OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Secure Two-Party Computation Protocol for Intersection Detection between Two Convex Hulls
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2021
Year: 2021

Intersection detection between three-dimensional bodies has various applications in computer graphics, video game development, robotics as well as military industries. In some respects, entities do not want to disclose sensitive information about themselves, including their location. In this paper, we present a secure two-party protocol to determine the existence of an intersection between entities. The protocol presented in this paper allows for intersection detection in three-dimensional spaces in geometry. Our approach is to use an intersecting plane between two spaces to determine their separation or intersection. For this purpose, we introduce a computational geometry protocol to determine the existence of an intersecting plane. In this paper, we first use the Minkowski difference to reduce the two-space problem into one-space. Then, the separating set is obtained and the separation of two shapes is determined based on the inclusion of the center point. We then secure the protocol by modifying the separating set computation method as a privacy-preserver and changing the Minkowski difference method to achieve this goal. The proposed protocol applies to any form of convex three-dimensional shape. The experiments successfully found a secure protocol for intersection detection between two convex hulls in geometrical shapes such as the pyramid and cuboid.
Self-paced and self-consistent co-training for semi-supervised image segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Deep co-training has recently been proposed as an effective approach for image segmentation when annotated data is scarce. In this paper, we improve existing approaches for semi-supervised segmentation with a self-paced and self-consistent co-training method. To help distillate information from unlabeled images, we first design a self-paced learning strategy for co-training that lets jointly-trained neural networks focus on easier-to-segment regions first, and then gradually consider harder ones.This is achieved via an end-to-end differentiable loss inthe form of a generalized Jensen Shannon Divergence(JSD). Moreover, to encourage predictions from different networks to be both consistent and confident, we enhance this generalized JSD loss with an uncertainty regularizer based on entropy. The robustness of individual models is further improved using a self-ensembling loss that enforces their prediction to be consistent across different training iterations. We demonstrate the potential of our method on three challenging image segmentation problems with different image modalities, using small fraction of labeled data. Results show clear advantages in terms of performance compared to the standard co-training baselines and recently proposed state-of-the-art approaches for semi-supervised segmentation
Predictive Monitoring with Logic-Calibrated Uncertainty for Cyber-Physical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Predictive monitoring -- making predictions about future states and monitoring if the predicted states satisfy requirements -- offers a promising paradigm in supporting the decision making of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Existing works of predictive monitoring mostly focus on monitoring individual predictions rather than sequential predictions. We develop a novel approach for monitoring sequential predictions generated from Bayesian Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that can capture the inherent uncertainty in CPS, drawing on insights from our study of real-world CPS datasets. We propose a new logic named \emph{Signal Temporal Logic with Uncertainty} (STL-U) to monitor a flowpipe containing an infinite set of uncertain sequences predicted by Bayesian RNNs. We define STL-U strong and weak satisfaction semantics based on if all or some sequences contained in a flowpipe satisfy the requirement. We also develop methods to compute the range of confidence levels under which a flowpipe is guaranteed to strongly (weakly) satisfy an STL-U formula. Furthermore, we develop novel criteria that leverage STL-U monitoring results to calibrate the uncertainty estimation in Bayesian RNNs. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach via experiments with real-world datasets and a simulated smart city case study, which show very encouraging results of STL-U based predictive monitoring approach outperforming baselines.
Improving Cyberbully Detection with User Interaction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Cyberbullying, identified as intended and repeated online bullying behavior, has become increasingly prevalent in the past few decades. Despite the significant progress made thus far, the focus of most existing work on cyberbullying detection lies in the independent content analysis of different comments within a social media session. We argue that such leading notions of analysis suffer from three key limitations: they overlook the temporal correlations among different comments; they only consider the content within a single comment rather than the topic coherence across comments; they remain generic and exploit limited interactions between social media users. In this work, we observe that user comments in the same session may be inherently related, e.g., discussing similar topics, and their interaction may evolve over time. We also show that modeling such topic coherence and temporal interaction are critical to capture the repetitive characteristics of bullying behavior, thus leading to better predicting performance. To achieve the goal, we first construct a unified temporal graph for each social media session. Drawing on recent advances in graph neural network, we then propose a principled graph-based approach for modeling the temporal dynamics and topic coherence throughout user interactions. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our approach with the tasks of session-level bullying detection and comment-level case study. Our code is released to public.
Price of Anarchy of Simple Auctions with Interdependent Values
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2021
Year: 2021

We expand the literature on the price of anarchy (PoA) of simultaneous item auctions by considering settings with correlated values; we do this via the fundamental economic model of interdependent values (IDV). It is well-known that in multi-item settings with private values, correlated values can lead to bad PoA, which can be polynomially large in the number of agents $n$. In the more general model of IDV, we show that the PoA can be polynomially large even in single-item settings. On the positive side, we identify a natural condition on information dispersion in the market, termed $γ$-heterogeneity, which enables good PoA guarantees. Under this condition, we show that for single-item settings, the PoA of standard mechanisms degrades gracefully with $γ$. For settings with $m>1$ items we show a separation between two domains: If $n \geq m$, we devise a new simultaneous item auction with good PoA (with respect to $γ$), under limited information asymmetry. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first positive PoA result for correlated values in multi-item settings. The main technical difficulty in establishing this result is that the standard tool for establishing PoA results -- the smoothness framework -- is unsuitable for IDV settings, and so we must introduce new techniques to address the unique challenges imposed by such settings. In the domain of $n \ll m$, we establish impossibility results even for surprisingly simple scenarios.
Bracketing Encodings for 2-Planar Dependency Parsing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present a bracketing-based encoding that can be used to represent any 2-planar dependency tree over a sentence of length n as a sequence of n labels, hence providing almost total coverage of crossing arcs in sequence labeling parsing. First, we show that existing bracketing encodings for parsing as labeling can only handle a very mild extension of projective trees. Second, we overcome this limitation by taking into account the well-known property of 2-planarity, which is present in the vast majority of dependency syntactic structures in treebanks, i.e., the arcs of a dependency tree can be split into two planes such that arcs in a given plane do not cross. We take advantage of this property to design a method that balances the brackets and that encodes the arcs belonging to each of those planes, allowing for almost unrestricted non-projectivity (round 99.9% coverage) in sequence labeling parsing. The experiments show that our linearizations improve over the accuracy of the original bracketing encoding in highly non-projective treebanks (on average by 0.4 LAS), while achieving a similar speed. Also, they are especially suitable when PoS tags are not used as input parameters to the models.
Model-Agnostic Explanations using Minimal Forcing Subsets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

How can we find a subset of training samples that are most responsible for a specific prediction made by a complex black-box machine learning model? More generally, how can we explain the model's decisions to end-users in a transparent way? We propose a new model-agnostic algorithm to identify a minimal set of training samples that are indispensable for a given model's decision at a particular test point, i.e., the model's decision would have changed upon the removal of this subset from the training dataset. Our algorithm identifies such a set of "indispensable" samples iteratively by solving a constrained optimization problem. Further, we speed up the algorithm through efficient approximations and provide theoretical justification for its performance. To demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our approach, we apply it to a variety of tasks including data poisoning detection, training set debugging and understanding loan decisions. The results show that our algorithm is an effective and easy-to-comprehend tool that helps to better understand local model behavior, and therefore facilitates the adoption of machine learning in domains where such understanding is a requisite.
Two-Port Analysis of Stability and Transparency in Series Damped Elastic Actuation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Series Elastic Actuation (SEA) is a widely-used approach for interaction control, as it enables high fidelity and robust force control, improving the safety of physical human-robot interaction (pHRI). Safety is an imperative design criterion for pHRI that limits the interaction performance since there exists a fundamental trade-off between stability robustness and rendering performance. The safety of interaction necessitates the closed-loop stability of a pHRI system when coupled to a wide range of unknown operators and environments. In this study, we provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for two-port passivity of series damped elastic actuation under velocity-sourced impedance control within the frequency-domain passivity framework. Based on the newly established conditions, we derive non-conservative passivity bounds for a virtual coupler and rigorously prove the necessity of a dissipative element parallel to the series elastic component and the necessity of a virtual coupler with dissipation for the absolute stability and two-port passivity of the system. The additional dissipative elements in the physical filter and the virtual coupler enable the system to render virtual stiffness values higher than that can be rendered using a pure SEA. Our results extend earlier studies on coupled stability by presenting the necessary and sufficient conditions for all passive terminations. We validate our results through a set of physical experiments and systematic numerical simulations.
Grasping in the Dark: Zero-Shot Object Grasping Using Tactile Feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Grasping and manipulating a wide variety of objects is a fundamental skill that would determine the success and wide spread adaptation of robots in homes. Several end-effector designs for robust manipulation have been proposed but they mostly work when provided with prior information about the objects or equipped with external sensors for estimating object shape or size. Such approaches are limited to many-shot or unknown objects and are prone to estimation errors from external estimation systems. We propose an approach to grasp and manipulate previously unseen or zero-shot objects: the objects without any prior of their shape, size, material and weight properties, using only feedback from tactile sensors which is contrary to the state-of-the-art. Such an approach provides robust manipulation of objects either when the object model is not known or when it is estimated incorrectly from an external system. Our approach is inspired by the ideology of how animals or humans manipulate objects, i.e., by using feedback from their skin. Our grasping and manipulation revolves around the simple notion that objects slip if not grasped stably. This slippage can be detected and counteracted for a robust grasp that is agnostic to the type, shape, size, material and weight of the object. At the crux of our approach is a novel tactile feedback based controller that detects and compensates for slip during grasp. We successfully evaluate and demonstrate our proposed approach on many real world experiments using the Shadow Dexterous Hand equipped with BioTac SP tactile sensors for different object shapes, sizes, weights and materials. We obtain an overall success rate of 73.5%
Aggregating Incomplete and Noisy Rankings
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We consider the problem of learning the true ordering of a set of alternatives from largely incomplete and noisy rankings. We introduce a natural generalization of both the classical Mallows model of ranking distributions and the extensively studied model of noisy pairwise comparisons. Our selective Mallows model outputs a noisy ranking on any given subset of alternatives, based on an underlying Mallows distribution. Assuming a sequence of subsets where each pair of alternatives appears frequently enough, we obtain strong asymptotically tight upper and lower bounds on the sample complexity of learning the underlying complete ranking and the (identities and the) ranking of the top-k alternatives from selective Mallows rankings. Moreover, building on the work of (Braverman and Mossel, 2009), we show how to efficiently compute the maximum likelihood complete ranking from selective Mallows rankings.
Learning a Deep Reinforcement Learning Policy Over the Latent Space of a Pre-trained GAN for Semantic Age Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Learning a disentangled representation of the latent space has become one of the most fundamental problems studied in computer vision. Recently, many Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown promising results in generating high fidelity images. However, studies to understand the semantic layout of the latent space of pre-trained models are still limited. Several works train conditional GANs to generate faces with required semantic attributes. Unfortunately, in these attempts, the generated output is often not as photo-realistic as the unconditional state-of-the-art models. Besides, they also require large computational resources and specific datasets to generate high fidelity images. In our work, we have formulated a Markov Decision Process (MDP) over the latent space of a pre-trained GAN model to learn a conditional policy for semantic manipulation along specific attributes under defined identity bounds. Further, we have defined a semantic age manipulation scheme using a locally linear approximation over the latent space. Results show that our learned policy samples high fidelity images with required age alterations, while preserving the identity of the person.
Efficient Data Management with a Flexible Address Space
Venue: arXiv cs.OS 2021
Year: 2021

Data management applications store their data using structured files in which data are usually sorted to serve indexing and queries. However, in-place insertions and removals of data are not naturally supported in a file's address space. To avoid repeatedly rewriting existing data in a sorted file to admit changes in place, applications usually employ extra layers of indirections, such as mapping tables and logs, to admit changes out of place. However, this approach leads to increased access cost and excessive complexity. This paper presents a novel storage engine that provides a flexible address space, where in-place updates of arbitrary-sized data, such as insertions and removals, can be performed efficiently. With this mechanism, applications can manage sorted data in a linear address space with minimal complexity. Extensive evaluations show that a key-value store built on top of it can achieve high performance and efficiency with a simple implementation.
Budget Sharing for Multi-Analyst Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2021
Year: 2021

Large organizations that collect data about populations (like the US Census Bureau) release summary statistics that are used by multiple stakeholders for resource allocation and policy making problems. These organizations are also legally required to protect the privacy of individuals from whom they collect data. Differential Privacy (DP) provides a solution to release useful summary data while preserving privacy. Most DP mechanisms are designed to answer a single set of queries. In reality, there are often multiple stakeholders that use a given data release and have overlapping but not-identical queries. This introduces a novel joint optimization problem in DP where the privacy budget must be shared among different analysts. We initiate study into the problem of DP query answering across multiple analysts. To capture the competing goals and priorities of multiple analysts, we formulate three desiderata that any mechanism should satisfy in this setting -- The Sharing Incentive, Non-Interference, and Adaptivity -- while still optimizing for overall error. We demonstrate how existing DP query answering mechanisms in the multi-analyst settings fail to satisfy at least one of the desiderata. We present novel DP algorithms that provably satisfy all our desiderata and empirically show that they incur low error on realistic tasks.
Faraway-Frustum: Dealing with Lidar Sparsity for 3D Object Detection using Fusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Learned pointcloud representations do not generalize well with an increase in distance to the sensor. For example, at a range greater than 60 meters, the sparsity of lidar pointclouds reaches to a point where even humans cannot discern object shapes from each other. However, this distance should not be considered very far for fast-moving vehicles: A vehicle can traverse 60 meters under two seconds while moving at 70 mph. For safe and robust driving automation, acute 3D object detection at these ranges is indispensable. Against this backdrop, we introduce faraway-frustum: a novel fusion strategy for detecting faraway objects. The main strategy is to depend solely on the 2D vision for recognizing object class, as object shape does not change drastically with an increase in depth, and use pointcloud data for object localization in the 3D space for faraway objects. For closer objects, we use learned pointcloud representations instead, following state-of-the-art. This strategy alleviates the main shortcoming of object detection with learned pointcloud representations. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art by a considerable margin for faraway object detection in bird's-eye-view and 3D. Our code is open-source and publicly available: https://github.com/dongfang-steven-yang/faraway-frustum.
Hybrid Visual Servoing Tracking Control of Uncalibrated Robotic Systems for Dynamic Dwarf Culture Orchards Harvest
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

The paper is concerned with the dynamic tracking problem of SNAP orchards harvesting robots in the presence of multiple uncalibrated model parameters in the application of dwarf culture orchards harvest. A new hybrid visual servoing adaptive tracking controller and three adaptive laws are proposed to guarantee harvesting robots to finish the dynamic harvesting task and the adaption to unknown parameters including camera intrinsic and extrinsic model and robot dynamics. By the Lyapunov theory, asymptotic convergence of the closed-loop system with the proposed control scheme is rigorously proven. Experimental and simulation results have been conducted to verify the performance of the proposed control scheme. The results demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority.
Out-of-Distribution Detection for Automotive Perception
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Neural networks (NNs) are widely used for object classification in autonomous driving. However, NNs can fail on input data not well represented by the training dataset, known as out-of-distribution (OOD) data. A mechanism to detect OOD samples is important for safety-critical applications, such as automotive perception, to trigger a safe fallback mode. NNs often rely on softmax normalization for confidence estimation, which can lead to high confidences being assigned to OOD samples, thus hindering the detection of failures. This paper presents a method for determining whether inputs are OOD, which does not require OOD data during training and does not increase the computational cost of inference. The latter property is especially important in automotive applications with limited computational resources and real-time constraints. Our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world automotive datasets.
PCEDNet : A Lightweight Neural Network for Fast and Interactive Edge Detection in 3D Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have proven to be efficient analysis tools for processing point clouds, e.g., for reconstruction, segmentation and classification. In this paper, we focus on the classification of edges in point clouds, where both edges and their surrounding are described. We propose a new parameterization adding to each point a set of differential information on its surrounding shape reconstructed at different scales. These parameters, stored in a Scale-Space Matrix (SSM), provide a well suited information from which an adequate neural network can learn the description of edges and use it to efficiently detect them in acquired point clouds. After successfully applying a multi-scale CNN on SSMs for the efficient classification of edges and their neighborhood, we propose a new lightweight neural network architecture outperforming the CNN in learning time, processing time and classification capabilities. Our architecture is compact, requires small learning sets, is very fast to train and classifies millions of points in seconds.