OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
MIPI 2022 Challenge on RGB+ToF Depth Completion: Dataset and Report
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Developing and integrating advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems is prevalent with the increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms. However, the lack of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). To bridge the gap, we introduce the first MIPI challenge including five tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, RGB+ToF Depth Completion, one of the five tracks, working on the fusion of RGB sensor and ToF sensor (with spot illumination) is introduced. The participants were provided with a new dataset called TetrasRGBD, which contains 18k pairs of high-quality synthetic RGB+Depth training data and 2.3k pairs of testing data from mixed sources. All the data are collected in an indoor scenario. We require that the running time of all methods should be real-time on desktop GPUs. The final results are evaluated using objective metrics and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) subjectively. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://github.com/mipi-challenge/MIPI2022.
A Lattice-Based Embedding Method for Reversible Audio Watermarking
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Reversible audio watermarking (RAW) is a promising technique in various applications. To simultaneously meet the demand of achieving high imperceptibility and robustness, this paper proposes a novel RAW scheme based on lattices. The scheme is referred to as Meet-in-the-Middle Embedding (MME), in which the lattice quantization errors are properly scaled and added back to the quantized host signals. Simulations show that MME excels in a wide range of metrics including signal-to-watermark ratio (SWR), objective difference grade (ODG), and bit error rate (BER).
Active Self-Training for Weakly Supervised 3D Scene Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Since the preparation of labeled data for training semantic segmentation networks of point clouds is a time-consuming process, weakly supervised approaches have been introduced to learn from only a small fraction of data. These methods are typically based on learning with contrastive losses while automatically deriving per-point pseudo-labels from a sparse set of user-annotated labels. In this paper, our key observation is that the selection of what samples to annotate is as important as how these samples are used for training. Thus, we introduce a method for weakly supervised segmentation of 3D scenes that combines self-training with active learning. The active learning selects points for annotation that likely result in performance improvements to the trained model, while the self-training makes efficient use of the user-provided labels for learning the model. We demonstrate that our approach leads to an effective method that provides improvements in scene segmentation over previous works and baselines, while requiring only a small number of user annotations.
Multi-Modal Masked Autoencoders for Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Medical vision-and-language pre-training provides a feasible solution to extract effective vision-and-language representations from medical images and texts. However, few studies have been dedicated to this field to facilitate medical vision-and-language understanding. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning paradigm with multi-modal masked autoencoders (M$^3$AE), which learn cross-modal domain knowledge by reconstructing missing pixels and tokens from randomly masked images and texts. There are three key designs to make this simple approach work. First, considering the different information densities of vision and language, we adopt different masking ratios for the input image and text, where a considerably larger masking ratio is used for images. Second, we use visual and textual features from different layers to perform the reconstruction to deal with different levels of abstraction in visual and language. Third, we develop different designs for vision and language decoders (i.e., a Transformer for vision and a multi-layer perceptron for language). To perform a comprehensive evaluation and facilitate further research, we construct a medical vision-and-language benchmark including three tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, where state-of-the-art results are achieved on all downstream tasks. Besides, we conduct further analysis to better verify the effectiveness of different components of our approach and various settings of pre-training. The source code is available at~\url{https://github.com/zhjohnchan/M3AE}.
The Impact of Edge Displacement Vaserstein Distance on UD Parsing Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We contribute to the discussion on parsing performance in NLP by introducing a measurement that evaluates the differences between the distributions of edge displacement (the directed distance of edges) seen in training and test data. We hypothesize that this measurement will be related to differences observed in parsing performance across treebanks. We motivate this by building upon previous work and then attempt to falsify this hypothesis by using a number of statistical methods. We establish that there is a statistical correlation between this measurement and parsing performance even when controlling for potential covariants. We then use this to establish a sampling technique that gives us an adversarial and complementary split. This gives an idea of the lower and upper bounds of parsing systems for a given treebank in lieu of freshly sampled data. In a broader sense, the methodology presented here can act as a reference for future correlation-based exploratory work in NLP.
Beat Transformer: Demixed Beat and Downbeat Tracking with Dilated Self-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

We propose Beat Transformer, a novel Transformer encoder architecture for joint beat and downbeat tracking. Different from previous models that track beats solely based on the spectrogram of an audio mixture, our model deals with demixed spectrograms with multiple instrument channels. This is inspired by the fact that humans perceive metrical structures from richer musical contexts, such as chord progression and instrumentation. To this end, we develop a Transformer model with both time-wise attention and instrument-wise attention to capture deep-buried metrical cues. Moreover, our model adopts a novel dilated self-attention mechanism, which achieves powerful hierarchical modelling with only linear complexity. Experiments demonstrate a significant improvement in demixed beat tracking over the non-demixed version. Also, Beat Transformer achieves up to 4% point improvement in downbeat tracking accuracy over the TCN architectures. We further discover an interpretable attention pattern that mirrors our understanding of hierarchical metrical structures.
Two case studies on implementing best practices for Software Process Improvement
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Software Process Improvement requires significant effort related not only to the identification of relevant issues and providing an adequate response to them but also to the implementation and adoption of the changes. Best practices provide recommendations to software teams on how to address the identified objectives in practice, based on aggregated experience and knowledge. In the paper, we present the GEANT experience and observations from the process of adopting the best practices and present the setting we have been using.
MVNet: Memory Assistance and Vocal Reinforcement Network for Speech Enhancement
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Speech enhancement improves speech quality and promotes the performance of various downstream tasks. However, most current speech enhancement work was mainly devoted to improving the performance of downstream automatic speech recognition (ASR), only a relatively small amount of work focused on the automatic speaker verification (ASV) task. In this work, we propose a MVNet consisted of a memory assistance module which improves the performance of downstream ASR and a vocal reinforcement module which boosts the performance of ASV. In addition, we design a new loss function to improve speaker vocal similarity. Experimental results on the Libri2mix dataset show that our method outperforms baseline methods in several metrics, including speech quality, intelligibility, and speaker vocal similarity et al.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Task Offloading in UAV-Aided Smart Farm Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The fifth and sixth generations of wireless communication networks are enabling tools such as internet of things devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and artificial intelligence, to improve the agricultural landscape using a network of devices to automatically monitor farmlands. Surveying a large area requires performing a lot of image classification tasks within a specific period of time in order to prevent damage to the farm in case of an incident, such as fire or flood. UAVs have limited energy and computing power, and may not be able to perform all of the intense image classification tasks locally and within an appropriate amount of time. Hence, it is assumed that the UAVs are able to partially offload their workload to nearby multi-access edge computing devices. The UAVs need a decision-making algorithm that will decide where the tasks will be performed, while also considering the time constraints and energy level of the other UAVs in the network. In this paper, we introduce a Deep Q-Learning (DQL) approach to solve this multi-objective problem. The proposed method is compared with Q-Learning and three heuristic baselines, and the simulation results show that our proposed DQL-based method achieves comparable results when it comes to the UAVs' remaining battery levels and percentage of deadline violations. In addition, our method is able to reach convergence 13 times faster than Q-Learning.
ESAVE: Estimating Server and Virtual Machine Energy
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

Sustainable software engineering has received a lot of attention in recent times, as we witness an ever-growing slice of energy use, for example, at data centers, as software systems utilize the underlying infrastructure. Characterizing servers for their energy use accurately without being intrusive, is therefore important to make sustainable software deployment choices. In this paper, we introduce ESAVE which is a machine learning-based approach that leverages a small set of hardware attributes to characterize a server or virtual machine's energy usage across different levels of utilization. This is based upon an extensive exploration of multiple ML approaches, with a focus on a minimal set of required attributes, while showcasing good accuracy. Early validations show that ESAVE has only around 12% average prediction error, despite being non-intrusive.
Chemotaxis of sea urchin sperm cells through deep reinforcement learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2022
Year: 2022

By imitating biological microswimmers, microrobots can be designed to accomplish targeted delivery of cargos and biomedical manipulations at microscale. However, it is still a great challenge to enable microrobots to maneuver in a complex environment. Machine learning algorithms offer a tool to boost mobility and flexibility of a synthetic microswimmer, hence could help us design truly smart microrobots. In this work, we investigate how a model of sea urchin sperm cell can self-learn chemotactic motion in a chemoattractant concentration field. We employ an artificial neural network to act as a decision-making agent and facilitate the sperm cell to discover efficient maneuver strategies through a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm. Our results show that chemotactic behaviours, very similar to the realistic ones, can be achieved by the DRL utilizing only limited environmental information. In most cases, the DRL algorithm discovers more efficient strategies than the human-devised one. Furthermore, the DRL can even utilize an external disturbance to facilitate the chemotactic motion if the extra flow information is also taken into account by the artificial neural network. Our results provide insights to the chemotactic process of sea urchin sperm cells and also prepare guidance for the intelligent maneuver of microrobots.
On the Surprising Effectiveness of Transformers in Low-Labeled Video Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recently vision transformers have been shown to be competitive with convolution-based methods (CNNs) broadly across multiple vision tasks. The less restrictive inductive bias of transformers endows greater representational capacity in comparison with CNNs. However, in the image classification setting this flexibility comes with a trade-off with respect to sample efficiency, where transformers require ImageNet-scale training. This notion has carried over to video where transformers have not yet been explored for video classification in the low-labeled or semi-supervised settings. Our work empirically explores the low data regime for video classification and discovers that, surprisingly, transformers perform extremely well in the low-labeled video setting compared to CNNs. We specifically evaluate video vision transformers across two contrasting video datasets (Kinetics-400 and SomethingSomething-V2) and perform thorough analysis and ablation studies to explain this observation using the predominant features of video transformer architectures. We even show that using just the labeled data, transformers significantly outperform complex semi-supervised CNN methods that leverage large-scale unlabeled data as well. Our experiments inform our recommendation that semi-supervised learning video work should consider the use of video transformers in the future.
Not As Easy As You Think -- Experiences and Lessons Learnt from Trying to Create a Bottom-Up Visualization Image Typology
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2022
Year: 2022

We present and discuss the results of a two-year qualitative analysis of images published in IEEE Visualization (VIS) papers. Specifically, we derive a typology of 13 visualization image types, coded to distinguish visualizations and several image characteristics. The categorization process required much more time and was more difficult than we initially thought. The resulting typology and image analysis may serve a number of purposes: to study the evolution of the community and its research output over time, to facilitate the categorization of visualization images for the purpose of teaching, to identify visual designs for evaluation purposes, or to enable progress towards standardization in visualization. In addition to the typology and image characterization, we provide a dataset of 6,833 tagged images and an online tool that can be used to explore and analyze the large set of tagged images. We thus facilitate a discussion of the diverse visualizations used and how they are published and communicated in our community.
MSREP: A Fast yet Light Sparse Matrix Framework for Multi-GPU Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Sparse linear algebra kernels play a critical role in numerous applications, covering from exascale scientific simulation to large-scale data analytics. Offloading linear algebra kernels on one GPU will no longer be viable in these applications, simply because the rapidly growing data volume may exceed the memory capacity and computing power of a single GPU. Multi-GPU systems nowadays being ubiquitous in supercomputers and data-centers present great potentials in scaling up large sparse linear algebra kernels. In this work, we design a novel sparse matrix representation framework for multi-GPU systems called MSREP, to scale sparse linear algebra operations based on our augmented sparse matrix formats in a balanced pattern. Different from dense operations, sparsity significantly intensifies the difficulty of distributing the computation workload among multiple GPUs in a balanced manner. We enhance three mainstream sparse data formats -- CSR, CSC, and COO, to enable fine-grained data distribution. We take sparse matrix-vector multiplication (SpMV) as an example to demonstrate the efficiency of our MSREP framework. In addition, MSREP can be easily extended to support other sparse linear algebra kernels based on the three fundamental formats (i.e., CSR, CSC and COO).
Portable Multi-Hypothesis Monte Carlo Localization for Mobile Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Self-localization is a fundamental capability that mobile robot navigation systems integrate to move from one point to another using a map. Thus, any enhancement in localization accuracy is crucial to perform delicate dexterity tasks. This paper describes a new location that maintains several populations of particles using the Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) algorithm, always choosing the best one as the sytems's output. As novelties, our work includes a multi-scale match matching algorithm to create new MCL populations and a metric to determine the most reliable. It also contributes the state-of-the-art implementations, enhancing recovery times from erroneous estimates or unknown initial positions. The proposed method is evaluated in ROS2 in a module fully integrated with Nav2 and compared with the current state-of-the-art Adaptive ACML solution, obtaining good accuracy and recovery times.
Self-Relation Attention and Temporal Awareness for Emotion Recognition via Vocal Burst
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

The technical report presents our emotion recognition pipeline for high-dimensional emotion task (A-VB High) in The ACII Affective Vocal Bursts (A-VB) 2022 Workshop \& Competition. Our proposed method contains three stages. Firstly, we extract the latent features from the raw audio signal and its Mel-spectrogram by self-supervised learning methods. Then, the features from the raw signal are fed to the self-relation attention and temporal awareness (SA-TA) module for learning the valuable information between these latent features. Finally, we concatenate all the features and utilize a fully-connected layer to predict each emotion's score. By empirical experiments, our proposed method achieves a mean concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) of 0.7295 on the test set, compared to 0.5686 on the baseline model. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/linhtd812/A-VB2022.
Computing the optimal distributionally-robust strategy to commit to
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

The Stackelberg game model, where a leader commits to a strategy and the follower best responds, has found widespread application, particularly to security problems. In the security setting, the goal is for the leader to compute an optimal strategy to commit to, in order to protect some asset. In many of these applications, the parameters of the follower utility model are not known with certainty. Distributionally-robust optimization addresses this issue by allowing a distribution over possible model parameters, where this distribution comes from a set of possible distributions. The goal is to maximize the expected utility with respect to the worst-case distribution. We initiate the study of distributionally-robust models for computing the optimal strategy to commit to. We consider the case of normal-form games with uncertainty about the follower utility model. Our main theoretical result is to show that a distributionally-robust Stackelberg equilibrium always exists across a wide array of uncertainty models. For the case of a finite set of possible follower utility functions we present two algorithms to compute a distributionally-robust strong Stackelberg equilibrium (DRSSE) using mathematical programs. Next, in the general case where there is an infinite number of possible follower utility functions and the uncertainty is represented by a Wasserstein ball around a finitely-supported nominal distribution, we give an incremental mixed-integer-programming-based algorithm for computing the optimal distributionally-robust strategy. Experiments substantiate the tractability of our algorithm on a classical Stackelberg game, showing that our approach scales to medium-sized games.
Self-Attentive Pooling for Efficient Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Efficient custom pooling techniques that can aggressively trim the dimensions of a feature map and thereby reduce inference compute and memory footprint for resource-constrained computer vision applications have recently gained significant traction. However, prior pooling works extract only the local context of the activation maps, limiting their effectiveness. In contrast, we propose a novel non-local self-attentive pooling method that can be used as a drop-in replacement to the standard pooling layers, such as max/average pooling or strided convolution. The proposed self-attention module uses patch embedding, multi-head self-attention, and spatial-channel restoration, followed by sigmoid activation and exponential soft-max. This self-attention mechanism efficiently aggregates dependencies between non-local activation patches during down-sampling. Extensive experiments on standard object classification and detection tasks with various convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures demonstrate the superiority of our proposed mechanism over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) pooling techniques. In particular, we surpass the test accuracy of existing pooling techniques on different variants of MobileNet-V2 on ImageNet by an average of 1.2%. With the aggressive down-sampling of the activation maps in the initial layers (providing up to 22x reduction in memory consumption), our approach achieves 1.43% higher test accuracy compared to SOTA techniques with iso-memory footprints. This enables the deployment of our models in memory-constrained devices, such as micro-controllers (without losing significant accuracy), because the initial activation maps consume a significant amount of on-chip memory for high-resolution images required for complex vision tasks. Our proposed pooling method also leverages the idea of channel pruning to further reduce memory footprints.
Monolith: Real Time Recommendation System With Collisionless Embedding Table
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses driven by time-sensitive customer feedback, such as short-videos ranking or online ads. Despite the ubiquitous adoption of production-scale deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, these general-purpose frameworks fall short of business demands in recommendation scenarios for various reasons: on one hand, tweaking systems based on static parameters and dense computations for recommendation with dynamic and sparse features is detrimental to model quality; on the other hand, such frameworks are designed with batch-training stage and serving stage completely separated, preventing the model from interacting with customer feedback in real-time. These issues led us to reexamine traditional approaches and explore radically different design choices. In this paper, we present Monolith, a system tailored for online training. Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations systems. Our contributions are manifold: first, we crafted a collisionless embedding table with optimizations such as expirable embeddings and frequency filtering to reduce its memory footprint; second, we provide an production-ready online training architecture with high fault-tolerance; finally, we proved that system reliability could be traded-off for real-time learning. Monolith has successfully landed in the BytePlus Recommend product.