OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Personalizing Sustainable Agriculture with Causal Machine Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

To fight climate change and accommodate the increasing population, global crop production has to be strengthened. To achieve the "sustainable intensification" of agriculture, transforming it from carbon emitter to carbon sink is a priority, and understanding the environmental impact of agricultural management practices is a fundamental prerequisite to that. At the same time, the global agricultural landscape is deeply heterogeneous, with differences in climate, soil, and land use inducing variations in how agricultural systems respond to farmer actions. The "personalization" of sustainable agriculture with the provision of locally adapted management advice is thus a necessary condition for the efficient uplift of green metrics, and an integral development in imminent policies. Here, we formulate personalized sustainable agriculture as a Conditional Average Treatment Effect estimation task and use Causal Machine Learning for tackling it. Leveraging climate data, land use information and employing Double Machine Learning, we estimate the heterogeneous effect of sustainable practices on the field-level Soil Organic Carbon content in Lithuania. We thus provide a data-driven perspective for targeting sustainable practices and effectively expanding the global carbon sink.
Parallel Attention Forcing for Machine Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Attention-based autoregressive models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various sequence-to-sequence tasks, including Text-To-Speech (TTS) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT), but can be difficult to train. The standard training approach, teacher forcing, guides a model with the reference back-history. During inference, the generated back-history must be used. This mismatch limits the evaluation performance. Attention forcing has been introduced to address the mismatch, guiding the model with the generated back-history and reference attention. While successful in tasks with continuous outputs like TTS, attention forcing faces additional challenges in tasks with discrete outputs like NMT. This paper introduces the two extensions of attention forcing to tackle these challenges. (1) Scheduled attention forcing automatically turns attention forcing on and off, which is essential for tasks with discrete outputs. (2) Parallel attention forcing makes training parallel, and is applicable to Transformer-based models. The experiments show that the proposed approaches improve the performance of models based on RNNs and Transformers.
Uplink Sensing Using CSI Ratio in Perceptive Mobile Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Uplink sensing in perceptive mobile networks (PMNs), which uses uplink communication signals for sensing the environment around a base station, faces challenging issues of clock asynchronism and the requirement of a line-of-sight (LOS) path between transmitters and receivers. The channel state information (CSI) ratio has been applied to resolve these issues, however, current research on the CSI ratio is limited to Doppler estimation in a single dynamic path. This paper proposes an advanced parameter estimation scheme that can extract multiple dynamic parameters, including Doppler frequency, angle-of-arrival (AoA), and delay, in a communication uplink channel and completes the localization of multiple moving targets. Our scheme is based on the multi-element Taylor series of the CSI ratio that converts a nonlinear function of sensing parameters to linear forms and enables the applications of traditional sensing algorithms. Using the truncated Taylor series, we develop novel multiple-signal-classification grid searching algorithms for estimating Doppler frequencies and AoAs and use the least-square method to obtain delays. Both experimental and simulation results are provided, demonstrating that our proposed scheme can achieve good performances for sensing both single and multiple dynamic paths, without requiring the presence of a LOS path.
Reconciliation of Pre-trained Models and Prototypical Neural Networks in Few-shot Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Incorporating large-scale pre-trained models with the prototypical neural networks is a de-facto paradigm in few-shot named entity recognition. Existing methods, unfortunately, are not aware of the fact that embeddings from pre-trained models contain a prominently large amount of information regarding word frequencies, biasing prototypical neural networks against learning word entities. This discrepancy constrains the two models' synergy. Thus, we propose a one-line-code normalization method to reconcile such a mismatch with empirical and theoretical grounds. Our experiments based on nine benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method over the counterpart models and are comparable to the state-of-the-art methods. In addition to the model enhancement, our work also provides an analytical viewpoint for addressing the general problems in few-shot name entity recognition or other tasks that rely on pre-trained models or prototypical neural networks.
Multimodal Learning for Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Prognosis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

This paper focuses on the task of survival time analysis for lung cancer. Although much progress has been made in this problem in recent years, the performance of existing methods is still far from satisfactory. Traditional and some deep learning-based survival time analyses for lung cancer are mostly based on textual clinical information such as staging, age, histology, etc. Unlike existing methods that predicting on the single modality, we observe that a human clinician usually takes multimodal data such as text clinical data and visual scans to estimate survival time. Motivated by this, in this work, we contribute a smart cross-modality network for survival analysis network named Lite-ProSENet that simulates a human's manner of decision making. Extensive experiments were conducted using data from 422 NSCLC patients from The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA). The results show that our Lite-ProSENet outperforms favorably again all comparison methods and achieves the new state of the art with the 89.3% on concordance. The code will be made publicly available.
Cross-Domain Local Characteristic Enhanced Deepfake Video Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

As ultra-realistic face forgery techniques emerge, deepfake detection has attracted increasing attention due to security concerns. Many detectors cannot achieve accurate results when detecting unseen manipulations despite excellent performance on known forgeries. In this paper, we are motivated by the observation that the discrepancies between real and fake videos are extremely subtle and localized, and inconsistencies or irregularities can exist in some critical facial regions across various information domains. To this end, we propose a novel pipeline, Cross-Domain Local Forensics (XDLF), for more general deepfake video detection. In the proposed pipeline, a specialized framework is presented to simultaneously exploit local forgery patterns from space, frequency, and time domains, thus learning cross-domain features to detect forgeries. Moreover, the framework leverages four high-level forgery-sensitive local regions of a human face to guide the model to enhance subtle artifacts and localize potential anomalies. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the impressive performance of our method, and we achieve superiority over several state-of-the-art methods on cross-dataset generalization. We also examined the factors that contribute to its performance through ablations, which suggests that exploiting cross-domain local characteristics is a noteworthy direction for developing more general deepfake detectors.
Semantic-Aware Environment Perception for Mobile Human-Robot Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Current technological advances open up new opportunities for bringing human-machine interaction to a new level of human-centered cooperation. In this context, a key issue is the semantic understanding of the environment in order to enable mobile robots more complex interactions and a facilitated communication with humans. Prerequisites are the vision-based registration of semantic objects and humans, where the latter are further analyzed for potential interaction partners. Despite significant research achievements, the reliable and fast registration of semantic information still remains a challenging task for mobile robots in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a vision-based system for mobile assistive robots to enable a semantic-aware environment perception without additional a-priori knowledge. We deploy our system on a mobile humanoid robot that enables us to test our methods in real-world applications.
BuildMapper: A Fully Learnable Framework for Vectorized Building Contour Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning based methods have significantly boosted the study of automatic building extraction from remote sensing images. However, delineating vectorized and regular building contours like a human does remains very challenging, due to the difficulty of the methodology, the diversity of building structures, and the imperfect imaging conditions. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end learnable building contour extraction framework, named BuildMapper, which can directly and efficiently delineate building polygons just as a human does. BuildMapper consists of two main components: 1) a contour initialization module that generates initial building contours; and 2) a contour evolution module that performs both contour vertex deformation and reduction, which removes the need for complex empirical post-processing used in existing methods. In both components, we provide new ideas, including a learnable contour initialization method to replace the empirical methods, dynamic predicted and ground truth vertex pairing for the static vertex correspondence problem, and a lightweight encoder for vertex information extraction and aggregation, which benefit a general contour-based method; and a well-designed vertex classification head for building corner vertices detection, which casts light on direct structured building contour extraction. We also built a suitable large-scale building dataset, the WHU-Mix (vector) building dataset, to benefit the study of contour-based building extraction methods. The extensive experiments conducted on the WHU-Mix (vector) dataset, the WHU dataset, and the CrowdAI dataset verified that BuildMapper can achieve a state-of-the-art performance, with a higher mask average precision (AP) and boundary AP than both segmentation-based and contour-based methods.
Debiasing Graph Transfer Learning via Item Semantic Clustering for Cross-Domain Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Deep learning-based recommender systems may lead to over-fitting when lacking training interaction data. This over-fitting significantly degrades recommendation performances. To address this data sparsity problem, cross-domain recommender systems (CDRSs) exploit the data from an auxiliary source domain to facilitate the recommendation on the sparse target domain. Most existing CDRSs rely on overlapping users or items to connect domains and transfer knowledge. However, matching users is an arduous task and may involve privacy issues when data comes from different companies, resulting in a limited application for the above CDRSs. Some studies develop CDRSs that require no overlapping users and items by transferring learned user interaction patterns. However, they ignore the bias in user interaction patterns between domains and hence suffer from an inferior performance compared with single-domain recommender systems. In this paper, based on the above findings, we propose a novel CDRS, namely semantic clustering enhanced debiasing graph neural recommender system (SCDGN), that requires no overlapping users and items and can handle the domain bias. More precisely, SCDGN semantically clusters items from both domains and constructs a cross-domain bipartite graph generated from item clusters and users. Then, the knowledge is transferred via this cross-domain user-cluster graph from the source to the target. Furthermore, we design a debiasing graph convolutional layer for SCDGN to extract unbiased structural knowledge from the cross-domain user-cluster graph. Our Experimental results on three public datasets and a pair of proprietary datasets verify the effectiveness of SCDGN over state-of-the-art models in terms of cross-domain recommendations.
A Federated DRL Approach for Smart Micro-Grid Energy Control with Distributed Energy Resources
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

The prevalence of the Internet of things (IoT) and smart meters devices in smart grids is providing key support for measuring and analyzing the power consumption patterns. This approach enables end-user to play the role of prosumers in the market and subsequently contributes to diminish the carbon footprint and the burden on utility grids. The coordination of trading surpluses of energy that is generated by house renewable energy resources (RERs) and the supply of shortages by external networks (main grid) is a necessity. This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture to manage energy in multiple smart buildings leveraging federated deep reinforcement learning (FDRL) with dynamic load in a distributed manner. Within the context of the developed FDRL-based framework, each agent that is hosted in local building energy management systems (BEMS) trains a local deep reinforcement learning (DRL) model and shares its experience in the form of model hyperparameters to the federation layer in the energy management system (EMS). Simulation studies are conducted using one EMS and up to twenty smart houses that are equipped with photovoltaic (PV) systems and batteries. This iterative training approach enables the proposed discretized soft actor-critic (SAC) agents to aggregate the collected knowledge to expedite the overall learning procedure and reduce costs and CO2 emissions, while the federation approach can mitigate privacy breaches. The numerical results confirm the performance of the proposed framework under different daytime periods, loads, and temperatures.
Learning Probabilistic Temporal Safety Properties from Examples in Relational Domains
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a framework for learning a fragment of probabilistic computation tree logic (pCTL) formulae from a set of states that are labeled as safe or unsafe. We work in a relational setting and combine ideas from relational Markov Decision Processes with pCTL model-checking. More specifically, we assume that there is an unknown relational pCTL target formula that is satisfied by only safe states, and has a horizon of maximum $k$ steps and a threshold probability $α$. The task then consists of learning this unknown formula from states that are labeled as safe or unsafe by a domain expert. We apply principles of relational learning to induce a pCTL formula that is satisfied by all safe states and none of the unsafe ones. This formula can then be used as a safety specification for this domain, so that the system can avoid getting into dangerous situations in future. Following relational learning principles, we introduce a candidate formula generation process, as well as a method for deciding which candidate formula is a satisfactory specification for the given labeled states. The cases where the expert knows and does not know the system policy are treated, however, much of the learning process is the same for both cases. We evaluate our approach on a synthetic relational domain.
Sittin'On the Dock of the (WiFi) Bay: On the Frame Aggregation under IEEE 802.11 DCF
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2022
Year: 2022

It is well known that frame aggregation in Internet communications improves transmission efficiency. However, it also causes a delay that for some real-time communications is inappropriate, thus creating a trade-off between efficiency and delay. In this paper, we establish the conditions for frame aggregation under the IEEE 802.11 DCF protocol to be beneficial on average delay. To do so, we first describe the transmission time in IEEE 802.11 in a stochastic framework and then we calculate the optimal value of the frames that, when aggregated, saves transmission time in the long term. Our findings, discussed with numerical experimentation, show that frame aggregation reduces transmission congestion and transmission delays.
Tri-Polarized Holographic MIMO Surface in Near-Field: Channel Modeling and Precoding Design
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

This paper investigates the utilization of triple polarization (TP) for multi-user (MU) holographic multiple-input multi-output surface (HMIMOS) wireless communication systems, targeting capacity boosting and diversity exploitation without enlarging the antenna array sizes. We specifically consider that both the transmitter and receiver are both equipped with an HMIMOS consisting of compact sub-wavelength TP patch antennas within the near-field (NF) regime. To characterize TP MU-HMIMOS systems, a TP NF channel model is constructed using the dyadic Green's function, whose characteristics are leveraged to design two precoding schemes for mitigating the cross-polarization and inter-user interference contributions. Specifically, a user-cluster-based precoding scheme assigns different users to one of three polarizations at the expense of the system's diversity, and a two-layer precoding scheme removes interference using the Gaussian elimination method at a high computational cost. The theoretical correlation analysis for HMIMOS in the NF region is also investigated, revealing that both the spacing of transmit patch antennas and user distance impact transmit correlation factors. Our numerical results show that the users far from transmitting HMIMOS experience higher correlation than those closer within the NF regime, resulting in a lower channel capacity. Meanwhile, in terms of channel capacity, TP HMIMOS can almost achieve 1.25 times gain compared with dual-polarized HMIMOS, and 3 times compared with conventional HMIMOS. In addition, the proposed two-layer precoding scheme combined with two-layer power allocation realizes a higher spectral efficiency than other schemes without sacrificing diversity.
Black-Box Attack against GAN-Generated Image Detector with Contrastive Perturbation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visually realistic GAN-generated facial images raise obvious concerns on potential misuse. Many effective forensic algorithms have been developed to detect such synthetic images in recent years. It is significant to assess the vulnerability of such forensic detectors against adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose a new black-box attack method against GAN-generated image detectors. A novel contrastive learning strategy is adopted to train the encoder-decoder network based anti-forensic model under a contrastive loss function. GAN images and their simulated real counterparts are constructed as positive and negative samples, respectively. Leveraging on the trained attack model, imperceptible contrastive perturbation could be applied to input synthetic images for removing GAN fingerprint to some extent. As such, existing GAN-generated image detectors are expected to be deceived. Extensive experimental results verify that the proposed attack effectively reduces the accuracy of three state-of-the-art detectors on six popular GANs. High visual quality of the attacked images is also achieved. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ZXMMD/BAttGAND.
Can laypeople predict the replicability of social science studies without expert intervention: an exploratory study
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

The low replication rate of published studies has long concerned the social science community, making understanding the replicability a critical problem. Several studies have shown that relevant research communities can make predictions about the replicability of individual studies with above-chance accuracy. Follow-up work further indicates that laypeople can also achieve above-chance accuracy in predicting replicability when experts interpret the studies into short descriptions that are more accessible for laypeople. The involvement of scarce expert resources may make these methods expensive from financial and time perspectives. In this work, we explored whether laypeople can predict the replicability of social science studies without expert intervention. We presented laypeople with raw materials truncated from published social science papers and elicited their answers to questions related to the paper. Our results suggested that laypeople were engaged in this technical task, providing reasonable and self-contained answers. The majority of them also demonstrated a good understanding of the material. However, the solicited information had limited predictive power on the actual replication outcomes. We further discuss several lessons we learned compared to the approach with expert intervention to inspire future works.
pyGSL: A Graph Structure Learning Toolkit
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce pyGSL, a Python library that provides efficient implementations of state-of-the-art graph structure learning models along with diverse datasets to evaluate them on. The implementations are written in GPU-friendly ways, allowing one to scale to much larger network tasks. A common interface is introduced for algorithm unrolling methods, unifying implementations of recent state-of-the-art techniques and allowing new methods to be quickly developed by avoiding the need to rebuild the underlying unrolling infrastructure. Implementations of differentiable graph structure learning models are written in PyTorch, allowing us to leverage the rich software ecosystem that exists e.g., around logging, hyperparameter search, and GPU-communication. This also makes it easy to incorporate these models as components in larger gradient based learning systems where differentiable estimates of graph structure may be useful, e.g. in latent graph learning. Diverse datasets and performance metrics allow consistent comparisons across models in this fast growing field. The full code repository can be found on https://github.com/maxwass/pyGSL.
Decentralized Complete Dictionary Learning via $\ell^{4}$-Norm Maximization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With the rapid development of information technologies, centralized data processing is subject to many limitations, such as computational overheads, communication delays, and data privacy leakage. Decentralized data processing over networked terminal nodes becomes an important technology in the era of big data. Dictionary learning is a powerful representation learning method to exploit the low-dimensional structure from the high-dimensional data. By exploiting the low-dimensional structure, the storage and the processing overhead of data can be effectively reduced. In this paper, we propose a novel decentralized complete dictionary learning algorithm, which is based on $\ell^{4}$-norm maximization. Compared with existing decentralized dictionary learning algorithms, comprehensive numerical experiments show that the novel algorithm has significant advantages in terms of per-iteration computational complexity, communication cost, and convergence rate in many scenarios. Moreover, a rigorous theoretical analysis shows that the dictionaries learned by the proposed algorithm can converge to the one learned by a centralized dictionary learning algorithm at a linear rate with high probability under certain conditions.