OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Depth and Feature Learning are Provably Beneficial for Neural Network Discriminators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We construct pairs of distributions $μ_d, ν_d$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ such that the quantity $|\mathbb{E}_{x \sim μ_d} [F(x)] - \mathbb{E}_{x \sim ν_d} [F(x)]|$ decreases as $Ω(1/d^2)$ for some three-layer ReLU network $F$ with polynomial width and weights, while declining exponentially in $d$ if $F$ is any two-layer network with polynomial weights. This shows that deep GAN discriminators are able to distinguish distributions that shallow discriminators cannot. Analogously, we build pairs of distributions $μ_d, ν_d$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ such that $|\mathbb{E}_{x \sim μ_d} [F(x)] - \mathbb{E}_{x \sim ν_d} [F(x)]|$ decreases as $Ω(1/(d\log d))$ for two-layer ReLU networks with polynomial weights, while declining exponentially for bounded-norm functions in the associated RKHS. This confirms that feature learning is beneficial for discriminators. Our bounds are based on Fourier transforms.
Visual Persuasion in COVID-19 Social Media Content: A Multi-Modal Characterization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Social media content routinely incorporates multi-modal design to covey information and shape meanings, and sway interpretations toward desirable implications, but the choices and outcomes of using both texts and visual images have not been sufficiently studied. This work proposes a computational approach to analyze the outcome of persuasive information in multi-modal content, focusing on two aspects, popularity and reliability, in COVID-19-related news articles shared on Twitter. The two aspects are intertwined in the spread of misinformation: for example, an unreliable article that aims to misinform has to attain some popularity. This work has several contributions. First, we propose a multi-modal (image and text) approach to effectively identify popularity and reliability of information sources simultaneously. Second, we identify textual and visual elements that are predictive to information popularity and reliability. Third, by modeling cross-modal relations and similarity, we are able to uncover how unreliable articles construct multi-modal meaning in a distorted, biased fashion. Our work demonstrates how to use multi-modal analysis for understanding influential content and has implications to social media literacy and engagement.
Predicting Breakdown Risk Based on Historical Maintenance Data for Air Force Ground Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Unscheduled maintenance has contributed to longer downtime for vehicles and increased costs for Logistic Readiness Squadrons (LRSs) in the Air Force. When vehicles are in need of repair outside of their scheduled time, depending on their priority level, the entire squadron's slated repair schedule is transformed negatively. The repercussions of unscheduled maintenance are specifically seen in the increase of man hours required to maintain vehicles that should have been working well: this can include more man hours spent on maintenance itself, waiting for parts to arrive, hours spent re-organizing the repair schedule, and more. The dominant trend in the current maintenance system at LRSs is that they do not have predictive maintenance infrastructure to counteract the influx of unscheduled repairs they experience currently, and as a result, their readiness and performance levels are lower than desired. We use data pulled from the Defense Property and Accountability System (DPAS), that the LRSs currently use to store their vehicle maintenance information. Using historical vehicle maintenance data we receive from DPAS, we apply three different algorithms independently to construct an accurate predictive system to optimize maintenance schedules at any given time. Through the application of Logistics Regression, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosted Trees algorithms, we found that a Logistic Regression algorithm, fitted to our data, produced the most accurate results. Our findings indicate that not only would continuing the use of Logistic Regression be prudent for our research purposes, but that there is opportunity to further tune and optimize our Logistic Regression model for higher accuracy.
SPIDER: Searching Personalized Neural Architecture for Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning (FL) is an efficient learning framework that assists distributed machine learning when data cannot be shared with a centralized server due to privacy and regulatory restrictions. Recent advancements in FL use predefined architecture-based learning for all the clients. However, given that clients' data are invisible to the server and data distributions are non-identical across clients, a predefined architecture discovered in a centralized setting may not be an optimal solution for all the clients in FL. Motivated by this challenge, in this work, we introduce SPIDER, an algorithmic framework that aims to Search Personalized neural architecture for federated learning. SPIDER is designed based on two unique features: (1) alternately optimizing one architecture-homogeneous global model (Supernet) in a generic FL manner and one architecture-heterogeneous local model that is connected to the global model by weight sharing-based regularization (2) achieving architecture-heterogeneous local model by a novel neural architecture search (NAS) method that can select optimal subnet progressively using operation-level perturbation on the accuracy value as the criterion. Experimental results demonstrate that SPIDER outperforms other state-of-the-art personalization methods, and the searched personalized architectures are more inference efficient.
LINDA: Unsupervised Learning to Interpolate in Natural Language Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Despite the success of mixup in data augmentation, its applicability to natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been limited due to the discrete and variable-length nature of natural languages. Recent studies have thus relied on domain-specific heuristics and manually crafted resources, such as dictionaries, in order to apply mixup in NLP. In this paper, we instead propose an unsupervised learning approach to text interpolation for the purpose of data augmentation, to which we refer as "Learning to INterpolate for Data Augmentation" (LINDA), that does not require any heuristics nor manually crafted resources but learns to interpolate between any pair of natural language sentences over a natural language manifold. After empirically demonstrating the LINDA's interpolation capability, we show that LINDA indeed allows us to seamlessly apply mixup in NLP and leads to better generalization in text classification both in-domain and out-of-domain.
Siamese Network with Interactive Transformer for Video Object Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) refers to segmenting the target object in remaining frames given its annotation in the first frame, which has been actively studied in recent years. The key challenge lies in finding effective ways to exploit the spatio-temporal context of past frames to help learn discriminative target representation of current frame. In this paper, we propose a novel Siamese network with a specifically designed interactive transformer, called SITVOS, to enable effective context propagation from historical to current frames. Technically, we use the transformer encoder and decoder to handle the past frames and current frame separately, i.e., the encoder encodes robust spatio-temporal context of target object from the past frames, while the decoder takes the feature embedding of current frame as the query to retrieve the target from the encoder output. To further enhance the target representation, a feature interaction module (FIM) is devised to promote the information flow between the encoder and decoder. Moreover, we employ the Siamese architecture to extract backbone features of both past and current frames, which enables feature reuse and is more efficient than existing methods. Experimental results on three challenging benchmarks validate the superiority of SITVOS over state-of-the-art methods.
Deep-CNN based Robotic Multi-Class Under-Canopy Weed Control in Precision Farming
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Smart weeding systems to perform plant-specific operations can contribute to the sustainability of agriculture and the environment. Despite monumental advances in autonomous robotic technologies for precision weed management in recent years, work on under-canopy weeding in fields is yet to be realized. A prerequisite of such systems is reliable detection and classification of weeds to avoid mistakenly spraying and, thus, damaging the surrounding plants. Real-time multi-class weed identification enables species-specific treatment of weeds and significantly reduces the amount of herbicide use. Here, our first contribution is the first adequately large realistic image dataset \textit{AIWeeds} (one/multiple kinds of weeds in one image), a library of about 10,000 annotated images of flax, and the 14 most common weeds in fields and gardens taken from 20 different locations in North Dakota, California, and Central China. Second, we provide a full pipeline from model training with maximum efficiency to deploying the TensorRT-optimized model onto a single board computer. Based on \textit{AIWeeds} and the pipeline, we present a baseline for classification performance using five benchmark CNN models. Among them, MobileNetV2, with both the shortest inference time and lowest memory consumption, is the qualified candidate for real-time applications. Finally, we deploy MobileNetV2 onto our own compact autonomous robot \textit{SAMBot} for real-time weed detection. The 90\% test accuracy realized in previously unseen scenes in flax fields (with a row spacing of 0.2-0.3 m), with crops and weeds, distortion, blur, and shadows, is a milestone towards precision weed control in the real world. We have publicly released the dataset and code to generate the results at \url{https://github.com/StructuresComp/Multi-class-Weed-Classification}.
Pale Transformer: A General Vision Transformer Backbone with Pale-Shaped Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Recently, Transformers have shown promising performance in various vision tasks. To reduce the quadratic computation complexity caused by the global self-attention, various methods constrain the range of attention within a local region to improve its efficiency. Consequently, their receptive fields in a single attention layer are not large enough, resulting in insufficient context modeling. To address this issue, we propose a Pale-Shaped self-Attention (PS-Attention), which performs self-attention within a pale-shaped region. Compared to the global self-attention, PS-Attention can reduce the computation and memory costs significantly. Meanwhile, it can capture richer contextual information under the similar computation complexity with previous local self-attention mechanisms. Based on the PS-Attention, we develop a general Vision Transformer backbone with a hierarchical architecture, named Pale Transformer, which achieves 83.4%, 84.3%, and 84.9% Top-1 accuracy with the model size of 22M, 48M, and 85M respectively for 224 ImageNet-1K classification, outperforming the previous Vision Transformer backbones. For downstream tasks, our Pale Transformer backbone performs better than the recent state-of-the-art CSWin Transformer by a large margin on ADE20K semantic segmentation and COCO object detection & instance segmentation. The code will be released on https://github.com/BR-IDL/PaddleViT.
GuidedMix-Net: Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation by Using Labeled Images as Reference
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Semi-supervised learning is a challenging problem which aims to construct a model by learning from limited labeled examples. Numerous methods for this task focus on utilizing the predictions of unlabeled instances consistency alone to regularize networks. However, treating labeled and unlabeled data separately often leads to the discarding of mass prior knowledge learned from the labeled examples. %, and failure to mine the feature interaction between the labeled and unlabeled image pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel method for semi-supervised semantic segmentation named GuidedMix-Net, by leveraging labeled information to guide the learning of unlabeled instances. Specifically, GuidedMix-Net employs three operations: 1) interpolation of similar labeled-unlabeled image pairs; 2) transfer of mutual information; 3) generalization of pseudo masks. It enables segmentation models can learning the higher-quality pseudo masks of unlabeled data by transfer the knowledge from labeled samples to unlabeled data. Along with supervised learning for labeled data, the prediction of unlabeled data is jointly learned with the generated pseudo masks from the mixed data. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012, and Cityscapes demonstrate the effectiveness of our GuidedMix-Net, which achieves competitive segmentation accuracy and significantly improves the mIoU by +7$\%$ compared to previous approaches.
Multilayer Graph Contrastive Clustering Network
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Multilayer graph has garnered plenty of research attention in many areas due to their high utility in modeling interdependent systems. However, clustering of multilayer graph, which aims at dividing the graph nodes into categories or communities, is still at a nascent stage. Existing methods are often limited to exploiting the multiview attributes or multiple networks and ignoring more complex and richer network frameworks. To this end, we propose a generic and effective autoencoder framework for multilayer graph clustering named Multilayer Graph Contrastive Clustering Network (MGCCN). MGCCN consists of three modules: (1)Attention mechanism is applied to better capture the relevance between nodes and neighbors for better node embeddings. (2)To better explore the consistent information in different networks, a contrastive fusion strategy is introduced. (3)MGCCN employs a self-supervised component that iteratively strengthens the node embedding and clustering. Extensive experiments on different types of real-world graph data indicate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.
Learning from What's Right and Learning from What's Wrong
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

The concept of updating (or conditioning or revising) a probability distribution is fundamental in (machine) learning and in predictive coding theory. The two main approaches for doing so are called Pearl's rule and Jeffrey's rule. Here we make, for the first time, mathematically precise what distinguishes them: Pearl's rule increases validity (expected value) and Jeffrey's rule decreases (Kullback-Leibler) divergence. This forms an instance of a more general distinction between learning from what's right and learning from what's wrong. The difference between these two approaches is illustrated in a mock cognitive scenario.
A General Glivenko-Gödel Theorem for Nuclei
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

Glivenko's theorem says that, in propositional logic, classical provability of a formula entails intuitionistic provability of double negation of that formula. We generalise Glivenko's theorem from double negation to an arbitrary nucleus, from provability in a calculus to an inductively generated abstract consequence relation, and from propositional logic to any set of objects whatsoever. The resulting conservation theorem comes with precise criteria for its validity, which allow us to instantly include Gödel's counterpart for first-order predicate logic of Glivenko's theorem. The open nucleus gives us a form of the deduction theorem for positive logic, and the closed nucleus prompts a variant of the reduction from intuitionistic to minimal logic going back to Johansson.
The Impacts of Low/No-Code Development on Digital Transformation and Software Development
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2021
Year: 2021

Low/No-code development is a software development method that provides users with a platform for visually creating applications with little or no coding. Companies and organizations need software applications and information systems for various business purposes like management in the technology era. Low/No-code development gives non-IT professionals a convenient tool for rapidly building simple business applications they need without or with little coding. In this paper, we explored the benefits & limitations of Low/No-Code development and modern Low/No-Code development platforms in the industry. In addition, we analyzed how it can be improved and prospected the impacts of Low/No-Code development on society and related industries in the future. In conclusion, we find that Low/No-code development is a promising trend that can significantly impact future software development and digital transformation.
APRIL: Finding the Achilles' Heel on Privacy for Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning frameworks typically require collaborators to share their local gradient updates of a common model instead of sharing training data to preserve privacy. However, prior works on Gradient Leakage Attacks showed that private training data can be revealed from gradients. So far almost all relevant works base their attacks on fully-connected or convolutional neural networks. Given the recent overwhelmingly rising trend of adapting Transformers to solve multifarious vision tasks, it is highly valuable to investigate the privacy risk of vision transformers. In this paper, we analyse the gradient leakage risk of self-attention based mechanism in both theoretical and practical manners. Particularly, we propose APRIL - Attention PRIvacy Leakage, which poses a strong threat to self-attention inspired models such as ViT. Showing how vision Transformers are at the risk of privacy leakage via gradients, we urge the significance of designing privacy-safer Transformer models and defending schemes.
Synchronized Audio-Visual Frames with Fractional Positional Encoding for Transformers in Video-to-Text Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Video-to-Text (VTT) is the task of automatically generating descriptions for short audio-visual video clips, which can support visually impaired people to understand scenes of a YouTube video for instance. Transformer architectures have shown great performance in both machine translation and image captioning, lacking a straightforward and reproducible application for VTT. However, there is no comprehensive study on different strategies and advice for video description generation including exploiting the accompanying audio with fully self-attentive networks. Thus, we explore promising approaches from image captioning and video processing and apply them to VTT by developing a straightforward Transformer architecture. Additionally, we present a novel way of synchronizing audio and video features in Transformers which we call Fractional Positional Encoding (FPE). We run multiple experiments on the VATEX dataset to determine a configuration applicable to unseen datasets that helps describe short video clips in natural language and improved the CIDEr and BLEU-4 scores by 37.13 and 12.83 points compared to a vanilla Transformer network and achieve state-of-the-art results on the MSR-VTT and MSVD datasets. Also, FPE helps increase the CIDEr score by a relative factor of 8.6%.
Fostering the Robustness of White-Box Deep Neural Network Watermarks by Neuron Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

The wide application of deep learning techniques is boosting the regulation of deep learning models, especially deep neural networks (DNN), as commercial products. A necessary prerequisite for such regulations is identifying the owner of deep neural networks, which is usually done through the watermark. Current DNN watermarking schemes, particularly white-box ones, are uniformly fragile against a family of functionality equivalence attacks, especially the neuron permutation. This operation can effortlessly invalidate the ownership proof and escape copyright regulations. To enhance the robustness of white-box DNN watermarking schemes, this paper presents a procedure that aligns neurons into the same order as when the watermark is embedded, so the watermark can be correctly recognized. This neuron alignment process significantly facilitates the functionality of established deep neural network watermarking schemes.
Robotic Perception of Object Properties using Tactile Sensing
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

The sense of touch plays a key role in enabling humans to understand and interact with surrounding environments. For robots, tactile sensing is also irreplaceable. While interacting with objects, tactile sensing provides useful information for the robot to understand the object, such as distributed pressure, temperature, vibrations and texture. During robot grasping, vision is often occluded by its end-effectors, whereas tactile sensing can measure areas that are not accessible by vision. In the past decades, a number of tactile sensors have been developed for robots and used for different robotic tasks. In this chapter, we focus on the use of tactile sensing for robotic grasping and investigate the recent trends in tactile perception of object properties. We first discuss works on tactile perception of three important object properties in grasping, i.e., shape, pose and material properties. We then review the recent development in grasping stability prediction with tactile sensing. Among these works, we identify the requirement for coordinating vision and tactile sensing in the robotic grasping. To demonstrate the use of tactile sensing to improve the visual perception, our recent development of vision-guided tactile perception for crack reconstruction is presented. In the proposed framework, the large receptive field of camera vision is first leveraged to achieve a quick search of candidate regions containing cracks, a high-resolution optical tactile sensor is then used to examine these candidate regions and reconstruct a refined crack shape. The experiments show that our proposed method can achieve a significant reduction of mean distance error from 0.82 mm to 0.24 mm for crack reconstruction. Finally, we conclude this chapter with a discussion of open issues and future directions for applying tactile sensing in robotic tasks.
Analysis of Longitudinal Changes in Privacy Behavior of Android Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Privacy concerns have long been expressed around smart devices, and the concerns around Android apps have been studied by many past works. Over the past 10 years, we have crawled and scraped data for almost 1.9 million apps, and also stored the APKs for 135,536 of them. In this paper, we examine the trends in how Android apps have changed over time with respect to privacy and look at it from two perspectives: (1) how privacy behavior in apps have changed as they are updated over time, (2) how these changes can be accounted for when comparing third-party libraries and the app's own internals. To study this, we examine the adoption of HTTPS, whether apps scan the device for other installed apps, the use of permissions for privacy-sensitive data, and the use of unique identifiers. We find that privacy-related behavior has improved with time as apps continue to receive updates, and that the third-party libraries used by apps are responsible for more issues with privacy. However, we observe that in the current state of Android apps, there has not been enough of an improvement in terms of privacy and many issues still need to be addressed.