OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Creation and Evaluation of a Pre-tertiary Artificial Intelligence (AI) Curriculum
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Contributions: The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)-Jockey Club AI for the Future Project (AI4Future) co-created an AI curriculum for pre-tertiary education and evaluated its efficacy. While AI is conventionally taught in tertiary level education, our co-creation process successfully developed the curriculum that has been used in secondary school teaching in Hong Kong and received positive feedback. Background: AI4Future is a cross-sector project that engages five major partners - CUHK Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Education, Hong Kong secondary schools, the government and the AI industry. A team of 14 professors with expertise in engineering and education collaborated with 17 principals and teachers from 6 secondary schools to co-create the curriculum. This team formation bridges the gap between researchers in engineering and education, together with practitioners in education context. Research Questions: What are the main features of the curriculum content developed through the co-creation process? Would the curriculum significantly improve the students perceived competence in, as well as attitude and motivation towards AI? What are the teachers perceptions of the co-creation process that aims to accommodate and foster teacher autonomy? Methodology: This study adopted a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods and involved 335 student participants. Findings: 1) two main features of learning resources, 2) the students perceived greater competence, and developed more positive attitude to learn AI, and 3) the co-creation process generated a variety of resources which enhanced the teachers knowledge in AI, as well as fostered teachers autonomy in bringing the subject matter into their classrooms.
Spatial Assembly: Generative Architecture With Reinforcement Learning, Self Play and Tree Search
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

With this work, we investigate the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the generation of spatial assemblies, by combining ideas from Procedural Generation algorithms (Wave Function Collapse algorithm (WFC)) and RL for Game Solving. WFC is a Generative Design algorithm, inspired by Constraint Solving. In WFC, one defines a set of tiles/blocks and constraints and the algorithm generates an assembly that satisfies these constraints. Casting the problem of generation of spatial assemblies as a Markov Decision Process whose states transitions are defined by WFC, we propose an algorithm that uses Reinforcement Learning and Self-Play to learn a policy that generates assemblies that maximize objectives set by the designer. Finally, we demonstrate the use of our Spatial Assembly algorithm in Architecture Design.
Synaptic metaplasticity in binarized neural networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Unlike the brain, artificial neural networks, including state-of-the-art deep neural networks for computer vision, are subject to "catastrophic forgetting": they rapidly forget the previous task when trained on a new one. Neuroscience suggests that biological synapses avoid this issue through the process of synaptic consolidation and metaplasticity: the plasticity itself changes upon repeated synaptic events. In this work, we show that this concept of metaplasticity can be transferred to a particular type of deep neural networks, binarized neural networks, to reduce catastrophic forgetting.
Promoting Self-Efficacy Through an Effective Human-Powered Nonvisual Smartphone Task Assistant
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

Accessibility assessments typically focus on determining a binary measurement of task performance success/failure; and often neglect to acknowledge the nuances of those interactions. Although a large population of blind people find smartphone interactions possible, many experiences take a significant toll and can have a lasting negative impact on the individual and their willingness to step out of technological comfort zones. There is a need to assist and support individuals with the adoption and learning process of new tasks to mitigate these negative experiences. We contribute with a human-powered nonvisual task assistant for smartphones to provide pervasive assistance. We argue, in addition to success, one must carefully consider promoting and evaluating factors such as self-efficacy and the belief in one's own abilities to control and learn to use technology. In this paper, we show effective assistant positively affects self-efficacy when performing new tasks with smartphones, affects perceptions of accessibility and enables systemic task-based learning.
Challenges for Computational Lexical Semantic Change
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The computational study of lexical semantic change (LSC) has taken off in the past few years and we are seeing increasing interest in the field, from both computational sciences and linguistics. Most of the research so far has focused on methods for modelling and detecting semantic change using large diachronic textual data, with the majority of the approaches employing neural embeddings. While methods that offer easy modelling of diachronic text are one of the main reasons for the spiking interest in LSC, neural models leave many aspects of the problem unsolved. The field has several open and complex challenges. In this chapter, we aim to describe the most important of these challenges and outline future directions.
A framework to compare music generative models using automatic evaluation metrics extended to rhythm
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

To train a machine learning model is necessary to take numerous decisions about many options for each process involved, in the field of sequence generation and more specifically of music composition, the nature of the problem helps to narrow the options but at the same time, some other options appear for specific challenges. This paper takes the framework proposed in a previous research that did not consider rhythm to make a series of design decisions, then, rhythm support is added to evaluate the performance of two RNN memory cells in the creation of monophonic music. The model considers the handling of music transposition and the framework evaluates the quality of the generated pieces using automatic quantitative metrics based on geometry which have rhythm support added as well.
Edge-Featured Graph Attention Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Lots of neural network architectures have been proposed to deal with learning tasks on graph-structured data. However, most of these models concentrate on only node features during the learning process. The edge features, which usually play a similarly important role as the nodes, are often ignored or simplified by these models. In this paper, we present edge-featured graph attention networks, namely EGATs, to extend the use of graph neural networks to those tasks learning on graphs with both node and edge features. These models can be regarded as extensions of graph attention networks (GATs). By reforming the model structure and the learning process, the new models can accept node and edge features as inputs, incorporate the edge information into feature representations, and iterate both node and edge features in a parallel but mutual way. The results demonstrate that our work is highly competitive against other node classification approaches, and can be well applied in edge-featured graph learning tasks.
GLocalX -- From Local to Global Explanations of Black Box AI Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to prominence as one of the major components of our society, with applications in most aspects of our lives. In this field, complex and highly nonlinear machine learning models such as ensemble models, deep neural networks, and Support Vector Machines have consistently shown remarkable accuracy in solving complex tasks. Although accurate, AI models often are "black boxes" which we are not able to understand. Relying on these models has a multifaceted impact and raises significant concerns about their transparency. Applications in sensitive and critical domains are a strong motivational factor in trying to understand the behavior of black boxes. We propose to address this issue by providing an interpretable layer on top of black box models by aggregating "local" explanations. We present GLocalX, a "local-first" model agnostic explanation method. Starting from local explanations expressed in form of local decision rules, GLocalX iteratively generalizes them into global explanations by hierarchically aggregating them. Our goal is to learn accurate yet simple interpretable models to emulate the given black box, and, if possible, replace it entirely. We validate GLocalX in a set of experiments in standard and constrained settings with limited or no access to either data or local explanations. Experiments show that GLocalX is able to accurately emulate several models with simple and small models, reaching state-of-the-art performance against natively global solutions. Our findings show how it is often possible to achieve a high level of both accuracy and comprehensibility of classification models, even in complex domains with high-dimensional data, without necessarily trading one property for the other. This is a key requirement for a trustworthy AI, necessary for adoption in high-stakes decision making applications.
Towards duration robust weakly supervised sound event detection
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

Sound event detection (SED) is the task of tagging the absence or presence of audio events and their corresponding interval within a given audio clip. While SED can be done using supervised machine learning, where training data is fully labeled with access to per event timestamps and duration, our work focuses on weakly-supervised sound event detection (WSSED), where prior knowledge about an event's duration is unavailable. Recent research within the field focuses on improving segment- and event-level localization performance for specific datasets regarding specific evaluation metrics. Specifically, well-performing event-level localization requires fully labeled development subsets to obtain event duration estimates, which significantly benefits localization performance. Moreover, well-performing segment-level localization models output predictions at a coarse-scale (e.g., 1 second), hindering their deployment on datasets containing very short events (< 1 second). This work proposes a duration robust CRNN (CDur) framework, which aims to achieve competitive performance in terms of segment- and event-level localization. This paper proposes a new post-processing strategy named "Triple Threshold" and investigates two data augmentation methods along with a label smoothing method within the scope of WSSED. Evaluation of our model is done on the DCASE2017 and 2018 Task 4 datasets, and URBAN-SED. Our model outperforms other approaches on the DCASE2018 and URBAN-SED datasets without requiring prior duration knowledge. In particular, our model is capable of similar performance to strongly-labeled supervised models on the URBAN-SED dataset. Lastly, ablation experiments to reveal that without post-processing, our model's localization performance drop is significantly lower compared with other approaches.
CoVaxxy: A Collection of English-language Twitter Posts About COVID-19 Vaccines
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

With a substantial proportion of the population currently hesitant to take the COVID-19 vaccine, it is important that people have access to accurate information. However, there is a large amount of low-credibility information about vaccines spreading on social media. In this paper, we present the CoVaxxy dataset, a growing collection of English-language Twitter posts about COVID-19 vaccines. Using one week of data, we provide statistics regarding the numbers of tweets over time, the hashtags used, and the websites shared. We also illustrate how these data might be utilized by performing an analysis of the prevalence over time of high- and low-credibility sources, topic groups of hashtags, and geographical distributions. Additionally, we develop and present the CoVaxxy dashboard, allowing people to visualize the relationship between COVID-19 vaccine adoption and U.S. geo-located posts in our dataset. This dataset can be used to study the impact of online information on COVID-19 health outcomes (e.g., vaccine uptake) and our dashboard can help with exploration of the data.
Image Denoising using Attention-Residual Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

During the image acquisition process, noise is usually added to the data mainly due to physical limitations of the acquisition sensor, and also regarding imprecisions during the data transmission and manipulation. In that sense, the resultant image needs to be processed to attenuate its noise without losing details. Non-learning-based strategies such as filter-based and noise prior modeling have been adopted to solve the image denoising problem. Nowadays, learning-based denoising techniques showed to be much more effective and flexible approaches, such as Residual Convolutional Neural Networks. Here, we propose a new learning-based non-blind denoising technique named Attention Residual Convolutional Neural Network (ARCNN), and its extension to blind denoising named Flexible Attention Residual Convolutional Neural Network (FARCNN). The proposed methods try to learn the underlying noise expectation using an Attention-Residual mechanism. Experiments on public datasets corrupted by different levels of Gaussian and Poisson noise support the effectiveness of the proposed approaches against some state-of-the-art image denoising methods. ARCNN achieved an overall average PSNR results of around 0.44dB and 0.96dB for Gaussian and Poisson denoising, respectively FARCNN presented very consistent results, even with slightly worsen performance compared to ARCNN.
TC-DTW: Accelerating Multivariate Dynamic Time Warping Through Triangle Inequality and Point Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Dynamic time warping (DTW) plays an important role in analytics on time series. Despite the large body of research on speeding up univariate DTW, the method for multivariate DTW has not been improved much in the last two decades. The most popular algorithm used today is still the one developed seventeen years ago. This paper presents a solution that, as far as we know, for the first time consistently outperforms the classic multivariate DTW algorithm across dataset sizes, series lengths, data dimensions, temporal window sizes, and machines. The new solution, named TC-DTW, introduces Triangle Inequality and Point Clustering into the algorithm design on lower bound calculations for multivariate DTW. In experiments on DTW-based nearest neighbor finding, the new solution avoids as much as 98% (60% average) DTW distance calculations and yields as much as 25X (7.5X average) speedups.
The Devils in the Point Clouds: Studying the Robustness of Point Cloud Convolutions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, there has been a significant interest in performing convolution over irregularly sampled point clouds. Since point clouds are very different from regular raster images, it is imperative to study the generalization of the convolution networks more closely, especially their robustness under variations in scale and rotations of the input data. This paper investigates different variants of PointConv, a convolution network on point clouds, to examine their robustness to input scale and rotation changes. Of the variants we explored, two are novel and generated significant improvements. The first is replacing the multilayer perceptron based weight function with much simpler third degree polynomials, together with a Sobolev norm regularization. Secondly, for 3D datasets, we derive a novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor by utilizing 3D geometric properties as the input to PointConv, in addition to the regular 3D coordinates. We have also explored choices of activation functions, neighborhood, and subsampling methods. Experiments are conducted on the 2D MNIST & CIFAR-10 datasets as well as the 3D SemanticKITTI & ScanNet datasets. Results reveal that on 2D, using third degree polynomials greatly improves PointConv's robustness to scale changes and rotations, even surpassing traditional 2D CNNs for the MNIST dataset. On 3D datasets, the novel viewpoint-invariant descriptor significantly improves the performance as well as robustness of PointConv. We achieve the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation performance on the SemanticKITTI dataset, as well as comparable performance with the current highest framework on the ScanNet dataset among point-based approaches.
Safer Illinois and RokWall: Privacy Preserving University Health Apps for COVID-19
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

COVID-19 has fundamentally disrupted the way we live. Government bodies, universities, and companies worldwide are rapidly developing technologies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and safely reopen society. Essential analytics tools such as contact tracing, super-spreader event detection, and exposure mapping require collecting and analyzing sensitive user information. The increasing use of such powerful data-driven applications necessitates a secure, privacy-preserving infrastructure for computation on personal data. In this paper, we analyze two such computing infrastructures under development at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to track and mitigate the spread of COVID-19. First, we present Safer Illinois, a system for decentralized health analytics supporting two applications currently deployed with widespread adoption: digital contact tracing and COVID-19 status cards. Second, we introduce the RokWall architecture for privacy-preserving centralized data analytics on sensitive user data. We discuss the architecture of these systems, design choices, threat models considered, and the challenges we experienced in developing production-ready systems for sensitive data analysis.
Cross-domain few-shot learning with unlabelled data
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Few shot learning aims to solve the data scarcity problem. If there is a domain shift between the test set and the training set, their performance will decrease a lot. This setting is called Cross-domain few-shot learning. However, this is very challenging because the target domain is unseen during training. Thus we propose a new setting some unlabelled data from the target domain is provided, which can bridge the gap between the source domain and the target domain. A benchmark for this setting is constructed using DomainNet \cite{peng2018oment}. We come up with a self-supervised learning method to fully utilize the knowledge in the labeled training set and the unlabelled set. Extensive experiments show that our methods outperforms several baseline methods by a large margin. We also carefully design an episodic training pipeline which yields a significant performance boost.
Epidemic? The Attack Surface of German Hospitals during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

In our paper we analyze the attack surface of German hospitals and healthcare providers in 2020 during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The analysis looked at the publicly visible attack surface utilizing a Distributed Cyber Recon System, utilizing distributed Internet scanning, Big Data methods and scan data of 1,483 GB from more than 89 different global Internet scans. From the 1,555 identified German clinical entities, security posture analysis was conducted by looking at more than 13,000 service banners for version identification and subsequent CVE-based vulnerability identification. Primary analysis shows that 32 percent of the analyzed services were determined as vulnerable to various degrees and 36 percent of all hospitals showed numerous vulnerabilities. Further resulting vulnerability statistics were mapped against size of organization and hospital bed count.
PGT: Pseudo Relevance Feedback Using a Graph-Based Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Most research on pseudo relevance feedback (PRF) has been done in vector space and probabilistic retrieval models. This paper shows that Transformer-based rerankers can also benefit from the extra context that PRF provides. It presents PGT, a graph-based Transformer that sparsifies attention between graph nodes to enable PRF while avoiding the high computational complexity of most Transformer architectures. Experiments show that PGT improves upon non-PRF Transformer reranker, and it is at least as accurate as Transformer PRF models that use full attention, but with lower computational costs.
MIT SafePaths Card (MiSaCa): Augmenting Paper Based Vaccination Cards with Printed Codes
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

In this early draft, we describe a user-centric, card-based system for vaccine distribution. Our system makes use of digitally signed QR codes and their use for phased vaccine distribution, vaccine administration/record-keeping, immunization verification, and follow-up symptom reporting. Furthermore, we propose and describe a complementary scanner app system to be used by vaccination clinics, public health officials, and immunization verification parties to effectively utilize card-based framework. We believe that the proposed system provides a privacy-preserving and efficient framework for vaccine distribution in both developed and developing regions.
SparseDNN: Fast Sparse Deep Learning Inference on CPUs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The last few years have seen gigantic leaps in algorithms and systems to support efficient deep learning inference. Pruning and quantization algorithms can now consistently compress neural networks by an order of magnitude. For a compressed neural network, a multitude of inference frameworks have been designed to maximize the performance of the target hardware. While we find mature support for quantized neural networks in production frameworks such as OpenVINO and MNN, support for pruned sparse neural networks is still lacking. To tackle this challenge, we present SparseDNN, a sparse deep learning inference engine targeting CPUs. We present both kernel-level optimizations with a sparse code generator to accelerate sparse operators and novel network-level optimizations catering to sparse networks. We show that our sparse code generator can achieve significant speedups over state-of-the-art sparse and dense libraries. On end-to-end benchmarks such as Huggingface pruneBERT, SparseDNN achieves up to 5x throughput improvement over dense inference with state-of-the-art OpenVINO. Open source library at: https://github.com/marsupialtail/sparsednn.
HIVE-4-MAT: Advancing the Ontology Infrastructure for Materials Science
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2021
Year: 2021

Introduces HIVE-4-MAT - Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering for Materials Science, an automatic linked data ontology application. Covers contextual background for materials science, shared ontology infrastructures, and reviews the knowledge extraction and indexing process. HIVE-4-MAT's vocabulary browsing, term search and selection, and knowledge extraction and indexing are reviewed, and plans to integrate named entity recognition. Conclusion highlights next steps with relation extraction to support better ontologies.