OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning on tree architectures outperforms a convolutional feedforward network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Advanced deep learning architectures consist of tens of fully connected and convolutional hidden layers, currently extended to hundreds, are far from their biological realization. Their implausible biological dynamics relies on changing a weight in a non-local manner, as the number of routes between an output unit and a weight is typically large, using the backpropagation technique. Here, a 3-layer tree architecture inspired by experimental-based dendritic tree adaptations is developed and applied to the offline and online learning of the CIFAR-10 database. The proposed architecture outperforms the achievable success rates of the 5-layer convolutional LeNet. Moreover, the highly pruned tree backpropagation approach of the proposed architecture, where a single route connects an output unit and a weight, represents an efficient dendritic deep learning.
Applications of statistical causal inference in software engineering
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

This paper reviews existing work in software engineering that applies statistical causal inference methods. These methods aim at estimating causal effects from observational data. The review covers 32 papers published between 2010 and 2022. Our results show that the application of statistical causal inference methods is relatively recent and that the corresponding research community remains relatively fragmented.
On Extensions of Quasi-Overlap and Quasi-Grouping Functions Defined on Bounded Lattices
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we propose a method of extending quasi-overlap and grouping functions defined on a sublattice $ M $ of a bounded lattice $ L $ to this lattice considering a more general version of sublattice definition, introduced by Palmeira and Bedregral.
Quantinar: a blockchain p2p ecosystem for honest scientific research
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Living in the Information Age, the power of data and correct statistical analysis has never been more prevalent. Academics and practitioners require nowadays an accurate application of quantitative methods. Yet many branches are subject to a crisis of integrity, which is shown in an improper use of statistical models, $p$-hacking, HARKing, or failure to replicate results. We propose the use of a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) ecosystem based on a blockchain network, Quantinar (quantinar.com), to support quantitative analytics knowledge paired with code in the form of Quantlets (quantlet.com) or software snippets. The integration of blockchain technology makes Quantinar a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that ensures fully transparent and reproducible scientific research.
Programming by Example and Text-to-Code Translation for Conversational Code Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Dialogue systems is an increasingly popular task of natural language processing. However, the dialogue paths tend to be deterministic, restricted to the system rails, regardless of the given request or input text. Recent advances in program synthesis have led to systems which can synthesize programs from very general search spaces, e.g. Programming by Example, and to systems with very accessible interfaces for writing programs, e.g. text-to-code translation, but have not achieved both of these qualities in the same system. We propose Modular Programs for Text-guided Hierarchical Synthesis (MPaTHS), a method for integrating Programming by Example and text-to-code systems which offers an accessible natural language interface for synthesizing general programs. We present a program representation that allows our method to be applied to the problem of task-oriented dialogue. Finally, we demo MPaTHS using our program representation.
Learning Heterogeneous Agent Cooperation via Multiagent League Training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Many multiagent systems in the real world include multiple types of agents with different abilities and functionality. Such heterogeneous multiagent systems have significant practical advantages. However, they also come with challenges compared with homogeneous systems for multiagent reinforcement learning, such as the non-stationary problem and the policy version iteration issue. This work proposes a general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm named Heterogeneous League Training (HLT) to address heterogeneous multiagent problems. HLT keeps track of a pool of policies that agents have explored during training, gathering a league of heterogeneous policies to facilitate future policy optimization. Moreover, a hyper-network is introduced to increase the diversity of agent behaviors when collaborating with teammates having different levels of cooperation skills. We use heterogeneous benchmark tasks to demonstrate that (1) HLT promotes the success rate in cooperative heterogeneous tasks; (2) HLT is an effective approach to solving the policy version iteration problem; (3) HLT provides a practical way to assess the difficulty of learning each role in a heterogeneous team.
Online facility location with weights and congestion
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

The classic online facility location problem deals with finding the optimal set of facilities in an online fashion when demand requests arrive one at a time and facilities need to be opened to service these requests. In this work, we study two variants of the online facility location problem; (1) weighted requests and (2) congestion. Both of these variants are motivated by their applications to real life scenarios and the previously known results on online facility location cannot be directly adapted to analyse them. Weighted requests: In this variant, each demand request is a pair $(x,w)$ where $x$ is the standard location of the demand while $w$ is the corresponding weight of the request. The cost of servicing request $(x,w)$ at facility $F$ is $w\cdot d(x,F)$. For this variant, given $n$ requests, we present an online algorithm attaining a competitive ratio of $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ in the secretarial model for the weighted requests and show that it is optimal. Congestion: The congestion variant considers the case when there is an additional congestion cost that grows with the number of requests served by each facility. For this variant, when the congestion cost is a monomial, we show that there exists an algorithm attaining a constant competitive ratio. This constant is a function of the exponent of the monomial and the facility opening cost but independent of the number of requests.
Boundary-aware Camouflaged Object Detection via Deformable Point Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The camouflaged object detection (COD) task aims to identify and segment objects that blend into the background due to their similar color or texture. Despite the inherent difficulties of the task, COD has gained considerable attention in several fields, such as medicine, life-saving, and anti-military fields. In this paper, we propose a novel solution called the Deformable Point Sampling network (DPS-Net) to address the challenges associated with COD. The proposed DPS-Net utilizes a Deformable Point Sampling transformer (DPS transformer) that can effectively capture sparse local boundary information of significant object boundaries in COD using a deformable point sampling method. Moreover, the DPS transformer demonstrates robust COD performance by extracting contextual features for target object localization through integrating rough global positional information of objects with boundary local information. We evaluate our method on three prominent datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through comparative experiments.
Leveraging Reinforcement Learning for Task Resource Allocation in Scientific Workflows
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Scientific workflows are designed as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and consist of multiple dependent task definitions. They are executed over a large amount of data, often resulting in thousands of tasks with heterogeneous compute requirements and long runtimes, even on cluster infrastructures. In order to optimize the workflow performance, enough resources, e.g., CPU and memory, need to be provisioned for the respective tasks. Typically, workflow systems rely on user resource estimates which are known to be highly error-prone and can result in over- or underprovisioning. While resource overprovisioning leads to high resource wastage, underprovisioning can result in long runtimes or even failed tasks. In this paper, we propose two different reinforcement learning approaches based on gradient bandits and Q-learning, respectively, in order to minimize resource wastage by selecting suitable CPU and memory allocations. We provide a prototypical implementation in the well-known scientific workflow management system Nextflow, evaluate our approaches with five workflows, and compare them against the default resource configurations and a state-of-the-art feedback loop baseline. The evaluation yields that our reinforcement learning approaches significantly reduce resource wastage compared to the default configuration. Further, our approaches also reduce the allocated CPU hours compared to the state-of-the-art feedback loop by 6.79% and 24.53%.
Video compression dataset and benchmark of learning-based video-quality metrics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Video-quality measurement is a critical task in video processing. Nowadays, many implementations of new encoding standards - such as AV1, VVC, and LCEVC - use deep-learning-based decoding algorithms with perceptual metrics that serve as optimization objectives. But investigations of the performance of modern video- and image-quality metrics commonly employ videos compressed using older standards, such as AVC. In this paper, we present a new benchmark for video-quality metrics that evaluates video compression. It is based on a new dataset consisting of about 2,500 streams encoded using different standards, including AVC, HEVC, AV1, VP9, and VVC. Subjective scores were collected using crowdsourced pairwise comparisons. The list of evaluated metrics includes recent ones based on machine learning and neural networks. The results demonstrate that new no-reference metrics exhibit a high correlation with subjective quality and approach the capability of top full-reference metrics.
Anatomy-guided domain adaptation for 3D in-bed human pose estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

3D human pose estimation is a key component of clinical monitoring systems. The clinical applicability of deep pose estimation models, however, is limited by their poor generalization under domain shifts along with their need for sufficient labeled training data. As a remedy, we present a novel domain adaptation method, adapting a model from a labeled source to a shifted unlabeled target domain. Our method comprises two complementary adaptation strategies based on prior knowledge about human anatomy. First, we guide the learning process in the target domain by constraining predictions to the space of anatomically plausible poses. To this end, we embed the prior knowledge into an anatomical loss function that penalizes asymmetric limb lengths, implausible bone lengths, and implausible joint angles. Second, we propose to filter pseudo labels for self-training according to their anatomical plausibility and incorporate the concept into the Mean Teacher paradigm. We unify both strategies in a point cloud-based framework applicable to unsupervised and source-free domain adaptation. Evaluation is performed for in-bed pose estimation under two adaptation scenarios, using the public SLP dataset and a newly created dataset. Our method consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods, surpasses the baseline model by 31%/66%, and reduces the domain gap by 65%/82%. Source code is available at https://github.com/multimodallearning/da-3dhpe-anatomy.
Semantic Guided Level-Category Hybrid Prediction Network for Hierarchical Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Hierarchical classification (HC) assigns each object with multiple labels organized into a hierarchical structure. The existing deep learning based HC methods usually predict an instance starting from the root node until a leaf node is reached. However, in the real world, images interfered by noise, occlusion, blur, or low resolution may not provide sufficient information for the classification at subordinate levels. To address this issue, we propose a novel semantic guided level-category hybrid prediction network (SGLCHPN) that can jointly perform the level and category prediction in an end-to-end manner. SGLCHPN comprises two modules: a visual transformer that extracts feature vectors from the input images, and a semantic guided cross-attention module that uses categories word embeddings as queries to guide learning category-specific representations. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we construct two new datasets in which images are at a broad range of quality and thus are labeled to different levels (depths) in the hierarchy according to their individual quality. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed HC method.
On Narrative Information and the Distillation of Stories
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The act of telling stories is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. This work introduces the concept of narrative information, which we define to be the overlap in information space between a story and the items that compose the story. Using contrastive learning methods, we show how modern artificial neural networks can be leveraged to distill stories and extract a representation of the narrative information. We then demonstrate how evolutionary algorithms can leverage this to extract a set of narrative templates and how these templates -- in tandem with a novel curve-fitting algorithm we introduce -- can reorder music albums to automatically induce stories in them. In the process of doing so, we give strong statistical evidence that these narrative information templates are present in existing albums. While we experiment only with music albums here, the premises of our work extend to any form of (largely) independent media.
Continual Learning of Natural Language Processing Tasks: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Continual learning (CL) is a learning paradigm that emulates the human capability of learning and accumulating knowledge continually without forgetting the previously learned knowledge and also transferring the learned knowledge to help learn new tasks better. This survey presents a comprehensive review and analysis of the recent progress of CL in NLP, which has significant differences from CL in computer vision and machine learning. It covers (1) all CL settings with a taxonomy of existing techniques; (2) catastrophic forgetting (CF) prevention, (3) knowledge transfer (KT), which is particularly important for NLP tasks; and (4) some theory and the hidden challenge of inter-task class separation (ICS). (1), (3) and (4) have not been included in the existing survey. Finally, a list of future directions is discussed.
Masked Autoencoding for Scalable and Generalizable Decision Making
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We are interested in learning scalable agents for reinforcement learning that can learn from large-scale, diverse sequential data similar to current large vision and language models. To this end, this paper presents masked decision prediction (MaskDP), a simple and scalable self-supervised pretraining method for reinforcement learning (RL) and behavioral cloning (BC). In our MaskDP approach, we employ a masked autoencoder (MAE) to state-action trajectories, wherein we randomly mask state and action tokens and reconstruct the missing data. By doing so, the model is required to infer masked-out states and actions and extract information about dynamics. We find that masking different proportions of the input sequence significantly helps with learning a better model that generalizes well to multiple downstream tasks. In our empirical study, we find that a MaskDP model gains the capability of zero-shot transfer to new BC tasks, such as single and multiple goal reaching, and it can zero-shot infer skills from a few example transitions. In addition, MaskDP transfers well to offline RL and shows promising scaling behavior w.r.t. to model size. It is amenable to data-efficient finetuning, achieving competitive results with prior methods based on autoregressive pretraining.
Towards Advanced Monitoring for Scientific Workflows
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Scientific workflows consist of thousands of highly parallelized tasks executed in a distributed environment involving many components. Automatic tracing and investigation of the components' and tasks' performance metrics, traces, and behavior are necessary to support the end user with a level of abstraction since the large amount of data cannot be analyzed manually. The execution and monitoring of scientific workflows involves many components, the cluster infrastructure, its resource manager, the workflow, and the workflow tasks. All components in such an execution environment access different monitoring metrics and provide metrics on different abstraction levels. The combination and analysis of observed metrics from different components and their interdependencies are still widely unregarded. We specify four different monitoring layers that can serve as an architectural blueprint for the monitoring responsibilities and the interactions of components in the scientific workflow execution context. We describe the different monitoring metrics subject to the four layers and how the layers interact. Finally, we examine five state-of-the-art scientific workflow management systems (SWMS) in order to assess which steps are needed to enable our four-layer-based approach.
Explainable AI for Pre-Trained Code Models: What Do They Learn? When They Do Not Work?
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, there has been a wide interest in designing deep neural network-based models that automate downstream software engineering tasks on source code, such as code document generation, code search, and program repair. Although the main objective of these studies is to improve the effectiveness of the downstream task, many studies only attempt to employ the next best neural network model, without a proper in-depth analysis of why a particular solution works or does not, on particular tasks or scenarios. In this paper, using an example eXplainable AI (XAI) method (attention mechanism), we study two recent large language models (LLMs) for code (CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT) on a set of software engineering downstream tasks: code document generation (CDG), code refinement (CR), and code translation (CT). Through quantitative and qualitative studies, we identify what CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT learn (put the highest attention on, in terms of source code token types), on these tasks. We also show some of the common patterns when the model does not work as expected (performs poorly even on easy problems) and suggest recommendations that may alleviate the observed challenges.
Perfect Sampling from Pairwise Comparisons
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we study how to efficiently obtain perfect samples from a discrete distribution $\mathcal{D}$ given access only to pairwise comparisons of elements of its support. Specifically, we assume access to samples $(x, S)$, where $S$ is drawn from a distribution over sets $\mathcal{Q}$ (indicating the elements being compared), and $x$ is drawn from the conditional distribution $\mathcal{D}_S$ (indicating the winner of the comparison) and aim to output a clean sample $y$ distributed according to $\mathcal{D}$. We mainly focus on the case of pairwise comparisons where all sets $S$ have size 2. We design a Markov chain whose stationary distribution coincides with $\mathcal{D}$ and give an algorithm to obtain exact samples using the technique of Coupling from the Past. However, the sample complexity of this algorithm depends on the structure of the distribution $\mathcal{D}$ and can be even exponential in the support of $\mathcal{D}$ in many natural scenarios. Our main contribution is to provide an efficient exact sampling algorithm whose complexity does not depend on the structure of $\mathcal{D}$. To this end, we give a parametric Markov chain that mixes significantly faster given a good approximation to the stationary distribution. We can obtain such an approximation using an efficient learning from pairwise comparisons algorithm (Shah et al., JMLR 17, 2016). Our technique for speeding up sampling from a Markov chain whose stationary distribution is approximately known is simple, general and possibly of independent interest.
A Survey of Deep Graph Clustering: Taxonomy, Challenge, Application, and Open Resource
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Graph clustering, which aims to divide nodes in the graph into several distinct clusters, is a fundamental yet challenging task. Benefiting from the powerful representation capability of deep learning, deep graph clustering methods have achieved great success in recent years. However, the corresponding survey paper is relatively scarce, and it is imminent to make a summary of this field. From this motivation, we conduct a comprehensive survey of deep graph clustering. Firstly, we introduce formulaic definition, evaluation, and development in this field. Secondly, the taxonomy of deep graph clustering methods is presented based on four different criteria, including graph type, network architecture, learning paradigm, and clustering method. Thirdly, we carefully analyze the existing methods via extensive experiments and summarize the challenges and opportunities from five perspectives, including graph data quality, stability, scalability, discriminative capability, and unknown cluster number. Besides, the applications of deep graph clustering methods in six domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, recommendation systems, social network analyses, bioinformatics, and medical science, are presented. Last but not least, this paper provides open resource supports, including 1) a collection (\url{https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering}) of state-of-the-art deep graph clustering methods (papers, codes, and datasets) and 2) a unified framework (\url{https://github.com/Marigoldwu/A-Unified-Framework-for-Deep-Attribute-Graph-Clustering}) of deep graph clustering. We hope this work can serve as a quick guide and help researchers overcome challenges in this vibrant field.
Micro-Architectural features as soft-error induced fault executions markers in embedded safety-critical systems: a preliminary study
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2023
Year: 2023

Radiation-induced soft errors are one of the most challenging issues in Safety Critical Real-Time Embedded System (SACRES) reliability, usually handled using different flavors of Double Modular Redundancy (DMR) techniques. This solution is becoming unaffordable due to the complexity of modern micro-processors in all domains. This paper addresses the promising field of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) based hardware detectors for soft errors. To create such cores and make them general enough to work with different software applications, microarchitectural attributes are a fascinating option as candidate fault detection features. Several processors already track these features through dedicated Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU). However, there is an open question to understand to what extent they are enough to detect faulty executions. Exploiting the capability of gem5 to simulate real computing systems, perform fault injection experiments and profile microarchitectural attributes (i.e., gem5 Stats), this paper presents the results of a comprehensive analysis regarding the potential attributes to detect soft error and the associated models that can be trained with these features.