OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Reasoning about Recursive Quantum Programs
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

Most modern (classical) programming languages support recursion. Recursion has also been successfully applied to the design of several quantum algorithms and introduced in a couple of quantum programming languages. So, it can be expected that recursion will become one of the fundamental paradigms of quantum programming. Several program logics have been developed for verification of quantum while-programs. However, there are as yet no general methods for reasoning about (mutual) recursive procedures and ancilla quantum data structure in quantum computing (with measurement). We fill the gap in this paper by proposing a parameterized quantum assertion logic and, based on which, designing a quantum Hoare logic for verifying parameterized recursive quantum programs with ancilla data and probabilistic control. The quantum Hoare logic can be used to prove partial, total, and even probabilistic correctness (by reducing to total correctness) of those quantum programs. In particular, two counterexamples for illustrating incompleteness of non-parameterized assertions in verifying recursive procedures, and, one counterexample for showing the failure of reasoning with exact probabilities based on partial correctness, are constructed. The effectiveness of our logic is shown by three main examples -- recursive quantum Markov chain (with probabilistic control), fixed-point Grover's search, and recursive quantum Fourier sampling.
Efficient inference of interventional distributions
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the problem of efficiently inferring interventional distributions in a causal Bayesian network from a finite number of observations. Let $\mathcal{P}$ be a causal model on a set $\mathbf{V}$ of observable variables on a given causal graph $G$. For sets $\mathbf{X},\mathbf{Y}\subseteq \mathbf{V}$, and setting ${\bf x}$ to $\mathbf{X}$, let $P_{\bf x}(\mathbf{Y})$ denote the interventional distribution on $\mathbf{Y}$ with respect to an intervention ${\bf x}$ to variables ${\bf x}$. Shpitser and Pearl (AAAI 2006), building on the work of Tian and Pearl (AAAI 2001), gave an exact characterization of the class of causal graphs for which the interventional distribution $P_{\bf x}({\mathbf{Y}})$ can be uniquely determined. We give the first efficient version of the Shpitser-Pearl algorithm. In particular, under natural assumptions, we give a polynomial-time algorithm that on input a causal graph $G$ on observable variables $\mathbf{V}$, a setting ${\bf x}$ of a set $\mathbf{X} \subseteq \mathbf{V}$ of bounded size, outputs succinct descriptions of both an evaluator and a generator for a distribution $\hat{P}$ that is $\varepsilon$-close (in total variation distance) to $P_{\bf x}({\mathbf{Y}})$ where $Y=\mathbf{V}\setminus \mathbf{X}$, if $P_{\bf x}(\mathbf{Y})$ is identifiable. We also show that when $\mathbf{Y}$ is an arbitrary set, there is no efficient algorithm that outputs an evaluator of a distribution that is $\varepsilon$-close to $P_{\bf x}({\mathbf{Y}})$ unless all problems that have statistical zero-knowledge proofs, including the Graph Isomorphism problem, have efficient randomized algorithms.
Can Action be Imitated? Learn to Reconstruct and Transfer Human Dynamics from Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Given a video demonstration, can we imitate the action contained in this video? In this paper, we introduce a novel task, dubbed mesh-based action imitation. The goal of this task is to enable an arbitrary target human mesh to perform the same action shown on the video demonstration. To achieve this, a novel Mesh-based Video Action Imitation (M-VAI) method is proposed by us. M-VAI first learns to reconstruct the meshes from the given source image frames, then the initial recovered mesh sequence is fed into mesh2mesh, a mesh sequence smooth module proposed by us, to improve the temporal consistency. Finally, we imitate the actions by transferring the pose from the constructed human body to our target identity mesh. High-quality and detailed human body meshes can be generated by using our M-VAI. Extensive experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our task and the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Multi-Rate Nyquist-SCM for C-Band 100Gbit/s Signal over 50km Dispersion-Uncompensated Link
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, to the best of our knowledge, we propose the first multi-rate Nyquist-subcarriers modulation (SCM) for C-band 100Gbit/s signal transmission over 50km dispersion-uncompensated link. Chromatic dispersion (CD) introduces severe spectral nulls on optical double-sideband signal, which greatly degrades the performance of intensity-modulation and direct-detection systems. Based on the prior knowledge of the dispersive channel, Nyquist-SCM with multi-rate subcarriers is proposed to keep away from the CD-caused spectral nulls flexibly. Signal on each subcarrier can be individually recovered by a digital signal processing, including the feed-forward equalizer with no more than 31 taps, a two-tap post filter, and maximum likelihood sequence estimation with one memory length. Combining with entropy loading based on probabilistic constellation shaping to maximize the capacity-reach, the C-band 100Gbit/s multi-rate Nyquist-SCM signal over 50km dispersion-uncompensated link can achieve 7% hard-decision forward error correction limit and average normalized generalized mutual information of 0.967 at received optical power of -4dBm and optical signal-to-noise ratio of 47.67dB. In conclusion, the multi-rate Nyquist-SCM shows great potentials in solving the CD-caused spectral distortions.
Adaptive Recursive Circle Framework for Fine-grained Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

How to model fine-grained spatial-temporal dynamics in videos has been a challenging problem for action recognition. It requires learning deep and rich features with superior distinctiveness for the subtle and abstract motions. Most existing methods generate features of a layer in a pure feedforward manner, where the information moves in one direction from inputs to outputs. And they rely on stacking more layers to obtain more powerful features, bringing extra non-negligible overheads. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Recursive Circle (ARC) framework, a fine-grained decorator for pure feedforward layers. It inherits the operators and parameters of the original layer but is slightly different in the use of those operators and parameters. Specifically, the input of the layer is treated as an evolving state, and its update is alternated with the feature generation. At each recursive step, the input state is enriched by the previously generated features and the feature generation is made with the newly updated input state. We hope the ARC framework can facilitate fine-grained action recognition by introducing deeply refined features and multi-scale receptive fields at a low cost. Significant improvements over feedforward baselines are observed on several benchmarks. For example, an ARC-equipped TSM-ResNet18 outperforms TSM-ResNet50 with 48% fewer FLOPs and 52% model parameters on Something-Something V1 and Diving48.
Graph-free Multi-hop Reading Comprehension: A Select-to-Guide Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-hop reading comprehension (MHRC) requires not only to predict the correct answer span in the given passage, but also to provide a chain of supporting evidences for reasoning interpretability. It is natural to model such a process into graph structure by understanding multi-hop reasoning as jumping over entity nodes, which has made graph modelling dominant on this task. Recently, there have been dissenting voices about whether graph modelling is indispensable due to the inconvenience of the graph building, however existing state-of-the-art graph-free attempts suffer from huge performance gap compared to graph-based ones. This work presents a novel graph-free alternative which firstly outperform all graph models on MHRC. In detail, we exploit a select-to-guide (S2G) strategy to accurately retrieve evidence paragraphs in a coarse-to-fine manner, incorporated with two novel attention mechanisms, which surprisingly shows conforming to the nature of multi-hop reasoning. Our graph-free model achieves significant and consistent performance gain over strong baselines and the current new state-of-the-art on the MHRC benchmark, HotpotQA, among all the published works.
Measuring Ethics in AI with AI: A Methodology and Dataset Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, the use of sound measures and metrics in Artificial Intelligence has become the subject of interest of academia, government, and industry. Efforts towards measuring different phenomena have gained traction in the AI community, as illustrated by the publication of several influential field reports and policy documents. These metrics are designed to help decision takers to inform themselves about the fast-moving and impacting influences of key advances in Artificial Intelligence in general and Machine Learning in particular. In this paper we propose to use such newfound capabilities of AI technologies to augment our AI measuring capabilities. We do so by training a model to classify publications related to ethical issues and concerns. In our methodology we use an expert, manually curated dataset as the training set and then evaluate a large set of research papers. Finally, we highlight the implications of AI metrics, in particular their contribution towards developing trustful and fair AI-based tools and technologies. Keywords: AI Ethics; AI Fairness; AI Measurement. Ethics in Computer Science.
COMPARE: Accelerating Groupwise Comparison in Relational Databases for Data Analytics
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Data analysis often involves comparing subsets of data across many dimensions for finding unusual trends and patterns. While the comparison between subsets of data can be expressed using SQL, they tend to be complex to write, and suffer from poor performance over large and high-dimensional datasets. In this paper, we propose a new logical operator COMPARE for relational databases that concisely captures the enumeration and comparison between subsets of data and greatly simplifies the expressing of a large class of comparative queries. We extend the database engine with optimization techniques that exploit the semantics of COMPARE to significantly improve the performance of such queries. We have implemented these extensions inside Microsoft SQL Server, a commercial DBMS engine. Our extensive evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets shows that COMPARE results in a significant speedup over existing approaches, including physical plans generated by today's database systems, user-defined function (UDF), as well as middleware solutions that compare subsets outside the databases.
HYPER-SNN: Towards Energy-efficient Quantized Deep Spiking Neural Networks for Hyperspectral Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Hyper spectral images (HSI) provide rich spectral and spatial information across a series of contiguous spectral bands. However, the accurate processing of the spectral and spatial correlation between the bands requires the use of energy-expensive 3-D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this challenge, we propose the use of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) that are generated from iso-architecture CNNs and trained with quantization-aware gradient descent to optimize their weights, membrane leak, and firing thresholds. During both training and inference, the analog pixel values of a HSI are directly applied to the input layer of the SNN without the need to convert to a spike-train. The reduced latency of our training technique combined with high activation sparsity yields significant improvements in computational efficiency. We evaluate our proposal using three HSI datasets on a 3-D and a 3-D/2-D hybrid convolutional architecture. We achieve overall accuracy, average accuracy, and kappa coefficient of 98.68%, 98.34%, and 98.20% respectively with 5 time steps (inference latency) and 6-bit weight quantization on the Indian Pines dataset. In particular, our models achieved accuracies similar to state-of-the-art (SOTA) with 560.6 and 44.8 times less compute energy on average over three HSI datasets than an iso-architecture full-precision and 6-bit quantized CNN, respectively.
Stable Dynamic Mode Decomposition Algorithm for Noisy Pressure-Sensitive Paint Measurement Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

In this study, we investigated the stability of dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) algorithms to noisy data. To achieve a stable DMD algorithm, we applied the truncated total least squares (T-TLS) regression and optimal truncation level selection to the TLS DMD algorithm. By adding truncation regularization to the TLS DMD algorithm, T-TLS DMD improves the stability of the computation while maintaining the accuracy of TLS DMD. The effectiveness of the T-TLS DMD was evaluated by the analysis of the wake behind a cylinder and practical pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) data for the buffet cell phenomenon. The results showed the importance of regularization in the DMD algorithm. With respect to the eigenvalues, T-TLS DMD was less affected by noise, and accurate eigenvalues could be obtained stably, whereas the eigenvalues of TLS and subspace DMD varied greatly due to noise. It was also observed that the eigenvalues of the standard and exact DMD had the problem of shifting to the damping side, as reported in previous studies. With respect to eigenvectors, T-TLS and exact DMD captured the characteristic flow patterns clearly even in the presence of noise, whereas TLS and subspace DMD were not able to capture them clearly due to noise.
Parametric Contrastive Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we propose Parametric Contrastive Learning (PaCo) to tackle long-tailed recognition. Based on theoretical analysis, we observe supervised contrastive loss tends to bias on high-frequency classes and thus increases the difficulty of imbalanced learning. We introduce a set of parametric class-wise learnable centers to rebalance from an optimization perspective. Further, we analyze our PaCo loss under a balanced setting. Our analysis demonstrates that PaCo can adaptively enhance the intensity of pushing samples of the same class close as more samples are pulled together with their corresponding centers and benefit hard example learning. Experiments on long-tailed CIFAR, ImageNet, Places, and iNaturalist 2018 manifest the new state-of-the-art for long-tailed recognition. On full ImageNet, models trained with PaCo loss surpass supervised contrastive learning across various ResNet backbones, e.g., our ResNet-200 achieves 81.8% top-1 accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Parametric-Contrastive-Learning.
Using Synthetic Corruptions to Measure Robustness to Natural Distribution Shifts
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Synthetic corruptions gathered into a benchmark are frequently used to measure neural network robustness to distribution shifts. However, robustness to synthetic corruption benchmarks is not always predictive of robustness to distribution shifts encountered in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a methodology to build synthetic corruption benchmarks that make robustness estimations more correlated with robustness to real-world distribution shifts. Using the overlapping criterion, we split synthetic corruptions into categories that help to better understand neural network robustness. Based on these categories, we identify three relevant parameters to take into account when constructing a corruption benchmark that are the (1) number of represented categories, (2) their relative balance in terms of size and, (3) the size of the considered benchmark. In doing so, we build new synthetic corruption selections that are more predictive of robustness to natural corruptions than existing synthetic corruption benchmarks.
AA3DNet: Attention Augmented Real Time 3D Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we address the problem of 3D object detection from point cloud data in real time. For autonomous vehicles to work, it is very important for the perception component to detect the real world objects with both high accuracy and fast inference. We propose a novel neural network architecture along with the training and optimization details for detecting 3D objects using point cloud data. We present anchor design along with custom loss functions used in this work. A combination of spatial and channel wise attention module is used in this work. We use the Kitti 3D Birds Eye View dataset for benchmarking and validating our results. Our method surpasses previous state of the art in this domain both in terms of average precision and speed running at > 30 FPS. Finally, we present the ablation study to demonstrate that the performance of our network is generalizable. This makes it a feasible option to be deployed in real time applications like self driving cars.
Systematic Literature Review of Validation Methods for AI Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Context: Artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into everyday activities, particularly through new techniques such as machine learning (ML). These techniques are implementable with little domain knowledge. This, combined with the difficulty of testing AI systems with traditional methods, has made system trustworthiness a pressing issue. Objective: This paper studies the methods used to validate practical AI systems reported in the literature. Our goal is to classify and describe the methods that are used in realistic settings to ensure the dependability of AI systems. Method: A systematic literature review resulted in 90 papers. Systems presented in the papers were analysed based on their domain, task, complexity, and applied validation methods. Results: The validation methods were synthesized into a taxonomy consisting of trial, simulation, model-centred validation, and expert opinion. Failure monitors, safety channels, redundancy, voting, and input and output restrictions are methods used to continuously validate the systems after deployment. Conclusions: Our results clarify existing strategies applied to validation. They form a basis for the synthesization, assessment, and refinement of AI system validation in research and guidelines for validating individual systems in practice. While various validation strategies have all been relatively widely applied, only few studies report on continuous validation. Keywords: artificial intelligence, machine learning, validation, testing, V&V, systematic literature review.
Black-Box Diagnosis and Calibration on GAN Intra-Mode Collapse: A Pilot Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) nowadays are capable of producing images of incredible realism. One concern raised is whether the state-of-the-art GAN's learned distribution still suffers from mode collapse, and what to do if so. Existing diversity tests of samples from GANs are usually conducted qualitatively on a small scale, and/or depends on the access to original training data as well as the trained model parameters. This paper explores to diagnose GAN intra-mode collapse and calibrate that, in a novel black-box setting: no access to training data, nor the trained model parameters, is assumed. The new setting is practically demanded, yet rarely explored and significantly more challenging. As a first stab, we devise a set of statistical tools based on sampling, that can visualize, quantify, and rectify intra-mode collapse. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed diagnosis and calibration techniques, via extensive simulations and experiments, on unconditional GAN image generation (e.g., face and vehicle). Our study reveals that the intra-mode collapse is still a prevailing problem in state-of-the-art GANs and the mode collapse is diagnosable and calibratable in black-box settings. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/BlackBoxGANCollapse.
Local2Global: Scaling global representation learning on graphs via local training
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We propose a decentralised "local2global" approach to graph representation learning, that one can a-priori use to scale any embedding technique. Our local2global approach proceeds by first dividing the input graph into overlapping subgraphs (or "patches") and training local representations for each patch independently. In a second step, we combine the local representations into a globally consistent representation by estimating the set of rigid motions that best align the local representations using information from the patch overlaps, via group synchronization. A key distinguishing feature of local2global relative to existing work is that patches are trained independently without the need for the often costly parameter synchronisation during distributed training. This allows local2global to scale to large-scale industrial applications, where the input graph may not even fit into memory and may be stored in a distributed manner. Preliminary results on medium-scale data sets (up to $\sim$7K nodes and $\sim$200K edges) are promising, with a graph reconstruction performance for local2global that is comparable to that of globally trained embeddings. A thorough evaluation of local2global on large scale data and applications to downstream tasks, such as node classification and link prediction, constitutes ongoing work.
Are Bayesian neural networks intrinsically good at out-of-distribution detection?
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The need to avoid confident predictions on unfamiliar data has sparked interest in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. It is widely assumed that Bayesian neural networks (BNN) are well suited for this task, as the endowed epistemic uncertainty should lead to disagreement in predictions on outliers. In this paper, we question this assumption and provide empirical evidence that proper Bayesian inference with common neural network architectures does not necessarily lead to good OOD detection. To circumvent the use of approximate inference, we start by studying the infinite-width case, where Bayesian inference can be exact considering the corresponding Gaussian process. Strikingly, the kernels induced under common architectural choices lead to uncertainties that do not reflect the underlying data generating process and are therefore unsuited for OOD detection. Finally, we study finite-width networks using HMC, and observe OOD behavior that is consistent with the infinite-width case. Overall, our study discloses fundamental problems when naively using BNNs for OOD detection and opens interesting avenues for future research.