OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Composite Learning for Robust and Effective Dense Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Multi-task learning promises better model generalization on a target task by jointly optimizing it with an auxiliary task. However, the current practice requires additional labeling efforts for the auxiliary task, while not guaranteeing better model performance. In this paper, we find that jointly training a dense prediction (target) task with a self-supervised (auxiliary) task can consistently improve the performance of the target task, while eliminating the need for labeling auxiliary tasks. We refer to this joint training as Composite Learning (CompL). Experiments of CompL on monocular depth estimation, semantic segmentation, and boundary detection show consistent performance improvements in fully and partially labeled datasets. Further analysis on depth estimation reveals that joint training with self-supervision outperforms most labeled auxiliary tasks. We also find that CompL can improve model robustness when the models are evaluated in new domains. These results demonstrate the benefits of self-supervision as an auxiliary task, and establish the design of novel task-specific self-supervised methods as a new axis of investigation for future multi-task learning research.
How to Train Vision Transformer on Small-scale Datasets?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Vision Transformer (ViT), a radically different architecture than convolutional neural networks offers multiple advantages including design simplicity, robustness and state-of-the-art performance on many vision tasks. However, in contrast to convolutional neural networks, Vision Transformer lacks inherent inductive biases. Therefore, successful training of such models is mainly attributed to pre-training on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet with 1.2M or JFT with 300M images. This hinders the direct adaption of Vision Transformer for small-scale datasets. In this work, we show that self-supervised inductive biases can be learned directly from small-scale datasets and serve as an effective weight initialization scheme for fine-tuning. This allows to train these models without large-scale pre-training, changes to model architecture or loss functions. We present thorough experiments to successfully train monolithic and non-monolithic Vision Transformers on five small datasets including CIFAR10/100, CINIC10, SVHN, Tiny-ImageNet and two fine-grained datasets: Aircraft and Cars. Our approach consistently improves the performance of Vision Transformers while retaining their properties such as attention to salient regions and higher robustness. Our codes and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/hananshafi/vits-for-small-scale-datasets.
Multi-Task Learning for Joint Semantic Role and Proto-Role Labeling
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We put forward an end-to-end multi-step machine learning model which jointly labels semantic roles and the proto-roles of Dowty (1991), given a sentence and the predicates therein. Our best architecture first learns argument spans followed by learning the argument's syntactic heads. This information is shared with the next steps for predicting the semantic roles and proto-roles. We also experiment with transfer learning from argument and head prediction to role and proto-role labeling. We compare using static and contextual embeddings for words, arguments, and sentences. Unlike previous work, our model does not require pre-training or fine-tuning on additional tasks, beyond using off-the-shelf (static or contextual) embeddings and supervision. It also does not require argument spans, their semantic roles, and/or their gold syntactic heads as additional input, because it learns to predict all these during training. Our multi-task learning model raises the state-of-the-art predictions for most proto-roles.
A Large-Scale Annotated Multivariate Time Series Aviation Maintenance Dataset from the NGAFID
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper presents the largest publicly available, non-simulated, fleet-wide aircraft flight recording and maintenance log data for use in predicting part failure and maintenance need. We present 31,177 hours of flight data across 28,935 flights, which occur relative to 2,111 unplanned maintenance events clustered into 36 types of maintenance issues. Flights are annotated as before or after maintenance, with some flights occurring on the day of maintenance. Collecting data to evaluate predictive maintenance systems is challenging because it is difficult, dangerous, and unethical to generate data from compromised aircraft. To overcome this, we use the National General Aviation Flight Information Database (NGAFID), which contains flights recorded during regular operation of aircraft, and maintenance logs to construct a part failure dataset. We use a novel framing of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction and consider the probability that the RUL of a part is greater than 2 days. Unlike previous datasets generated with simulations or in laboratory settings, the NGAFID Aviation Maintenance Dataset contains real flight records and maintenance logs from different seasons, weather conditions, pilots, and flight patterns. Additionally, we provide Python code to easily download the dataset and a Colab environment to reproduce our benchmarks on three different models. Our dataset presents a difficult challenge for machine learning researchers and a valuable opportunity to test and develop prognostic health management methods
Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning in 5G Networks -- A Comparison of Scientific Impact
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2022
Year: 2022

Introduction of fifth generation (5G) wireless network technology has matched the crucial need for high capacity and speed needs of the new generation mobile applications. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) also empowered 5G cellular networks with two mainstreams as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. Our study aims to uncover the differences in scientific impact for these two techniques by the means of statistical bibliometrics. The performed analysis includes citation performance with respect to indexing types, funding availability, journal or conference publishing options together with distributions of these metrics along years to evaluate the popularity trends in a detailed manner. Web of Science (WoS) database host 2245 papers for ML and 1407 papers for DL-related studies. DL studies, starting with 9% rate in 2013, has reached to 45% rate in 2022 among all DL and ML-related studies. Results related to scientific impact indicate that DL studies get slightly more average normalized citation (2.256) compared to ML studies (2.118) in 5G, while SCI-Expanded indexed papers in both sides tend to have similar citation performance (3.165 and 3.162 respectively). ML-related studies those are indexed in ESCI show twice citation performance compared to DL. Conference papers in DL domain and journal papers in ML domain are superior in scientific interest to their counterparts with minor differences. Highest citation performance for ML studies is achieved for year 2014, while this peak is observed for 2017 for DL studies. We can conclude that both publication and citation rate for DL-related papers tend to increase and outperform ML-based studies in 5G domain by the means of citation metrics.
Secure Multiparty Computation for Synthetic Data Generation from Distributed Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Legal and ethical restrictions on accessing relevant data inhibit data science research in critical domains such as health, finance, and education. Synthetic data generation algorithms with privacy guarantees are emerging as a paradigm to break this data logjam. Existing approaches, however, assume that the data holders supply their raw data to a trusted curator, who uses it as fuel for synthetic data generation. This severely limits the applicability, as much of the valuable data in the world is locked up in silos, controlled by entities who cannot show their data to each other or a central aggregator without raising privacy concerns. To overcome this roadblock, we propose the first solution in which data holders only share encrypted data for differentially private synthetic data generation. Data holders send shares to servers who perform Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) computations while the original data stays encrypted. We instantiate this idea in an MPC protocol for the Multiplicative Weights with Exponential Mechanism (MWEM) algorithm to generate synthetic data based on real data originating from many data holders without reliance on a single point of failure.
A Relational Macrostate Theory Guides Artificial Intelligence to Learn Macro and Design Micro
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

The high-dimesionality, non-linearity and emergent properties of complex systems pose a challenge to identifying general laws in the same manner that has been so successful in simpler physical systems. In Anderson's seminal work on why "more is different" he pointed to how emergent, macroscale patterns break symmetries of the underlying microscale laws. Yet, less recognized is that these large-scale, emergent patterns must also retain some symmetries of the microscale rules. Here we introduce a new, relational macrostate theory (RMT) that defines macrostates in terms of symmetries between two mutually predictive observations, and develop a machine learning architecture, MacroNet, that identifies macrostates. Using this framework, we show how macrostates can be identifed across systems ranging in complexity from the simplicity of the simple harmonic oscillator to the much more complex spatial patterning characteristic of Turing instabilities. Furthermore, we show how our framework can be used for the inverse design of microstates consistent with a given macroscopic property -- in Turing patterns this allows us to design underlying rule with a given specification of spatial patterning, and to identify which rule parameters most control these patterns. By demonstrating a general theory for how macroscopic properties emerge from conservation of symmetries in the mapping between observations, we provide a machine learning framework that allows a unified approach to identifying macrostates in systems from the simple to complex, and allows the design of new examples consistent with a given macroscopic property.
A Concise Introduction to Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

One of the biggest hurdles robotics faces is the facet of sophisticated and hard-to-engineer behaviors. Reinforcement learning offers a set of tools, and a framework to address this problem. In parallel, the misgivings of robotics offer a solid testing ground and evaluation metric for advancements in reinforcement learning. The two disciplines go hand-in-hand, much like the fields of Mathematics and Physics. By means of this survey paper, we aim to invigorate links between the research communities of the two disciplines by focusing on the work done in reinforcement learning for locomotive and control aspects of robotics. Additionally, we aim to highlight not only the notable successes but also the key challenges of the application of Reinforcement Learning in Robotics. This paper aims to serve as a reference guide for researchers in reinforcement learning applied to the field of robotics. The literature survey is at a fairly introductory level, aimed at aspiring researchers. Appropriately, we have covered the most essential concepts required for research in the field of reinforcement learning, with robotics in mind. Through a thorough analysis of this problem, we are able to manifest how reinforcement learning could be applied profitably, and also focus on open-ended questions, as well as the potential for future research.
Early Discovery of Disappearing Entities in Microblogs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We make decisions by reacting to changes in the real world, in particular, the emergence and disappearance of impermanent entities such as events, restaurants, and services. Because we want to avoid missing out on opportunities or making fruitless actions after they have disappeared, it is important to know when entities disappear as early as possible. We thus tackle the task of detecting disappearing entities from microblogs, whose posts mention various entities, in a timely manner. The major challenge is detecting uncertain contexts of disappearing entities from noisy microblog posts. To collect these disappearing contexts, we design time-sensitive distant supervision, which utilizes entities from the knowledge base and time-series posts, for this task to build large-scale Twitter datasets\footnote{We will release the datasets (tweet IDs) used in the experiments to promote reproducibility.} for English and Japanese. To ensure robust detection in noisy environments, we refine pretrained word embeddings of the detection model on microblog streams of the target day. Experimental results on the Twitter datasets confirmed the effectiveness of the collected labeled data and refined word embeddings; more than 70\% of the detected disappearing entities in Wikipedia are discovered earlier than the update on Wikipedia, and the average lead-time is over one month.
Frame Mining: a Free Lunch for Learning Robotic Manipulation from 3D Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We study how choices of input point cloud coordinate frames impact learning of manipulation skills from 3D point clouds. There exist a variety of coordinate frame choices to normalize captured robot-object-interaction point clouds. We find that different frames have a profound effect on agent learning performance, and the trend is similar across 3D backbone networks. In particular, the end-effector frame and the target-part frame achieve higher training efficiency than the commonly used world frame and robot-base frame in many tasks, intuitively because they provide helpful alignments among point clouds across time steps and thus can simplify visual module learning. Moreover, the well-performing frames vary across tasks, and some tasks may benefit from multiple frame candidates. We thus propose FrameMiners to adaptively select candidate frames and fuse their merits in a task-agnostic manner. Experimentally, FrameMiners achieves on-par or significantly higher performance than the best single-frame version on five fully physical manipulation tasks adapted from ManiSkill and OCRTOC. Without changing existing camera placements or adding extra cameras, point cloud frame mining can serve as a free lunch to improve 3D manipulation learning.
Neural Network Compression by Joint Sparsity Promotion and Redundancy Reduction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Compression of convolutional neural network models has recently been dominated by pruning approaches. A class of previous works focuses solely on pruning the unimportant filters to achieve network compression. Another important direction is the design of sparsity-inducing constraints which has also been explored in isolation. This paper presents a novel training scheme based on composite constraints that prune redundant filters and minimize their effect on overall network learning via sparsity promotion. Also, as opposed to prior works that employ pseudo-norm-based sparsity-inducing constraints, we propose a sparse scheme based on gradient counting in our framework. Our tests on several pixel-wise segmentation benchmarks show that the number of neurons and the memory footprint of networks in the test phase are significantly reduced without affecting performance. MobileNetV3 and UNet, two well-known architectures, are used to test the proposed scheme. Our network compression method not only results in reduced parameters but also achieves improved performance compared to MobileNetv3, which is an already optimized architecture.
GazeBaseVR, a large-scale, longitudinal, binocular eye-tracking dataset collected in virtual reality
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

We present GazeBaseVR, a large-scale, longitudinal, binocular eye-tracking (ET) dataset collected at 250 Hz with an ET-enabled virtual-reality (VR) headset. GazeBaseVR comprises 5,020 binocular recordings from a diverse population of 407 college-aged participants. Participants were recorded up to six times each over a 26-month period, each time performing a series of five different ET tasks: (1) a vergence task, (2) a horizontal smooth pursuit task, (3) a video-viewing task, (4) a self-paced reading task, and (5) a random oblique saccade task. Many of these participants have also been recorded for two previously published datasets with different ET devices, and some participants were recorded before and after COVID-19 infection and recovery. GazeBaseVR is suitable for a wide range of research on ET data in VR devices, especially eye movement biometrics due to its large population and longitudinal nature. In addition to ET data, additional participant details are provided to enable further research on topics such as fairness.
Time-Space Tradeoffs for Element Distinctness and Set Intersection via Pseudorandomness
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

In the Element Distinctness problem, one is given an array $a_1,\dots, a_n$ of integers from $[poly(n)]$ and is tasked to decide if $\{a_i\}$ are mutually distinct. Beame, Clifford and Machmouchi (FOCS 2013) gave a low-space algorithm for this problem running in space $S(n)$ and time $T(n)$ where $T(n) \le \widetilde{O}(n^{3/2}/S(n)^{1/2})$, assuming a random oracle (i.e., random access to polynomially many random bits). A recent breakthrough by Chen, Jin, Williams and Wu (SODA 2022) showed how to remove the random oracle assumption in the regime $S(n) = polylog(n)$ and $T(n) = \widetilde{O}(n^{3/2})$. They designed the first truly $polylog(n)$-space, $\widetilde{O}(n^{3/2})$-time algorithm by constructing a small family of hash functions $\mathcal{H} \subseteq \{h | h:[poly(n)]\to [n]\}$ with a certain pseudorandom property. In this paper, we give a significantly simplified analysis of the pseudorandom hash family by Chen et al. Our analysis clearly identifies the key pseudorandom property required to fool the BCM algorithm, allowing us to explore the full potential of this construction. As our main result, we show a time-space tradeoff for Element Distinctness without random oracle. Namely, for every $S(n),T(n)$ such that $T\approx \widetilde{O}(n^{3/2}/S(n)^{1/2})$, our algorithm can solve the problem in space $S(n)$ and time $T(n)$. Our algorithm also works for a related problem Set Intersection, for which this tradeoff is tight due to a matching lower bound by Dinur (Eurocrypt 2020). As two additional contributions, we show a more general pseudorandom property of the hash family, and slightly improve the seed length to sample the pseudorandom hash function.
The User-Aware Arabic Gender Rewriter
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

We introduce the User-Aware Arabic Gender Rewriter, a user-centric web-based system for Arabic gender rewriting in contexts involving two users. The system takes either Arabic or English sentences as input, and provides users with the ability to specify their desired first and/or second person target genders. The system outputs gender rewritten alternatives of the Arabic input sentences (or their Arabic translations in case of English input) to match the target users' gender preferences.
Cross-Scale Context Extracted Hashing for Fine-Grained Image Binary Encoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Deep hashing has been widely applied to large-scale image retrieval tasks owing to efficient computation and low storage cost by encoding high-dimensional image data into binary codes. Since binary codes do not contain as much information as float features, the essence of binary encoding is preserving the main context to guarantee retrieval quality. However, the existing hashing methods have great limitations on suppressing redundant background information and accurately encoding from Euclidean space to Hamming space by a simple sign function. In order to solve these problems, a Cross-Scale Context Extracted Hashing Network (CSCE-Net) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, we design a two-branch framework to capture fine-grained local information while maintaining high-level global semantic information. Besides, Attention guided Information Extraction module (AIE) is introduced between two branches, which suppresses areas of low context information cooperated with global sliding windows. Unlike previous methods, our CSCE-Net learns a content-related Dynamic Sign Function (DSF) to replace the original simple sign function. Therefore, the proposed CSCE-Net is context-sensitive and able to perform well on accurate image binary encoding. We further demonstrate that our CSCE-Net is superior to the existing hashing methods, which improves retrieval performance on standard benchmarks.
Probabilistic Scheduling of Dynamic I/O Requests via Application Clustering for Burst-Buffer Equipped HPC
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2022
Year: 2022

Burst-Buffering is a promising storage solution that introduces an intermediate highthroughput storage buffer layer to mitigate the I/O bottleneck problem that the current High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms suffer. The existing Markov-Chain based probabilistic I/O scheduling utilizes the load state of Burst-Buffers and the periodical characteristics of applications to reduce I/O congestion due to the limited capacity of Burst-Buffers. However, this probabilistic approach requires consistent I/O characteristics of applications, including similar I/O duration and long application length, in order to obtain an accurate I/O load estimation. These consistency conditions do not often hold in realistic situations. In this paper, we propose a generic framework of dynamic probabilistic I/O scheduling based on application clustering (DPSAC) to make applications meet the consistency requirements. According to the I/O phrase length of each application, our scheme first deploys a one-dimensional K-means clustering algorithm to cluster the applications into clusters. Next, it calculates the expected workload of each cluster through the probabilistic model of applications and then partitions the Burst-Buffers proportionally. Then, to handle dynamic changes (join and exit) of applications, it updates the clusters based on a heuristic strategy. Finally, it applies the probabilistic I/O scheduling, which is based on the distribution of application workload and the state of Burst-Buffers, to schedule I/O for all the concurrent applications to mitigate I/O congestion. The simulation results on synthetic data show that our DPSAC is effective and efficient.
The State of Profanity Obfuscation in Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Work on hate speech has made the consideration of rude and harmful examples in scientific publications inevitable. This raises various problems, such as whether or not to obscure profanities. While science must accurately disclose what it does, the unwarranted spread of hate speech is harmful to readers, and increases its internet frequency. While maintaining publications' professional appearance, obfuscating profanities makes it challenging to evaluate the content, especially for non-native speakers. Surveying 150 ACL papers, we discovered that obfuscation is usually employed for English but not other languages, and even so quite uneven. We discuss the problems with obfuscation and suggest a multilingual community resource called PrOf that has a Python module to standardize profanity obfuscation processes. We believe PrOf can help scientific publication policies to make hate speech work accessible and comparable, irrespective of language.