) A $1-1/e$ ratio when the stochastic graph is generated from a known stochastic type graph where the $t^{th}$ online node is drawn independently from a known distribution $\scr{D}_{π(t)}$ and $π$ is a random permutation. We refer to this setting as the known i.d. stochastic matching problem with random order arrivals. Our results improve upon the previous best competitive ratio of $0.46$ in the known i.i.d. setting against the standard adaptive benchmark. Moreover, we are the first to study the prophet secretary matching problem in the context of probing, where we match the best known classical result.
Counting and Locating High-Density Objects Using Convolutional Neural Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approach for counting and locating objects in high-density imagery. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first object counting and locating method based on a feature map enhancement and a Multi-Stage Refinement of the confidence map. The proposed method was evaluated in two counting datasets: tree and car. For the tree dataset, our method returned a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.05, a root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 2.87 and a coefficient of determination (R$^2$) of 0.986. For the car dataset (CARPK and PUCPR+), our method was superior to state-of-the-art methods. In the these datasets, our approach achieved an MAE of 4.45 and 3.16, an RMSE of 6.18 and 4.39, and an R$^2$ of 0.975 and 0.999, respectively. The proposed method is suitable for dealing with high object-density, returning a state-of-the-art performance for counting and locating objects.
Applying the Affective Aware Pseudo Association Method to Enhance the Top-N Recommendations Distribution to Users in Group Emotion Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Recommender Systems are a subclass of information retrieval systems, or more succinctly, a class of information filtering systems that seeks to predict how close is the match of the user's preference to a recommended item. A common approach for making recommendations for a user group is to extend Personalized Recommender Systems' capability. This approach gives the impression that group recommendations are retrofits of the Personalized Recommender Systems. Moreover, such an approach not taken the dynamics of group emotion and individual emotion into the consideration in making top_N recommendations. Recommending items to a group of two or more users has certainly raised unique challenges in group behaviors that influence group decision-making that researchers only partially understand. This study applies the Affective Aware Pseudo Association Method in studying group formation and dynamics in group decision-making. The method shows its adaptability to group's moods change when making recommendations.
Noise Optimization for Artificial Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Adding noises to artificial neural network(ANN) has been shown to be able to improve robustness in previous work. In this work, we propose a new technique to compute the pathwise stochastic gradient estimate with respect to the standard deviation of the Gaussian noise added to each neuron of the ANN. By our proposed technique, the gradient estimate with respect to noise levels is a byproduct of the backpropagation algorithm for estimating gradient with respect to synaptic weights in ANN. Thus, the noise level for each neuron can be optimized simultaneously in the processing of training the synaptic weights at nearly no extra computational cost. In numerical experiments, our proposed method can achieve significant performance improvement on robustness of several popular ANN structures under both black box and white box attacks tested in various computer vision datasets.
Two-grid method on unstructured tetrahedra: Applying computational geometry to staggered solution of coupled flow and mechanics problems
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

We develop a computational framework that leverages the features of sophisticated software tools and numerics to tackle some of the pressing issues in the realm of earth sciences. The algorithms to handle the physics of multiphase flow, concomitant geomechanics all the way to the surface of the earth and the complex geometries of field cases with surfaces of discontinuity are stacked on top of each other in a modular fashion which allows for easy use to the end user. The current focus of the framework is to provide the user with tools for assessing seismic risks associated with energy technologies as well as for use in generating forward simulations in inversion analysis from data obtained using GPS and InSAR. In this work, we focus on one critical aspect in the development of the framework: the use of computational geometry in a two-grid method for unstructured tetrahedral meshes
Securing the Network for a Smart Bracelet System
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Digital instruments play a vital role in our daily life. It is a routine to produce business papers, watch the news program, write articles and blogs, manage healthcare systems, to purchase online, to send messages and all this is processed by making observations and then manipulating, receiving and availing the diverse data. This electronic data provides the foundation of real time data. All this transmission of data needs to be secured. Security is essential for healthcare systems as the present one where the blood pressure recordings provided by the smart bracelet are sent to the user's mobile phone via Bluetooth. The bracelet monitors the pregnant women, but also other users who wish to have their blood pressure under control. The system's server analyses the recordings and announces the user, as well as the associated persons to the user in case of an emergency. The doctors, the medical staff, user and user's family and caregivers have access to the health recordings belonging to the monitored user. Security is a main feature of the electronic healthcare system based on the smart bracelet.
Multi-Objective Learning to Predict Pareto Fronts Using Hypervolume Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Real-world problems are often multi-objective with decision-makers unable to specify a priori which trade-off between the conflicting objectives is preferable. Intuitively, building machine learning solutions in such cases would entail providing multiple predictions that span and uniformly cover the Pareto front of all optimal trade-off solutions. We propose a novel approach for multi-objective training of neural networks to approximate the Pareto front during inference. In our approach, the neural networks are trained multi-objectively using a dynamic loss function, wherein each network's losses (corresponding to multiple objectives) are weighted by their hypervolume maximizing gradients. We discuss and illustrate why training processes to approximate Pareto fronts need to optimize on fronts of individual training samples instead of on only the front of average losses. Experiments on three multi-objective problems show that our approach returns outputs that are well-spread across different trade-offs on the approximated Pareto front without requiring the trade-off vectors to be specified a priori. Further, results of comparisons with the state-of-the-art approaches highlight the added value of our proposed approach, especially in asymmetric Pareto fronts.
Tractable mechanisms for computing near-optimal utility functions
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

Large scale multiagent systems must rely on distributed decision making, as centralized coordination is either impractical or impossible. Recent works approach this problem under a game theoretic lens, whereby utility functions are assigned to each of the agents with the hope that their local optimization approximates the centralized optimal solution. Yet, formal guarantees on the resulting performance cannot be obtained for broad classes of problems without compromising on their accuracy. In this work, we address this concern relative to the well-studied problem of resource allocation with nondecreasing concave welfare functions. We show that optimally designed local utilities achieve an approximation ratio (price of anarchy) of 1-c/e, where c is the function's curvature and e is Euler's constant. The upshot of our contributions is the design of approximation algorithms that are distributed and efficient, and whose performance matches that of the best existing polynomial-time (and centralized) schemes.
Semantic Segmentation with Labeling Uncertainty and Class Imbalance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) achieved impressive success in semantic segmentation tasks. However, challenges such as the class imbalance and the uncertainty in the pixel-labeling process are not completely addressed. As such, we present a new approach that calculates a weight for each pixel considering its class and uncertainty during the labeling process. The pixel-wise weights are used during training to increase or decrease the importance of the pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed approach leads to significant improvements in three challenging segmentation tasks in comparison to baseline methods. It was also proved to be more invariant to noise. The approach presented here may be used within a wide range of semantic segmentation methods to improve their robustness.
Statistically Profiling Biases in Natural Language Reasoning Datasets and Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recent work has indicated that many natural language understanding and reasoning datasets contain statistical cues that may be taken advantaged of by NLP models whose capability may thus be grossly overestimated. To discover the potential weakness in the models, some human-designed stress tests have been proposed but they are expensive to create and do not generalize to arbitrary models. We propose a light-weight and general statistical profiling framework, ICQ (I-See-Cue), which automatically identifies possible biases in any multiple-choice NLU datasets without the need to create any additional test cases, and further evaluates through blackbox testing the extent to which models may exploit these biases.
Visual Search at Alibaba
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

This paper introduces the large scale visual search algorithm and system infrastructure at Alibaba. The following challenges are discussed under the E-commercial circumstance at Alibaba (a) how to handle heterogeneous image data and bridge the gap between real-shot images from user query and the online images. (b) how to deal with large scale indexing for massive updating data. (c) how to train deep models for effective feature representation without huge human annotations. (d) how to improve the user engagement by considering the quality of the content. We take advantage of large image collection of Alibaba and state-of-the-art deep learning techniques to perform visual search at scale. We present solutions and implementation details to overcome those problems and also share our learnings from building such a large scale commercial visual search engine. Specifically, model and search-based fusion approach is introduced to effectively predict categories. Also, we propose a deep CNN model for joint detection and feature learning by mining user click behavior. The binary index engine is designed to scale up indexing without compromising recall and precision. Finally, we apply all the stages into an end-to-end system architecture, which can simultaneously achieve highly efficient and scalable performance adapting to real-shot images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancement of each module in our system. We hope visual search at Alibaba becomes more widely incorporated into today's commercial applications.
Simulating dense granular flow using the $μ$($I$)-rheology within a space-time framework
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2021
Year: 2021

A space-time framework is applied to simulate dense granular flow. Two different numerical experiments are performed: a column collapse and a dam break on an inclined plane. The experiments are modeled as two-phase flows. The dense granular material is represented by a constitutive model, the $μ$($I$)-rheology, that is based on the Coulomb's friction law, such that the normal stress applied by the pressure is related to the tangential stress. The model represents a complex shear thinning viscoplastic material behavior. The interface between the dense granular material and the surrounding light fluid is captured with a level set function. Due to discontinuities close to the the interface, the mesh requires a sufficient resolution. The space-time approach allows unstructured meshes in time and, therefore a well refined mesh in the temporal direction around the interface. In this study, results and performance of a flat and a simplex space time discretization are verified and analyzed.
Improving Scene Graph Classification by Exploiting Knowledge from Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Training scene graph classification models requires a large amount of annotated image data. Meanwhile, scene graphs represent relational knowledge that can be modeled with symbolic data from texts or knowledge graphs. While image annotation demands extensive labor, collecting textual descriptions of natural scenes requires less effort. In this work, we investigate whether textual scene descriptions can substitute for annotated image data. To this end, we employ a scene graph classification framework that is trained not only from annotated images but also from symbolic data. In our architecture, the symbolic entities are first mapped to their correspondent image-grounded representations and then fed into the relational reasoning pipeline. Even though a structured form of knowledge, such as the form in knowledge graphs, is not always available, we can generate it from unstructured texts using a transformer-based language model. We show that by fine-tuning the classification pipeline with the extracted knowledge from texts, we can achieve ~8x more accurate results in scene graph classification, ~3x in object classification, and ~1.5x in predicate classification, compared to the supervised baselines with only 1% of the annotated images.
COLOGNE: Coordinated Local Graph Neighborhood Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Representation learning for graphs enables the application of standard machine learning algorithms and data analysis tools to graph data. Replacing discrete unordered objects such as graph nodes by real-valued vectors is at the heart of many approaches to learning from graph data. Such vector representations, or embeddings, capture the discrete relationships in the original data by representing nodes as vectors in a high-dimensional space. In most applications graphs model the relationship between real-life objects and often nodes contain valuable meta-information about the original objects. While being a powerful machine learning tool, embeddings are not able to preserve such node attributes. We address this shortcoming and consider the problem of learning discrete node embeddings such that the coordinates of the node vector representations are graph nodes. This opens the door to designing interpretable machine learning algorithms for graphs as all attributes originally present in the nodes are preserved. We present a framework for coordinated local graph neighborhood sampling (COLOGNE) such that each node is represented by a fixed number of graph nodes, together with their attributes. Individual samples are coordinated and they preserve the similarity between node neighborhoods. We consider different notions of similarity for which we design scalable algorithms. We show theoretical results for all proposed algorithms. Experiments on benchmark graphs evaluate the quality of the designed embeddings and demonstrate how the proposed embeddings can be used in training interpretable machine learning algorithms for graph data.
Structured Diversification Emergence via Reinforced Organization Control and Hierarchical Consensus Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

When solving a complex task, humans will spontaneously form teams and to complete different parts of the whole task, respectively. Meanwhile, the cooperation between teammates will improve efficiency. However, for current cooperative MARL methods, the cooperation team is constructed through either heuristics or end-to-end blackbox optimization. In order to improve the efficiency of cooperation and exploration, we propose a structured diversification emergence MARL framework named {\sc{Rochico}} based on reinforced organization control and hierarchical consensus learning. {\sc{Rochico}} first learns an adaptive grouping policy through the organization control module, which is established by independent multi-agent reinforcement learning. Further, the hierarchical consensus module based on the hierarchical intentions with consensus constraint is introduced after team formation. Simultaneously, utilizing the hierarchical consensus module and a self-supervised intrinsic reward enhanced decision module, the proposed cooperative MARL algorithm {\sc{Rochico}} can output the final diversified multi-agent cooperative policy. All three modules are organically combined to promote the structured diversification emergence. Comparative experiments on four large-scale cooperation tasks show that {\sc{Rochico}} is significantly better than the current SOTA algorithms in terms of exploration efficiency and cooperation strength.
CNN Application in Detection of Privileged Documents in Legal Document Review
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Protecting privileged communications and data from disclosure is paramount for legal teams. Legal advice, such as attorney-client communications or litigation strategy are typically exempt from disclosure in litigations or regulatory events and are vital to the attorney-client relationship. To protect this information from disclosure, companies and outside counsel often review vast amounts of documents to determine those that contain privileged material. This process is extremely costly and time consuming. As data volumes increase, legal counsel normally employs methods to reduce the number of documents requiring review while balancing the need to ensure the protection of privileged information. Keyword searching is relied upon as a method to target privileged information and reduce document review populations. Keyword searches are effective at casting a wide net but often return overly inclusive results - most of which do not contain privileged information. To overcome the weaknesses of keyword searching, legal teams increasingly are using machine learning techniques to target privileged information. In these studies, classic text classification techniques are applied to build classification models to identify privileged documents. In this paper, the authors propose a different method by applying machine learning / convolutional neural network techniques (CNN) to identify privileged documents. Our proposed method combines keyword searching with CNN. For each keyword term, a CNN model is created using the context of the occurrences of the keyword. In addition, a method was proposed to select reliable privileged (positive) training keyword occurrences from labeled positive training documents. Extensive experiments were conducted, and the results show that the proposed methods can significantly reduce false positives while still capturing most of the true positives.
The Role of the Input in Natural Language Video Description
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Natural Language Video Description (NLVD) has recently received strong interest in the Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Multimedia, and Autonomous Robotics communities. The State-of-the-Art (SotA) approaches obtained remarkable results when tested on the benchmark datasets. However, those approaches poorly generalize to new datasets. In addition, none of the existing works focus on the processing of the input to the NLVD systems, which is both visual and textual. In this work, it is presented an extensive study dealing with the role of the visual input, evaluated with respect to the overall NLP performance. This is achieved performing data augmentation of the visual component, applying common transformations to model camera distortions, noise, lighting, and camera positioning, that are typical in real-world operative scenarios. A t-SNE based analysis is proposed to evaluate the effects of the considered transformations on the overall visual data distribution. For this study, it is considered the English subset of Microsoft Research Video Description (MSVD) dataset, which is used commonly for NLVD. It was observed that this dataset contains a relevant amount of syntactic and semantic errors. These errors have been amended manually, and the new version of the dataset (called MSVD-v2) is used in the experimentation. The MSVD-v2 dataset is released to help to gain insight into the NLVD problem.