OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Better sampling in explanation methods can prevent dieselgate-like deception
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning models are used in many sensitive areas where besides predictive accuracy their comprehensibility is also important. Interpretability of prediction models is necessary to determine their biases and causes of errors, and is a necessary prerequisite for users' confidence. For complex state-of-the-art black-box models post-hoc model-independent explanation techniques are an established solution. Popular and effective techniques, such as IME, LIME, and SHAP, use perturbation of instance features to explain individual predictions. Recently, Slack et al. (2020) put their robustness into question by showing that their outcomes can be manipulated due to poor perturbation sampling employed. This weakness would allow dieselgate type cheating of owners of sensitive models who could deceive inspection and hide potentially unethical or illegal biases existing in their predictive models. This could undermine public trust in machine learning models and give rise to legal restrictions on their use. We show that better sampling in these explanation methods prevents malicious manipulations. The proposed sampling uses data generators that learn the training set distribution and generate new perturbation instances much more similar to the training set. We show that the improved sampling increases the robustness of the LIME and SHAP, while previously untested method IME is already the most robust of all.
Ten Simple Rules for Attending Your First Conference
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

Conferences are a mainstay of most scientific disciplines, where scientists of all career stages come together to share cutting-edge ideas and approaches. If you do research, chances are you will attend one or more of these meetings in your career. Conferences are a microcosm of their discipline, and while conferences offer different perspectives in different disciplines, they all offer experiences that range from a casual chat waiting in line for coffee to watching someone present their groundbreaking, hot-off-the-press research. The authors of this piece have attended our fair share of conferences and have collectively mentored hundreds of students in understanding the "unwritten rules" and pro-tips of conference attendance. As you head to your first scientific conference, these rules will help you navigate the conference environment and make the most of your experience. We have also developed a web portal which contains far more information about these rules, tables of professional societies and conferences in different disciplines, and other resources that may come in handy for first-time conference attendees and their mentors. We encourage any reader to use, adapt, and contribute to these materials.
Damage detection in operational wind turbine blades using a new approach based on machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The application of reliable structural health monitoring (SHM) technologies to operational wind turbine blades is a challenging task, due to the uncertain nature of the environments they operate in. In this paper, a novel SHM methodology, which uses Gaussian Processes (GPs) is proposed. The methodology takes advantage of the fact that the blades on a turbine are nominally identical in structural properties and encounter the same environmental and operational variables (EOVs). The properties of interest are the first edgewise frequencies of the blades. The GPs are used to predict the edge frequencies of one blade given that of another, after these relationships between the pairs of blades have been learned when the blades are in a healthy state. In using this approach, the proposed SHM methodology is able to identify when the blades start behaving differently from one another over time. To validate the concept, the proposed SHM system is applied to real onshore wind turbine blade data, where some form of damage was known to have taken place. X-bar control chart analysis of the residual errors between the GP predictions and actual frequencies show that the system successfully identified early onset of damage as early as six months before it was identified and remedied.
BOLD: Dataset and Metrics for Measuring Biases in Open-Ended Language Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Recent advances in deep learning techniques have enabled machines to generate cohesive open-ended text when prompted with a sequence of words as context. While these models now empower many downstream applications from conversation bots to automatic storytelling, they have been shown to generate texts that exhibit social biases. To systematically study and benchmark social biases in open-ended language generation, we introduce the Bias in Open-Ended Language Generation Dataset (BOLD), a large-scale dataset that consists of 23,679 English text generation prompts for bias benchmarking across five domains: profession, gender, race, religion, and political ideology. We also propose new automated metrics for toxicity, psycholinguistic norms, and text gender polarity to measure social biases in open-ended text generation from multiple angles. An examination of text generated from three popular language models reveals that the majority of these models exhibit a larger social bias than human-written Wikipedia text across all domains. With these results we highlight the need to benchmark biases in open-ended language generation and caution users of language generation models on downstream tasks to be cognizant of these embedded prejudices.
Not Now, Ask Later: Users Weaken Their Behavior Change Regimen Over Time, But Expect To Re-Strengthen It Imminently
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

How effectively do we adhere to nudges and interventions that help us control our online browsing habits? If we have a temporary lapse and disable the behavior change system, do we later resume our adherence, or has the dam broken? In this paper, we investigate these questions through log analyses of 8,000+ users on HabitLab, a behavior change platform that helps users reduce their time online. We find that, while users typically begin with high-challenge interventions, over time they allow themselves to slip into easier and easier interventions. Despite this, many still expect to return to the harder interventions imminently: they repeatedly choose to be asked to change difficulty again on the next visit, declining to have the system save their preference for easy interventions.
FIRe-GAN: A novel Deep Learning-based infrared-visible fusion method for wildfire imagery
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Early wildfire detection is of paramount importance to avoid as much damage as possible to the environment, properties, and lives. Deep Learning (DL) models that can leverage both visible and infrared information have the potential to display state-of-the-art performance, with lower false-positive rates than existing techniques. However, most DL-based image fusion methods have not been evaluated in the domain of fire imagery. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, no publicly available dataset contains visible-infrared fused fire images. There is a growing interest in DL-based image fusion techniques due to their reduced complexity. Due to the latter, we select three state-of-the-art, DL-based image fusion techniques and evaluate them for the specific task of fire image fusion. We compare the performance of these methods on selected metrics. Finally, we also present an extension to one of the said methods, that we called FIRe-GAN, that improves the generation of artificial infrared images and fused ones on selected metrics.
Rethinking Floating Point Overheads for Mixed Precision DNN Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose a mixed-precision convolution unit architecture which supports different integer and floating point (FP) precisions. The proposed architecture is based on low-bit inner product units and realizes higher precision based on temporal decomposition. We illustrate how to integrate FP computations on integer-based architecture and evaluate overheads incurred by FP arithmetic support. We argue that alignment and addition overhead for FP inner product can be significant since the maximum exponent difference could be up to 58 bits, which results into a large alignment logic. To address this issue, we illustrate empirically that no more than 26-bitproduct bits are required and up to 8-bit of alignment is sufficient in most inference cases. We present novel optimizations based on the above observations to reduce the FP arithmetic hardware overheads. Our empirical results, based on simulation and hardware implementation, show significant reduction in FP16 overhead. Over typical mixed precision implementation, the proposed architecture achieves area improvements of up to 25% in TFLOPS/mm2and up to 46% in TOPS/mm2with power efficiency improvements of up to 40% in TFLOPS/Wand up to 63% in TOPS/W.
On the Performance of Large-Scale Wireless Networks in the Finite Block-Length Regime
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications have stringent delay constraints, and hence use codes with small block length (short codewords). In these cases, classical models that provide good approximations to systems with infinitely long codewords become imprecise. To remedy this, in this paper, an average coding rate expression is derived for a large scale network with short codewords using stochastic geometry and the theory of coding in the finite blocklength regime. The average coding rate and upper and lower bounds on the outage probability of the large-scale network are derived, and a tight approximation of the outage probability is presented. Then, simulations are presented to study the effect of network parameters on the average coding rate and the outage probability of the network, which demonstrate that results in the literature derived for the infinite blocklength regime overestimate the network performance, whereas the results in this paper provide a more realistic performance evaluation.
Evolutionary Co-Design of Morphology and Control of Soft Tensegrity Modular Robots with Programmable Stiffness
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Tensegrity structures are lightweight, can undergo large deformations, and have outstanding robustness capabilities. These unique properties inspired roboticists to investigate their use. However, the morphological design, control, assembly, and actuation of tensegrity robots are still difficult tasks. Moreover, the stiffness of tensegrity robots is still an underestimated design parameter. In this article, we propose to use easy to assemble, actuated tensegrity modules and body-brain co-evolution to design soft tensegrity modular robots. Moreover, we prove the importance of tensegrity robots stiffness showing how the evolution suggests a different morphology, control, and locomotion strategy according to the modules stiffness.
Object Detection Made Simpler by Eliminating Heuristic NMS
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We show a simple NMS-free, end-to-end object detection framework, of which the network is a minimal modification to a one-stage object detector such as the FCOS detection model [Tian et al. 2019]. We attain on par or even improved detection accuracy compared with the original one-stage detector. It performs detection at almost the same inference speed, while being even simpler in that now the post-processing NMS (non-maximum suppression) is eliminated during inference. If the network is capable of identifying only one positive sample for prediction for each ground-truth object instance in an image, then NMS would become unnecessary. This is made possible by attaching a compact PSS head for automatic selection of the single positive sample for each instance (see Fig. 1). As the learning objective involves both one-to-many and one-to-one label assignments, there is a conflict in the labels of some training examples, making the learning challenging. We show that by employing a stop-gradient operation, we can successfully tackle this issue and train the detector. On the COCO dataset, our simple design achieves superior performance compared to both the FCOS baseline detector with NMS post-processing and the recent end-to-end NMS-free detectors. Our extensive ablation studies justify the rationale of the design choices.
AdaSpring: Context-adaptive and Runtime-evolutionary Deep Model Compression for Mobile Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

There are many deep learning (e.g., DNN) powered mobile and wearable applications today continuously and unobtrusively sensing the ambient surroundings to enhance all aspects of human lives. To enable robust and private mobile sensing, DNN tends to be deployed locally on the resource-constrained mobile devices via model compression. The current practice either hand-crafted DNN compression techniques, i.e., for optimizing DNN-relative performance (e.g., parameter size), or on-demand DNN compression methods, i.e., for optimizing hardware-dependent metrics (e.g., latency), cannot be locally online because they require offline retraining to ensure accuracy. Also, none of them have correlated their efforts with runtime adaptive compression to consider the dynamic nature of the deployment context of mobile applications. To address those challenges, we present AdaSpring, a context-adaptive and self-evolutionary DNN compression framework. It enables the runtime adaptive DNN compression locally online. Specifically, it presents the ensemble training of a retraining-free and self-evolutionary network to integrate multiple alternative DNN compression configurations (i.e., compressed architectures and weights). It then introduces the runtime search strategy to quickly search for the most suitable compression configurations and evolve the corresponding weights. With evaluation on five tasks across three platforms and a real-world case study, experiment outcomes show that AdaSpring obtains up to 3.1x latency reduction, 4.2 x energy efficiency improvement in DNNs, compared to hand-crafted compression techniques, while only incurring <= 6.2ms runtime-evolution latency.
Adaptive Decision Forest: An Incremental Machine Learning Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this study, we present an incremental machine learning framework called Adaptive Decision Forest (ADF), which produces a decision forest to classify new records. Based on our two novel theorems, we introduce a new splitting strategy called iSAT, which allows ADF to classify new records even if they are associated with previously unseen classes. ADF is capable of identifying and handling concept drift; it, however, does not forget previously gained knowledge. Moreover, ADF is capable of handling big data if the data can be divided into batches. We evaluate ADF on five publicly available natural data sets and one synthetic data set, and compare the performance of ADF against the performance of eight state-of-the-art techniques. Our experimental results, including statistical sign test and Nemenyi test analyses, indicate a clear superiority of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art techniques.
DRAG: Director-Generator Language Modelling Framework for Non-Parallel Author Stylized Rewriting
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Author stylized rewriting is the task of rewriting an input text in a particular author's style. Recent works in this area have leveraged Transformer-based language models in a denoising autoencoder setup to generate author stylized text without relying on a parallel corpus of data. However, these approaches are limited by the lack of explicit control of target attributes and being entirely data-driven. In this paper, we propose a Director-Generator framework to rewrite content in the target author's style, specifically focusing on certain target attributes. We show that our proposed framework works well even with a limited-sized target author corpus. Our experiments on corpora consisting of relatively small-sized text authored by three distinct authors show significant improvements upon existing works to rewrite input texts in target author's style. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses further show that our model has better meaning retention and results in more fluent generations.
Large Scale Analysis of Multitasking Behavior During Remote Meetings
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Virtual meetings are critical for remote work because of the need for synchronous collaboration in the absence of in-person interactions. In-meeting multitasking is closely linked to people's productivity and wellbeing. However, we currently have limited understanding of multitasking in remote meetings and its potential impact. In this paper, we present what we believe is the most comprehensive study of remote meeting multitasking behavior through an analysis of a large-scale telemetry dataset collected from February to May 2020 of U.S. Microsoft employees and a 715-person diary study. Our results demonstrate that intrinsic meeting characteristics such as size, length, time, and type, significantly correlate with the extent to which people multitask, and multitasking can lead to both positive and negative outcomes. Our findings suggest important best-practice guidelines for remote meetings (e.g., avoid important meetings in the morning) and design implications for productivity tools (e.g., support positive remote multitasking).
Explaining Natural Language Processing Classifiers with Occlusion and Language Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Deep neural networks are powerful statistical learners. However, their predictions do not come with an explanation of their process. To analyze these models, explanation methods are being developed. We present a novel explanation method, called OLM, for natural language processing classifiers. This method combines occlusion and language modeling, which are techniques central to explainability and NLP, respectively. OLM gives explanations that are theoretically sound and easy to understand. We make several contributions to the theory of explanation methods. Axioms for explanation methods are an interesting theoretical concept to explore their basics and deduce methods. We introduce a new axiom, give its intuition and show it contradicts another existing axiom. Additionally, we point out theoretical difficulties of existing gradient-based and some occlusion-based explanation methods in natural language processing. We provide an extensive argument why evaluation of explanation methods is difficult. We compare OLM to other explanation methods and underline its uniqueness experimentally. Finally, we investigate corner cases of OLM and discuss its validity and possible improvements.
Automatic design of novel potential 3CL$^{\text{pro}}$ and PL$^{\text{pro}}$ inhibitors
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

With the goal of designing novel inhibitors for SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2, we propose the general molecule optimization framework, Molecular Neural Assay Search (MONAS), consisting of three components: a property predictor which identifies molecules with specific desirable properties, an energy model which approximates the statistical similarity of a given molecule to known training molecules, and a molecule search method. In this work, these components are instantiated with graph neural networks (GNNs), Deep Energy Estimator Networks (DEEN) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), respectively. This implementation is used to identify 120K molecules (out of 40-million explored) which the GNN determined to be likely SARS-CoV-1 inhibitors, and, at the same time, are statistically close to the dataset used to train the GNN.
LESA: Linguistic Encapsulation and Semantic Amalgamation Based Generalised Claim Detection from Online Content
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The conceptualization of a claim lies at the core of argument mining. The segregation of claims is complex, owing to the divergence in textual syntax and context across different distributions. Another pressing issue is the unavailability of labeled unstructured text for experimentation. In this paper, we propose LESA, a framework which aims at advancing headfirst into expunging the former issue by assembling a source-independent generalized model that captures syntactic features through part-of-speech and dependency embeddings, as well as contextual features through a fine-tuned language model. We resolve the latter issue by annotating a Twitter dataset which aims at providing a testing ground on a large unstructured dataset. Experimental results show that LESA improves upon the state-of-the-art performance across six benchmark claim datasets by an average of 3 claim-F1 points for in-domain experiments and by 2 claim-F1 points for general-domain experiments. On our dataset too, LESA outperforms existing baselines by 1 claim-F1 point on the in-domain experiments and 2 claim-F1 points on the general-domain experiments. We also release comprehensive data annotation guidelines compiled during the annotation phase (which was missing in the current literature).
Detecting Malicious Accounts showing Adversarial Behavior in Permissionless Blockchains
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Different types of malicious activities have been flagged in multiple permissionless blockchains such as bitcoin, Ethereum etc. While some malicious activities exploit vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the blockchain, some target its users through social engineering techniques. To address these problems, we aim at automatically flagging blockchain accounts that originate such malicious exploitation of accounts of other participants. To that end, we identify a robust supervised machine learning (ML) algorithm that is resistant to any bias induced by an over representation of certain malicious activity in the available dataset, as well as is robust against adversarial attacks. We find that most of the malicious activities reported thus far, for example, in Ethereum blockchain ecosystem, behaves statistically similar. Further, the previously used ML algorithms for identifying malicious accounts show bias towards a particular malicious activity which is over-represented. In the sequel, we identify that Neural Networks (NN) holds up the best in the face of such bias inducing dataset at the same time being robust against certain adversarial attacks.
An Upper Bound on the Complexity of Tablut
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2021
Year: 2021

Tablut is a complete-knowledge, deterministic, and asymmetric board game, which has not been solved nor properly studied yet. In this work, its rules and characteristics are presented, then a study on its complexity is reported. An upper bound to its complexity is found eventually by dividing the state-space of the game into subspaces according to specific conditions. This upper bound is comparable to the one found for Draughts, therefore, it would seem that the open challenge of solving this game requires a considerable computational effort.