OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Contrastive Learning with Dynamic Correlation for Multi-Phase Organ Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recent studies have demonstrated the superior performance of introducing ``scan-wise" contrast labels into contrastive learning for multi-organ segmentation on multi-phase computed tomography (CT). However, such scan-wise labels are limited: (1) a coarse classification, which could not capture the fine-grained ``organ-wise" contrast variations across all organs; (2) the label (i.e., contrast phase) is typically manually provided, which is error-prone and may introduce manual biases of defining phases. In this paper, we propose a novel data-driven contrastive loss function that adapts the similar/dissimilar contrast relationship between samples in each minibatch at organ-level. Specifically, as variable levels of contrast exist between organs, we hypothesis that the contrast differences in the organ-level can bring additional context for defining representations in the latent space. An organ-wise contrast correlation matrix is computed with mean organ intensities under one-hot attention maps. The goal of adapting the organ-driven correlation matrix is to model variable levels of feature separability at different phases. We evaluate our proposed approach on multi-organ segmentation with both non-contrast CT (NCCT) datasets and the MICCAI 2015 BTCV Challenge contrast-enhance CT (CECT) datasets. Compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, our proposed contrastive loss yields a substantial and significant improvement of 1.41% (from 0.923 to 0.936, p-value$<$0.01) and 2.02% (from 0.891 to 0.910, p-value$<$0.01) on mean Dice scores across all organs with respect to NCCT and CECT cohorts. We further assess the trained model performance with the MICCAI 2021 FLARE Challenge CECT datasets and achieve a substantial improvement of mean Dice score from 0.927 to 0.934 (p-value$<$0.01). The code is available at: https://github.com/MASILab/DCC_CL
GeoThermalCloud: Machine Learning for Geothermal Resource Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a novel ML-based methodology for geothermal exploration towards PFA applications. Our methodology is provided through our open-source ML framework, GeoThermalCloud \url{https://github.com/SmartTensors/GeoThermalCloud.jl}. The GeoThermalCloud uses a series of unsupervised, supervised, and physics-informed ML methods available in SmartTensors AI platform \url{https://github.com/SmartTensors}. Here, the presented analyses are performed using our unsupervised ML algorithm called NMF$k$, which is available in the SmartTensors AI platform. Our ML algorithm facilitates the discovery of new phenomena, hidden patterns, and mechanisms that helps us to make informed decisions. Moreover, the GeoThermalCloud enhances the collected PFA data and discovers signatures representative of geothermal resources. Through GeoThermalCloud, we could identify hidden patterns in the geothermal field data needed to discover blind systems efficiently. Crucial geothermal signatures often overlooked in traditional PFA are extracted using the GeoThermalCloud and analyzed by the subject matter experts to provide ML-enhanced PFA, which is informative for efficient exploration. We applied our ML methodology to various open-source geothermal datasets within the U.S. (some of these are collected by past PFA work). The results provide valuable insights into resource types within those regions. This ML-enhanced workflow makes the GeoThermalCloud attractive for the geothermal community to improve existing datasets and extract valuable information often unnoticed during geothermal exploration.
A Generative User Simulator with GPT-based Architecture and Goal State Tracking for Reinforced Multi-Domain Dialog Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Building user simulators (USs) for reinforcement learning (RL) of task-oriented dialog systems (DSs) has gained more and more attention, which, however, still faces several fundamental challenges. First, it is unclear whether we can leverage pretrained language models to design, for example, GPT-2 based USs, to catch up and interact with the recently advanced GPT-2 based DSs. Second, an important ingredient in a US is that the user goal can be effectively incorporated and tracked; but how to flexibly integrate goal state tracking and develop an end-to-end trainable US for multi-domains has remained to be a challenge. In this work, we propose a generative user simulator (GUS) with GPT-2 based architecture and goal state tracking towards addressing the above two challenges. Extensive experiments are conducted on MultiWOZ2.1. Different DSs are trained via RL with GUS, the classic agenda-based user simulator (ABUS) and other ablation simulators respectively, and are compared for cross-model evaluation, corpus-based evaluation and human evaluation. The GUS achieves superior results in all three evaluation tasks.
Temporal and Contextual Transformer for Multi-Camera Editing of TV Shows
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The ability to choose an appropriate camera view among multiple cameras plays a vital role in TV shows delivery. But it is hard to figure out the statistical pattern and apply intelligent processing due to the lack of high-quality training data. To solve this issue, we first collect a novel benchmark on this setting with four diverse scenarios including concerts, sports games, gala shows, and contests, where each scenario contains 6 synchronized tracks recorded by different cameras. It contains 88-hour raw videos that contribute to the 14-hour edited videos. Based on this benchmark, we further propose a new approach temporal and contextual transformer that utilizes clues from historical shots and other views to make shot transition decisions and predict which view to be used. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods on the proposed multi-camera editing benchmark.
Tencent AI Lab - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Low-Resource Translation System for the WMT22 Translation Task
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

This paper describes Tencent AI Lab - Shanghai Jiao Tong University (TAL-SJTU) Low-Resource Translation systems for the WMT22 shared task. We participate in the general translation task on English$\Leftrightarrow$Livonian. Our system is based on M2M100 with novel techniques that adapt it to the target language pair. (1) Cross-model word embedding alignment: inspired by cross-lingual word embedding alignment, we successfully transfer a pre-trained word embedding to M2M100, enabling it to support Livonian. (2) Gradual adaptation strategy: we exploit Estonian and Latvian as auxiliary languages for many-to-many translation training and then adapt to English-Livonian. (3) Data augmentation: to enlarge the parallel data for English-Livonian, we construct pseudo-parallel data with Estonian and Latvian as pivot languages. (4) Fine-tuning: to make the most of all available data, we fine-tune the model with the validation set and online back-translation, further boosting the performance. In model evaluation: (1) We find that previous work underestimated the translation performance of Livonian due to inconsistent Unicode normalization, which may cause a discrepancy of up to 14.9 BLEU score. (2) In addition to the standard validation set, we also employ round-trip BLEU to evaluate the models, which we find more appropriate for this task. Finally, our unconstrained system achieves BLEU scores of 17.0 and 30.4 for English to/from Livonian.
Systematic Evaluation of Predictive Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Mitigating bias in training on biased datasets is an important open problem. Several techniques have been proposed, however the typical evaluation regime is very limited, considering very narrow data conditions. For instance, the effect of target class imbalance and stereotyping is under-studied. To address this gap, we examine the performance of various debiasing methods across multiple tasks, spanning binary classification (Twitter sentiment), multi-class classification (profession prediction), and regression (valence prediction). Through extensive experimentation, we find that data conditions have a strong influence on relative model performance, and that general conclusions cannot be drawn about method efficacy when evaluating only on standard datasets, as is current practice in fairness research.
Sample-efficient Model Predictive Control Design of Soft Robotics by Bayesian Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents a sample-efficient data-driven method to design model predictive control (MPC) for cable-actuated soft robotics using Bayesian optimization. Instead of modeling the complex dynamics of the soft robots, the proposed approach uses Bayesian optimization to search the best-guessed low-dimensional prediction model and its associated controller to minimize the objective function of closed-loop responses. The prediction model is updated by Bayesian optimization from the closed-loop input-output data in each iteration. A linear MPC is then designed based on the updated prediction model, and evaluated based on the closed-loop responses. Different from directly searching controller parameters, the closed-loop system stability, and inputs/outputs constraints can be easily handled in the MPC design. After a few iterations, a convergent solution of a (sub-)optimal controller can be obtained, which minimizes the user-defined closed-loop performance index. The proposed method is simulated and validated by a high-fidelity simulation of a cable-actuated soft robot. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve desired tracking controller for the soft robot without a prior-known model.
Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has recently emerged as an effective learning paradigm to alleviate the reliance on labelling information for graph representation learning. The core of GCL is to maximise the mutual information between the representation of a node and its contextual representation (i.e., the corresponding instance with similar semantic information) summarised from the contextual scope (e.g., the whole graph or 1-hop neighbourhood). This scheme distils valuable self-supervision signals for GCL training. However, existing GCL methods still suffer from limitations, such as the incapacity or inconvenience in choosing a suitable contextual scope for different datasets and building biased contrastiveness. To address aforementioned problems, we present a simple self-supervised learning method termed Unifying Graph Contrastive Learning with Flexible Contextual Scopes (UGCL for short). Our algorithm builds flexible contextual representations with tunable contextual scopes by controlling the power of an adjacency matrix. Additionally, our method ensures contrastiveness is built within connected components to reduce the bias of contextual representations. Based on representations from both local and contextual scopes, UGCL optimises a very simple contrastive loss function for graph representation learning. Essentially, the architecture of UGCL can be considered as a general framework to unify existing GCL methods. We have conducted intensive experiments and achieved new state-of-the-art performance in six out of eight benchmark datasets compared with self-supervised graph representation learning baselines. Our code has been open-sourced.
HCL-TAT: A Hybrid Contrastive Learning Method for Few-shot Event Detection with Task-Adaptive Threshold
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Conventional event detection models under supervised learning settings suffer from the inability of transfer to newly-emerged event types owing to lack of sufficient annotations. A commonly-adapted solution is to follow a identify-then-classify manner, which first identifies the triggers and then converts the classification task via a few-shot learning paradigm. However, these methods still fall far short of expectations due to: (i) insufficient learning of discriminative representations in low-resource scenarios, and (ii) trigger misidentification caused by the overlap of the learned representations of triggers and non-triggers. To address the problems, in this paper, we propose a novel Hybrid Contrastive Learning method with a Task-Adaptive Threshold (abbreviated as HCLTAT), which enables discriminative representation learning with a two-view contrastive loss (support-support and prototype-query), and devises a easily-adapted threshold to alleviate misidentification of triggers. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset FewEvent demonstrate the superiority of our method to achieve better results compared to the state-of-the-arts. All the code and data of this paper will be available for online public access.
Test-Time Training for Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made tremendous progress in the graph classification task. However, a performance gap between the training set and the test set has often been noticed. To bridge such gap, in this work we introduce the first test-time training framework for GNNs to enhance the model generalization capacity for the graph classification task. In particular, we design a novel test-time training strategy with self-supervised learning to adjust the GNN model for each test graph sample. Experiments on the benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed framework, especially when there are distribution shifts between training set and test set. We have also conducted exploratory studies and theoretical analysis to gain deeper understandings on the rationality of the design of the proposed graph test time training framework (GT3).
Search-Based Path Planning Algorithm for Autonomous Parking:Multi-Heuristic Hybrid A*
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper proposed a novel method for autonomous parking. Autonomous parking has received a lot of attention because of its convenience, but due to the complex environment and the non-holonomic constraints of vehicle, it is difficult to get a collision-free and feasible path in a short time. To solve this problem, this paper introduced a novel algorithm called Multi-Heuristic Hybrid A* (MHHA*) which incorporates the characteristic of Multi-Heuristic A* and Hybrid A*. So it could provide the guarantee for completeness, the avoidance of local minimum and sub-optimality, and generate a feasible path in a short time. And this paper also proposed a new collision check method based on coordinate transformation which could improve the computational efficiency. The performance of the proposed method was compared with Hybrid A* in simulation experiments and its superiority has been proved.
Reducing Collision Checking for Sampling-Based Motion Planning Using Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Sampling-based motion planning is a popular approach in robotics for finding paths in continuous configuration spaces. Checking collision with obstacles is the major computational bottleneck in this process. We propose new learning-based methods for reducing collision checking to accelerate motion planning by training graph neural networks (GNNs) that perform path exploration and path smoothing. Given random geometric graphs (RGGs) generated from batch sampling, the path exploration component iteratively predicts collision-free edges to prioritize their exploration. The path smoothing component then optimizes paths obtained from the exploration stage. The methods benefit from the ability of GNNs of capturing geometric patterns from RGGs through batch sampling and generalize better to unseen environments. Experimental results show that the learned components can significantly reduce collision checking and improve overall planning efficiency in challenging high-dimensional motion planning tasks.
Semi-Supervised Knowledge-Grounded Pre-training for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent advances in neural approaches greatly improve task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems which assist users to accomplish their goals. However, such systems rely on costly manually labeled dialogs which are not available in practical scenarios. In this paper, we present our models for Track 2 of the SereTOD 2022 challenge, which is the first challenge of building semi-supervised and reinforced TOD systems on a large-scale real-world Chinese TOD dataset MobileCS. We build a knowledge-grounded dialog model to formulate dialog history and local KB as input and predict the system response. And we perform semi-supervised pre-training both on the labeled and unlabeled data. Our system achieves the first place both in the automatic evaluation and human interaction, especially with higher BLEU (+7.64) and Success (+13.6\%) than the second place.
Watch the Neighbors: A Unified K-Nearest Neighbor Contrastive Learning Framework for OOD Intent Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Discovering out-of-domain (OOD) intent is important for developing new skills in task-oriented dialogue systems. The key challenges lie in how to transfer prior in-domain (IND) knowledge to OOD clustering, as well as jointly learn OOD representations and cluster assignments. Previous methods suffer from in-domain overfitting problem, and there is a natural gap between representation learning and clustering objectives. In this paper, we propose a unified K-nearest neighbor contrastive learning framework to discover OOD intents. Specifically, for IND pre-training stage, we propose a KCL objective to learn inter-class discriminative features, while maintaining intra-class diversity, which alleviates the in-domain overfitting problem. For OOD clustering stage, we propose a KCC method to form compact clusters by mining true hard negative samples, which bridges the gap between clustering and representation learning. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Weakly Supervised Face Naming with Symmetry-Enhanced Contrastive Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We revisit the weakly supervised cross-modal face-name alignment task; that is, given an image and a caption, we label the faces in the image with the names occurring in the caption. Whereas past approaches have learned the latent alignment between names and faces by uncertainty reasoning over a set of images and their respective captions, in this paper, we rely on appropriate loss functions to learn the alignments in a neural network setting and propose SECLA and SECLA-B. SECLA is a Symmetry-Enhanced Contrastive Learning-based Alignment model that can effectively maximize the similarity scores between corresponding faces and names in a weakly supervised fashion. A variation of the model, SECLA-B, learns to align names and faces as humans do, that is, learning from easy to hard cases to further increase the performance of SECLA. More specifically, SECLA-B applies a two-stage learning framework: (1) Training the model on an easy subset with a few names and faces in each image-caption pair. (2) Leveraging the known pairs of names and faces from the easy cases using a bootstrapping strategy with additional loss to prevent forgetting and learning new alignments at the same time. We achieve state-of-the-art results for both the augmented Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset and the Celebrity Together dataset. In addition, we believe that our methods can be adapted to other multimodal news understanding tasks.
Artificial Intelligence and Innovation to Reduce the Impact of Extreme Weather Events on Sustainable Production
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

Frequent occurrences of extreme weather events substantially impact the lives of the less privileged in our societies, particularly in agriculture-inclined economies. The unpredictability of extreme fires, floods, drought, cyclones, and others endangers sustainable production and life on land (SDG goal 15), which translates into food insecurity and poorer populations. Fortunately, modern technologies such as Artificial Intelligent (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, 3D printing, and virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) are promising to reduce the risk and impact of extreme weather in our societies. However, research directions on how these technologies could help reduce the impact of extreme weather are unclear. This makes it challenging to emploring digital technologies within the spheres of extreme weather. In this paper, we employed the Delphi Best Worst method and Machine learning approaches to identify and assess the push factors of technology. The BWM evaluation revealed that predictive nature was AI's most important criterion and role, while the mass-market potential was the less important criterion. Based on this outcome, we tested the predictive ability of machine elarning on a publilcly available dataset to affrm the predictive rols of AI. We presented the managerial and methodological implications of the study, which are crucial for research and practice. The methodology utilized in this study could aid decision-makers in devising strategies and interventions to safeguard sustainable production. This will also facilitate allocating scarce resources and investment in improving AI techniques to reduce the adverse impacts of extreme events. Correspondingly, we put forward the limitations of this, which necessitate future research.
When Digital Economy Meets Web3.0: Applications and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2022
Year: 2022

With the continuous development of web technology, Web3.0 has attracted a considerable amount of attention due to its unique decentralized characteristics. The digital economy is an important driver of high-quality economic development and is currently in a rapid development stage. In the digital economy scenario, the centralized nature of the Internet and other characteristics usually bring about security issues such as infringement and privacy leakage. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how to use Web3.0 technologies to solve the pain points encountered in the development of the digital economy by fully exploring the critical technologies of digital economy and Web3.0. In this paper, we discuss the aspects of Web3.0 that should be integrated with the digital economy to better find the entry point to solve the problems by examining the latest advances of Web3.0 in machine learning, finance, and data management. We hope this research will inspire those who are involved in both academia and industry, and finally help to build a favourable ecology for the digital economy.
A Symbolic Representation of Human Posture for Interpretable Learning and Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Robots that interact with humans in a physical space or application need to think about the person's posture, which typically comes from visual sensors like cameras and infra-red. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms use information from these sensors either directly or after some level of symbolic abstraction, and the latter usually partitions the range of observed values to discretize the continuous signal data. Although these representations have been effective in a variety of algorithms with respect to accuracy and task completion, the underlying models are rarely interpretable, which also makes their outputs more difficult to explain to people who request them. Instead of focusing on the possible sensor values that are familiar to a machine, we introduce a qualitative spatial reasoning approach that describes the human posture in terms that are more familiar to people. This paper explores the derivation of our symbolic representation at two levels of detail and its preliminary use as features for interpretable activity recognition.