OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Transliterating Kurdish texts in Latin into Persian-Arabic script
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Kurdish is written in different scripts. The two most popular scripts are Latin and Persian-Arabic. However, not all Kurdish readers are familiar with both mentioned scripts that could be resolved by automatic transliterators. So far, the developed tools mostly transliterate Persian-Arabic scripts into Latin. We present a transliterator to transliterate Kurdish texts in Latin into Persian-Arabic script. We also discuss the issues that should be considered in the transliteration process. The tool is a part of Kurdish BLARK, and it is publicly available for non-commercial use
Automated Extraction of Sentencing Decisions from Court Cases in the Hebrew Language
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

We present the task of Automated Punishment Extraction (APE) in sentencing decisions from criminal court cases in Hebrew. Addressing APE will enable the identification of sentencing patterns and constitute an important stepping stone for many follow up legal NLP applications in Hebrew, including the prediction of sentencing decisions. We curate a dataset of sexual assault sentencing decisions and a manually-annotated evaluation dataset, and implement rule-based and supervised models. We find that while supervised models can identify the sentence containing the punishment with good accuracy, rule-based approaches outperform them on the full APE task. We conclude by presenting a first analysis of sentencing patterns in our dataset and analyze common models' errors, indicating avenues for future work, such as distinguishing between probation and actual imprisonment punishment. We will make all our resources available upon request, including data, annotation, and first benchmark models.
NAS-FCOS: Efficient Search for Object Detection Architectures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown great potential in effectively reducing manual effort in network design by automatically discovering optimal architectures. What is noteworthy is that as of now, object detection is less touched by NAS algorithms despite its significant importance in computer vision. To the best of our knowledge, most of the recent NAS studies on object detection tasks fail to satisfactorily strike a balance between performance and efficiency of the resulting models, let alone the excessive amount of computational resources cost by those algorithms. Here we propose an efficient method to obtain better object detectors by searching for the feature pyramid network (FPN) as well as the prediction head of a simple anchor-free object detector, namely, FCOS [36], using a tailored reinforcement learning paradigm. With carefully designed search space, search algorithms, and strategies for evaluating network quality, we are able to find top-performing detection architectures within 4 days using 8 V100 GPUs. The discovered architectures surpass state-of-the-art object detection models (such as Faster R-CNN, Retina-Net and, FCOS) by 1.0% to 5.4% points in AP on the COCO dataset, with comparable computation complexity and memory footprint, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed NAS method for object detection. Code is available at https://github.com/Lausannen/NAS-FCOS.
Problems with information theoretic approaches to causal learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

The language of information theory is favored in both causal reasoning and machine learning frameworks. But, is there a better language than this? In this study, we demonstrate the pitfalls of infotheoretic estimation using first order statistics on (short) sequences for causal learning. We recommend the use of data compression based approaches for causality testing since these make very little assumptions on data as opposed to infotheoretic measures, and are more robust to finite data length effects. We conclude with a discussion on the challenges posed in modeling the effects of conditioning process $X$ with another process $Y$ in causal machine learning. Specifically, conditioning can increase 'confusion' which can be difficult to model by classical information theory. A conscious causal agent creates new choices, decisions and meaning which poses huge challenges for AI.
Detecting model drift using polynomial relations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning models serve critical functions, such as classifying loan applicants as good or bad risks. Each model is trained under the assumption that the data used in training and in the field come from the same underlying unknown distribution. Often, this assumption is broken in practice. It is desirable to identify when this occurs, to minimize the impact on model performance. We suggest a new approach to detecting change in the data distribution by identifying polynomial relations between the data features. We measure the strength of each identified relation using its R-square value. A strong polynomial relation captures a significant trait of the data which should remain stable if the data distribution does not change. We thus use a set of learned strong polynomial relations to identify drift. For a set of polynomial relations that are stronger than a given threshold, we calculate the amount of drift observed for that relation. The amount of drift is measured by calculating the Bayes Factor for the polynomial relation likelihood of the baseline data versus field data. We empirically validate the approach by simulating a range of changes, and identify drift using the Bayes Factor of the polynomial relation likelihood change.
Conductance and Social Capital: Modeling and Empirically Measuring Online Social Influence
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2021
Year: 2021

Social influence pervades our everyday lives and lays the foundation for complex social phenomena. In a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, social influence can determine whether life-saving information is adopted. Existing literature studying online social influence suffers from several drawbacks. First, a disconnect appears between psychology approaches, which are generally performed and tested in controlled lab experiments, and the quantitative methods, which are usually data-driven and rely on network and event analysis. The former are slow, expensive to deploy, and typically do not generalize well to topical issues (such as an ongoing pandemic); the latter often oversimplify the complexities of social influence and ignore psychosocial literature. This work bridges this gap and presents three contributions towards modeling and empirically quantifying online influence. The first contribution is a data-driven Generalized Influence Model that incorporates two novel psychosocial-inspired mechanisms: the conductance of the diffusion network and the social capital distribution. The second contribution is a framework to empirically rank users' social influence using a human-in-the-loop active learning method combined with crowdsourced pairwise influence comparisons. We build a human-labeled ground truth, calibrate our generalized influence model and perform a large-scale evaluation of influence. We find that our generalized model outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches and corrects the inherent biases introduced by the widely used follower count. As the third contribution, we apply the influence model to discussions around COVID-19. We quantify users' influence, and we tabulate it against their professions. We find that the executives, media, and military are more influential than pandemic-related experts such as life scientists and healthcare professionals.
Observable and Attention-Directing BDI Agents for Human-Autonomy Teaming
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2021
Year: 2021

Human-autonomy teaming (HAT) scenarios feature humans and autonomous agents collaborating to meet a shared goal. For effective collaboration, the agents must be transparent and able to share important information about their operation with human teammates. We address the challenge of transparency for Belief-Desire-Intention agents defined in the Conceptual Agent Notation (CAN) language. We extend the semantics to model agents that are observable (i.e. the internal state of tasks is available), and attention-directing (i.e. specific states can be flagged to users), and provide an executable semantics via an encoding in Milner's bigraphs. Using an example of unmanned aerial vehicles, the BigraphER tool, and PRISM, we show and verify how the extensions work in practice.
Towards Partial Monitoring: It is Always too Soon to Give Up
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2021
Year: 2021

Runtime Verification is a lightweight formal verification technique. It is used to verify at runtime whether the system under analysis behaves as expected. The expected behaviour is usually formally specified by means of properties, which are used to automatically synthesise monitors. A monitor is a device that, given a sequence of events representing a system execution, returns a verdict symbolising the satisfaction or violation of the formal property. Properties that can (resp. cannot) be verified at runtime by a monitor are called monitorable and non-monitorable, respectively. In this paper, we revise the notion of monitorability from a practical perspective, where we show how non-monitorable properties can still be used to generate partial monitors, which can partially check the properties. Finally, we present the implications both from a theoretical and practical perspectives.
Complete Agent-driven Model-based System Testing for Autonomous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

In this position paper, a novel approach to testing complex autonomous transportation systems (ATS) in the automotive, avionic, and railway domains is described. It is intended to mitigate some of the most critical problems regarding verification and validation (V&V) effort for ATS. V&V is known to become infeasible for complex ATS, when using conventional methods only. The approach advocated here uses complete testing methods on the module level, because these establish formal proofs for the logical correctness of the software. Having established logical correctness, system-level tests are performed in simulated cloud environments and on the target system. To give evidence that 'sufficiently many' system tests have been performed with the target system, a formally justified coverage criterion is introduced. To optimise the execution of very large system test suites, we advocate an online testing approach where multiple tests are executed in parallel, and test steps are identified on-the-fly. The coordination and optimisation of these executions is achieved by an agent-based approach. Each aspect of the testing approach advocated here is shown to either be consistent with existing standards for development and V&V of safety-critical transportation systems, or it is justified why it should become acceptable in future revisions of the applicable standards.
Complete Test of Synthesised Safety Supervisors for Robots and Autonomous Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Verified controller synthesis uses world models that comprise all potential behaviours of humans, robots, further equipment, and the controller to be synthesised. A world model enables quantitative risk assessment, for example, by stochastic model checking. Such a model describes a range of controller behaviours some of which -- when implemented correctly -- guarantee that the overall risk in the actual world is acceptable, provided that the stochastic assumptions have been made to the safe side. Synthesis then selects an acceptable-risk controller behaviour. However, because of crossing abstraction, formalism, and tool boundaries, verified synthesis for robots and autonomous systems has to be accompanied by rigorous testing. In general, standards and regulations for safety-critical systems require testing as a key element to obtain certification credit before entry into service. This work-in-progress paper presents an approach to the complete testing of synthesised supervisory controllers that enforce safety properties in domains such as human-robot collaboration and autonomous driving. Controller code is generated from the selected controller behaviour. The code generator, however, is hard, if not infeasible, to verify in a formal and comprehensive way. Instead, utilising testing, an abstract test reference is generated, a symbolic finite state machine with simpler semantics than code semantics. From this reference, a complete test suite is derived and applied to demonstrate the observational equivalence between the synthesised abstract test reference and the generated concrete controller code running on a control system platform.
Assuring Increasingly Autonomous Systems in Human-Machine Teams: An Urban Air Mobility Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

As aircraft systems become increasingly autonomous, the human-machine role allocation changes and opportunities for new failure modes arise. This necessitates an approach to identify the safety requirements for the increasingly autonomous system (IAS) as well as a framework and techniques to verify and validate that an IAS meets its safety requirements. We use Crew Resource Management techniques to identify requirements and behaviors for safe human-machine teaming behaviors. We provide a methodology to verify that an IAS meets its requirements. We apply the methodology to a case study in Urban Air Mobility, which includes two contingency scenarios: unreliable sensor and aborted landing. For this case study, we implement an IAS agent in the Soar language that acts as a copilot for the selected contingency scenarios and performs takeoff and landing preparation, while the pilot maintains final decision authority. We develop a formal human-machine team architecture model in the Architectural Analysis and Design Language (AADL), with operator and IAS requirements formalized in the Assume Guarantee REasoning Environment (AGREE) Annex to AADL. We formally verify safety requirements for the human-machine team given the requirements on the IAS and operator. We develop an automated translator from Soar to the nuXmv model checking language and formally verify that the IAS agent satisfies its requirements using nuXmv. We share the design and requirements errors found in the process as well as our lessons learned.
GeoSneakPique: Visual Autocompletion for Geospatial Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2021
Year: 2021

How many crimes occurred in the city center? And exactly which part of town is the 'city center'? While location is at the heart of many data questions, geographic location can be difficult to specify in natural language (NL) queries. This is especially true when working with fuzzy cognitive regions or regions that may be defined based on data distributions instead of absolute administrative location (e.g., state, country). GeoSneakPique presents a novel method for using a mapping widget to support the NL query process, allowing users to specify location via direct manipulation with data-driven guidance on spatial distributions to help select the area of interest. Users receive feedback to help them evaluate and refine their spatial selection interactively and can save spatial definitions for re-use in subsequent queries. We conduct a qualitative evaluation of the GeoSneakPique that indicates the usefulness of the interface as well as opportunities for better supporting geospatial workflows in visual analysis tasks employing cognitive regions.
Semantic Resizing of Charts Through Generalization:A Case Study with Line Charts
Venue: arXiv cs.GR 2021
Year: 2021

Inspired by cartographic generalization principles, we present a generalization technique for rendering line charts at different sizes, preserving the important semantics of the data at that display size. The algorithm automatically determines the generalization operators to be applied at that size based on spatial density, distance, and the semantic importance of the various visualization elements in the line chart. A qualitative evaluation of the prototype that implemented the algorithm indicates that the generalized line charts pre-served the general data shape, while minimizing visual clutter. We identify future opportunities where generalization can be extended and applied to other chart types and visual analysis authoring tools.
MUSE: Feature Self-Distillation with Mutual Information and Self-Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We present a novel information-theoretic approach to introduce dependency among features of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). The core idea of our proposed method, called MUSE, is to combine MUtual information and SElf-information to jointly improve the expressivity of all features extracted from different layers in a CNN. We present two variants of the realization of MUSE -- Additive Information and Multiplicative Information. Importantly, we argue and empirically demonstrate that MUSE, compared to other feature discrepancy functions, is a more functional proxy to introduce dependency and effectively improve the expressivity of all features in the knowledge distillation framework. MUSE achieves superior performance over a variety of popular architectures and feature discrepancy functions for self-distillation and online distillation, and performs competitively with the state-of-the-art methods for offline distillation. MUSE is also demonstrably versatile that enables it to be easily extended to CNN-based models on tasks other than image classification such as object detection.
No News is Good News: A Critique of the One Billion Word Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

The One Billion Word Benchmark is a dataset derived from the WMT 2011 News Crawl, commonly used to measure language modeling ability in natural language processing. We train models solely on Common Crawl web scrapes partitioned by year, and demonstrate that they perform worse on this task over time due to distributional shift. Analysis of this corpus reveals that it contains several examples of harmful text, as well as outdated references to current events. We suggest that the temporal nature of news and its distribution shift over time makes it poorly suited for measuring language modeling ability, and discuss potential impact and considerations for researchers building language models and evaluation datasets.
Linear Contextual Bandits with Adversarial Corruptions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We study the linear contextual bandit problem in the presence of adversarial corruption, where the interaction between the player and a possibly infinite decision set is contaminated by an adversary that can corrupt the reward up to a corruption level $C$ measured by the sum of the largest alteration on rewards in each round. We present a variance-aware algorithm that is adaptive to the level of adversarial contamination $C$. The key algorithmic design includes (1) a multi-level partition scheme of the observed data, (2) a cascade of confidence sets that are adaptive to the level of the corruption, and (3) a variance-aware confidence set construction that can take advantage of low-variance reward. We further prove that the regret of the proposed algorithm is $\tilde{O}(C^2d\sqrt{\sum_{t = 1}^T σ_t^2} + C^2R\sqrt{dT})$, where $d$ is the dimension of context vectors, $T$ is the number of rounds, $R$ is the range of noise and $σ_t^2,t=1\ldots,T$ are the variances of instantaneous reward. We also prove a gap-dependent regret bound for the proposed algorithm, which is instance-dependent and thus leads to better performance on good practical instances. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first variance-aware corruption-robust algorithm for contextual bandits. Experiments on synthetic data corroborate our theory.
Age and Gender Prediction using Deep CNNs and Transfer Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

The last decade or two has witnessed a boom of images. With the increasing ubiquity of cameras and with the advent of selfies, the number of facial images available in the world has skyrocketed. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in automatic age and gender prediction of a person using facial images. We in this paper focus on this challenging problem. Specifically, this paper focuses on age estimation, age classification and gender classification from still facial images of an individual. We train different models for each problem and we also draw comparisons between building a custom CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) architecture and using various CNN architectures as feature extractors, namely VGG16 pre-trained on VGGFace, Res-Net50 and SE-ResNet50 pre-trained on VGGFace2 dataset and training over those extracted features. We also provide baseline performance of various machine learning algorithms on the feature extraction which gave us the best results. It was observed that even simple linear regression trained on such extracted features outperformed training CNN, ResNet50 and ResNeXt50 from scratch for age estimation.
Duals of linearized Reed-Solomon codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

We give a description of the duals of linearized Reed-Solomon codes in terms of codes obtained by taking residues of Ore rational functions. Our construction shows in particular that, under some assumptions on the base field, the class of linearized Reed-Solomon codes is stable under duality. As a byproduct of our work, we develop a theory of residues in the Ore setting.
An Adaptive Structural Learning of Deep Belief Network for Image-based Crack Detection in Concrete Structures Using SDNET2018
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We have developed an adaptive structural Deep Belief Network (Adaptive DBN) that finds an optimal network structure in a self-organizing manner during learning. The Adaptive DBN is the hierarchical architecture where each layer employs Adaptive Restricted Boltzmann Machine (Adaptive RBM). The Adaptive RBM can find the appropriate number of hidden neurons during learning. The proposed method was applied to a concrete image benchmark data set SDNET2018 for crack detection. The dataset contains about 56,000 crack images for three types of concrete structures: bridge decks, walls, and paved roads. The fine-tuning method of the Adaptive DBN can show 99.7%, 99.7%, and 99.4% classification accuracy for three types of structures. However, we found the database included some wrong annotated data which cannot be judged from images by human experts. This paper discusses consideration that purses the major factor for the wrong cases and the removal of the adversarial examples from the dataset.