OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Forest: Structural Code Editing with Multiple Cursors
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Software developers frequently refactor code. Often, a single logical refactoring change involves changing multiple related components in a source base such as renaming each occurrence of a variable or function. While many code editors can perform such common and generic refactorings, they do not support more complex refactorings or those that are specific to a given code base. For those, as a flexible - albeit less interactive - alternative, developers can write refactoring scripts that can implement arbitrarily complex logic by manipulating the program's tree representation. In this work, we present Forest, a structural code editor that aims to bridge the gap between the interactiveness of code editors and the expressiveness of refactoring scripts. While structural editors have occupied a niche as general code editors, the key insight of this work is that they enable a novel structural multi-cursor design that allows Forest to reach a similar expressiveness as refactoring scripts; Forest allows to perform a single action simultaneously in multiple program locations and thus support complex refactorings. To support interactivity, Forest provides features typical for text code editors such as writing and displaying the program through its textual representation. Our evaluation demonstrates that Forest allows performing edits similar to those from refactoring scripts, while still being interactive. We attempted to perform edits from 48 real-world refactoring scripts using Forest and found that 11 were possible, while another 17 would be possible with added features. We believe that a multi-cursor setting plays to the strengths of structural editing, since it benefits from reliable and expressive commands. Our results suggest that multi-cursor structural editors could be practical for performing small-scale specialized refactorings.
Super-Resolution and Image Re-projection for Iris Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Several recent works have addressed the ability of deep learning to disclose rich, hierarchical and discriminative models for the most diverse purposes. Specifically in the super-resolution field, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) using different deep learning approaches attempt to recover realistic texture and fine grained details from low resolution images. In this work we explore the viability of these approaches for iris Super-Resolution (SR) in an iris recognition environment. For this, we test different architectures with and without a so called image re-projection to reduce artifacts applying it to different iris databases to verify the viability of the different CNNs for iris super-resolution. Results show that CNNs and image re-projection can improve the results specially for the accuracy of recognition systems using a complete different training database performing the transfer learning successfully.
From Modelling to Understanding Children's Behaviour in the Context of Robotics and Social Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot interventions. However, children's development involve complex faculties such as exploration, creativity and curiosity which are challenging to model. Also, often children express themselves in a playful way which is different from a typical adult behaviour. Different children also have different needs, and it remains a challenge in the current state of the art that those of neurodiverse children are under-addressed. With this workshop, we aim to promote a common ground among different disciplines such as developmental sciences, artificial intelligence and social robotics and discuss cutting-edge research in the area of user modelling and adaptive systems for children.
Intramorphic Testing: A New Approach to the Test Oracle Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

A test oracle determines whether a system behaves correctly for a given input. Automatic testing techniques rely on an automated test oracle to test the system without user interaction. Important families of automated test oracles include Differential Testing and Metamorphic Testing, which are both black-box approaches; that is, they provide a test oracle that is oblivious to the system's internals. In this work, we propose Intramorphic Testing as a white-box methodology to tackle the test oracle problem. To realize an Intramorphic Testing approach, a modified version of the system is created, for which, given a single input, a test oracle can be provided that relates the output of the original and modified systems. As a concrete example, by replacing a greater-equals operator in the implementation of a sorting algorithm with smaller-equals, it would be expected that the output of the modified implementation is the reverse output of the original implementation. In this paper, we introduce the methodology and illustrate it via a set of use cases.
Context-driven Visual Object Recognition based on Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Current deep learning methods for object recognition are purely data-driven and require a large number of training samples to achieve good results. Due to their sole dependence on image data, these methods tend to fail when confronted with new environments where even small deviations occur. Human perception, however, has proven to be significantly more robust to such distribution shifts. It is assumed that their ability to deal with unknown scenarios is based on extensive incorporation of contextual knowledge. Context can be based either on object co-occurrences in a scene or on memory of experience. In accordance with the human visual cortex which uses context to form different object representations for a seen image, we propose an approach that enhances deep learning methods by using external contextual knowledge encoded in a knowledge graph. Therefore, we extract different contextual views from a generic knowledge graph, transform the views into vector space and infuse it into a DNN. We conduct a series of experiments to investigate the impact of different contextual views on the learned object representations for the same image dataset. The experimental results provide evidence that the contextual views influence the image representations in the DNN differently and therefore lead to different predictions for the same images. We also show that context helps to strengthen the robustness of object recognition models for out-of-distribution images, usually occurring in transfer learning tasks or real-world scenarios.
OCR-VQGAN: Taming Text-within-Image Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Synthetic image generation has recently experienced significant improvements in domains such as natural image or art generation. However, the problem of figure and diagram generation remains unexplored. A challenging aspect of generating figures and diagrams is effectively rendering readable texts within the images. To alleviate this problem, we present OCR-VQGAN, an image encoder, and decoder that leverages OCR pre-trained features to optimize a text perceptual loss, encouraging the architecture to preserve high-fidelity text and diagram structure. To explore our approach, we introduce the Paper2Fig100k dataset, with over 100k images of figures and texts from research papers. The figures show architecture diagrams and methodologies of articles available at arXiv.org from fields like artificial intelligence and computer vision. Figures usually include text and discrete objects, e.g., boxes in a diagram, with lines and arrows that connect them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of OCR-VQGAN by conducting several experiments on the task of figure reconstruction. Additionally, we explore the qualitative and quantitative impact of weighting different perceptual metrics in the overall loss function. We release code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/joanrod/ocr-vqgan.
The University of Edinburgh's Submission to the WMT22 Code-Mixing Shared Task (MixMT)
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The University of Edinburgh participated in the WMT22 shared task on code-mixed translation. This consists of two subtasks: i) generating code-mixed Hindi/English (Hinglish) text generation from parallel Hindi and English sentences and ii) machine translation from Hinglish to English. As both subtasks are considered low-resource, we focused our efforts on careful data generation and curation, especially the use of backtranslation from monolingual resources. For subtask 1 we explored the effects of constrained decoding on English and transliterated subwords in order to produce Hinglish. For subtask 2, we investigated different pretraining techniques, namely comparing simple initialisation from existing machine translation models and aligned augmentation. For both subtasks, we found that our baseline systems worked best. Our systems for both subtasks were one of the overall top-performing submissions.
SS-VAERR: Self-Supervised Apparent Emotional Reaction Recognition from Video
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This work focuses on the apparent emotional reaction recognition (AERR) from the video-only input, conducted in a self-supervised fashion. The network is first pre-trained on different self-supervised pretext tasks and later fine-tuned on the downstream target task. Self-supervised learning facilitates the use of pre-trained architectures and larger datasets that might be deemed unfit for the target task and yet might be useful to learn informative representations and hence provide useful initializations for further fine-tuning on smaller more suitable data. Our presented contribution is two-fold: (1) an analysis of different state-of-the-art (SOTA) pretext tasks for the video-only apparent emotional reaction recognition architecture, and (2) an analysis of various combinations of the regression and classification losses that are likely to improve the performance further. Together these two contributions result in the current state-of-the-art performance for the video-only spontaneous apparent emotional reaction recognition with continuous annotations.
Deep conditional transformation models for survival analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

An every increasing number of clinical trials features a time-to-event outcome and records non-tabular patient data, such as magnetic resonance imaging or text data in the form of electronic health records. Recently, several neural-network based solutions have been proposed, some of which are binary classifiers. Parametric, distribution-free approaches which make full use of survival time and censoring status have not received much attention. We present deep conditional transformation models (DCTMs) for survival outcomes as a unifying approach to parametric and semiparametric survival analysis. DCTMs allow the specification of non-linear and non-proportional hazards for both tabular and non-tabular data and extend to all types of censoring and truncation. On real and semi-synthetic data, we show that DCTMs compete with state-of-the-art DL approaches to survival analysis.
Transformer-based Global 3D Hand Pose Estimation in Two Hands Manipulating Objects Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This report describes our 1st place solution to ECCV 2022 challenge on Human Body, Hands, and Activities (HBHA) from Egocentric and Multi-view Cameras (hand pose estimation). In this challenge, we aim to estimate global 3D hand poses from the input image where two hands and an object are interacting on the egocentric viewpoint. Our proposed method performs end-to-end multi-hand pose estimation via transformer architecture. In particular, our method robustly estimates hand poses in a scenario where two hands interact. Additionally, we propose an algorithm that considers hand scales to robustly estimate the absolute depth. The proposed algorithm works well even when the hand sizes are various for each person. Our method attains 14.4 mm (left) and 15.9 mm (right) errors for each hand in the test set.
Learning and Retrieval from Prior Data for Skill-based Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Imitation learning offers a promising path for robots to learn general-purpose behaviors, but traditionally has exhibited limited scalability due to high data supervision requirements and brittle generalization. Inspired by recent advances in multi-task imitation learning, we investigate the use of prior data from previous tasks to facilitate learning novel tasks in a robust, data-efficient manner. To make effective use of the prior data, the robot must internalize knowledge from past experiences and contextualize this knowledge in novel tasks. To that end, we develop a skill-based imitation learning framework that extracts temporally extended sensorimotor skills from prior data and subsequently learns a policy for the target task that invokes these learned skills. We identify several key design choices that significantly improve performance on novel tasks, namely representation learning objectives to enable more predictable skill representations and a retrieval-based data augmentation mechanism to increase the scope of supervision for policy training. On a collection of simulated and real-world manipulation domains, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning approaches. Videos and code are available at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/sailor
Improving aircraft performance using machine learning: a review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This review covers the new developments in machine learning (ML) that are impacting the multi-disciplinary area of aerospace engineering, including fundamental fluid dynamics (experimental and numerical), aerodynamics, acoustics, combustion and structural health monitoring. We review the state of the art, gathering the advantages and challenges of ML methods across different aerospace disciplines and provide our view on future opportunities. The basic concepts and the most relevant strategies for ML are presented together with the most relevant applications in aerospace engineering, revealing that ML is improving aircraft performance and that these techniques will have a large impact in the near future.
Learning Sample Reweighting for Accuracy and Adversarial Robustness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

There has been great interest in enhancing the robustness of neural network classifiers to defend against adversarial perturbations through adversarial training, while balancing the trade-off between robust accuracy and standard accuracy. We propose a novel adversarial training framework that learns to reweight the loss associated with individual training samples based on a notion of class-conditioned margin, with the goal of improving robust generalization. We formulate weighted adversarial training as a bilevel optimization problem with the upper-level problem corresponding to learning a robust classifier, and the lower-level problem corresponding to learning a parametric function that maps from a sample's \textit{multi-class margin} to an importance weight. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently improves both clean and robust accuracy compared to related methods and state-of-the-art baselines.
LiBeamsNet: AUV Velocity Vector Estimation in Situations of Limited DVL Beam Measurements
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are employed for marine applications and can operate in deep underwater environments beyond human reach. A standard solution for the autonomous navigation problem can be obtained by fusing the inertial navigation system and the Doppler velocity log sensor (DVL). The latter measures four beam velocities to estimate the vehicle's velocity vector. In real-world scenarios, the DVL may receive less than three beam velocities if the AUV operates in complex underwater environments. In such conditions, the vehicle's velocity vector could not be estimated leading to a navigation solution drift and in some situations the AUV is required to abort the mission and return to the surface. To circumvent such a situation, in this paper we propose a deep learning framework, LiBeamsNet, that utilizes the inertial data and the partial beam velocities to regress the missing beams in two missing beams scenarios. Once all the beams are obtained, the vehicle's velocity vector can be estimated. The approach performance was validated by sea experiments in the Mediterranean Sea. The results show up to 7.2% speed error in the vehicle's velocity vector estimation in a scenario that otherwise could not provide an estimate.
XC: Exploring Quantitative Use Cases for Explanations in 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Explainable AI (XAI) methods are frequently applied to obtain qualitative insights about deep models' predictions. However, such insights need to be interpreted by a human observer to be useful. In this paper, we aim to use explanations directly to make decisions without human observers. We adopt two gradient-based explanation methods, Integrated Gradients (IG) and backprop, for the task of 3D object detection. Then, we propose a set of quantitative measures, named Explanation Concentration (XC) scores, that can be used for downstream tasks. These scores quantify the concentration of attributions within the boundaries of detected objects. We evaluate the effectiveness of XC scores via the task of distinguishing true positive (TP) and false positive (FP) detected objects in the KITTI and Waymo datasets. The results demonstrate an improvement of more than 100\% on both datasets compared to other heuristics such as random guesses and the number of LiDAR points in the bounding box, raising confidence in XC's potential for application in more use cases. Our results also indicate that computationally expensive XAI methods like IG may not be more valuable when used quantitatively compare to simpler methods.
New data poison attacks on machine learning classifiers for mobile exfiltration
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Most recent studies have shown several vulnerabilities to attacks with the potential to jeopardize the integrity of the model, opening in a few recent years a new window of opportunity in terms of cyber-security. The main interest of this paper is directed towards data poisoning attacks involving label-flipping, this kind of attacks occur during the training phase, being the aim of the attacker to compromise the integrity of the targeted machine learning model by drastically reducing the overall accuracy of the model and/or achieving the missclassification of determined samples. This paper is conducted with intention of proposing two new kinds of data poisoning attacks based on label-flipping, the targeted of the attack is represented by a variety of machine learning classifiers dedicated for malware detection using mobile exfiltration data. With that, the proposed attacks are proven to be model-agnostic, having successfully corrupted a wide variety of machine learning models; Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest and KNN are some examples. The first attack is performs label-flipping actions randomly while the second attacks performs label flipping only one of the 2 classes in particular. The effects of each attack are analyzed in further detail with special emphasis on the accuracy drop and the misclassification rate. Finally, this paper pursuits further research direction by suggesting the development of a defense technique that could promise a feasible detection and/or mitigation mechanisms; such technique should be capable of conferring a certain level of robustness to a target model against potential attackers.
Photo-realistic 360 Head Avatars in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Delivering immersive, 3D experiences for human communication requires a method to obtain 360 degree photo-realistic avatars of humans. To make these experiences accessible to all, only commodity hardware, like mobile phone cameras, should be necessary to capture the data needed for avatar creation. For avatars to be rendered realistically from any viewpoint, we require training images and camera poses from all angles. However, we cannot rely on there being trackable features in the foreground or background of all images for use in estimating poses, especially from the side or back of the head. To overcome this, we propose a novel landmark detector trained on synthetic data to estimate camera poses from 360 degree mobile phone videos of a human head for use in a multi-stage optimization process which creates a photo-realistic avatar. We perform validation experiments with synthetic data and showcase our method on 360 degree avatars trained from mobile phone videos.
Tag-Set-Sequence Learning for Generating Question-Answer Pairs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Transformer-based QG models can generate question-answer pairs (QAPs) with high qualities, but may also generate silly questions for certain texts. We present a new method called tag-set sequence learning to tackle this problem, where a tag-set sequence is a sequence of tag sets to capture the syntactic and semantic information of the underlying sentence, and a tag set consists of one or more language feature tags, including, for example, semantic-role-labeling, part-of-speech, named-entity-recognition, and sentiment-indication tags. We construct a system called TSS-Learner to learn tag-set sequences from given declarative sentences and the corresponding interrogative sentences, and derive answers to the latter. We train a TSS-Learner model for the English language using a small training dataset and show that it can indeed generate adequate QAPs for certain texts that transformer-based models do poorly. Human evaluation on the QAPs generated by TSS-Learner over SAT practice reading tests is encouraging.
Using Large Language Models to Enhance Programming Error Messages
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

A key part of learning to program is learning to understand programming error messages. They can be hard to interpret and identifying the cause of errors can be time-consuming. One factor in this challenge is that the messages are typically intended for an audience that already knows how to program, or even for programming environments that then use the information to highlight areas in code. Researchers have been working on making these errors more novice friendly since the 1960s, however progress has been slow. The present work contributes to this stream of research by using large language models to enhance programming error messages with explanations of the errors and suggestions on how to fix the error. Large language models can be used to create useful and novice-friendly enhancements to programming error messages that sometimes surpass the original programming error messages in interpretability and actionability. These results provide further evidence of the benefits of large language models for computing educators, highlighting their use in areas known to be challenging for students. We further discuss the benefits and downsides of large language models and highlight future streams of research for enhancing programming error messages.