OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Diversification in Session-based News Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

Recommender systems are widely applied in digital platforms such as news websites to personalize services based on user preferences. In news websites most of users are anonymous and the only available data is sequences of items in anonymous sessions. Due to this, typical collaborative filtering methods, which are highly applied in many applications, are not effective in news recommendations. In this context, session-based recommenders are able to recommend next items given the sequence of previous items in the active session. Neighborhood-based session-based recommenders has been shown to be highly effective compared to more sophisticated approaches. In this study we propose scenarios to make these session-based recommender systems diversity-aware and to address the filter bubble phenomenon. The filter bubble phenomenon is a common concern in news recommendation systems and it occurs when the system narrows the information and deprives users of diverse information. The results of applying the proposed scenarios show that these diversification scenarios improve the diversity measures in these session-based recommender systems based on four news datasets.
Estimating 2-Sinkhorn Divergence between Gaussian Processes from Finite-Dimensional Marginals
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

\emph{Optimal Transport} (OT) has emerged as an important computational tool in machine learning and computer vision, providing a geometrical framework for studying probability measures. OT unfortunately suffers from the curse of dimensionality and requires regularization for practical computations, of which the \emph{entropic regularization} is a popular choice, which can be 'unbiased', resulting in a \emph{Sinkhorn divergence}. In this work, we study the convergence of estimating the 2-Sinkhorn divergence between \emph{Gaussian processes} (GPs) using their finite-dimensional marginal distributions. We show almost sure convergence of the divergence when the marginals are sampled according to some base measure. Furthermore, we show that using $n$ marginals the estimation error of the divergence scales in a dimension-free way as $\mathcal{O}\left(ε^ {-1}n^{-\frac{1}{2}}\right)$, where $ε$ is the magnitude of entropic regularization.
Stable Online Computation Offloading via Lyapunov-guided Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

In this paper, we consider a multi-user mobile-edge computing (MEC) network with time-varying wireless channels and stochastic user task data arrivals in sequential time frames. In particular, we aim to design an online computation offloading algorithm to maximize the network data processing capability subject to the long-term data queue stability and average power constraints. The online algorithm is practical in the sense that the decisions for each time frame are made without the assumption of knowing future channel conditions and data arrivals. We formulate the problem as a multi-stage stochastic mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem that jointly determines the binary offloading (each user computes the task either locally or at the edge server) and system resource allocation decisions in sequential time frames. To address the coupling in the decisions of different time frames, we propose a novel framework, named LyDROO, that combines the advantages of Lyapunov optimization and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Specifically, LyDROO first applies Lyapunov optimization to decouple the multi-stage stochastic MINLP into deterministic per-frame MINLP subproblems of much smaller size. Then, it integrates model-based optimization and model-free DRL to solve the per-frame MINLP problems with very low computational complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed LyDROO achieves optimal computation performance while satisfying all the long-term constraints. Besides, it induces very low execution latency that is particularly suitable for real-time implementation in fast fading environments.
baller2vec: A Multi-Entity Transformer For Multi-Agent Spatiotemporal Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-agent spatiotemporal modeling is a challenging task from both an algorithmic design and computational complexity perspective. Recent work has explored the efficacy of traditional deep sequential models in this domain, but these architectures are slow and cumbersome to train, particularly as model size increases. Further, prior attempts to model interactions between agents across time have limitations, such as imposing an order on the agents, or making assumptions about their relationships. In this paper, we introduce baller2vec, a multi-entity generalization of the standard Transformer that can, with minimal assumptions, simultaneously and efficiently integrate information across entities and time. We test the effectiveness of baller2vec for multi-agent spatiotemporal modeling by training it to perform two different basketball-related tasks: (1) simultaneously modeling the trajectories of all players on the court and (2) modeling the trajectory of the ball. Not only does baller2vec learn to perform these tasks well (outperforming a graph recurrent neural network with a similar number of parameters by a wide margin), it also appears to "understand" the game of basketball, encoding idiosyncratic qualities of players in its embeddings, and performing basketball-relevant functions with its attention heads.
Fusion of neural networks, for LIDAR-based evidential road mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

LIDAR sensors are usually used to provide autonomous vehicles with 3D representations of their environment. In ideal conditions, geometrical models could detect the road in LIDAR scans, at the cost of a manual tuning of numerical constraints, and a lack of flexibility. We instead propose an evidential pipeline, to accumulate road detection results obtained from neural networks. First, we introduce RoadSeg, a new convolutional architecture that is optimized for road detection in LIDAR scans. RoadSeg is used to classify individual LIDAR points as either belonging to the road, or not. Yet, such point-level classification results need to be converted into a dense representation, that can be used by an autonomous vehicle. We thus secondly present an evidential road mapping algorithm, that fuses consecutive road detection results. We benefitted from a reinterpretation of logistic classifiers, which can be seen as generating a collection of simple evidential mass functions. An evidential grid map that depicts the road can then be obtained, by projecting the classification results from RoadSeg into grid cells, and by handling moving objects via conflict analysis. The system was trained and evaluated on real-life data. A python implementation maintains a 10 Hz framerate. Since road labels were needed for training, a soft labelling procedure, relying lane-level HD maps, was used to generate coarse training and validation sets. An additional test set was manually labelled for evaluation purposes. So as to reach satisfactory results, the system fuses road detection results obtained from three variants of RoadSeg, processing different LIDAR features.
Machine Learning Applications on Neuroimaging for Diagnosis and Prognosis of Epilepsy: A Review
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning is playing an increasingly important role in medical image analysis, spawning new advances in the clinical application of neuroimaging. There have been some reviews on machine learning and epilepsy before, and they mainly focused on electrophysiological signals such as electroencephalography (EEG) and stereo electroencephalography (SEEG), while neglecting the potential of neuroimaging in epilepsy research. Neuroimaging has its important advantages in confirming the range of the epileptic region, which is essential in presurgical evaluation and assessment after surgery. However, it is difficult for EEG to locate the accurate epilepsy lesion region in the brain. In this review, we emphasize the interaction between neuroimaging and machine learning in the context of epilepsy diagnosis and prognosis. We start with an overview of epilepsy and typical neuroimaging modalities used in epilepsy clinics, MRI, DWI, fMRI, and PET. Then, we elaborate two approaches in applying machine learning methods to neuroimaging data: i) the conventional machine learning approach combining manual feature engineering and classifiers, ii) the deep learning approach, such as the convolutional neural networks and autoencoders. Subsequently, the application of machine learning on epilepsy neuroimaging, such as segmentation, localization, and lateralization tasks, as well as tasks directly related to diagnosis and prognosis are looked into in detail. Finally, we discuss the current achievements, challenges, and potential future directions in this field, hoping to pave the way for computer-aided diagnosis and prognosis of epilepsy.
NRTSI: Non-Recurrent Time Series Imputation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Time series imputation is a fundamental task for understanding time series with missing data. Existing methods either do not directly handle irregularly-sampled data or degrade severely with sparsely observed data. In this work, we reformulate time series as permutation-equivariant sets and propose a novel imputation model NRTSI that does not impose any recurrent structures. Taking advantage of the permutation equivariant formulation, we design a principled and efficient hierarchical imputation procedure. In addition, NRTSI can directly handle irregularly-sampled time series, perform multiple-mode stochastic imputation, and handle data with partially observed dimensions. Empirically, we show that NRTSI achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of time series imputation benchmarks.
On the Reproducibility of Neural Network Predictions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Standard training techniques for neural networks involve multiple sources of randomness, e.g., initialization, mini-batch ordering and in some cases data augmentation. Given that neural networks are heavily over-parameterized in practice, such randomness can cause {\em churn} -- for the same input, disagreements between predictions of the two models independently trained by the same algorithm, contributing to the `reproducibility challenges' in modern machine learning. In this paper, we study this problem of churn, identify factors that cause it, and propose two simple means of mitigating it. We first demonstrate that churn is indeed an issue, even for standard image classification tasks (CIFAR and ImageNet), and study the role of the different sources of training randomness that cause churn. By analyzing the relationship between churn and prediction confidences, we pursue an approach with two components for churn reduction. First, we propose using \emph{minimum entropy regularizers} to increase prediction confidences. Second, \changes{we present a novel variant of co-distillation approach~\citep{anil2018large} to increase model agreement and reduce churn}. We present empirical results showing the effectiveness of both techniques in reducing churn while improving the accuracy of the underlying model.
Robust Single-step Adversarial Training with Regularizer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

High cost of training time caused by multi-step adversarial example generation is a major challenge in adversarial training. Previous methods try to reduce the computational burden of adversarial training using single-step adversarial example generation schemes, which can effectively improve the efficiency but also introduce the problem of catastrophic overfitting, where the robust accuracy against Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) can achieve nearby 100\% whereas the robust accuracy against Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) suddenly drops to 0\% over a single epoch. To address this problem, we propose a novel Fast Gradient Sign Method with PGD Regularization (FGSMPR) to boost the efficiency of adversarial training without catastrophic overfitting. Our core idea is that single-step adversarial training can not learn robust internal representations of FGSM and PGD adversarial examples. Therefore, we design a PGD regularization term to encourage similar embeddings of FGSM and PGD adversarial examples. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can train a robust deep network for L$_\infty$-perturbations with FGSM adversarial training and reduce the gap to multi-step adversarial training.
A Network Based Approach to Characterize Twenty-First-Century Populism in Colombia
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Populism is a political phenomenon of democratic illiberalism centered on the figure of a strong leader. By modeling person/node connections of prominent figures of the recent Colombian political landscape we map, quantify, and analyze the position and influence of Alvaro Uribe as a populist leader. We found that Uribe is a central hub in the political alliances networks, cutting through traditional party alliances, . but is not the most central figure in the state machinery. The article first presents the framing of the problem, followed by the historical context of the case in study, the methodology employed and data collection, analysis, conclusions and further research paths. This study has implications for offering a new way of applying quantitative methods to the studies of populist regimes
The Maximum Exposure Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2021
Year: 2021

Given a set of points $P$ and axis-aligned rectangles $\mathcal{R}$ in the plane, a point $p \in P$ is called \emph{exposed} if it lies outside all rectangles in $\mathcal{R}$. In the \emph{max-exposure problem}, given an integer parameter $k$, we want to delete $k$ rectangles from $\mathcal{R}$ so as to maximize the number of exposed points. We show that the problem is NP-hard and assuming plausible complexity conjectures is also hard to approximate even when rectangles in $\mathcal{R}$ are translates of two fixed rectangles. However, if $\mathcal{R}$ only consists of translates of a single rectangle, we present a polynomial-time approximation scheme. For range space defined by general rectangles, we present a simple $O(k)$ bicriteria approximation algorithm; that is by deleting $O(k^2)$ rectangles, we can expose at least $Ω(1/k)$ of the optimal number of points.
Improving Model and Search for Computer Go
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

The standard for Deep Reinforcement Learning in games, following Alpha Zero, is to use residual networks and to increase the depth of the network to get better results. We propose to improve mobile networks as an alternative to residual networks and experimentally show the playing strength of the networks according to both their width and their depth. We also propose a generalization of the PUCT search algorithm that improves on PUCT.
MOTS R-CNN: Cosine-margin-triplet loss for multi-object tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

One of the central tasks of multi-object tracking involves learning a distance metric that is consistent with the semantic similarities of objects. The design of an appropriate loss function that encourages discriminative feature learning is among the most crucial challenges in deep neural network-based metric learning. Despite significant progress, slow convergence and a poor local optimum of the existing contrastive and triplet loss based deep metric learning methods necessitates a better solution. In this paper, we propose cosine-margin-contrastive (CMC) and cosine-margin-triplet (CMT) loss by reformulating both contrastive and triplet loss functions from the perspective of cosine distance. The proposed reformulation as a cosine loss is achieved by feature normalization which distributes the learned features on a hypersphere. We then propose the MOTS R-CNN framework for joint multi-object tracking and segmentation, particularly targeted at improving the tracking performance. Specifically, the tracking problem is addressed through deep metric learning based on the proposed loss functions. We propose a scale-invariant tracking by using a multi-layer feature aggregation scheme to make the model robust against object scale variations and occlusions. The MOTS R-CNN achieves the state-of-the-art tracking performance on the KITTI MOTS dataset. We show that the MOTS R-CNN reduces the identity switching by $62\%$ and $61\%$ on cars and pedestrians, respectively in comparison to Track R-CNN.
Video-based Hierarchical Species Classification for Longline Fishing Monitoring
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The goal of electronic monitoring (EM) of longline fishing is to monitor the fish catching activities on fishing vessels, either for the regulatory compliance or catch counting. Hierarchical classification based on videos allows for inexpensive and efficient fish species identification of catches from longline fishing, where fishes are under severe deformation and self-occlusion during the catching process. More importantly, the flexibility of hierarchical classification mitigates the laborious efforts of human reviews by providing confidence scores in different hierarchical levels. Some related works either use cascaded models for hierarchical classification or make predictions per image or predict one overlapping hierarchical data structure of the dataset in advance. However, with a known non-overlapping hierarchical data structure provided by fisheries scientists, our method enforces the hierarchical data structure and introduces an efficient training and inference strategy for video-based fisheries data. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the classic flat classification system significantly and our ablation study justifies our contributions in CNN model design, training strategy, and the video-based inference schemes for the hierarchical fish species classification task.
Learning adaptive differential evolution algorithm from optimization experiences by policy gradient
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

Differential evolution is one of the most prestigious population-based stochastic optimization algorithm for black-box problems. The performance of a differential evolution algorithm depends highly on its mutation and crossover strategy and associated control parameters. However, the determination process for the most suitable parameter setting is troublesome and time-consuming. Adaptive control parameter methods that can adapt to problem landscape and optimization environment are more preferable than fixed parameter settings. This paper proposes a novel adaptive parameter control approach based on learning from the optimization experiences over a set of problems. In the approach, the parameter control is modeled as a finite-horizon Markov decision process. A reinforcement learning algorithm, named policy gradient, is applied to learn an agent (i.e. parameter controller) that can provide the control parameters of a proposed differential evolution adaptively during the search procedure. The differential evolution algorithm based on the learned agent is compared against nine well-known evolutionary algorithms on the CEC'13 and CEC'17 test suites. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs competitively against these compared algorithms on the test suites.
An Autonomous Negotiating Agent Framework with Reinforcement Learning Based Strategies and Adaptive Strategy Switching Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2021
Year: 2021

Despite abundant negotiation strategies in literature, the complexity of automated negotiation forbids a single strategy from being dominant against all others in different negotiation scenarios. To overcome this, one approach is to use mixture of experts, but at the same time, one problem of this method is the selection of experts, as this approach is limited by the competency of the experts selected. Another problem with most negotiation strategies is their incapability of adapting to dynamic variation of the opponent's behaviour within a single negotiation session resulting in poor performance. This work focuses on both, solving the problem of expert selection and adapting to the opponent's behaviour with our Autonomous Negotiating Agent Framework. This framework allows real-time classification of opponent's behaviour and provides a mechanism to select, switch or combine strategies within a single negotiation session. Additionally, our framework has a reviewer component which enables self-enhancement capability by deciding to include new strategies or replace old ones with better strategies periodically. We demonstrate an instance of our framework by implementing maximum entropy reinforcement learning based strategies with a deep learning based opponent classifier. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our agent against state-of-the-art negotiators under varied negotiation scenarios.
Recommending More Efficient Workflows to Software Developers
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Existing recommendation systems can help developers improve their software development abilities by recommending new programming tools, such as a refactoring tool or a program navigation tool. However, simply recommending tools in isolation may not, in and of itself, allow developers to successfully complete their tasks. In this paper, I introduce a new recommendation system that recommends workflows, or sequences of tools, to developers. By learning more efficient workflows, the system could make software developers more efficient.
Emergency Department Optimization and Load Prediction in Hospitals
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Over the past several years, across the globe, there has been an increase in people seeking care in emergency departments (EDs). ED resources, including nurse staffing, are strained by such increases in patient volume. Accurate forecasting of incoming patient volume in emergency departments (ED) is crucial for efficient utilization and allocation of ED resources. Working with a suburban ED in the Pacific Northwest, we developed a tool powered by machine learning models, to forecast ED arrivals and ED patient volume to assist end-users, such as ED nurses, in resource allocation. In this paper, we discuss the results from our predictive models, the challenges, and the learnings from users' experiences with the tool in active clinical deployment in a real world setting.
Decentralized Ability-Aware Adaptive Control for Multi-robot Collaborative Manipulation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Multi-robot teams can achieve more dexterous, complex and heavier payload tasks than a single robot, yet effective collaboration is required. Multi-robot collaboration is extremely challenging due to the different kinematic and dynamics capabilities of the robots, the limited communication between them, and the uncertainty of the system parameters. In this paper, a Decentralized Ability-Aware Adaptive Control is proposed to address these challenges based on two key features. Firstly, the common manipulation task is represented by the proposed nominal task ellipsoid, which is used to maximize each robot force capability online via optimizing its configuration. Secondly, a decentralized adaptive controller is designed to be Lyapunov stable in spite of heterogeneous actuation constraints of the robots and uncertain physical parameters of the object and environment. In the proposed framework, decentralized coordination and load distribution between the robots is achieved without communication, while only the control deficiency is broadcast if any of the robots reaches its force limits. In this case, the object reference trajectory is modified in a decentralized manner to guarantee stable interaction. Finally, we perform several numerical and physical simulations to analyse and verify the proposed method with heterogeneous multi-robot teams in collaborative manipulation tasks.